Page 466 - The Secret Museum

‘WE HAVE TENS OF THOUSANDS of handaxes in here,’ said Nick Ashton, curator at the

British Museum, as he opened the door to the museum’s handaxe storage facility in
the heart of hipster-friendly Hoxton, east London. ‘They vary in shape, size, thickness
and beauty.’

The storage room is lined with rows of tall cabinets. Each cabinet has a stack of
slim drawers. There are 700 drawers per row and each one contains a few handaxes.

‘Let me show you my favourite,’ said Nick, pulling one drawer open and lifting
out a stone handaxe. I could see why he liked it. There was something magical about
it. The human who created it must have been something of an artist, because it is
perfectly symmetrical and has an S-shaped twist on both sides. You can almost feel

the presence of the person who made it 400,000 years ago, carefully shaping it into
this beautiful form. It’s a fully functional handaxe, but it has the X factor; for some
reason, the creator thought to make this handaxe prettier than it needed to be.

Who was this artistic human being who lived hundreds of thousands of years ago?
Well, he – or she – was an early Neanderthal who lived in an area now called
Hoxne, on the border of Suffolk and Norfolk. He would have hunted with a spear and
used this axe to cut apart the animals he killed to get meat for food and hides for
clothing and shelter.

At that time, what is now the East Anglian coastline was connected by boggy
marshland to mainland Europe, so this individual’s ancestors would have made the

intrepid journey on foot from southern Europe to Hoxne, surviving off the land as they
went. The climate would have been colder, the landscape more akin to the heavily
forested Scandinavian countryside of today, and there would have been lots of
animals we wouldn’t see in Suffolk now, including elephants, rhino and spotted
hyenas.

Although this is one of the most artistic handaxes in the storage, the British
Museum has an impressive range of the tools. Nick pointed some out. ‘Here are the
oldest ones, made 1.2 million years ago in Oldavai Gorge in Tanzania. And here are

ones from Sudan and these are from the Middle East.’

The museum has lots of handaxes from Britain, mainly from Norfolk, Suffolk and
southern England. The biggest in the collection of British axes is from Biddenham.
Why is it so big? ‘I think he was just showing off,’ said Nick of the human who lived
hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Each one was shaped out of a piece of rock – by banging the rock with a pebble,
and then shaping it with a piece of bone or antler – into a tool that could fit into the
palm of the user’s hand.

We looked at a range from Swanscombe in Kent. ‘These are more typical,’
explained Nick. ‘Look closely and you can see where a series of flakes has been
removed to create the handaxe’s sharp edges.’ Sometimes the museum has found the
flakes that were removed from the stone to shape the handaxe. We looked at some