300 000 years ago, the Medway Valley in England was not the beautiful place we know today. Instead, it was a vast hostile wasteland inhabited by primitives who were only on the borders of being fully human. Without arts, sciences or the law, their lives must have been nasty, brutish and short. How very different indeed from the modern bustling towns like Rochester, Chatham and Gillingham!
Yet these creatures, perhaps Homo heidelbergensis or late Homo erectus, were already displaying one very advanced feature; high quality manufacturing beyond and above immediate need. Our story comes from the PA via the Guardian, and describes the discovery of a whole cache of early Paleolithic hand axes and other tools[1] in ancient sediments in the river valley
And why are we interested? As astute readers will have noticed, the tools clearly belong to the Acheulean culture, which first appeared over one million years ago, and represents the first human attempt at high quality complicated tool making. They were amazing in their day, and lasted a long, long time at the cutting edge of human technology. But the culture carries one very special feature. Every so often, researchers turn up an axe that is over-engineered, like these big ones from Kent. Why go to all that trouble? No one knows for sure. But, as the article speculates, these “supertools” may have had a special non functional purpose. Perhaps they were proud symbols of the toolmaker’s skill, prestige symbols exchanged between groups as signs of their power and ability. Which in turn raises an economic question. Was the value of the tools dependent on the labour that went to make them? Or their exchange value, such as how many ordinary bits of stone you could exchange for one. It’s a question that has exercised economists for a long time. We never suspected that it went so far back!
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/06/giant-handaxes-unearthed-kent#acheulean #medway towns #stone age #paleolithic
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