I wanna throw a crazy hypothesis out there as I’m reading Mark White’s Global History of the Earlier Palaeolithic. The predominant theory is that our hominin ancestors, starting in Africa, began flaking rocks in order to create tools to interface with the environment. The first of these are presumed to be Oldowan tools, found in Olduvai Gorge in South Africa, which are estimated to have been made ~2.5-1.5 million years ago. These were actually found long after Acheulean handaxes were located in France in the late 19th century in the region of St. Acheul, which appear more developed and are believed to have been made ~1.5 mya-100,000 years ago.
The predominant theory is that our hominin ancestors flaked these rocks from all kinds of sources into all kinds of shapes in order to create tools. These tools helped them solve problems in the environment: cutting wood for fires, scraping meat off skin, etc.
Throughout, the author notes that 150 years of archaeology can’t make heads or tails as to why certain handaxe styles persist in some regions, not in others, why they’re mixed in some places, and why there were so many in single spots when they could have been simply transported for use elsewhere. There are literally a hundred or so different schemes for categorizing these tools based on intended size, flaking techniques, final size, cultural factors, etc.
I’ve seen zero attention paid to the fact that inter-tribal combat might have factored into the diversity of shapes. All the experts focus on are the standard externalities like the need for food, shelter, water. I would expect at least lip service be paid to warfare, but there’s none. Again, there’s silence surrounding the fact that hominins (and humans) were unique in that they/we are unique in their/our ability to use objects for combat. Why this mental block?
So let me lay out a crazy hypothesis. What if the first stones chipped were done in order to avert violence? Hominins would have realized, at some point, that they were able to use rocks for combat, in ways that no ape could then, and no ape can to this day. This ability would have seemed to come out of thin air. Its presence now creates an implicit danger in all human interactions. All people can now be killers, no matter how big or small they might be, thanks to the ability to use a rock. Or any object for that matter.
If hominins realized that all-out warfare, tribal extinction, could result from their newfound abilities, then they would have tried to mitigate this somehow, since it represented an acute crisis that imposed a more immediate danger than plague or hunger did. Perhaps the resolution was to take the rock, the weapon, and break it as a symbol of one’s desire not to engage in warfare. The first rock cutting might have been a symbol of pacifism. This could easily be made into a routine, a ritual. These cut rocks might be carried on hunts and shown to rival tribes to indicate, “We come in peace.” Rival tribes might adopt similar rock cuttings, and indeed we see that the Oldowan “style” spreads north. It becomes more streamlined and beautiful with the Acheulean.
These cut rocks, as symbols, could have had their functions as well as cutters, scrapers, and piercers. This would have reduced their value as symbols, though, since such use wears them down. So there might have been an effort to make new ones constantly.
I doubled down on this hypothesis when I looked at flaking patterns. You can derive the order and direction of these strikes just looking at the end product, as archaeologists have done.
These striking patterns look like cuneiform, the wedge patterns used in Ugarit, Akkadian, early Persian, etc. Could cuneiform be based on an old rock striking pattern? Because otherwise cuneiform makes little sense and appears arbitrary. But if the first cuneiform characters were literally rocks that you had to bring around to indicate “1”, “monkey”, etc., then this would be a good case that the first lithic formations were language themselves.
I hope an archaeologist and/or a linguist out there will chime in!