Hand axes were the tools of primates from about 1.7 million years ago to maybe 100k or so years ago.
I was watching a documentary once where the narrator said that adding handles to the axes was as unthinkable as birds building machines would be since the brain areas hadn’t been evolved yet.
So what brain areas evolved that allowed primates to turn hand axes into actual axes (with handles), and when did that occur?
I’m not sure it was evolution rather than an invention. Some birds and chimpanzees both use tools.
I’m puzzled by this statement - they have been used by primates much more recently than 100,000 years ago (I used one yesterday).
My point is that the handle adds leverage and power to the axe, but primates didn’t figure that out for about 1.6 million years or so. For that period people just held the axe in the palm of their hand.
I believe I saw an article once that detailed which brain regions evolved to let us comprehend how adding a handle would make the axe more stable and powerful but I can’t find it right now.
An axe isn’t a handaxe with a handle. It’s a stick with a sharp rock attached.
Our earliest ancestors used sticks to hit things with. Even chimps sometimes do this, although infrequently. So they moved from picking up random sticks to looking around for particularly good sticks and keeping them, to fashioning good sticks by trimming them. Now you’ve got a purpose-built club. All you have to do is stick some sharp rocks to the club, and you’ve got an axe.
Yet despite this simplification, as the OP points out it took us millions of years to figure this out. More astoundingly, Tasmanian Aborigines *lost *this technology and had no concept of hafted tools when they first came into contact with Europeans. So clearly the concept is nowhere near as simple as it seems.
The fact that at least one group of modern humans lost the ability to manufacture hafted axes suggests that the OP is based on an erroneous assumption. If there was some specific area of the brain that made it possible to comprehend hafted tools then it would then it should be impossible for modern humans not to understand the concept. Yet we know that they did, and that they lost that technology within a few thousand years.
So I doubt very much if there is any specific section of the brain that deals with the concept. It would appear to be just a generic technological advance that was invented once and then passed on to subsequent generations. In that respect it’s no different to the wheel or writing or any other technology that seems “obvious” once you are taught it, but that clearly isn’t obvious at all. We don’t argue that there is a specific section of the brain that deals with writing or wheels, and I can’t see any reason to assume there is a specific section of the brain that deals with hafted tools.
If you did, it was bullshit (or, at best, wild speculation, going far beyond any available evidence).
The answer to your question is that we don’t know. We are nowhere near understanding the brain well enough. (And much of what we do know comes from the study of monkeys and other animals, rather than humans, so they won’t answer this question. The really cool experiments involve doing things you are not normally allowed to do with humans, like sticking electrodes deep into brain tissue.)
It is most unlikely, anyway, that one particular brain area was involved in this invention. Like most actual performances, it probably involves many parts of the brain working together. We can say things like some brain areas are (mostly) concerned with vision, or hearing, or language understanding, etc., and, to some extent, which are concerned with things like spatial cognition or object identification, but that is very different from saying which parts are involved in inventing axe handles.
I expect the invention of handles also reduced the number of hand injuries related to using axes, which seems like an even simpler idea for people to grasp than physics concepts like leverage and power.
Is it really the consensus view that Tasmanian Aboriginals were unable to make hafted tools? And if so, did they lose the ability or the need?
At any rate, Neanderthals had hafted tools, although I don’t think they had any hafted axes. Maybe just spears and knives. That would lead me to believe that knowledge of hafting was possessed by our common ancestor, at least 500k years ago.
all I can say is that we’re extremely lucky to have hands like what we’ve got, it helped fuel our brain evolution for bigger and better things. more accomplishments were set in stone at some point.
its hard to say at what in point everything was determined, maybe before the big bang (if there was one). but that’s beside the point.
I’ve seen, in nature, sticks with rocks embedded in them – a tree or bush simply grew around a chunk of rock. A completely natural hafted-axe.
Actually, the key technology is in the binding! Someone was clever enough to figure out how to tie things together with sinews. From that point on, things like axes with handles, and arrowheads or spearheads attached to shafts – and clever artwork such as the Zuni fetishes! – are relatively obvious and easy.
There’s no doubt that Tasmanians couldn’t make hafted tools. As for need, all we can say is that they were universal before the island was isolated from the mainland, and the people living a hundred miles away on the mainland in identical ecological and environmental conditions continued to find them useful. Tasmanians also lost the ability to make fishhooks, needles, clothing and freakin’ *fire *amongst many, many other things. So it would require some exceptional special pleading to suggest that they stopped making hafted tools because they had no need. The simple explanation is that they lost the technology and couldn’t reinvent it.
Spears aren’t considered hafted tools, they are just spears.
Not being able to comprehend something is completely different from not being able to invent it. The human brain, presumably, hasn’t changed much in the last 400 years, and yet nobody could do calculus 400 years ago, while I took it in tenth grade. And trust me, I’m no Isaac Newton.
Breakthrough discoveries are unpredictable. The first guy in Tasmania to use a handle on his axe probably didn’t sit down and figure it out; it was probably more a case of Og randomly hitting rocks with a club, and one of them was sharp on two edges, and one sharp edge made it get stuck on the end of the club, and suddenly he had an axe.
And since the warriors could immediately comprehend that this was a very powerful weapon, they might have tried to restrict knowledge of it to their own tribe, either enslaving or killing rivals who saw it. And then something happened, maybe a natural disaster or a plague, that wiped the whole tribe out, and the knowledge was lost, and nobody else had the same happy accident as Og to rediscover it.
What?
First off, as i already pointed out, if there was a section of the brain that was specifically to "comprehend how adding a handle would make the axe more stable " then there could not be human groups who could no comprehend how adding a handle would make the axe more stable. Yet it is a fact that such a group existed. So clearly such an area of the brain does not exist.
Invention doesn’t enter into it, unless you are suggesting that there is a section of the brain devoted to understanding the uses of calculus.
Beyond that, Tasmanians had hafted weapons 10, 000 years ago. They lost them at some point in time, along with a whole slew of other technology. This wasn’t technology that wasn’t invented. It was technology that was lost.
And finally, the idea that hafted tools might have derived from shards of stone that became accidentally embedded in a club is just farcical. Hafted tools are carefully constructed bits of engineering with every step in the construction process needing to be planned out on advance, they aren’t accidental.
This Science article addresses some of the issues of the op but may be behind the pay wall. It’s Science 2 March 2001: Vol. 291 no. 5509 pp. 1748-1753 DOI: 10.1126/science.1059487 if you want to find it otherwise.
A more recent Science article expands the concept that composite tools may have co-evolved with language.
On reread I realize that reading those bits taken out of the context of the article may be a bit hard to follow. The essence is as follows:
Complex composite tools, like hafted axes, began to appear about 300K years ago in several human lines. While not discussed in these articles, it is not completely clear they invented by these different groups independently or spread as an idea once invented by one group.
It does seem that this advanced tool making capacity required growth in brain areas overlapping those required for human level language development and longer term planning, including one adjacent to Broca’s area and various frontal lobe areas, such as areas of the inferior left frontal lobe, the frontopolar prefrontal cortex, and the inferior frontal gyrus. The hypothesis expressed in these articles is that advanced tool making and language capacities drove each other. This hypothesis dovetails nicely with other work that supports the concept that language began primarily as gestural (hand signs) and had vocalization built on top of it. (See this article on mirror neurons for a taste of those speculations.)
I was looking for cites. I have to wonder how rigorous the anthropological research was, at the time, while they were being wiped out by disease and warfare. Tasmania is a large place, and there were numerous tribes living all over the island, so I’m not even sure that it makes sense to speak of Tasmanians in such monolithic terms.
Spears can be either hafted (a point attached) or not (just a sharpened stick).
Clearly you misunderstand how the brain works.
Read up on DSeid’s cites which exactly answer the question posed by the OP:
“So what brain areas evolved that allowed primates to turn hand axes into actual axes (with handles), and when did that occur?”
Can we stop using “primate” in this context and start using Human ancestor or something similar? “Primate” is an extremely broad term that includes monkey, lemurs and other mammals that are quite distantly related to us, although we are all in the same order.
Better to use the genus Homo, since that’s what we’re talking about.