Development of stone processing technology in human history. General characteristics of the Mesolithic era. Weapons on chips

The superbly crafted "bay leaf" from France (shown at life size on the left and in wide shot on the right) is so fragile that it could not serve any practical purpose. Its length is 28 centimeters, and its thickness is only one centimeter, and perhaps it represented some kind of ritual object or even served as a proud emblem of a skilled craftsman

Perhaps in the distant future, when the internal combustion engine has become a funny ancient curiosity, penicillin has been considered a quack drug, and steel has fallen out of use, archaeologists studying the 20th century will never cease to be amazed that people with such primitive and limited technology managed to live at all not bad. In the same way, today, many, imagining their Cro-Magnon ancestors as beast-like creatures who chopped up a mammoth carcass with blunt stone fragments, are perplexed how such people with such tools managed to survive in the harsh conditions of the Ice Age.

How caricatured such a concept is becomes clear to anyone who has ever held and examined a Stone Age tool like the famous “laurel leaf” depicted on the page on the left. The impeccable proportions and exquisite workmanship of this flint blade irrefutably prove that its maker could not have been a clumsy dunce, and testify to a remarkable technical achievement. In reality, Cro-Magnon man was a skilled and inventive tool maker and made the greatest leap in the history of technology. In 30 thousand years, he has advanced along the path of progress much further than all his predecessors in 1.3 million years, and has subjugated the environment much more than they did.

He was an incomparable mason and, improving on previous methods, he produced much more varied and effective tools from flint and other suitable rocks. But, in addition, he learned to process other materials - bone, horns, tusks - that had hardly been used before, and created new weapons from them, came up with new techniques to use them more effectively, as well as new household items and decorations. He learned to make fire better and faster and applied it to new purposes. Some of the dwellings he built were only one step away from real houses, they were much stronger than all the previous ones and better protected from cold, rain and wind; and when the climate changed, man was able to cope with new difficulties. Technological innovations and the development of material culture replaced physical evolution: man was now increasingly breaking ties with his animal past. He still depended on nature, but she no longer controlled him. From the tropics to the Arctic, he thrived in his relationship with nature, and overall his life in all geographic areas was a fulfilling life.

The improvement of stone tools was the decisive moment of the new technical achievements of Cro-Magnon man, but, no matter how funny it may be, no one knows the purpose of the most beautiful examples of his new skill - thin plates, like the twenty-eight-centimeter "bay leaf", which received this name for its shape. Too thin to be a knife, too large and fragile to be a spearhead, this superbly crafted piece of flint appears to be a deliberate display of craftsmanship. Undoubtedly, the manufacture of an object of such harmonious proportions required a skill bordering on art, and many archaeologists believe that masterpieces like this were precisely works of art that served an aesthetic and ritual function and had no utilitarian purpose. Perhaps these were highly valued gifts that were passed from one person to another, from one group to another.

If such large “laurel leaves” were not made for practical use, they are a clear example of the transition of technology to a different quality - after all, the smaller conventional tools, after which these masterpieces were created, had a purely practical purpose. Excavations in western Europe have yielded thousands of stone points of varying sizes, and undoubtedly many of them would have made excellent spear points or razor-edged knives. These were the most important weapons in the arsenal of a people who, living and hunting in the game-rich regions of Europe, depended less and less on the mere strength of their biceps and more and more on the strength of their intellect and the efficiency of their weapons in the struggle for existence.

The stone blades were undeniably sharp and effective. Modern experiments have shown that well-processed flint tips are sharper than iron tips and penetrate deeper into the animal's body. And in terms of cutting ability, flint knives are equal to or even superior to steel ones. The only drawback of flint tips and knives is their fragility, due to which they break much more often.

The most important role of these tools in the life of the Cro-Magnons led experts to the idea that large, practically useless masterpieces - and several dozen of them were found - could be ritual objects, embodiments of the ideal spear tip. There is, however, an assumption that the magnificent “bay leaf” was made by a virtuoso master simply to demonstrate his art. In this case, the admiration and praise he received from family, friends or group was well deserved. The Bay Leaf is an undeniable masterpiece, and there are only a handful of people in the modern world so skilled in the ancient craft that they could create something like it.

It is quite natural, although perhaps a little sad, that a skill that has been a necessary condition of human existence for over a million years has almost disappeared over the past few centuries. Some hunter-gatherer tribes - such as the Australian Aborigines - still make stone arrow and spear points and scrapers, but they increasingly prefer modern metals to stone. In an industrial society, in various places there are some craft communities that practice the ancient art to one degree or another. For example, peasants in the Turkish village of Cakmak insert flint flints into wooden sleds, which serve as threshers for them to pull back and forth over ears of wheat. In England, in Brandon, two or three artisans still make flints for flintlocks used at American festivities dedicated to the War of Independence. And finally, in different countries, individual enthusiasts (mostly archaeologists) independently studied the intricacies of flint processing in order to learn more about the life of prehistoric man and more accurately establish how he used his tools (see pp. 81-89),

It is very difficult to acquire the necessary skill. First of all, you need to know the material - the stone from which you are going to cut pieces, so that you can then process them to make this or that tool. The best stones have a uniform, fine structure. As a matter of fact, the most convenient material for processing is not even stone, but glass. Glass insulators on telegraph poles in remote areas of Australia were disappearing faster than they could be replaced - local Aborigines discovered that they made excellent tools. Eventually, workers began leaving piles of insulators at the posts as a gift to the masonry craftsmen.

However, glass is a very fragile material, and obsidian (volcanic glass) is rare in nature. In second place behind it is flint. Its fine crystalline structure allows the master to give the future weapon the desired shape. The coarse-grained structure and various defects make it difficult to process granites or layered stones like slate with the same confidence. If flint was not available, craftsmen used stones with the finest structure they could find, such as quartzite or basalt.

The art of processing lies in knowing where and how to work on the stone. It is either directly struck with a stone, bone or wooden hammer, or a bone chisel is used, or it is pressed firmly at the intended point with a pointed tool, such as the tip of a deer antler. But the force of impact or pressure must always be controlled with absolute precision, and the master must feel all the planes and angles of the structure of the stone he has chosen. When he acquires the necessary dexterity, it is relatively easy for him to knock off or squeeze out a flake of the required size with razor-sharp edges from the stone.

These two properties of some types of stone - the relative ease of processing and the tendency to produce sharp edges when broken - became the basis of man's first technology, and for hundreds of thousands of years the ability to use them was the measure of his technical progress. At first, he used one of two main methods: either he hit stone against stone to sharpen one of them into a handaxe or striker, or he knocked off flakes with sharp edges from one stone and used these flakes as tools. Over time, he discovered how to cut flakes of a predetermined size and shape and how to process and retouch them, then using them for specific purposes - a scraper to clean skins, a spearhead to kill animals, an ax to chop or chop wood.

Another improvement appeared in Cro-Magnon times. Prehistoric craftsmen in Europe learned to cut very thin, so-called knife-shaped plates from stone cores, the length of which was at least twice as wide as the width, and both edges were so sharp that they sometimes had to be blunted so that the plate could be grasped in the hand. A high degree of skill is required to produce knife-shaped plates.

The craftsman first shapes the flint nodule into a roughly cylindrical shape, and then, one by one, breaks off the plates from the outer edge in a longitudinal direction, either by applying a strong squeeze or by accurately striking the upper edge of the core. The breaking off pieces are equal in length to the core (usually 25-30 centimeters), but their thickness, as a rule, is several millimeters. Each new plate breaks off exactly next to the previous one - and so on around the entire core until it is almost completely used. Then various tools are made from these plates. A good master can obtain more than 50 wafers from one core, spending literally minutes on the entire operation.

This cut and drilled deer antler, found in the Dordogne (France) and made 15 thousand years ago, belongs to the mysterious Cro-Magnon products that modern experts call the "chief's staff" (based on the assumption that it served as a symbol of power). Later wands were decorated with intricate carvings

The knife plate method is much more economical than the more ancient flake method. From a given amount of flint, more blades are obtained, and in addition, the working edge of such a blade is five times longer than that of a flake. Such savings may not have been significant in areas where good flint was abundant; for example, in England, so-called chalk flints are found very often and of all kinds of sizes - from pieces the size of a chicken egg to fifty-kilogram nodules. However, for a group of hunter-gatherers living in places not rich in flint, such an advantage is obvious. As S.A. Semenov, a Soviet specialist and expert on Stone Age tools, pointed out, “a person, using a small amount of flint, now achieves a much greater result.”

Interestingly, the knife-blade tools found in the Soviet Union, at Kostenki on the Don River (see pp. 49-57), were made from flint mined at least 150 kilometers away. For the hunters who lived in Kostenki, it undoubtedly made sense to chop off as many plates as possible from the nodule. The plates were struck directly at the site of flint mining, which also saved time and effort. If the nodule turned out to have a defect, it could immediately be easily replaced with another one; the fragments broken off during the preliminary processing of the nodule remained in place, and the people returning to Kostenki with unfinished plates carried only the payload.

The knife-blade method was probably of great help to hunters who went on multi-day expeditions into areas where not only flints, but also other fine-grained rocks were scarcely found. They could take with them a supply of cores or plates so that they would have something to replace spear tips that broke off during an unsuccessful throw or remained in the wound of an animal that managed to escape. And the edges of the flint knives, which were used to cut joints and tendons, broke off and became dull. Thanks to the knife-plate method, new tools could be made on the spot.

The increasing sophistication of tool making appears to have played a decisive role in the rapid increase in diversity in the cultures of the Cro-Magnon groups. Homo erectus's hackles were roughly the same whether he lived in Spain or East Africa, and similarly, wherever Neanderthals lived, their scrapers and knives were similar to each other - sometimes so much that it seemed as if they were made by the same person. But with the advent of the Cro-Magnons, the situation changes. At the beginning of their era in western Europe, according to the French classification, there were two main types of tool making - Aurignacian and Périgordian (named after the areas where their first examples were found) with some variations in each. In later Cro-Magnon times, two other cultures dominated - Solutrean and Magdalenian.

The people who made Aurignacian and Périgord scrapers apparently lived at the same time or almost simultaneously. This gave rise to a number of mysteries. Did each type represent a distinct culture? Were these people physically different from each other? Do the differences in stone implements not reflect the differences in climate, flora and fauna familiar to each of these groups? Or are these just differences in style? Perhaps one group in some cases made different tools - or the same tools, but in different quantities - depending on seasonal activity and certain situations.

Now it seems that it can be firmly assumed that some variations in the manufacture of tools simply reflect the individuality or preferences of those who made them, and not differences in functional purpose. Craftsmen who lived in the same area and, perhaps, were related to each other, developed a certain method of processing flint, and therefore the tools received a similar shape. These masters jealously maintained their style and passed it on to new generations as an expression of their personality - as a signature. There is no doubt that the art, painting and jewelry of Cro-Magnon man clearly indicate growing self-expression and self-awareness. It is likely that the same trends were reflected in some of his tools. But no matter how individual in dressing the tools included in various Cro-Magnon inventories were, in terms of their intended purpose these implements had much in common. Each of them included many more specialized tools than those used by more ancient people. Archaeologists distinguish 60-70 types of tools in the stone inventory of some Neanderthals - scrapers that should have been held horizontally, knives with blunt backs, double-edged knives, and so on. But the Cro-Magnon inventory contains over a hundred types of them - knives for cutting meat, knives for planing wood, bone scrapers, skin scrapers, drills, piercings, stone saws, chisels, grinding plates and many others. Cro-Magnon man was a great innovator. Among other things, he apparently began attaching handles of bone and deer antlers to many of his stone tools, such as axes and knives. The handles doubled or tripled the force applied to a given implement, providing a stronger grip and allowing much greater use of the arm and shoulder muscles.

One of the most important tools improved by the Cro-Magnon man was the chisel. It would be very tempting to say that he invented it, but incisors have also been found in some Neanderthal artifacts and even in Homo erectus. However, in the hands of the first modern man, incisors gradually became better, more useful and more varied. Nowadays, a chisel is called, for example, a tool of a sculptor, engraver, etc. In the Stone Age, it was a tool with a strong, sharply beveled edge or point, used to cut, notch and process materials such as bone, horns, wood and sometimes stone. Thus, the main difference between the chisel and the vast majority of other Stone Age tools was that it was not used to kill animals, cut meat, peel skins, or cut down young trees for poles. It was intended for the manufacture of other tools and devices, that is, it had the same function as modern tool machines. With the advent of tools for making other tools, the technique of Cro-Magnon man was able to develop many times faster than before.

With the help of a chisel, many different wooden devices were probably made, but only minor fragments of them have survived. Therefore, the best proof of the effectiveness of the chisel are the tools processed by it - magnificent tools, which, like the chisel itself, testify to the remarkable achievements of the Cro-Magnon man.

Three main organic materials - bone, horn and ivory - helped meet the needs of the growing material culture of the Cro-Magnons, and the chisel opened up the possibility of a wide variety of their uses. Homo erectus and Neanderthals used bones to a certain extent - for scraping, piercing and digging - but not nearly as extensively as Cro-Magnon. When excavating a typical Neanderthal site, for every thousand stone tools found, there are at most 25 made of bone. In Cro-Magnon settlements this ratio is equal to one to one, or there are even more bone tools than stone ones.

Bone, horn and ivory were the wonder materials of Cro-Magnon times - about the same as plastics today. They are much stronger and harder than wood, and also less fragile and therefore more convenient for processing. They could be cut, hollowed out, jagged, scored and sharpened into a variety of shapes. They could be turned into tiny devices like needles or used for heavy work: a deer antler makes an excellent pick, any of the long bones of a mammoth's legs, split lengthwise, is an almost finished scoop, needing only a handle. Ivory could be steamed and bent, which opened up new possibilities for making tools.

And besides, these materials did not have to be specially mined: the Cro-Magnons were supplied with them in abundance by the very animals they constantly hunted. It goes without saying that all animals have bones, and many of the large herbivores - red deer, reindeer and mammoths - also had antlers or tusks. Antlers are a true gift from nature: after all, every year deer shed their antlers, so people could only pick them up. Since at one time red and reindeer were especially numerous in western Europe, their antlers were used more widely than bone or tusks. In some treeless areas in eastern Europe and Siberia, the source of raw materials for tools were the skeletons of mammoths that died of natural causes or were driven into a trap by hunters. The average mammoth tusk reached a length of almost three meters and weighed more than forty kilograms - many tools and all kinds of devices could be made from such an amount of raw materials.

True, bone, horns and tusks required special tools for processing. And this is where the cutter came in handy. Its strong, chisel-like edge easily cut and chiseled through bone without breaking it. To cut the bone, the craftsman made a deep groove around its circumference, and then with a sharp blow he broke it evenly in the right place - just like today a glazier runs a diamond along the glass and then breaks it off.

To make a needle, piercing or awl, it was enough to scratch two deep parallel grooves with a chisel to a softer core, after which the strip between the grooves was broken out and given the desired shape (see pp. 86-87). From pieces of bone, in addition, it was possible to make polishes, scrapers, beads, bracelets, digging tools and much more.

In addition to household utensils, spearheads, darts and jagged ends of harpoons were made from bone and horns, which helped the Cro-Magnons to make fuller use of the abundance of all kinds of game. Perhaps, such a number of edible herbivores have never inhabited our planet - mammoths, horses, red and reindeer, wild boars, bison in Europe and Asia, and in Africa lived all the animals that now exist in it, and many others, now extinct, including the giant relatives of the buffalo, the buffalo and the zebra. As the English archaeologist Graham Clark put it, from a Cro-Magnon point of view, these animals existed “to transform plants into meat, fat and raw materials such as hides, sinews, bones and horns” - and the first modern people put all their considerable ingenuity to use, to use these gifts of nature as fully as possible.

Archaeologists have found two striking evidence of Cro-Magnon hunting skills in Europe. Near the town of Pavlova in Czechoslovakia, the remains of more than 100 mammoth skeletons were unearthed in one colossal pile, and near Solutre, in France, an even more stunning pile contained the fossils of approximately 10,000 wild horses lying haphazardly under a high cliff. The mammoth bones apparently came from animals that hunters killed in pit traps. Skilled hunters who knew the terrain and the habits of their prey may have organized raids on horses and driven them to this cliff, from where the animals jumped down in panic, and this was repeated from year to year, from generation to generation.

It is very likely that the people of that era, including the ancestors of the Indians who eventually settled the plains of North America, were able to hunt big game like no other in the history of mankind. They undoubtedly knew which plants these animals preferred, they knew when seasonal migrations began and at what speed the animals moved, they knew what scared them and what calmed them down. They knew where to dig pit traps and where to place belt loops with bait. They knew how to direct animals into natural or specially constructed pens - either by scaring the herd, or skillfully and imperceptibly turning it in the right direction. Animals caught in the trap were finished off with spears or knives and the carcasses were butchered on the spot. The meat was then taken to the parking lot, perhaps after preliminary processing: for example, by cutting it into narrow strips, and then smoking or drying it.

These hunters undoubtedly knew the anatomy of their prey and understood the benefits of eating certain organs. Modern Eskimos of interior Alaska save the adrenal glands of killed caribou for small children and pregnant women. Chemical analysis of these endocrine glands has shown that they are surprisingly rich in vitamin C, which is absolutely necessary for humans, but is included in only a relatively small number of components of the Eskimo diet. And without overestimating the knowledge of Cro-Magnon hunters in this regard, one can still assume that they also knew very well which parts of the killed game were especially useful, and not just tasty.

A deep understanding of the habits and characteristics of game, combined with significant improvements in hunting equipment, greatly increased the amount of meat obtained. People have long had wooden spears with burnt ends or sharp stone tips. With these spears they acted like pikes or threw them from afar, but a spear thrown by hand was unlikely to often inflict a serious wound even on a young deer, not to mention the thick-skinned giant bison, especially if it was thrown after a fleeing animal. Cro-Magnon hunters invented a spear thrower, which helped them hit game more accurately at a noticeably greater distance.

As evidenced by finds in the French cave of La Placard, this device appeared at least 14 thousand years ago. Fragments of spear throwers were found there, including an oblong piece of bone with a tooth at the end, very similar to a huge crochet hook. In total, about 70 spear throwers made from deer antlers were found in southwestern France and near Lake Constance, but in the Old World they are found almost nowhere else - perhaps because they were made from short-lived wood and they rotted a long time ago. About 10 thousand years ago, wooden spear throwers were used by the Indians of North and South America. The Aztecs called them "atlatl". The Eskimos used them until very recently, and they are still in use among the Australian Aborigines, who call them "woomera."

To put it simply, a spear thrower is like an extension of the human hand, lengthening it by 30-60 centimeters. One end serves as a handle, and the other has a barb or hook to hold the blunt end of the spear (see pages 28-29). The hunter raises the spear thrower over his shoulder with the prong upward and places the spear on it so that the sharp end is directed forward and slightly upward. To throw a spear, he sharply throws his hand forward, and it breaks off the prong of the spear thrower at the top point of the arc it describes with a high initial speed due to the centrifugal force that arises. The hunter continues to hold the spear thrower, which may have a strap attached to the end that wraps around his wrist. The spear flies faster than when thrown by hand, since the spear thrower extends the lever and the end with the tooth moves faster than the end held in the fingers.

Modern experiments have shown the enormous advantage of the spear thrower. A two-meter spear thrown by hand flies no more than 60-70 meters, and a spear thrower sends it 150 meters with such force that it kills a deer 30 meters away. This increase in range played a colossal role for the prehistoric hunter. He no longer had to sneak up close to his prey; he even often managed to throw a spear before the animals noticed him and took flight. Now a person could hunt alone: ​​it was no longer necessary to surround the animal before hitting it with a spear. And it goes without saying that the spear thrower made hunting safer, as it allowed one to keep a respectful distance from teeth, horns and hooves. The benefits of all this are obvious: hunters who caught game more often and were less likely to be wounded lived better and longer.

The first spear throwers were undoubtedly made from wood, like modern Australian woomeras, but they were soon made from deer antlers. These later Cro-Magnons, called Maglenians, decorated their spear throwers with carved figures and designs, and possibly painted them - traces of red ocher remain in the recesses of one, while the eyes on others are blackened. Many spear throwers amaze with the grace and expressiveness of the animals depicted on them - horses, deer, mountain goats, bison, birds and fish (see page 98). This combination of aesthetics and utilitarianism is visible in many aspects of the life of Cro-Magnon man. At least three spear-throwers seem to indicate Rabelaisian humor - all three depict mountain goats defecating with amazing art.

This piece of iron pyrite (magnified by one and a half times), the oldest known "fire stone", was found in a Belgian cave, where it lay for 10 thousand years or more. A deep notch in a rounded piece of pyrite appeared as a result of constant strikes with flint, striking sparks. Apparently the Cro-Magnons were the first to discover that flint and iron pyrites produced sparks hot enough to ignite tinder.

The spear itself has also changed. By this time, hunters realized that a jagged tip caused more severe wounds than a smooth one. Harpoon-type tips, made from bone and antler, often had several barbs on one or both sides. Another improvement was dictated by the fact that the spear, even hitting an animal, rarely killed it outright. The hunters pursued it until it weakened from loss of blood, and then they finished it off. To speed up this process, hunters began to make tips with deep grooves on both sides - these grooves, apparently, were intended to allow blood to flow out of the wound faster and more easily.

Perhaps a mysterious device, which was given the name “chief’s rod,” was also associated with hunting. These wands were made of horns or bone and varied noticeably in length, although they were rarely more than 30 centimeters. They are Y-shaped or T-shaped, and a hole is necessarily drilled under the fork of the "Y" or under the crossbar of the "T". Unlike the deadly tips, which are simple and serrated, their purpose remains intriguingly unclear.

Many archaeologists believe that it was ritual - that the wands, like sceptres, served as a symbol of status or authority for those who had the right to bear them. Some wands are clearly phallic in shape and may have had some magical powers attributed to them. Other archaeologists offer a completely prosaic explanation and consider them to be a device for straightening arrows - if a bent arrow shaft is inserted into a hole and its ends are secured, then, using the rod as a lever, the bend can be straightened, especially if the shaft is first steamed or soaked.

In addition, the staff could be used as a hunting weapon - a kind of sling, consisting of a handle and a piece of leather secured to it with straps passed through a hole. Other explanations were also proposed - from the most everyday (pegs for dwellings made of skins) to the humorous (see page 65). But for now the mystery of the wands remains unsolved.

A different kind of mystery is the question of whether the Cro-Magnons used bows and arrows. There is no clear archaeological evidence that they had such weapons, at least not until the very end of their era. Since bows are usually made from wood and sinew or guts, it would truly be a miracle if any of them survived from the last glaciation. In Denmark, two bows with an antiquity of about 8 thousand years were found, and to the southeast, excavations at sites of reindeer hunters yielded a large number of wooden arrows with stone tips made approximately 10 thousand years ago. In the French cave of La Colombiere, small stones were discovered, perhaps more than 20 thousand years old, with scratched designs that seem to depict feathered projectiles, but it is impossible to decide whether they are arrows or darts.

However, it is clear that Cro-Magnon man had enough intelligence and resourcefulness to invent the bow. He knew that bent young trees straighten sharply if they are released; he had leather belts, and he almost certainly knew that the dried tendons and intestines of animals were very strong and elastic. This is why many archaeologists are now convinced that some Cro-Magnon hunters used bows earlier than ten thousand years BC, although no material evidence of this has survived.

Undoubtedly, the bow provided the Cro-Magnon hunter with enormous benefits. The spear thrower, with all its advantages, forced him to run out into the open, and if the throw was unsuccessful, the frightened animals would flee. But with a bow, he could remain in cover and, having missed, send another arrow - and another, and another. In addition, the arrow flew faster than the spear and hit harder at greater distances. Using a bow, it was easier to hit running or small prey, as well as flying birds.

Perhaps, in expanding the diet of the Cro-Magnons and in the development of areas previously unsuitable for human habitation, the invention of various devices for fishing played an even greater role than the spear thrower and bow. People had previously enjoyed the gifts of streams, rivers and the sea, but for some Cro-Magnons, fishing became the main occupation. For example, archaeological material left behind by hunter-gatherers who lived in the Nelson Bay Cave in South Africa indicates that here, too, the improvement of tools and devices was a necessary condition for successful survival.

One of these ingenious inventions was a spear-point with two curved bone teeth attached to the sides, which held the fish pierced by the point. A fish cross was also used - a small bone or wooden stick about 5 centimeters long, tied in the middle to a long leather strap or tendon. The fisherman threw a baited rod into the water, the fish swallowed the bait, the bait got stuck in its throat, and the fisherman pulled the catch ashore.

Somewhat later in South Africa, and perhaps also in Europe, people began to fish in much larger quantities than ever before. Small, cylindrical, grooved stones found in South Africa may have been suspended as weights on nets woven from straps or plant fibers. With the help of nets, two or three fishermen could catch a whole school of fish at one time.

Perhaps the Cro-Magnons also used stone fences, which primitive tribes still use for fishing. They would be particularly effective on rivers such as the Dordogne and Vézère in France, where salmon would move upstream in a single live stream during spawning days. It is quite possible to assume that during the spawning season, small groups went to the river far from the main site to prepare salmon for everyone. The fish was probably cleaned and dried in the sun or smoked over fires right there and taken away ready for storage. In France, in Solvier, excavations discovered a large rectangle neatly laid out with small stones. Its location and shape suggest that it was used for drying fish.

The systematic exploitation of the abundant protein resources of the seas, rivers and lakes, including not only fish, but also a variety of shellfish, according to anthropologist Bernard Campbell, was of great importance not only because it expanded the basis of the human diet, but also because it led man to the next a great step in cultural evolution - towards settled life. When the Cro-Magnons received such a reliable addition to their meat and vegetable diet as fish and shellfish, the need to constantly wander in search of prey began to disappear. Thanks to the networks, they obtained more food with less effort than before, when they were simply wandering hunter-gatherers, and therefore a larger number of people could live in one place without starving. In a world with a rapidly increasing population, the possibility of transition to a sedentary lifestyle played a decisive role.

For people at the end of the Ice Age, improving tools and methods of obtaining food was the main, but not the only concern. As they learned to take more and more of nature's gifts, they found more effective ways to protect themselves from its harshness. The production of carefully sewn, tailored clothing helped them conquer the far north and opened the way to the deserted expanses of the American continent.

Cro-Magnon clothing made from skins probably resembled the national clothing of the Eskimos. A shirt with tightly sewn seams to retain body heat, trousers that can be easily tucked into boots, and something like socks, possibly fur, allow you to feel normal in any weather, except for the most severe cold. And outerwear, consisting of a fur jacket with a hood, mittens and fur boots, does not allow a person to freeze even in bitter frosts. Some Stone Age figurines found in the Soviet Union appear to depict women dressed in furs. But even in milder climates, well-tailored clothing has clear advantages - the most ancient needles with an eye were made by the same Solutrean craftsmen who created the amazing “bay leaves”.

For hunter-gatherers battling the icy cold of the North, fire was even more important than warm clothing. Since the time of Homo erectus, people have used it for cooking. In addition, it gave them light, warmth and protection from dangerous predators. But the Cro-Magnons found other uses for fire. To begin with, they are the first of the people who left evidence of their ability to quickly make fire in case of need. A rounded piece of iron pyrite was found in a Belgian cave. This mineral is one of the few natural substances from which flint produces sparks capable of igniting dry tinder - the sparks produced by striking flint on flint or a simple stone on another simple stone are not hot enough. Moreover, on the surface of the Belgian pyrite there is a notch formed by numerous blows. Finding a piece of iron pyrite is far from easy, and therefore “fire stones” were undoubtedly very valuable and the group carried them with them on all their travels.

An even more striking example of the power that Cro-Magnon man continued to acquire over fire (evidence of which has been found in the Soviet Union and France) seems at first glance quite uninteresting - these are the shallow grooves in the bottom of the hearth and the groove extending from it. Such a simple innovation may have gone unnoticed more than once during earlier excavations. But, in essence, this was the first step on the path to modern blast furnaces. The fact is that a fire burns hotter if it receives more air, that is, more oxygen. The recesses and grooves of these prehistoric hearths opened the way for air to reach the fuel, and the flames produced more heat.

For the ancient inhabitants of the Russian steppes, who built such hearths, this device was absolutely necessary because of the fuel they used. Due to the lack of trees, they were forced to make do with fuel, which burns very poorly under normal conditions. They burned the same miracle material that revolutionized the production of tools - bone. Although it is difficult to light and burns poorly, since the flammable substances in it make up only 25%, the bone produces enough heat. And the prehistoric Russian steppe dwellers used bones as logs, which is proven by the absence of charcoal and significant amounts of bone ash in their specially blown hearths.

Hearth meant home, and Cro-Magnon man, who changed so many things, also changed the concept of home. Living in caves and under rocky overhangs that had previously sheltered his predecessors, he - at least in some places - seemed to be more concerned about the cleanliness of his home: garbage no longer accumulated inside, but was thrown out.

The improvements of Cro-Magnon dwellings are especially noticeable in those areas where there were no ready-made shelters. In Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in Siberia, many remains of strong structures were found in open areas. Apparently, they lived in them, although not all year round, but more or less constantly. One of the most famous of these villages was excavated in Dolní Vestonice, in south-central Czechoslovakia, and from the surviving remains it is possible to reconstruct an extremely interesting picture of the home life of a person who lived in Europe 27 thousand years ago.

On a grassy hillock with sparsely scattered trees there was a village of five huts, partly surrounded by a simple fence of mammoth bones and tusks dug into the ground, which were then covered with brushwood and turf. One hut stood 80 meters from the rest. Four huts, built side by side, rested on slightly inwardly inclined wooden posts, driven into the ground and lined with stones for stability. The walls were made of skins, presumably processed and sewn, stretched over pillars and secured to the ground with stones and heavy bones.

A stream flowed down the slope near the huts, and the earth around was compacted by the feet of people who had lived there for generations. In the open space between the huts there was a large fire burning - perhaps a special fire keeper made sure that it did not go out and threw bones into it. Apparently the fire was kept burning constantly to keep predators away.

Inside the largest hut, about 15 meters long and about 6 meters wide, five shallow hearth pits were discovered in the floor. At one hearth, two long mammoth bones were dug into the ground to support a spit. In this rather cozy environment, it is not difficult to imagine a man sitting on a boulder making tools - the master’s precise movements are deceptively leisurely, each blow of a bone hammer breaks off a thin plate from a cylindrical piece of flint (core). From the far end of the hut comes a clear, ringing sound, like a bird's trill. This woman blew into a hollow bone with two or three holes - after 25 thousand years in Dolni Vestonica they will find what we would now call a whistle.

But the most striking discovery was the remains of a small hut on the hillside away from the rest. The hut was cut into the slope so that it formed its back wall, the side walls were partly made of stones and clay, and the entrance faced towards the base of the hill.

Inside, the visitor would see a fireplace quite different from the fireplaces in the other huts - a clay vault over hot coals. It was a clay kiln - one of the very first such kilns on Earth. Even then, a specially composed clay dough was fired in this oven - not just clay from the bank of a stream, but mixed with crushed bone, so that the heat spread through it evenly, turning the viscous mass into a new material, hard as stone. This is the first example in the history of technology of what was to become a ubiquitous process - the combination and processing of two or more different substances to obtain a new useful material, unlike its components, which later led to the emergence of glass, bronze, steel, nylon and others. countless materials of human use. It would be another 15,000 years before other people living in what is now Japan would learn to turn clay into vessels, but as the findings at Dolni Vestonica show, ceramics had already been invented by this time.

When the hut with the stove was excavated in 1951, it turned out that its sooty floor was strewn with fragments of ceramic figurines. Among them were the heads of animals - bears, foxes, lions. In one especially beautiful lion's head there is a hole simulating a wound - perhaps the figurine was supposed to help some hunter inflict the same wound on a real lion. There were also hundreds of clay pellets with fingerprints of the prehistoric master on the floor (see page 78). Perhaps he removed them from a lump of unfired clay when he began to knead it and give it the desired shape. The arms and legs of human figures and animal limbs lay nearby. Perhaps they fell off during firing, or perhaps the ancient sculptor carelessly discarded figures that did not satisfy him.

But much more interesting and mysterious than all these debris and even the animal figurines on the floor of the hut are the human figurines and especially female figurines found there. Unlike animals, they are not realistic. Their breasts and buttocks are prohibitively large, their arms are very conventional, and their legs converge at a point. Experts have not yet come to a common conclusion regarding these Venuses, as they are called (see pp. 90,95-97). Were they goddesses of the hearth and had pointed feet stuck into the ground to keep them standing upright, protecting the home? Were they a symbol of fertility and were their hypertrophied forms supposed to ensure fertility? But be that as it may, they are beautiful, despite their grotesque proportions. They have grace and dignity, and their stylized plasticity makes them similar to some modern sculptures.

And who made them? Was he just a craftsman? Or an artist? Or a shaman? One thing is certain: art and practical work are already inextricably welded together. And this was one of the most brilliant achievements of Cro-Magnon man.

Paleolithic. Under the broad term "stone Age" we understand a huge period, spanning tens of thousands of years, when the main material from which tools were made was stone. In addition to stone, of course, wood and animal bones were used, but objects made from these materials were preserved either in relatively small quantities (bone) or not preserved at all (wood).

The technologies of the Lower and Middle Paleolithic were not diverse and were dictated by the harsh natural conditions of these eras. The development of human communities at this time was determined by hunting and gathering. Among the large groups of Paleolithic sources are hand tools And ground structures. The last group is less numerous, but very informative, as it gives an idea of ​​the level of “engineering” thinking of Paleolithic man. The remains of Late Paleolithic structures are the most studied. Modern researchers distinguish two types of such structures - temporary and permanent. The first type is close to the modern tent (the dwelling of the peoples of the Far North of Europe and America) and is a cone-shaped frame of wooden poles placed vertically and covered with animal skins. Long-term dwellings had a dome shape (the frame was made of both wood and mammoth ribs), a kind of foundation made of mammoth jaws or skulls. Technologically, such a structure is close to the modern northern yaranga. Yarangas, unlike tents, are more stable and have a larger area. Remains of similar structures were found in France (Mezin), Ukraine (Mezhirichi site) and Russia (Kostenki site).

No less expressive source of knowledge of Paleolithic man was drawings in caves. Such drawings were discovered in caves in France and Spain - Altamira (1879), La Mout (1895), Marsoula, Le Grez, Marnifal (beginning of the 20th century), Lascaux (1940), Roufignac (1956). In 1959

Rock paintings were also discovered on the territory of Russia - in the Kapova Cave in Bashkiria. It must be said that until the beginning of the 20th century. many researchers questioned the antiquity of the discovered drawings - they were too realistic and multi-colored. Their excellent preservation did not support the ancient dating either. The first doubts about antiquity were shaken after the discovery of a drawing of an elephant in the Chabot Cave (France). Subsequently, the improvement of excavation techniques and the development of technical means made it possible to date the drawings in the caves more accurately, and it turned out that most of them actually belong to the Paleolithic era.

In addition to evidence of ancient fauna, these images provide insight into primitive paint technology and lighting. For example, durable mineral paints were used to create drawings, which were a mixture of crushed stones, ocher and water. Since it was dark in the caves, the ancient artists used stone lamps - flat stones with hollowed-out recesses into which fuel (obviously animal fat) was poured into which the wick was lowered.

The beginning also dates back to the Paleolithic man's mastery of fire - one might say, the first energy revolution in human history. There are different points of view on the dating of the earliest use of fire (traces of such use, for example, are noted at sites Homo erectus, however, the most likely dating is 120-130 thousand years BC), but the main thing is that fire changed human life. It became possible to use new products for food (both plant and animal origin), heat habitats, and protect themselves from wild animals with fire. All this led to biological changes - the person received more energy, as well as new useful substances. Later, with the help of fire, it became possible to develop pottery, blacksmithing and many other crafts.

Important changes occur at the border between the Middle and Upper Paleolithic. At this time, a hard-to-explain radical leap occurs in the physical and, most importantly, intellectual development of the emerging person: a person of the modern type appears (and has hardly changed since then) - Homo sapiens, the history of human society begins. This process originates in Africa (the formation of Neanderthals took place in Europe at the same time). About 40-30 thousand years ago Homo sapiens begins to spread to other regions - Asia, Australia and Europe. This leads to the assimilation by Homo sapiens of the hominids located in these regions (modern anthropologists sometimes find Neanderthal features on Homo sapiens skulls dating back to the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic).

Mesolithic. Important changes in technology and knowledge occur during the Mesolithic era. This period is characterized by the beginning global warming. Natural conditions are gradually changing - the melting of glaciers leads to an increase in the area of ​​inland water bodies and the development of certain species of fauna. A person masters a new form of activity - fishing. Warming has led to the gradual disappearance of megafauna. However, modern researchers are inclined to believe that, for example, the extinction of mammoths is associated not so much with changes in natural conditions as with human activity. Thus, the migration of mammoths to the northern parts of Europe was accompanied by their extermination by tribes of hunters. We can also say that already in the Stone Age there are features of the later era of consumption - man killed more mammoths than he could eat.

Man masters hunting for smaller fauna (relatively small mammals, birds) - One of the main inventions of mankind appears in the Mesolithic - Bow and arrows. This is an ingenious device where potential energy is converted into kinetic energy. The relatively small one-time damage (compared to spears or stones) caused by arrows to an animal or bird was compensated by the rather high initial speed of the arrow, hit accuracy and firing rate. The bow was used not only for hunting land inhabitants, but also for fishing. Spears continued to be used in hunting, but were developed into another Mesolithic invention - the harpoon, a thrusting weapon primarily tipped with bone, used to catch large fish.

During the Mesolithic era, insertion tools. Such tools (for example, a knife) were based on a small thick stick with a longitudinal groove in the middle. Small thin stone plates were inserted into this trench to form a blade. As the blade became chipped or if it broke off, the blade could be replaced with a new one, without requiring the entire blade or its base to be changed - hand-held insert tools were easier to produce, which led to their widespread use.

The history of the “material production” of primitive man is not very rich, but, constantly remembering that such inventions as simple and then inserted stone tools, bows, arrows, traps, and the development of fire were made for the first time, it is difficult to object to the fact that if labor may not have created man, but it certainly ensured his survival in changing natural conditions.

In historical science, there are various ways of constructing historical periodizations - or dividing the history of mankind into separate periods, each of which is fundamentally different from the others in one way or another. For archaeologists, such a fundamental difference is changes in the ways in which a person obtains his livelihood, provides life - for himself and his entire community. At different stages of history, people used various natural materials for this. At first - only stone and wood, then bone, horn and tusk were added to them, later clay (which formed the basis of ceramics) and, finally, metals. From all these materials, man made tools and other life support items, simultaneously making changes in the methods of their processing—in technology.

At the end of the 19th century, the Stone Age was divided into Paleolithic and Neolithic. However, later in the Paleolithic it was possible to distinguish a number of periods. The basis for this was observations of changes in the forms and techniques of processing stone tools. To be understood, I will have to say at least a few words about the chipping technique.

Even in order to obtain the simplest flake - a thin chip with sharp edges - a number of preliminary expedient actions are required. On a piece of stone, you need to prepare the impact site and hit it at a certain angle and with a certain force. It is even more difficult to make a weapon of a strictly specified, sometimes quite complex shape. In ancient times, a system of covering with small chips, called retouching in archeology, was used for this purpose.

These techniques developed and improved over a very long time - from one era to another. Nowadays, scientists are studying the technique of chipping using special methods. Experimentation is of great help in this - that is, the archaeologist himself begins to split stones and make stone tools, trying to better understand how this was done in ancient times.

Let me also remind you that the communities of mammoth hunters that interest us lived in the Upper (or Late) Paleolithic era, which, according to modern data, lasted from approximately 45 to 10 thousand years ago. Not so long ago, it was believed that the beginning of this era approximately coincides with the emergence of modern man - Homo sapiens sapiens. However, it has now been established that this is not the case. In fact, people of the same physical type as modern humanity appeared much earlier - perhaps about 200 thousand years ago. However, the development of technology was quite slow for them. For a long time, Homo sapiens sapiens made the same primitive tools as people of a more archaic type - archanthropes and paleoanthropes - which later became completely extinct.

A number of scientists believe that the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic era should be associated with the massive introduction of new material into human practice - bone, horn and tusk. This material turned out to be more ductile than stone and harder than most wood species. In that distant era, its development opened up completely new possibilities for man. Longer, lighter and sharper knives appeared. Spear and dart tips appeared, and with them simple but ingenious devices for throwing them at a target.

At the same time, people invented new tools for removing and dressing the skins of killed animals. Awls and needles made from bone appeared, the thinnest of which were almost no different in size from our modern ones. This was the most important achievement of mankind: after all, the presence of such needles meant the appearance of sewn clothes among our ancestors! In addition, tools began to be made from tusk and horn, specifically designed for digging dugouts and storage pits. There were probably many other specialized objects made of bone during this period. But the purpose of many of them, found at Paleolithic sites, still remains a mystery to archaeologists... Finally, it is worth noting: the vast majority of various jewelry and works of Paleolithic art were also made from bone, horn and tusk.

People processed these materials in different ways. Sometimes they treated a piece of tusk or thick bone in the same way as flint: they chipped it, removed flakes, from which they then made the necessary things. But much more often special techniques were used: chopping, planing, cutting. The surface of finished objects was usually polished to a shine. A very important technical achievement was the invention of drilling technology. It arose as a mass practice at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic. However, the very first drilling experiments, apparently, were carried out already in the previous Middle Paleolithic era, but extremely rarely.

The most important achievement of Upper Paleolithic technology was the first combination of two different materials in one tool: bone and stone, wood and stone, and other combinations. The simplest examples of this kind are flint scrapers, chisels, or piercings mounted in a bone or wooden handle. More complex are composite or inserted tools - knives and tips.

The earliest of them were found in the Sungir burial already described above: the striking ends of the tusk spears were reinforced with two rows of small flint flakes glued with resin directly to the surface of the tusk. Somewhat later, such tools will be improved: a longitudinal groove will begin to be cut into the bone base, into which inserts specially prepared from small flint plates should be inserted. These liners were subsequently secured with resin. However, such spear tips are characteristic not of mammoth hunters, but of their southern neighbors, inhabitants of the Black Sea steppes. Tribes of buffalo hunters lived there.

Let us immediately note one point that is extremely important for archaeologists. In archaic societies, not only clothing, not only jewelry and works of art were able to “speak” about their belonging to one or another clan or tribe. Tools too. Although not all. Tools of the simplest forms - the same needles and awls - are essentially the same everywhere and, therefore, in this respect are “dumb”. But more complex tools look different in different cultures. For example, mammoth hunters who came to the Russian Plain from Central Europe were characterized by tusk hoes with richly ornamented handles, which were used for digging the ground. When tanning hides, these people used elegant flat bone spatulas, the handles of which were ornamented along the edges and ended with a carefully carved “head”. Such objects are truly capable of “communicating” their cultural affiliation! Later, when the aliens from the banks of the Danube were replaced on the Russian Plain by tribes of builders of land dwellings made from mammoth bones (see chapter “Dwellings”), the shapes of tools for the same purpose immediately changed. The “talking” things disappeared, along with the human community that lived here before.

Processing new material inevitably required new tools. In the Upper Paleolithic, the basic set of stone tools changed, and their manufacturing technologies improved. One of the main achievements of this period was the development of the lamellar cleavage technique. To remove long and thin plates, so-called prismatic cores were specially prepared; chipping from them was carried out with the help of a bone intermediary. Thus, the blow was applied not to the stone itself, but to the blunt end of a bone or horn rod, the sharp end of which was placed exactly in the place from which the master intended to break off the plate. In the Upper Paleolithic, the squeezing technique first appeared: that is, the removal of the workpiece was carried out not by blow, but by pressure on the intermediary. However, this technique began to be used everywhere later, already in the Neolithic.

Previously, craftsmen were content mainly with the raw materials that were located in the vicinity of the site. Starting from the Upper Paleolithic, people began to take special care in extracting high quality raw materials; To search for and extract it, special trips were made tens and even hundreds of kilometers from the site! Of course, it was not nodules that were transported to such a distance, but already prepared cores and cleaved plates.

The prismatic cores of mammoth hunters have such a complex and perfect shape that their finds have long been identified as very large axes. In fact, this is an object specially prepared for subsequent chipping of plates.

Later it was found that such cores were indeed used as tools - however, not for cutting down wood, but for loosening dense rock. Apparently, on long trips for flint raw materials, the Noiryrao people used the cores they already had on hand to extract new nodules from the chalk deposits. This kind of chalky flint is especially good. From the resulting nodules, travelers made new cores on site, which they transported to a site located 400-500 kilometers to the north, on the territory of the modern village of Kostenki, Voronezh region.

The retouching technique is also being improved at this stage. Squeeze retouching is used, especially when making elegant double-sided tips. The craftsman successively presses the edge of the workpiece with the end of a bone rod, separating thin small chips running in a strictly specified direction, giving the tool the desired shape. To decorate stone tools, sometimes not only stones, bones or wood were used, but also... their own teeth! This is exactly how some Australian aborigines retouch their arrowheads. Well, one can only envy the amazing health and strength of their teeth! Along with retouching, other processing techniques are being developed: the technique of cutting is widely used - a narrow, long removal from a blow applied to the end of the workpiece. In addition, the technique of grinding and drilling stone appeared for the first time - however, it was not used everywhere and only for the manufacture of jewelry and specific tools (“graters”) intended for grinding paint, grains or plant fibers.

Finally, the set of tools itself underwent significant changes in the Upper Paleolithic. Previous forms completely disappear, or their number is sharply reduced. They are being replaced by forms that were either absent from the monuments of early eras or were found there as a few curiosities: end scrapers, cutters, chisels and chisels, narrow points and piercings. Gradually, an increasing number of different miniature tools were used, either for very delicate work, or as components (inserts) of complex tools, fixed in a wooden or bone base. Archaeologists today count not tens, but hundreds of varieties of these tools!

It is worth noting one circumstance that even experts sometimes forget about. The names of many stone tools seem to suggest that we know their purpose. “Knife”, “cutter” is what is used to cut; “scraper”, “scraper” - something used to scrape; “piercing” - something used to pierce, etc. In the century before last, when the science of the Stone Age was just emerging, scientists really tried to “guess” the purpose of incomprehensible objects excavated by their appearance. This is how all these terms arose. Later, archaeologists realized that with this approach they were too often mistaken.

The true functions of stone tools are now determined using a special traceological method - based on the marks that form on the surface of the tool during its use. These traces can be seen with high magnification, under a magnifying glass or microscope. The traceological method, now widely used throughout the world, was first developed in the 1930s by the Leningrad scientist Sergei Aristarkhovich Semenov. Previous names assigned to products based on their external form are also preserved in science, but as conventional terms.

One of the features of the Upper Paleolithic is that people not only actively mastered new material, but began artistic creativity for the first time. He begins to decorate bone tools with rich and complex ornaments, carves figures of animals and people from bone, tusk or soft stone (marl), and produces a wide variety of jewelry. All these delicate works, sometimes performed with amazing skill, required a special set of tools.

The technology of stone processing became so developed that in different groups, sometimes living side by side, people began to make tools for the same purpose in different ways. By processing the tip of a spear, scraper or chisel differently than their neighbors did, giving them a different shape, the ancient craftsmen seemed to be saying: “This is us! This is ours!". By grouping monuments with the closest set of tools into archaeological cultures, scientists are able to to some extent present a picture of the existence of ancient groups, their distribution, characteristics of life and, finally, their relationships with each other.

The “language” of the tips of spears and darts is especially expressive, probably due to the fact that such forms require especially careful finishing. Perhaps the need to mark “your” blow, to mark “your” prey also played a role here. You cannot confuse “your” tip with “someone else’s” - this has been the case at all times, in all archaic societies.

So, for example, one of the cultures of mammoth hunters who came to the Russian Plain from the banks of the Danube, which appears in the novel “The Path of a Lifetime” under the name “children of the Tiger,” is sometimes called by archaeologists “the culture of the tip with a side notch.” And this is not at all accidental.

The tip with a side notch is a form especially characteristic of one of the cultures of mammoth hunters. However, from time to time (although not often) the shape of the same tip, characteristic of one culture, was “borrowed” by foreigners for one reason or another. However, in such cases, the tools, as a rule, acquired specific features that were clearly visible to the archaeologist.

In some cultures, special attention was paid to high skill in the manufacture of thin leaf-shaped tips, processed with flat chips on both sides. In the Upper Paleolithic there are three known cultures where the production of such tools reached an exceptionally high level. The most ancient of them, the Streltsy culture, existed on the Russian Plain between 40 and 25 thousand years ago. People of this culture made triangular arrowheads with a concave base. In the Solutre culture, widespread in the territory of modern France and Spain about 22-17 thousand years ago, leaf-shaped tips, no less perfect in processing, had other, elongated shapes - the so-called laurel-leaved or willow-leaved. Finally, the production of double-sided tips of various types reached an exceptionally high development in the Paleoindian cultures of North America, which existed approximately 12-7 thousand years ago. It should be noted that to date no connections have been established between these three cultural variants. Different groups of people invented similar technical techniques completely independently, independently of each other.

Eastern European mammoth hunters belonged to cultures of a different type, where the necessary shape of the tool was achieved by processing only the edge of the workpiece, and not its entire surface. Here, special attention was paid to obtaining good plates, with the required dimensions and proportions.

It should be noted once again: after the cultures of people from Central Europe were replaced in most of the Russian Plain by the cultures of house builders from mammoth bones, there were noticeable changes in stone processing. The shapes of stone tools are becoming simpler and smaller, and the technique of chipping blanks, leading to the production of thin long plates and plates of regular cut, is becoming more and more perfect. This cannot in any way be considered “degradation”. The mammoth hunters who lived on the banks of the Dnieper and Don 20-14 thousand years ago reached real peaks for their era in house-building, in the processing of bone and tusk, and in ornamentation (it is worth recalling here that the “meander” type ornament was created for the first time not by the ancient Greeks, but by the inhabitants of the Mezin site!). So, apparently, their “simplified” stone inventory at that time simply served its purpose.

When making stone tools, the material was split in two ways: by impact or by pressing. Impact splitting is divided into direct and indirect (indirect). Most often, a striker was used for impact splitting, which was often an ordinary cobblestone of suitable size and hardness. You can find out that the flakes were knocked off from the core using a stone striker by two signs. When a stone hits a stone, a shallow depression or “wound” appears at the point of impact on the opposite side of the flake, a noticeable impact tubercle and impact mark are formed. It is necessary, of course, to take into account the fragility of the material and secondary processing, or retouching, as a result of which traces of impact could be eliminated. However, particularly thin points and knives from plates can only be made by indirect impact, that is, using a bone or wooden chisel. The blank, of course, can be separated from the core using a stone striker. If, instead of a stone striker, we use, say, a peg made of hard wood, suitable mainly for easily splitting materials, such as obsidian or flint, then we will find that on the heel of the flake an inconspicuous impact tubercle is formed, less noticeable than the tubercle that arose from a straight hit with a stone. It also occurs when there is strong pressure on a stone core with a wooden or bone object.

Stone striker made of coil; there are numerous traces of impacts on the surface; Madeleine, Pekarna cave, Moravia.

The stone striker used in the technique of direct impact splitting of stone was, as a rule, made of a harder material than the core being processed. Quartz cobblestones were most often used.

A percussion instrument made from horn.

A chisel, for example, a peg made of hard wood, bone, elephant tusks or horns, on the contrary, is softer than the material being processed. When working, a person, holding a stone in his left hand and a chisel in his right, processed the raw material with strong, precise blows. The initial form was usually a core for making percussion tools and a flake broken from the core for making blade tools. This method of working was quite fast. This is exactly how many non-specialized tools were made with the help of a striker or a chopper: various scrapers, choppers, hoes or spear tips. The blanks of some smaller instruments were also made in a similar way and only then trimmed more finely.

Apparently the most commonly used technique was to split the stone against a hard object. The man either forcefully hit a prepared striker on an even harder stone placed on the ground like an anvil, or with a mighty throw he smashed it against a boulder or steep rock. In this case, the stone disintegrated into several pieces of arbitrary shape, from which only suitable fragments were selected. Another technique was based on the fact that a person, placing the prepared core on a boulder - an “anvil” and holding it with his hand, hit it with a chopper. With this method, the stone chopper was often damaged.

A boulder that served as a working plate (“anvil”) when making stone tools.
A flat stone slab used as a working slab; Madeleine, Moravia.

Direct impact splitting of stone on a hard anvil.

Using a similar, but more subtle technique, the final finishing of the weapon was carried out, during which the force and direction of each blow were accurately calculated.

Fine retouching performed on a stone anvil. The left hand holds the tool being retouched.

Specialists who knew how to make complex tools were deeply respected members of primitive society, as evidenced by reports about the life of modern backward peoples. For example, among the Shasta Indians in California, making stone arrowheads was a common occupation for men, but only a few became masters of this craft.

In his work "The Method of Making Stone Arrow Points" Knowles describes a technique for processing a flat quartz flake. The Indian places the record on a smooth boulder, holding it with his left hand. Holding it in his right hand, he delivers light and precise blows to the edges of the plate, first on one side, then on the other, beating off small fragments with each blow. For the final finishing, he uses a pressing technique using a bone cutter. The initial phases of this process are similar to the technique of bilateral processing of disc-shaped stone tools, in which these latter are held suspended by hand. Hewing raw material on hard stone limits the working possibilities somewhat. The flakes obtained in this way are used as finished tools or undergo further, more precise processing. A serious drawback of the technique of splitting stone on a solid base is that it is impossible to determine in advance where the flake is separated from the core: at the point of contact of the ax with the core or at the point of contact of the core with the “anvil”. This method does not allow achieving high cleavage accuracy. The most advanced tool that could be made using a stone ax was a leaf-shaped (or disc-shaped) point. His production looked something like this: The ancient master held a core blank in one hand and a chopper in the other. The first flake was knocked off with the first blow, directed at a certain angle to the edge of the core.

Beginning of production of a leaf-shaped point: the first flake is separated from the core by the first blow.

Then, at the same angle from the center, measured blows were applied to the edges of the facets, forming the required plate. Thus, half of the core was formed by the intact part of the original nodule, and the second half was a platform corrected by wide chips.

Production of leaf-shaped points using a stone ax; the beginning of processing the back side of the core (in the left hand).

The second half, that is, the natural surface of the stone, was processed in the same way until a double-sided disc-shaped point with regular wide edges converging towards the center appeared. Sometimes the central part of the gun remained uneven, with many dents and roughness.

Poorly processed leaf-shaped point - a tubercle that is too high remains in the center; the weapon remained unfinished and was thrown into waste as a “scrap”; selet, Orzechov, Moravia.

If such a tool could not be fixed, it was simply thrown away. It happened that the tip broke during work; There are many such fragments in the waste from the production of stone tools, in the so-called “workshops”. If the fracture surface has the same patina as the rest of the tool, we have the right to believe that the breakage occurred during production. There are many examples of the manufacture of leaf-shaped points; they are found not only at European sites of the Early Stone Age, but also in other places and at a much later time, since their production was chronologically and geographically extremely widespread.

Various types of leaf-shaped cusps. On the two outermost ones there are visible marks in the place where they were attached to the shaft. The asymmetry of the first and second points suggests that they were used as knives (Paleoindian culture, Aurignacian, Selet).

Glass points made from bottle glass; Kimberley, Australia.

Leaf-shaped pointed tip of Australian Aborigines from the Arnhemland Peninsula.

Another technique is indirect impact cleavage of the stone. This involves using a chisel made of stone or, more often, bone and other materials, such as hard wood. The master holds the core in one hand, holding the attached chisel with it; with his other hand he hits the chisel with a stone.

Processing the core in one hand using a bone or hardwood chisel.

A less skilled maker holds a workpiece in one hand and a chisel in the other, which is struck by his assistant.

Retouching the scraper using a hardwood chisel. The hand holding the chisel is protected by a skin.

The striker can be stone, bone or wood. In a similar way, alone or together, you can split cores on a stone slab (as with the direct blow technique). The stone being processed can also be pressed against the stone slab with your knee.

Indirect impact cleavage of the stone, in which the core was clamped between the knees.

Catlin (1968) describes the method of indirect impact splitting by weight among the Apaches. The flake is processed on the palm, covered with a piece of leather with a hole for the thumb; the skin faces the palm with fur. The master usually sits on the ground, holding the flake in his palm, protected from being cut by sandpaper, and holding it with the fingers of the same hand. With his other hand he applies a chisel made of bone or, more often, of walrus tusks, i.e., made of hard material. He applies the blade of the chisel so that a chip is formed on the opposite side of the flake, and the assistant hits the chisel with a club made of hard wood. The plate is thus trimmed alternately on both sides until the desired result is obtained. Handling the stone in a soft palm reduces the risk of breaking the point. The chisel is usually 14-16 cm long and 2-2.5 cm in diameter. In cross section, two sides are flat and one is rounded.

B. B. Redding describes the processing technique adopted by the Wintun Indians, with the difference that one person is involved in the manufacture. He holds a piece of obsidian being processed with the palm of his left hand, and with the index and middle fingers of the same hand holding a chisel made of bone or deer antlers. He places the chisel blade from the edge of the core at the distance that should be the intended width of the chip. In the case described, the first attempt ended in failure: the flake broke off from the core, but at the same time cracked. The Indian repeated the blow, this time pressing the chisel harder against the core, and the result was a perfect flake with a shell-like chipping surface. By combining chisels from different materials and stone or bone strikers, very thin stone tools can be made.

Retouching a flake held in the hand using a percussion tool.

The thin and flat blades removed from the flake correspond to equally thin negative surfaces on the tool. The impact tubercles formed in this case have a vague shape.

Soft strikers are used in the production of tools with long thin blades, for example from obsidian. They are especially suitable for finishing fragile material or for fine finishing, for final retouching of a tool.

Processing a suspended stone tool using a bone axe.

The technique of working with soft strikers was practically no different from that using a stone core. Spin processing served primarily for detailed, fine finishing and retouching of the weapon. By squeezing, you can remove chips the size of fish scales. Achieving a wider chip with this technique is not easy. For squeezing processing, various bone, horn or wooden tools with a pointed end were most often used. Some modern backward peoples (Eskimos) attach a handle to them, turning them into a more complex specialized tool.

A kangaroo ulna, honed at the end, used by Aboriginal people to retouch stone points (Northern Australia).

An Eskimo tool made from a beaver tooth, used for pressing and retouching stone tools (Alaska).

An Eskimo tool used for processing stone tools by squeezing. Below in the section we see the design of the tool, in the center its general appearance is shown, and the top picture shows the method of application.

Two Eskimo stone pressing tools (Alaska).

The squeezing retouching technique can also be reversed: in this case, the master presses the edge of the retouched flake against a hard slab, bone, stone boulder or pebble.

Retouching by pressing using a stone disc. The work is done by weight.

Retouching a stone tool by pressing, in which the craftsman presses the edge of a flake onto hard bone.

A stone tool used as a retoucher; Mousterian culture, Rozhek.

Applying retouching by pressing on hard bone material (modern Australian Aboriginal technique).

Such disc-shaped plates, skillfully carved from stone and smoothed, are known from Ukraine and Czechoslovakia (Pavlovian culture). Another specific example is the retouching of microliths, too small to be cut by hand. Therefore, such microliths were first planted in a piece of wood or horn, equipped with a groove so that the hand would not slip, and with the other hand the master carried out fine retouching by pressing.

In rare cases, we come across the technique of cutting stone, especially soft rocks. At the site of Dolni Vestonice in Moravia, thin rectangular stone plates were found, apparently semi-finished. The outer walls of the workpiece were cut with stone knives, and then the individual layers were separated from each other.

Stone knives for cutting stone plates; Dol ni Vestonice, Moravia.

Plates cut from soft rock (marl); Gravett, Pavlov, Dol ni Vestonice, Moravia. This technology is extremely unusual for the Old Stone Age.

The Pavlovsk culture also produces large stone disks up to 20 cm in diameter with a large centralized hole of 5-8 cm. These disks, primarily their outer circumference and inner hole, were also cut with a saw blade.

A flat circle carved from soft stone; Pavlov, Predmosti, Moravia.

Stone disk carved from marl. This is not a fragment, but a finished product, all the edges of which are artificially trimmed; Pavlov, Predmosti, Moravia.

In completely exceptional cases, smoothed stone tools are found in the Old Stone Age, since the grinding technique is inherent only in the Neolithic. Some time ago, quite unexpectedly for everyone, hatchets with a sharpened blade, found in Oenpelli in Northern Australia, were dated to 18-23 thousand years ago. However, the oldest traces of grinding or sharpening of stone tools (24-28 thousand years old) are known from Předmost and Brno.

Polished stone from a Gravettian site: Pavlov, Předmosti, Moravia. One of the few examples of stone polishing in the Paleolithic.

Finds of stone tools equipped with bone attachments and handles indicate that people in the Upper Paleolithic no longer held them with their bare hands. Unfortunately, the wooden handles and handles that were prevalent at that time have largely not survived to this day.

Various options for securing stone knives in wooden handles; the drawings are based on finds from the Late Paleolithic sites of Luka-Vrubletskaya (USSR) and Lucerne (Switzerland).

Double-edged stone knife secured to the handle with a raw leather band: Alaska.

Stone scraper inserted into a wooden handle; served for processing hides. The shape of the tool suggests that this is not a typical scraper, but a flake. As a result of frequent use, a small retouch has formed on the working edge (see picture below); Chukchi. Eastern Siberia.

Processing skins (fleshing) using a stone scraper equipped with a wooden handle; Chukchi. Eastern Siberia.

Prehistoric Indian double-edged knife with bone handle; Paleoindian culture, USA.

Horse phalanges adapted for use as attachments for stone tools; Madeleine, Pekarna cave, Moravia.

A pointed tip of an atypical shape, inserted into a deer antler; Madeleine, Pekarna cave, Moravia.

In particularly favorable conditions, even complex instruments made up of several microliths set in a common frame have been preserved. Based on the shape and position of the microliths, it is easy to determine the purpose of such a tool. Empty bone attachments are more common. Short hollow bits were often made from horse phalanges. In the Bakery Cave near Brno, in one of these attachments, a stone tool was preserved - a long, thick atypical awl.

Incisive instrument in a bone attachment; Madeleine, Pekarna cave, Moravia.

A hole was first hollowed out in the bone, into which an awl was then fastened. Three other stone tools are known from the Siberian site of Malta and from the Pekarna cave, on which horns were deeply set, thus turning into a strong handle.

Horn handle with a stone tool inserted into it. The numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4 indicate the sections of the handle in different places; Malta, Siberia.

An atypically shaped stone blade inserted into a deer antler; Madeleine, Pekarna cave, Moravia.

Two stone tools (scraper and chisel) with horn handle; Malta, Siberia.

Occasionally, paleontologists find stone tools embedded in animal bones. They give us a certain idea of ​​the hunting method of the ancient Stone Age man. It is generally accepted that the main weapon of hunters was a spear or a spear, therefore, the tips found should have a leaf-shaped shape with cutting edges. However, some finds made on the territory of Czechoslovakia force us to reconsider this point of view. From karst deposits in Moravia, known as the Moravian Krast, comes a bear skull with a wound on the crown. A bone thickening in the form of a ridge formed around the deep wound - proof that the bear had left the hunters and the wound had healed. The shape of the hole punched into the bone indicates an atypical stone point. Another find was a wolf skull from the Gravettian (Pavlovian) site of Dolni Vestonice. It was discovered among the bones of other animals that became the prey of a Paleolithic hunter. A flint weapon was stuck in the skeleton of the wolf's muzzle, which was obviously fatal for the wolf: the wound showed no signs of healing.

A fragment of a stone tool stuck in a wolf's skull; Pavlov, Dolni Vestonice, Moravia.

Our photograph shows that the weapon was a wide, flat, atypical flake. Both examples convince us that the typology of stone tools that we developed for our own needs was not always observed by Paleolithic people as strictly as we would like.

Page 1 of 8

SECTION 1. From the history of stone processing

The role of stone in the development of primitive man

The mystery of the beauty of stone has excited man since ancient times. It is not for nothing that the stone is considered a symbol of eternity. It was he who brought to this day the immortal creations of man imprinted in him. The discoveries of archaeologists make it possible to learn more and more about the history of mankind and the development of life on earth.

For primitive man, stone turned out to be the most reliable, durable and durable material. An entire era in human history is called the Stone Age, which is divided into three periods: Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic.

Round-shaped stones (ordinary pebbles), after chipping and rough upholstery by ancient people, turned into simple tools in the form of knives, scrapers, and choppers. What was important was not the shape, size or weight of the pebble, but the hardness and strength of the stone itself. The most suitable were flattened pebbles made of diorite, quartz and silicon. The pebbles were beaten directly on the spot with several blows until they were given the required shape. This is how the first stone processing technology was born. In the struggle for the quality of the resulting products, production technology was improved and new operations were introduced. Thus, to make hand axes of low quality, 10-30 blows were required, and of a higher quality – 50-80 or more blows. When polishing an ax, the Neolithic master made 50 thousand movements of the stone on the abrasive material in 8-10 hours of work. In archeology, a special “pebble” culture has long been identified, one of the most ancient in the development of mankind.

Traces left on the stone are being studied by a new direction in archaeological science - transology. Stone processing technologies are different: chipping, retouching, drilling, splitting, sawing, turning. It must be assumed that the same people involved in the manufacture of stone tools combined two professions - prospecting geologist and stone cutter.

Subsequently, chipping and splitting technologies found wider use, and the best materials for this turned out to be flint and volcanic glass - obsidian. These stones, having a relatively high hardness, have the ability, when split, to form narrow and thin plates with sharp cutting edges, which can hold such an “edge” for some time.

In addition to these stones, quartzite, petrified wood, siliceous tuff, clay and calcareous shales, granites, fine-grained sandstones and other rocks that are easily processed by impact methods have similar properties. Other stones, such as jade, although strong, are difficult to work with blows due to their viscosity.

The splitting process is reminiscent of chopping firewood, when logs break off from a round cut of a tree. When splitting stone blanks, it was necessary to know in detail the methods of work being performed (size of the stone, direction and force of impact). Therefore, the manufacture of flint tools is an art multiplied by strength, dexterity and precise calculation of the blow.

The objects found by archaeologists can be attributed to jewelry, since it is difficult to imagine how it was possible to make plates 55 mm long, 5 mm wide and 1 mm thick at that time! In archeology, this finishing of stone plates

received the name retouching (from the French word “retouche” - to correct).

Retouching the blades made it possible to make the cutting edges not smooth, but jagged. Such tools were more effective. It is generally accepted that the Stone Age is characterized by primitive stone processing, however, in fact, Stone Age craftsmen possessed advanced technologies, such as grinding, polishing and turning.

Since ancient times, the feeling of beauty has been inherent in the soul of primitive man - the artist. One has to wonder how at that time they could drill small holes in stone, the thickness of a needle, with a length tens of times greater than its diameter. Moreover, holes were drilled not only in soft rocks, but also in hard rocks, such as jasper, agate, and chalcedony. It is possible that corundum or even diamond was used as a drill tip.

The ancestor of the drilling tool was a T-shaped device reminiscent of a modern ax with a stone tip. The hole was “checked” with this tool, and sand was added to speed up the work. You had to press and turn the tool by hand. Subsequently, the tool was improved and took the form of a brace, the work of which is performed with two hands: with one hand the tool is rotated, and with the other it is pressed. The rotator has a clamping device (chuck), with which you can secure replaceable drills. Modern masters also use the rotary with some improvements. With a T-shaped tool in the form of an ax, rotational movements were made in both directions, and with a brace only in one direction, which made it possible to increase labor productivity. The rotator became the prototype of the modern drilling machine. Quartz sand is currently used as a free abrasive: emery and corundum. In terms of abrasive properties, emery is 3-5 times more effective than quartz. Productivity increases significantly if the sand is constantly moistened with water.

In order to cut stone tiles, the cut was not made completely, but only partially, and then it was broken. For insurance, stone processors made cuts on both sides.

Sanding and polishing stone surfaces requires more time compared to sawing and drilling. At first these operations were performed using the dry method. The use of wet grinding speeded up the work by 2-3 times. Such processes made it possible to produce parts with regular geometric shapes and sharp edges.

Experience in stone processing accumulated slowly. People learned to polish stone ten thousand years after rough processing. As a rule, two slabs were polished at once, placing one on top of the other. Pumice and crushed chalk were used as powder. The grinding surfaces were smooth sections of rock or flat stone, from which all irregularities were removed using the point picket method.

The first mirrors appeared thanks to the high quality of polishing pieces of obsidian and basalt. To improve reflectivity, they were wetted with water. When polishing mirror surfaces, soft materials and leather were used.

The point picketing method has evolved into a separate stone processing technology. By frequent blows on a round, pointed rod made of strong material, you can punch a hole, level the surface, and apply a textured design or letters to the polished surface. Simple stone bowls, mortars, and lamps were made using the same method. The picketing method can be used both in the production of small plastic sculptures and in the production of large sculptures. The famous gigantic idols of Easter Island are carved from volcanic tuff and other rocks without the use of metal using the point picket method using basalt scarpels. Zakolniki, scarpels, bushchards (tools for masonry work) were originally made from hard stone, varying in shape and weight: from a few tens of grams to 5-6 kilograms.

Historical research in science and technology helps us more fully imagine the evolution of the development of technological processes for processing materials, including various types of stone. In the Stone Age, the range of manufactured stone products reached the highest level, but with the advent of the Bronze Age, and then the Iron Age, a significant part of stone products began to be made from metal. With the advent of the atomic-space, electronic-cybernetic age, the stone did not lose its significance. Modern technologies make it possible to find new uses for it. Now these are super-hard productive tools, beautiful jewelry, and an irreplaceable durable building and facing material. Artists use stone to create beautiful objects of decorative and applied art in combination with various materials.