Handaxes Are Not Just Handmade, They're Invented

Handaxes are not things you just knock off, they're the result of experience and careful planning. Simply watching a practised knapper at work shows how many skills the maker of our handaks must have possessed. The person that made this is, i think, a person we would have recognized as someone like us. All this carefully focused and planned creativity implies an enormous advance in how our ancestors saw the world. And how their brains worked. But this hand ax may contain the evidence of something even more important: does this chipped stone tool hold the secret of speech? Was it in making things like this that we learned how to talk to one another?