Museums worldwide preserve and record the remains of technology used by our predecessors. Use of particular materials has led to a way of categorising whole groups of people in specific places and times. We refer to people of the Palaeolithic Age, the Neolithic Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age and more recently, the Industrial Age.
Stored safely in small drawers in a Whanganui Regional Museum collection storeroom is a whole series of Palaeolithic stone tools produced by our human and pre-human predecessors. This amazing collection of stone tools was collected by H W Seton-Karr in North Africa during the late 19th century and donated to our Museum in 1935.
Looking at these tools leads to a sense of wonder about the people who made them, who they might have been and what their lives were like.
One drawer holds extremely ancient, rounded chipped stones called Oldawan tools which were created by pre-human hominids over 1.5 million years ago. These very clever hominids called Homo habilis (known as the Handymen) walked on two feet, lived in Africa and used stones gathered from around them as their technological solution to practical tasks. Perhaps they were skinning animals, cutting meat, or processing plant materials. The tools are rounded stones, small enough to fit into a modern human hand and flaked at one end, probably to create sharp stone fragments to use like a knife.
Yet another iteration of humankind, living in the period from 1.8 million to 300,000 years ago, developed much greater skill in working stone, creating teardrop shaped tools called Acheulean hand-axes, named after the valley in Europe where these tools were first discovered.
