Archaeologists have unearthed a “giant” handaxe in southern England that was crafted by early human relatives more than 300,000 years ago, reports a new study. Measuring nearly a foot long from tip to butt, the artifact is the third biggest prehistoric handaxe ever found in Britain and belongs to a special class of big tools with mysterious origins.
Humans are the last surviving members of the Homo family, which was once a diverse and far-ranging group of apes that included many tool-using species. England’s fossil record suggests that various early human relatives occupied the island over the past million years, some of whom left behind artifacts and tools.
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So-called “giant” handaxes, which are more than 22 centimeters in length, are among the most puzzling tools from these extinct groups. Whereas most axes are designed to fit in a normal human hand, give or take, the super-sized versions seem unwieldy and impractical, raising questions about their purpose to their creators.
Now, researchers led by Letty Ingrey, a senior archeologist at University College London, report the discovery of “a very large flint cutting tool, or handaxe, which is currently the third largest known to be found in Britain,” according to a study published on Thursday in the journal Internet Archaeology.
The handaxe, which dates back some 300,000 years to the Middle Pleistocene period, was found during excavations in Frindsbury, Kent, a region in the Medway Valley that is known for its abundance of early human artifacts of a similar age.
“It was immediately clear that we’d found something special,” said Ingrey in an email to Motherboard. “A handaxe is such a distinctive kind of tool and immediately recognizable. It’s also so rare to find a handaxe of any kind that there is always a lot of excitement when one is uncovered.”
“So there was an initial, ‘wow that’s a handaxe’ moment, but as soon as we’d finished excavating it we realized that as well as being a really beautiful and finely worked handaxe this was also a really big one. We didn’t realize while we were on site that this was so big it was actually the third biggest ever found in Britain, that happened later after we’d taken it back to our lab and had time to properly measure it and compare it with other British handaxes.”
The archaeologists began excavating this site two years ago in advance of the construction of a new school called the Maritime Academy on the grounds. In addition to uncovering the foot-long handaxe, the team found a second giant handaxe that measures just over 22 centimeters, along with about 800 other artifacts that will be described in future research. The handaxes belong to a special class of tools known as “ficrons,” which are among the oldest artifacts made by human hands.
“We think the artifacts date from an interglacial (warm period) between about 330,000 and 300,000 years ago,” Ingrey said. “We have no human fossil evidence from the site, so no direct evidence of who was making it. However, we do know that Britain was populated at this time by early Neanderthal people, but there also could have been other archaic human species around.”
“Pointed ficron type handaxes are very typical from this period across southern Britain,” she added. “The especially big handaxes also seem to generally be from this period, and there are several examples of these ‘giants’ from Kent.”
The current record-holder for England’s largest giant handaxe extends for 32.3 centimeters, or about 12.7 inches, which was found near the town of Maidenhead. Like their smaller counterparts, these tools were sculpted from stones like flint, but it’s not clear that they fulfilled the same purpose as most handheld axes.
“Generally we think of handaxes as cutting tools” like “large knives with strong and sharp edges that would have been brilliant for butchering animals and cutting up meat,” Ingrey explained. “We’re just not sure if the size of this one meant it had another function or was used in a different way. ‘Giant’ handaxes like the one we found are real outliers, and it’s no accident it was made this size. Whoever made it went to a lot of effort, firstly to find a piece of good quality flint big enough to make a tool of this size and then to carefully flake it and shape its long and finely worked tip.”
Given the prominent role of giants in European folklore, It’s tempting to imagine that these huge tools were made for the huge hands of some long-lost lineage of titans. However, there are no signs of significant variations in hand size across these bygone species, rendering it “impossible to determine whether these tools could have belonged to a population containing individuals who could wield these tools effectively as knives,” according to the study.
“There’s no evidence that people at this time had much bigger hands than we do which makes it hard to imagine how the tool could have been easily handled, and it’s difficult to imagine how it could have been easily used in the same way we think other handaxes were,” Ingrey said. “So possibly it was used for another function that we’re not yet aware of, or just possibly it might have a more symbolic role.”
“Could this be an individual trying to demonstrate something about themselves to other group members? Or could it be a group expression trying to demonstrate something to another group of humans? At present we’re not really able to confidently answer this,” she said.
We will probably never know exactly what these giant handaxes meant to the cultures that produced them, but Ingrey and her hope to learn more about the context in which they were made in the coming years.
“We spent about two years doing fieldwork on this site ahead of the construction of a new school, and finished fieldwork earlier this year,” Ingrey said. “We now have a massive archive of material from the site that we need to analyze. There are more than 800 stone artifacts from the site, including the handaxes, that we have to analyze and compare with material from other sites. We have taken many samples from the deposits to analyze for scientific dating and gain other information about the local environment when these tools were made.”
“So much of archaeology actually happens after the excavations finish and we’re really just at the start of our work on this material,” she concluded. “We’re looking forward to doing this work on the collection and learning a lot more about this remarkable archaeological site and the people that made these tools. And once we know more we’ll be sure to share it!”
