The second argument for the dawn stone was impressive. In 1910, after
years of search, J. Reid Moir found eoliths near Ipswich, England, under
unusual conditions. They came in two layers, which seemed to indicate
that early man had camped twice in this neighborhood at different times.
They were bedded in soft sand and therefore could not have been chipped
by geologic pressure. The sand dated from the Pliocene Period which
preceded the Great Ice Age. Later, in the same district, he found
eoliths in a layer of delicate shells—again a sign that the eoliths had
not been chipped by natural forces.[6] Moreover, many of Moir’s eoliths
had a new and peculiar shape; they were keeled like an upturned boat or
beaked like an eagle. Sir Ray Lankester called them rostrocarinates. In
1900 Mortillet had to admit man—or pre-man—to an Eolithic Age.
Flake vs. Core Industries
More difficulties beset Mortillet and his system of names and cultures
as time passed and as fellow scientists dug new caves and terraces, and
turned up stone tools of other patterns and other periods. Implements
appeared that did not fit into the Frenchman’s classic system. A
supplementary scheme had to be devised, and soon it, too, failed to fit
the facts.
The new system divided all paleolithic tools into two types—which was
sound enough—and assigned each type to certain peoples and to those
peoples only—which proved not so sound. The division lay between cores
and flakes. It lay between tools that had been made out of the heart of
a lump of flint, and tools that had been made from chips flaked off the
lump. The fact that there were core tools and flake tools was plain
enough, but the fondness of scientists for strict classification led the
prehistorians into theories that time disproved.
First of all, they had to set up a time sequence. They decided, not
unnaturally, that man must have begun by hammering things with a handy
rock until his rude tool began to chip away into something approaching
an edge and eventually a point. Thus the hand ax, or _coup de poing_,
came into being (see illustration, page 71). In the course of time man
began to notice the chips, and to use the larger ones to cut and scrape
with. Soon—that is, after a couple of hundred thousand years—he was
deliberately knocking flakes off a stone core, and using them for spear
points as well as scrapers. The prehistorians called hand axes the
products of a “core industry,” and chips the products of a “flake
industry.” They believed that one industry had preceded the other by
hundreds of thousands of years, and that the Abbevillian and Acheulean
had stuck to cores and left flakes to the Mousterian. Thus they believed
that certain cultures had devoted themselves exclusively to the core,
and certain others to the flake.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account