Being an axe head, this stone would have to be a substantial one, not a piece of slate that would too easily disintegrate, so you can imagine how much time and effort must have been expended in getting it to a clean edge.
Then again, they didn't have television, Facebook or the internet to soak up most of their lives, so stone sharpening would almost have been therapeutic.
The second wonderful find was dozens of fossilised footprints on a small island off the west coast of Canada.
I am ashamed to say I have little interest in what has become known as our carbon footprint, but I am interested in carbon-dated footprints and these date back 13,200 years.
In human terms, that is staggering.
Okay, we can visit various locations round the world and see the prints of dinosaurs that left this Earth, we are told, en masse 65 millions years ago, but we are talking about our ancestors here and 13,200 years is a long time ago.
The footprints are said to be the oldest ever found in North America and, what makes the find even more fascinating, is they have been determined as belonging to two adults and a child who, all those years ago, were seemingly huddled around a stone-ringed fire pit.
That is where your imagination can cut into this story. I would love to be able to wind back the clock 13,200 years and sit with this little family, although in my modern-day attire I would stand out like a sore thumb.
Just who were they and what was life really like for them?
In my imagination, they are a man, his woman and their child, gathered around the fire pit for the obvious warmth it offered in an otherwise spartan and probably quite frightening world.
I wonder if they sheltered there and what they sheltered in, if they were cooking food and how they were clothed, if at all.
Most of all, I would like to be able to tell them that the little gathering around a fire pit, which was probably just another day or night in their primitive lives, would emerge eons later to take its place in the history of mankind.
That those footprints they so innocently left behind would spark research by people so altered by genetics they would not remotely recognise them and who lived in a world as alien to them as life in another galaxy would probably be to us.
Mind you, being able to communicate with them would be an agony in itself. No doubt they had a means but whether that was a language as we know it would be conjecture.
So, having learned a little about them, just imagine how difficult it would be for me to be able to tell them what had happened over 13,200 years to bring us to the point we are now at.
Come to think of it, I would rather not do so, it would not only overwhelm them but it could easily disappoint them.
Gathered around their warming fire, they would not want to hear we have stripped away most of the forests, killed off huge numbers of game and wild animals, polluted the air with strange types of fumes to the stage the inhabitants of some countries have to cover their noses and mouths so they can breathe poorly filtered air, and taken the mystery out of what the night sky means.
It's true we could probably not survive gathered around a stone-ringed fire pit, unclad and without our supermarket food, but that little family from long ago would have no greater success trying to live in our world either.
-Don Farmer is chief reporter of the Wairarapa Times-Age.
