Chopping Tools Instead of Hand Axes in Asia
Showing the areas where the hand ax dominated and those where the chopping tool took precedence. The white portions are the ice fields of the last glaciation. (After Movius, 1944.)
Throughout most of Asia the men of the Old Stone Age developed a very different core industry from that of Europe. Instead of the hand ax (coup-de-poing), they made an implement now called a chopping tool. This was a large and somewhat flat pebble with a sharpened edge made by striking off flakes alternately from either side. They had also large, crude scrapers, flaked on a single side, which are now called choppers. Only in India and the Near East did the hand ax seem to flourish as in western Europe and much of Africa. In the border area of the Upper Punjab, Helmut de Terra found both hand axes and chopping tools in the early Soan culture, which seems to lie in the Second Interglacial. In upper Burma the hand ax disappears, leaving the field to the chopping tool and the chopper. The same seems true of Java and northern China.[14] Here there are flake artifacts, but they were not chipped by European methods. On the whole, the tools of the Asiatic complex look much more like the choppers and scrapers found at very early sites such as Lake Mohave, southeastern Arizona (Cochise), Sonora, Lower California, and the Valley of Mexico.
A chopping tool of the early Soan culture, in northwestern India. (After Paterson, 1942.)
Yet—another puzzle—hand axes have been found in central and southern Texas, and in Renaud’s Black’s Fork culture of Wyoming, without traces of Folsom or Eden. Can these hand axes, like the Aurignacian and Magdalenian traits of which Nelson and Harrington write, represent an earlier migration than Sandia and Folsom? This is most problematical.