IFL Science looks back in time, studying handaxes made by Homo erectus from unlikely materials like crystals or fossils … which seem likely to have been created for religious reasons, hunting spiritual meat when flesh-and-blood elephants started dying off:
The incredible lithic assemblage was first discovered in the Sakhnin Valley in Israel by local independent researcher Muataz Shalata, who then contacted Professor Ran Barkai from Tel Aviv University. Describing the moment when the pair met, Barkai told IFLScience how “Muataz took a handaxe out of his bag and gave it to me with the fossils facing down, so the face I saw looked like a regular handaxe. But when I turned it around, I was really shocked.”
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In the Sakhnin Valley, however, Barkai and Shalata went on to discover 10 extraordinary handaxes featuring fossils and crystals. They also found a spheroid shaped from a geode – a task that would have been extremely difficult to accomplish, given the almost impossibility of knapping such crystals.
While the Sakhnin Valley is unusually rich in fossils and geodes, Barkai says that it also contains an abundance of high-quality flint – and indeed, the team have so far uncovered around 200 regular flint handaxes bearing no exceptional features. The fact that some tools were made from less amenable materials therefore suggests that this was an intentional act that was performed for a particular reason.
Generally, handaxes in the region were used to process large game, with ancient elephants being the major source of prey. However, the nature of these tools suggests that they belong to the late Acheulean industry, which arose around half a million years ago – just as these elephants were beginning to die out.
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“This strange combination of fossils, geodes, handaxes, elephants, and this unusual psychedelic landscape allowed them to perform all kinds of ceremonies and execute all kinds of beliefs that they felt could be of support,” says Barkai.
“So I think that rituals go back way in time, in human evolution, and that they were practiced in order to solve problems and look for answers,” he adds.
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You can read more of Barkai’s research here, in Tel Aviv.