Stone is attached to wood
Putting a sharp point on a shaft multiplies what a hand can do, and it requires planning several steps ahead.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 100 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 50 thousand years
- Era
- Middle Pleistocene, Quaternary
Points from Kathu Pan 1 in South Africa, around 500,000 years old, carry damage patterns consistent with use as hafted spear tips rather than hand-held tools. Hafting is a genuine cognitive threshold: it is a composite technology, requiring a stone component, a wooden shaft, a binding and often an adhesive, each prepared separately and assembled toward a goal. Everything from arrows to axes descends from this step.