Early Man in the New World

by Kenneth Macgowan; Joseph A. Hester

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.

The theory that the early stone workers had a core industry and the later ones worked flakes was rudely upset by the discovery of flaked tools—called Cromerian—in an English stratum as old as the French sources of the first hand axes, and possibly older. Some say they lie at the beginning of the Great Ice Age or at the end of the earlier period, the Pliocene. This demonstration of a very early flake industry was reenforced by the discovery of a special type of flaked tool—the Clactonian—which runs from late Abbevillian into Acheulean times. Another type—the Levalloisian—laps over from the Acheulean into the Mousterian.

The core industries and the flake industries simply would not stay nicely separated. The first excavators had found only hand axes because these tools were so much more interesting than scrapers; later students found flake tools in the same ancient levels. No hand axes turned up in Clactonian culture-sites, but they appeared at the end of the Levallois, and the flake-loving Mousterians made them for a time. “Flake and core run parallel to one another in time,” says W. B. Wright, “and even intermix.”[7]

PALEOLITHIC TYPES AND INDUSTRIES

A chart of the core-, flake-, and blade-making traditions and industries, devised and dated by Robert J. Braidwood.[8] The dates indicate the approximate beginning and end of the various types of artifacts. Usually the same group of men made different kinds of tools within one industry. The Solutrean was distinguished for double-faced, leaf-shaped projectile points, rather than blades.

MAN’S FIRST PERFECTED TOOL

Three European hand axes that may bridge 300,000 years. They are, top, Pre-Abbevillian; left, Abbevillian; and right, Acheulean. The last is one of the tools found by John Frere at Hoxne in 1715. Most hand axes are not so well formed. Somewhat similar tools have been found in American Indian cultures hafted at the top of a wooden handle or in the middle, as a sort of spokeshave. (After Osborn, 1915; Leakey, 1935; and Burkitt, 1933.)

If we do not try to apply the core-versus-flake theory too broadly and too strictly, it suggests a fascinating picture of two kinds of men and two kinds of life through the first two-thirds of the Great Ice Age. One kind dominated during the cold of the glaciations; the other, during the warmth of the interglacials. For the flake tools of the Clactonian and Levalloisian peoples are found mainly with the fossils of cold-loving animals in the north and east of Europe, and the core tools of the Abbevillian and Acheulean peoples with warmer-blooded animals in the west and south.

Science accepted Mortillet’s system of orderly cultures and the theory of successive core and flake industries, and for fifty years tried to apply it to new discoveries both in Europe and elsewhere. Though the system has had to be modified in parts, and in parts abandoned, its terms are still used, and used in a way that is confusing because the terms are no longer exact. In Africa the various types of tools resemble only approximately those of Europe, and they do not seem to correspond in time. The hand ax may have spread from Spain into almost all Africa, or, more probably, from Africa into Spain, as well as southern India, but there are plenty of flaked tools, too, in these regions. Central and northern Asia seem to be devoted to the flake, and to eschew the hand ax in favor of a kind of chopping tool made out of a core. Asia, like Africa, has tools made out of large, smooth pebbles.