This fourth early tradition is called the chopper-chopping tool tradition. It probably has its earliest roots in the pebble tool tradition of African type. There are several kinds of tools in this tradition, but all differ from the western core-bifaces and flakes. There are broad, heavy scrapers or cleavers, and tools with an adze-like cutting edge. These last-named tools are called “hand adzes,” just as the core-bifaces of the west have often been called “hand axes.” The section of an adze cutting edge is ∠ shaped; the section of an ax is < shaped.
ANYATHIAN ADZE-LIKE TOOL
There are also pointed pebble tools. Thus the tool kit of these early south and east Asiatic peoples seems to have included tools for doing as many different jobs as did the tools of the Western traditions.
Dr. H. L. Movius has emphasized that the tools which were found in the Peking cave with Peking man belong to the chopper-tool tradition. This is the only case as yet where the tools and the man have been found together from very earliest times—if we except Sterkfontein.
DIFFERENCES WITHIN THE TOOL-MAKING TRADITIONS
The latter three great traditions in the manufacture of stone tools—and the less clear-cut pebble tools before them—are all we have to show of the cultures of the men of those times. Changes happened in each of the traditions. As time went on, the tools in each tradition were better made. There could also be slight regional differences in the tools within one tradition. Thus, tools with small differences, but all belonging to one tradition, can be given special group (facies) names.
This naming of special groups has been going on for some time. Here are some of these names, since you may see them used in museum displays of flint tools, or in books. Within each tradition of tool-making (save the chopper tools), the earliest tool type is at the bottom of the list, just as it appears in the lowest beds of a geological stratification.[3]
[3] Archeologists usually make their charts and lists with the earliest materials at the bottom and the latest on top, since this is the way they find them in the ground.
Chopper tool (all about equally early):
Anyathian (Burma)
Choukoutienian (China)
Patjitanian (Java)
Soan (India)