Making tools has been linked to periods recognized by the material used to create tools: Stone Age, Bronze Age, and The Iron Age. The Stone Age was a long period that spanned from when humans first began making stone tools until the dawning of the Bronze Age.
The Bronze Age, evolving about 3500 B.C., was a period of rapid growth associated with the first smelting processes and the manufacturing of bronze items.
The Iron Age began with the discovery of iron and the technology of reducing minerals to form a material that could be made into tools. The current period of steel and machine could be considered a component of the Iron Age.
The ages of humanity aren’t necessarily accurate since they are timeframes of cultural significance. Thus a Stone Age tool may be designed by the earliest man to make tools and a nineteenth-century Australian aborigine or the 20th-century Indian from the upper Amazon. The mechanism of each of these tool-makers is an expression of the Stone Age culture.
Stone Age man made his flake, core, and blade tools using various methods that included striking the stone’s center with an oversized, hand-held hammerstone or using an easier baton made of wood or bone to cut off the rocks into flakes utilizing the help of a pointed stick or bone; and grinding and polishing.
At the time of this era, during the Stone Age, stone tools were used to cut down trees, build, and make spears, canoes, and sleds, as well as other wooden instruments.
Many stone tools have been used. It’s difficult to know the extent to which they were utilized to create objects made of wood as the wood, exposed to the elements, the elements, to weathering and dampness, eventually split.
It is possible that the wood used in everyday use in tools such as the bow or spears that were used by Stone Age man, unearthed from European peat bogs. Many stone tools with concave edges that were hollowed were suitable for shaping the smooth surfaces of wooden objects.
The research has been conducted in the contemporary replica of Stone Age implements, and Anthropologists have succeeded in replicating both the process of making the tools and their use for cutting, scraping, incising, and boring.
These research studies have proven important in proving theories about how the tools were constructed and their performance. The most challenging research on the production as well as the use of the instruments performed by Semenov has been conducted based on the notion that bone and stone tools bear not only the mark of their creation as well as the method of making them, they were constructed and what materials were created.
Microphotography and microscopic inspections reveal the direction in which the tool was working and give information about the way it was held in the hands of the user. Semenov has found that prehistoric humans utilized wood extensively in the latter part of the Stone Age when planting and harvesting crops, fishing, and animal domestication were beginning.
Since man was more of a food creator than a gatherer of food, he renounced his wandering lifestyle and set up settlements. This led to the need for homes and the necessary tools to build them.
Semenov’s microanalysis suggests that axes were utilized to chop down trees. The stone hands were also employed for hollowing, possibly to form shelters.
The rough cutting edges of early Stone Age stone ax, knife, and chisel, appropriate for the most basic needs, were improved to cut more efficiently.
Stone surfaces were polished, and edges were ground on sandstone blocks, creating edges and surfaces that decreased their resistance to wood or other materials that were being worked.
Semenov confirmed his scientific conclusions on the usage of the ax when falling trees using evidence from the field that the size of fir, with a diameter of ten inches, was cut in 20 minutes using an ax made of nephrite.
In the year 1960, Vladimir Kozak had the exceptional opportunity to witness the making of an ax made from stone an indigenous people who lived in the Stone Age culture. He was a part of a research expedition in Brazil’s Amazon area of Brazil that required the removal of an isolated, small tribe of Indians called the Heta.
In reality, the Heta were making their presence known after they observed the native Brazilian farmer clearing the land in the wild with an ax made of steel.
They were amazed by the power of modern tools to recognize their superiority over their old stone tool. Kozak managed to convince a person of the tribe to create the stone ax and then recorded the entire making process.
The tool maker first chose an appropriate extended ovoid stone. Over several days, he formed the stone by removing small particles using a hammerstone held by hand until he reached the desired shape needed in the shape of the blade.
Then, using a joint polishing and grinding procedure, employing a sandstone block of White clay and water, he worked the blade until its smoothness and sharpness matched his expectations.
After deciding on a length of four feet of hardwood that was five inches wide to make a handle, the Indian constructed a chisel out of the bones of the tapir’s leg and sharpened it on the block of sandstone.
The next step was to chisel a deep oval hole on one side of the ax’s handle to accept the top, unpolished end of the ax’s head. He then cut the remainder of the handle to around two inches, cutting away any wood that was not needed with the bone chisel and then fitting the ax head with force into the hole in the handle.
The stone axes Heta cut down trees as big up to four feet wide. Important developments occurred in the last Stone Age, all taking in very slowly; over a long period, materials improved man’s tool manufacturing techniques and the efficacy of the instruments.
The angle of the cutting edge was decreased by grinding to facilitate easier perforation. The friction caused by the cutting tool when cutting or cleaving was lessened by smoothing.
