The earliest stone tools
Approximately 700-600 with 40 millennium BC., by definition, archaeologists and geologists, lasted the earliest period of human history, which is called the lower (or early) Paleolithic. If the first guns were raw random pieces of stone with sharp edges and simple stick, then over time people begin to deliberately produce tools made of stone, using these simple technical methods of crushing and splitting the stones. At the same time, I think, they have learned to sharpen his primitive tools of wood, burning tip sticks on the fire or cutting off their sharp stones.
The oldest wooden products have disappeared without a trace, and therefore science cannot say anything about them. It is also difficult to distinguish chopped natural forces of silicon (called topped up) from the gross initial products, which at first excrete prehistoric man deliberately splitting the flint nodules and stones in order to obtain the required him cutting blade or the tip, however can be no doubt that having a correct and stable form of stone tools preceded by just such a shapeless rough product. This initial phase of the primary use of cutting properties of the stone, the stage immediately following the use of sticks and sharp stones in the final natural form, had to cover a huge amount of time, at least several hundred thousand years.
After that, add up already certain methods of use of stone. There are the first expedient designed tools, and not accidentally received pieces of stone with a cutting blade or tip. This primary guns and were obviously enjoy Pithecanthropus.
On the territory of West Punjab (present Pakistan), in the old gravel deposits Sawan River, they were found, for example, massive coarse flakes, certainly made the hand of man. Together with them detected rough tools made from whole pebbles roughly hewn at only one end, while the rest of the stone surface is left in its natural form. At about the same time is one of the locations in China, near Beijing (Zhoukoudian), where the remains of animals found, related to the early phase of the Lower Pleistocene. There were burnt bones and a right flaked pebbles – “the oldest product of man, now known in China,” – writes about her famous Chinese archaeologist Pei Wen-chung.
Among these ancient instruments owned and roughly shaped pebbles found in different areas of the African continent: in Kenya, Uganda, Morocco.
Tanganyika and in the valley of the river Waal. They have an almond shape. One end of a few chipped at the edges chipped and turned into a coarse massive spearhead. In East Africa, these weapons were in fact based on the ancient pebble deposits of the Zambezi River. Together with them, the primitive elephant bones were found – an ancient ancestor of the elephant-dinothere elephant, zebra, and giraffe horned. In southern Africa, such tools are found in the gravel of the ancient terraces of the river Waal. In the classical region of ancient Paleolithic Europe, in the Somme River valley, the city of Amiens, in the gravel deposits of the second terrace, together with similar products are also found people make numerous flakes. Slightly retouched along the edges rough retouching (retouching here- hewing small chips.) They form a different kind of primitive tools, like an island, and scrapers with convex and concave blade; form is entirely dependent more on the shape of the starting material, i.e. flakes. In the same pebble layers met the bones of the Middle time animals – southern elephant, the ancient elephant, rhino Merck, Etruscan rhinoceros, horse Stenon (called by the names of scientists, explore and identify fossils auspices of animals.), A saber-toothed tiger (machairodus).