1.2-Million-Year-Old Stone Tool Unearthed in Turkey

....so back to the flake, take a look at the illustration of the flake in the paper posted a page or so back. The flat zone at the very top (sort of a trapezoid shape) is the "platform" where the core (ie: the stone that the flake was taken from) was hit.

This creates a "Bulb of percussion" where the shockwave begins - these can be seen by the radiating curved lines, like ripples in a pool. In Quartzite this bulb does not develop into a full cone shaped fracture like it would in flint, chert, obsidian etc - i'm simplifying a bit as it's never a true cone for more than a few millimetres.

In flint etc, the flake would usually have a slightly curved shape but as can be seen this is not the case with Quartzite.

Quartzite needs a heck of a lot of force behind a blow to flake in this way. Even with the more brittle flint, a knapper has to apply a lot of force and carry the blow right through the target stone.

The blow also would need to be right near the edge of the target stone, and the stone would need an edge of ninety degrees or less to carry the shockwave and detach a flake, otherwise all that would happen is that you would get an "incipient cone", ie a very shallow, only partially fractured cone shape that goes into the stone a tiny depth and leave a circular mark. Either that or just crushing on the stone's surface.

These do occur in nature, but not isolated enough to make one flake - usually in really rough fast rivers, stones will batter each other continuously, making large numbers of blows and incipient cones, causing the creation of flint gravel for example.

Even if one flake was made, by a million to one accurate strike on an already cleaved stone, with the correct angles on a corner of under 90 degrees, with an isolated platform on the edge stuck, the stone that strikes it would be massively unlikely to have enough follow through force to detach the flake.

And even if in the million to one chance that it did, such a forceful, rock laden river would destroy the flake.

Therefore, it's intentionally produced by a human who very much knew what they were doing.


ETA: during this process, the target stone that the flake comes from need to be very securely held when receiving the blow, or the force of the striking blow is lost and no flake is made. This is sooo human made that suggesting otherwise can only come about when the principles of flaking stone are not yet understood, which is fine - it's a pretty arcane subject nowadays

Sound can make patterns and water can create differing vibrations . We also know about little fish making complicated geometric patterns We may not know of a bird or another animal that may have had the ability do do things because they may be extinct and we have no record of them or we have the bones but really don't know what their social behavior was .In some fields of science the rhetoric lends more to uncertainty .A modem day study of Mount St.Helens with a known time frame in hand might suggest that other older times may have been wrong guesses . We see that some sciences that they are surprised at new discoveries because it doesn't fit with the what they thought they should see .Rather then scrap their initial assumptions they will come up for another reason for the new discovery to make it fit the standard models and even create many options like multiple big bang and black holes and multi universes , along with different types of matter or anti-matter if you will . I often wonder if they ever consider that some if not most of it is actually science fiction . So based on some simple facts it's possible to build a fiction . I see the same thing with myth built around a real creator ,a God if you will .

When a scientist provides us with some factual evidence ,the standard models should take note as to what they think they know about geology

Polonium halos - falsifiable hypothesis of young earth - synthesizing granite A presentation about polonium halos and dating the earth with a falsifiable challenge that has been unmet by any evolutionist for 30+ years. From www.halos.com

a reply to: the2ofusr1

Maybe make a thread about Polonium Halos and see what responses you get?

There are different ways of looking at the science in that vid that brings into question the standard models as to how granite came to be and can not fit into a billions of years time frame . If the standard models of time frame is incorrect over long time frames then how doe it affect the millions of years suppositions using the same false assumptions .Weather you want to include Polonium or just use granite alone . a reply to: skalla

a reply to: Pistoche

So...a natural process like a flood, earthquake, eruption, meteorite impact, landslide and just about anything else that can move rocks and earth couldn't possibly have done this???

I find that too bizarre frankly.

Picture picking up a flint, throwing it away with force, and that flint smacking into another rock with force...that's how easy it is to make a flint flake that shows signs of it being struck with force. ALL of those natural forces and plenty more besides could have struck the stone that flake is from, so how these 'experts' jumped to the conclusion this is evidence of early hominid tool making is more than a stretch.

NOT to say that it couldn't be exactly as they say, but i am saying that it is certainly not the only method of flaking flint and many ways, sans clever hominids, are the more likely scenarios to how this came about.

a reply to: MysterX

Please read my explanations in this thread re how flint and quartzite flake, i've made several in this thread, i'd be happy to respond tomorrow once you have done so and commented

if they already had a hard tool to hit the stone with how did they make the "hard tool"? How do they know the flake wasn't the result of an impact with no intentions of using the piece for a tool? so something hard hit the stone and made the flake? a lot of guessing and speculation going on here.

a reply to: Pistoche

a reply to: MysterX

Is it so hard to read a few pages of a research paper?

Do you not think that they explain their reasonings?

originally posted by: bottleslingguy
if they already had a hard tool to hit the stone with how did they make the "hard tool"? How do they know the flake wasn't the result of an impact with no intentions of using the piece for a tool? so something hard hit the stone and made the flake? a lot of guessing and speculation going on here.

a reply to: Pistoche

The "hard tool" would most likely be a stone. I knapp using sandstone, quartzite or granite hammerstones. It could also be antler, ivory, well seasoned bone or a very hard wood. Modern quartzite knappers often favour dogwood (eg. cornus alba Iirc) batons. Read the thread and the paper, it's all there.

ETA: oh yeah, and stop guessing. It's pretty obvious that you know nothing about making stone tools.

For tools out there,
This is a portion of the criteria on how to tell whether an object is man made or a geofact.

A 'geofact' is a piece of rock that has been naturally broken, as opposed to o that was broken by purposef human agency. The word is what linguists call a 'back formation' from the word artifact, of course; artifacts are products of human behaviors, while geofacts are products of natural forces. 


These are important to distinguish in particular at very very old sites, where the implications of misidentifying broken rock as artifacts are pretty serious. As a result, there are a few rules archaeologists use to sort out geofacts from artifacts. By the way, the flip side of identifying geofacts is identifying systematic flaking--the characteristics of human working.

Your artifact is probably a geofact if two or more of the following are true.

There are four or fewer flake scars. A flake (aka waste flake or debitage) is what archaeologists call a tiny fragment of stone broken off a larger stone. A flake scar is the dent made on a piece of rock from where a small fragment was removed. Flake scars can occur naturally, when rocks bang against each other in a rock slide or within a streambed; but more than four begins to look intentional.


See Also: Lithics and Lithic Analysis


There is no platform preparation. Precise control of stone flaking is an important part of stone tool manufacture. Evidence that a flat place was created on a piece of stone from which to knock off additional flakes is a sure sign of human activity.


The flake scars are weathered at different rates. Weathering is the term used to describe the effects of long-term exposure to climatic events. All exposed surfaces of an untouched stone should weather at the same rate. Depending on the climate and the type of rock, it takes many centuries or millennia for weathering to be apparent. If a stone has several flakes removed, and the flake scars are differently weathered, you know there was a large quantity of time passed between flaking events, and so not likely human.



The flake scars occur randomly on the rock. Flaking scars made on stone by human beings are likely to be patterned, rather than random.


 

 archaeology.about.com...


 

originally posted by: MysterX
a reply to: Pistoche

So...a natural process like a flood, earthquake, eruption, meteorite impact, landslide and just about anything else that can move rocks and earth couldn't possibly have done this???

I find that too bizarre frankly.

Picture picking up a flint, throwing it away with force, and that flint smacking into another rock with force...that's how easy it is to make a flint flake that shows signs of it being struck with force. ALL of those natural forces and plenty more besides could have struck the stone that flake is from, so how these 'experts' jumped to the conclusion this is evidence of early hominid tool making is more than a stretch.

NOT to say that it couldn't be exactly as they say, but i am saying that it is certainly not the only method of flaking flint and many ways, sans clever hominids, are the more likely scenarios to how this came about.

Only it is NOT flint, it's Quartzite.

Flint may be very hard, but it is also fairly brittle.

Once again, Quartzite is much, much tougher to flake than flint. But i have said this already.

Quartzite is fairly easy to find in rivers and sandstone deposits in the UK. Go make a flake like this by throwing rocks at it.

Don't forget that it needs to have a platform at the top of the flake to reproduce this artefact.

Throwing stones is the crappest possible way to flake rocks, you need to carry the blow through the stone to detach flakes consistently, otherwise you get crushed edges and incipient cones. Seriously - start knapping without doing this and all you get is rubble. Give it a try, loads of flint in the southeast, dig it up or visit a chalk quarry.

ETA: if you were to outline the more likely scenarios that you mention, then we can examine those

how do they know a human was holding the hard tool? do they guess that part?

a reply to: skalla

a reply to: Pistoche

After looking at the picture all I can say is HAHAHAHA. Sure, it's a "tool". There are thousands of rocks shaped like that laying on Mars. I guess they are all million year old tools as well.

a reply to: skalla

Give it a try, loads of flint in the southeast, dig it up or visit a chalk quarry.

How did you know i was in the Southeast UK?

Throwing stones is the crappest possible way to flake rocks, you need to carry the blow through the stone to detach flakes consistently, otherwise you get crushed edges and incipient cones.

I wasn't suggesting a Hominid deliberately threw stones in order to produce flakes...i mean't natural forces could conceivably 'throw' the stones, a lucky impact then producing the flake.

Again though, i'm not saying i know one way or the other, only that a fluke of nature could have produced it, rather than it having to have been made by hand deliberately.

As an aside, even IF an early Hominid did actually produce this flake deliberately, the idea to actully produce a flake from a larger stone had to have originated somewhere and for a specific reason..IOW, our hypothetical Hominid would have to have realised that this could be done to the stone in the first place.

Where could this enlightenment have come from originally? I would guess that a natural process, or an accidental happening like a Hominid throwing the stone hard against another, or indeed finding stones that had been thrown and fractured by natural processes, produced sharp flakes which were then discovered to be useful (possibly by cutting the hand or feet of a passing Hominid who made a fortunate mental leap and realised these sharp pieces of stone could be useful for cutting things...then tried to reproduce the effect deliberately, which of course they did achieve at some point.

Copying natural processes or what nature does leads to innovation, we still do it today.

But if i get the chance i will attempt to try knapping as you suggested and let you know my results.

a reply to: MysterX

I did not know that you were in the SE, i was just sharing info on where to find flint in the UK

As to how the innovation of using sharp stone edges came from, think about the use of none sharpened stone to crack open nuts and bones for example. (eta - the use of a flint-like stone for this task, using another stone as an anvil, then cracking the stone etc etc)

Flint-like nodules can also become broken by dropping, or by freeze-fracturing - where water gets in to micro cracks in the stone, and then expand when freezing, cracking open a nodule. This does not produce flakes, but still very sharp edges, more like a bi-polar fracturing of a nodule (where a cobble is rested on a stone anvil, then whacked at the top with a hard hammer to split the cobble in two).

I think that many of the older tool innovations, such as blow pipes and atl-atls come about through play around the campfire, and idle experimentation.... as the phrase goes "just keep banging the rocks together". I even have a theory that the bow and arrow came about from bow-drill fire makers observing how their spindle would accidentally shoot out of position with some considerable force, leading to further experimentation and play until we have a weapon system.

As far as i know there is only one recent (19th century plus) "primitive" group who have been observed making stone tools via throwing stones at a core - a tribe in Madagascar who worked with obsidian, and their technology was very poor indeed (no projectile points, just sharp stone pieces, and obsidian is extremely brittle) as well as the method of production being potentially lethal and approached with the requisite amount of fear and running for cover.

Though of course the stone flake in the OP is Quartzite (or more correctly, Quartzitic) and that is immeasurably tougher than obsidian, and still a heck of a lot tougher than flint - expert modern knappers move to quartzite when they are jaded with the usual materials and want to feel like an absolute beginner again!"

Flint knapping is a mega absorbing craft too, i hope you do try it, hit me up for advice or a chat on it if you ever feel the need

originally posted by: bottleslingguy
how do they know a human was holding the hard tool? do they guess that part?

a reply to: skalla

I've explained the forces and other factors required many times in this thread, if you re-read my posts all the info is there.