The Acheulean handaxe
A deliberately symmetrical, two-sided tool appears — and stays essentially unchanged for a million years.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 986 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 30 thousand years
- Era
- Early Pleistocene, Quaternary
At Kokiselei in West Turkana, around 1.76 million years ago, large bifacially worked handaxes and cleavers appear, the beginning of the Acheulean. Unlike an Oldowan flake, a handaxe is shaped to a preconceived form: the maker had a template in mind before striking. The technology then spreads across Africa, into the Levant, Europe and India, and persists with remarkably little change for over a million years — the longest-lived tool tradition in human history by an enormous margin.