Posted on 12/17/2004 11:37:14 AM PST by blam
ARCHAEOLOGISTS EXCITED BY 500,000-YEAR-OLD AXE FIND IN QUARRY
By David Prudames 16/12/2004
This image shows the axe head from different angles. Photo: Graham Norrie, University of Birmingham Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity.
A Stone Age hand axe dating back 500,000 years has been discovered at a quarry in Warwickshire.
The tool was found at the Smiths Concrete Bubbenhall Quarry at Waverley Wood Farm, near Coventry, which has already produced evidence of some of the earliest known human occupants of the UK.
It was uncovered in gravel by quarry manager John Green who took it to be identified by archaeologists at the University of Birmingham.
"We are very excited about this discovery," enthused Professor David Keen of the university's Archaeology Field Unit.
"Lower Palaeolithic artefacts are comparatively rare in the West Midlands compared to the south and east of England so this is a real find for us."
Despite being half and million years old the tool is very well-preserved and will eventually go on show at Warwickshire Museum.
Amongst other things, the hand axe would have been used for butchering animals, but what is perhaps most intriguing about it is that it is made of a type of volcanic rock called andesite.
Photo: Graham Norrie, University of Birmingham Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity.,
Andesite bedrock only occurs in the Lake District or North Wales and this is only the ninth andesite hand axe to be found in the midlands in over a century. Archaeologists are now trying to figure out how the tool might have got there.
Although it is possible the rock was transported to the midlands by glacial ice from the north west there is as yet no evidence for it, which suggests humans might have brought it into the area.
The lack of material for good quality hand axes in the midlands would probably have been known to our ancestors, therefore these tools could have been brought in ready made.
It may also be significant that all previous andesite hand axe finds have been made in deposits of the Bytham River, a now lost river system that crossed England from the Cotswolds via the West Midlands and Leicester to the North Sea.
This valley was destroyed in a later glaciation and seems to have provided a route into the midlands for Palaeolithic hunters.
Half a million years ago the area was at the edge of the human world, linked to Europe along the Bytham valley and across a land-bridge existing before the cutting of the Straits of Dover.
In addition to the hand axe the Smiths Concrete Bubbenhall Quarry has produced 18 other Palaeolithic tools, currently under investigation by the team at Birmingham Archaeology.
Other finds in the area include bones and teeth from a straight-tusked elephant, which are also set to be displayed at Warwickshire Museum.
That's what I was thinking. You'd expect the housing industry would be much further ahead if it were 500,000 years old.
very, very slim, which is still astronomically higher than the odds of say, the sophistication of my DNA or my eyeball alone, evolving, eh?
Can you ask this guy to also dig around and see if he finds any ballots from Washington State?
Thanks!
LOLOLOL.....that's true. So, according to science, maybe the axe just chanced into being there. How do they KNOW someone made the axe?
I agree. It all appears to be hard-hammer (hammerstone) percussion flaking. For working andesite, that must have been one tough hammerstone! Looks to me like they started with a near-net-shape thin, ovoid andesite cobble -- and basically just edged it. I see no evidence of biface thinning (no flakes crossing the midline...)
Given the right materials (core-cobble and hammerstone) I could make a replica in a few minutes -- but I'd thicken up the padding I use on my "anvil leg" considerably over what I normaly use for chert...
TXnMA
Texas Archeological Steward
(...and, based on prior experience knapping tough materials, I'd probably still be sore the next day...)
I suspect that it is a typo...one too many zeroes. Most anthropologists put the start of homo sapiens at between 120,000 to 500,000 years ago (I know, big window). So either this axe belonged to an earlier hominid or those sapiens characters jumped from East Africa to the midlands much more promptly than anyone has guessed before. If I am right that there is one too many zeroes, that puts it at 50,000 years old, which coincides nicely with the begining of the early upper paleolithic era...which certainly seems to fit the design of the axe...and it would fit the migratory models.
If science can talk about "codes" within parts of our bodies and within nature minus acknowledging a code-maker, then I think we can start talking about a lot of archaelogical discoveries across the board that may appear to have been of human origin, but were simply of natural origin.
Increasing complexity, after all, is the standard earmark of scientific discovery. That is the condeded pattern.
So, mark this equation: Any rudimentary object is the potential ancestor/parent of increasingly complex objects. The totally unsophisticated can morph into the sophisticated, as long as your recipe has "enough" time (whatever that is).
So, 500,000 years for nature to work on an axe head? Oh, a few scratchings are a piece of cake in comparison to the wonder and awe of the worksmanship of our own bodies!
What? You don't believe my description about your unsophisticated, multiple great-grandthing as your original ancestor? All ya need to do is take a leap of faith like most normal scientific evolutionists, preaching at a university pulpit near you!
How do they know it is 500k years old?
These wild estimates on huge spans of time are fabrications, nothing more. They have no clue how old this thing is. More junk science, probably paid for by British taxpayers.
Gimli lives!
How about Dianne Feinstein??
"I'd like to know how one could possibly get an accurate date on an inorganic rock. Surely this has to be an estimate...since the rock itself is surely much older. Based on the layer it was found?
Anyway, 500,000 years sounds like bunk."
My guess is they used the layer it was found in to date it.
There are some pretty sophisticated new testing methods of dating around now though.
>>>>I stopped by just to see if anyone had posted a Helen Thomas picture, yet.<<<<
Pay no attention to this poster!
I have visions of archeologists running around with a little sack of old museum stuff....and planting it. Hey, it's good for a big grant!!
"Scientists are the most gullible people on earth according to the Amazing Randi."
The Amazing Randi is amazingly ignorant.
He should read about pre-Columbian dating disputes concerning Clovis First theories.
Scientists are VERY cautious by nature and trying to get them to change earlier assumptions is difficult without a mountain of data.
If these guys say 500,000 years - its probably pretty close to that.
Only by the person trying to carry out such an obvious hoax.
Making a drastic simplification: let's say I used that axe ten years ago to butcher an animal and someone found the axe today, along with the carcass. Date-by-association would make the axe ten years old, more or less.
Not trying to be argumentive here -- just wondering how they can be so sure they aren't dating the actual rock material itself, rather than the axe-creation date?
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