Hobbies And Interests
Choppers
Choppers are roughly spherical stones from which large flakes have been broken to form a sharp edge or point. Choppers tend to use natural breaks as cutting edges, with little retouching to lengthen the cutting edge produced by the removal of a single flake. These tools are representative of the Oldowan technology of the species Homo habilis, named after the Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania where remains of the species and stone tools were found, according to the University of California, San Diego.
Hand-axes
Hand-axes belong to Acheulean technology, associated with Homo eretus. Acheulean hand-axes were refined choppers, flatter and in some cases chipped all around. The flakes are smaller and better removed, producing longer cutting edges. Hand-axes had sufficient weight for heavy jobs but good enough cutting edges for finer work. Some hand-axes have unchipped ends that would have been held in the hand, while hand-axes worked on all sides to produce a range of blade-shapes may have been manipulated by using a piece of leather to protect the hand.
Scrapers
Scrapers were an early special-purpose tool used to scrapes the insides of animal skins or the hair from the outside. Other scraper functions may have included vegetable preparation and handling fibers for clothing. Scraper cutting edges were long, flat and usually slightly curved. A burin was a specialized kind of scraper with a barb sticking out of the side. In the Upper Paleolithic era, burins were used to cut two long narrow slots in a piece of bone or ivory and carefully break out the piece between the slots, producing a needle, one of the most important inventions in the history of clothing.
Points
Projectile points include arrowheads and spear points. Their shapes and sizes depended on what was needed to kill a particular animal and their material on the kinds of stone locally available.
Blades
Blades, defined by archaeologists as tools that are twice as long as wide and have roughly parallel sides, appear in the Upper Paleolithic period and were made by detaching the longest possible flake from a core and retouching the edges as necessary for the desired shape and cutting edge. Blades required skill to produce, since they were thin enough to break. They were usually hafted to wooden or antler handles and were critical for making deep holes, including wounds in prey animals.