In different areas of the earth, the transition from stone axes to metal axes occurred at different times. But even now there are places in which non-metallic tools are still used. Basically, this can be observed in African and Australian tribes with a preserved primitive communal way of life.
Stone ax in the life of ancient people
The first tools of labor of the most ancient people were made of stone. Initially, they were just the simplest devices that only made work easier. People in ancient times sought out strong stones (mainly pebbles and flint) with the sharpest edges and used them in everyday life. Then they learned to process, split, crush and even grind them (in the Paleolithic).
The first stone axes (rather hand axes) of ancient people are a universal tool of labor. With their help, the ancient man performed certain work when a point was needed, and strong and durable.
For such tools, primitive people found rather massive stones (approximately 1 kg in weight) 10-20 centimeters long,they were upholstered with some other, also hard, stone, sharpening at the bottom, and rounding at the top, so that it was convenient to hold with hands.
How was the stone ax used? With a chopper, people dug, struck when hunting, cut with it everything that succumbed to it.
Due to the fact that the hands of people were still imperfect, the shape of the turned tool mainly depended on the size of the stone originally found.
Improving the forms of tools
People in the process of life gradually improved their tools. The stone ax more and more took the form of a tool and became a tool not so universal, but used only for certain purposes.
A new tool, a pointed point, has already been used in hunting to get animals. A scraper was used by women when skinning animals killed by men. Work with this tool more often had to be performed by women. This is how the first female stone tool appeared.
Battle stone axes
Only during the Neolithic period (Late Stone Age), with the process of increasing the skill of people in terms of stone processing, fighting types of axes began to appear. The hatchets were small in size, especially for the possibility of fighting with one hand (length - 60-80 cm, weight - 1-3.5 kg).
Such axes made of an obsidian blade were also found on the American continent among the indigenous inhabitants of these places (the period of Spanish colonization).
Stone ax:photo, development history
The oldest tools found in our time were created about 2.5 million years ago. As mentioned above, the first tool of an ancient person (handaxe) was an ordinary stone with one sharp edge.
Subsequently, the process of making an ax or any other stone product went something like this: 1 piece of flint was fixed, and the other was used instead of a hammer, with which extra parts were chipped from the stone, and thus the appropriate shape was given to the produced tool. Then people learned how to polish and grind these products.
There was one problem though. Stone tools crumbled quickly and needed to be replaced frequently.
Over time, the next important step came - the combination of a stick and a chopped into a single tool. And so the stone ax turned out. The advantage of such a tool is that the additional lever greatly increased the impact force, and working with it became more convenient.
The ways of fastening the handle and the cutting part were very different: a bandage was used in the split handle, rubber resin was used, or the working part of the tool was simply driven into a strong massive handle.
It was made from flint, obsidian and other hard rocks.
In the later Stone Age (Neolithic), axes were already made with a hole for the handle (with an eye).
The stone ax began to disappear in the territories of modern Europe whenbronze products appear (starting from the 2nd 1000th anniversary BC). Despite this, stone ones, due to their cheapness, existed for quite a long time in parallel with metal ones.
Difficulties in making a stone ax
The very first axes, which are similar in shape to modern ones, appeared in the Mesolithic period (about 6000 BC).
How to make a stone ax out of stone? It was a difficult engineering task for primitive people to connect two elements of an ax.
If even holes in the stone could already be made, then in this case the thickness of the "blade" of the stone ax increased, and it turned into a hammer or cleaver, with which it was only possible to crush the wood fibers, and not cut them. In this regard, an ax with an ax handle was simply tied together with the help of veins or skins of various animals.
As soon as people learned how to smelt metal, they immediately began to make copper ax handles. But the "blades" themselves continued to be made in the old way (from stone) for a long time, because the slate and flint surfaces made it possible to grind surprisingly sharp products. And the eye was made in the ax itself.
In conclusion
If you think about it, many centuries ago this simple and at the same time amazing object was not just a tool for primitive people or a tool, but also a symbol of greatness and power. Stone axes are the most valuable items of that time, made by the hands of ancient people, which marked the beginning of the creation of the modern ax.
