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.
Dating Early Man in Europe
One good thing can be said for Mortillet’s modified sequence of Abbevillian, Acheulean, Mousterian, Aurignacian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian. It may not be complete enough, and it may not apply too well to the world outside Europe; but it is chronologically sound locally. It is a succession of cultures along a time scale. If an archaeologist finds two or more varieties of paleolithic tools in a new site, he finds, for example, Acheulean beneath Mousterian, or Mousterian beneath Aurignacian. Similarly, when he comes upon Abbevillian and Acheulean in separate terraces of the same river, he always finds the Abbevillian in a higher terrace than the Acheulean, and, as we have explained on pages [51] and [52], the higher terrace is always the older.
