Stick: the unsung hero of human evolution

Silent companion stone on archaeological records

In April 1997, at the World Snooker Championship, held at the Crucible Theater in Sheffield, England, Ronnie O'Sullivan approached the table in order to play a frame in the seemingly routine victory game in the first round against Mick Price. But what happened in the next 5 minutes and 20 seconds shocked the world of snooker and sent waves of respect around the world of professional sports. For those who do not understand this sport - to score the maximum possible number of points, 147, you need to send 36 pockets in the pockets in the right order. Until 1997, this happened in official snooker matches several times - and this sport turned into a professional in the late 1960s. Sooner or later, the talented O'Sullivan had to score 147 points, but the manner in which he did it was surprising. He slid around the table and played with a constellation and confidence that did not match his 21-year-old. He was one with a cue in his hands , and was in a trance that connected a man and his art. He defiantly thought four or five strikes forward, and with his smooth movements practically opened a new milestone in the game.

This may sound rude, but in order to somehow more clearly describe his achievement, it can be compared with other sports simply from a financial point of view. For a frame length of 320 seconds, O'Sullivan received a prize of £ 165,000. Few can boast that he earns £ 515.63 per second - especially at such a young age. And in fact, he makes money with a long piece of polished wood and a piece of chalk. For many people, the result of O'Sullivan is among the highest achievements of world sport. But from my point of view, this is a triumph for the achievement of human use of the stick: a poetically beautiful combination of craft, genius, composure and panache.


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The sticks are probably at the origin of the craft - at the point where our very distant ancestors moved from animal existence to life improved by the objects around them. This transition is most mercilessly shown in the passage “The Dawn of Man” in the Stanley Kubrick film “ 2001: A Space Odyssey ”, where at the time of illumination the great ape holds the bone it has just used to crush the leader of a hostile clan. It is a pity that my example of a breakthrough moment in the evolution of humanity towards the use of tools is in such a cruel context. Without any doubt, Kubrick’s goal was to demonstrate what exactly underlies technological progress and how the use of sticks to fight each other benefited the development of human communities. But I suspect that they played a more mundane role in our evolutionary journey as long as they were systematically used to abuse other individuals of their own species. Even with such musical accompaniment, provided with the initial bars of the Strauss symphonic poem “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, this passage would not have enough expressiveness if in it the humanoid monkey Kubrick simply knocked the apple off the tree with a stick.

No matter how you want to portray this defining moment in the history of mankind, the successful use of the stick in those prehistoric times certainly brought fame and fortune.


3 million years later, this rule is still applicable in many cultural circumstances. Technically speaking, snooker is not a craft, but a sport. But if we consider sport as a physical art, required to participate in competitions - and win them - I have no problems in order to extend the concept of the craft to the activities of athletes - especially using sticks. Tennis, cricket, snooker, and golf players are just a few examples of athletes who skillfully use certain types of sticks. This is how we return to Ronnie O'Sullivan and the path of hominid use of sticks leading us from the very beginning, represented by the Kubrikov monkey, to the zenith, in the Crucible Theater, in April 1997, to the fastest set of points in snooker history.

However, Kubrick could have taken stone and stone instead of bone, and this might have been an even more believable image of the origin of the use of tools. Although the stones and bones survived, once in the archaeological records of the early prehistoric period, it is quite difficult to find out in the absence of obvious signs of wear or modifications whether the found bone was used for some non-standard purposes. With wooden sticks, the situation is even more complicated, since, if only they did not fall into extreme conditions and did not undergo special chemical changes, they had long ago decomposed and turned into dust. Stones also suffer the ravages of time, and it is completely obvious from them whether they were somehow reworked or altered by the human hand. As a result, they give us obvious evidence of the use of tools by humans and determined how we understand the development of human communities from 3 to 4 million years ago to at least the Bronze Age (2500 - 800 BC).

In archeology, stones are designated by the suffix "-lit", derived from the Greek word λίθος, "stone". It is on the basis of the topology of stone tools that we were able to construct the chronology of the Stone Age. From the Paleolithic (“old” Stone Age) through the Mesolithic (“middle”) to the Neolithic (“new”), stone tools gradually became more difficult. The story begins about 3 million years ago in the Olduvai Gorge on the Serengeti plains in Tanzania, where British and Kenyan paleoanthropologies and archaeologists Mary and Louis Liki excavated in the 1950s. Here was found the skeleton of Australopithecus , an early ape-like hominid, along with a set of working stones. These early tools are commonly referred to as pebble implements, since they seem to have been studded quite a bit, just to get a sharp edge. Therefore, the earliest implements were very simple. Yet for Australopithecus, whose diet included carrion, it was undoubtedly a step forward from tearing the carcasses with bare hands, which made it possible to cut off the skin, meat, and break bones to access the bone marrow. This small, but important step will lead to an increase in protein intake, and therefore will have a long-term evolutionary influence.

Then, approximately 1.9 million years ago, a skillful man (Homo habilis) appears on the archaeological scene - which, 1.2 million years ago, was soon followed by a man with straight erectus (Homo erectus). Now the talk will be about hominini - members of the human clade - defined on the basis of a wider classification of hominids, which includes more human-like members of the genus, for example, African Australopithecus. We call the processed flint of this period Ashelian - in honor of the site of archaeological excavations, located in Saint-Ashel, a suburb of Amiens in northern France. Here in the XIX century, many hand axes were found in the area of ​​gravel river benches in the Somme region. In a sense, it was then that the Stone Age was born - when indisputable evidence in the form of stones, modified by human efforts related to geological sediments of a certain age, forced us to reconsider traditional biblical stories about the creation of people.

Ashelian hand axes are beautiful artifacts. For my very first lecture on archaeological illustrations at the London Archeological Institute, I had to prepare a technical drawing of one of these axes. Rotating it in my hands, I admired his epic journey through time. These wonderfully processed pieces of flint showed obvious signs of repeated blows, thanks to which the final product was hewed out of a stone - an ax with sharp edges from two sides converging at the top and with a “handle” at the base. What is striking about them is that in their fault lines one can see reasonably made decisions and cognitive development processes for the authorship of a stone cutter from the Lower Paleolithic who conceived a definite final shape. It was something truly “human.” However, the term "hand ax" probably does not quite fit it.

In the late 1990s, my friends and I went to the woodland of Sussex, Wilde, to conduct an experiment: we wanted to know if we could dump a tree with the help of a self-made rough version of the “hand ax”. Proponents of the classic version of the Ashele Paleolithic, no doubt, would not have approved the quality of our replicas, hastily carved out of stone; this took place in the courtyard of a house located in London Haringi, on a hot summer day, just before the train leaves Sussex. But our stones definitely had sharp edges, and some enthusiastic archaeologists would have been happy to spend the whole weekend knocking on the tree trunk. In fact, this whole story did not last more than a few hours. Our hands and wrists were quickly tired, our joints swelled, and the transfer of tools from hand to hand only increased the agony. We’ve overworked our bones and muscles so much that we could barely bring a pint to our mouths at a local village pub that evening. Sucking the ale through the colored straws, we concluded that the manual ax probably could be attributed to an Achele Swiss knife or a Leatherman type multitool. Today, experts say that manual axes had at one time a whole range of functions, including cutting meat, hard objects, chopping wood, scraping, digging, and also served as currency.

At the end of the Acheul industry, the appearance of Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) and reasonable man (Homo sapiens) from 100,000 to 125,000 years ago is extensively superimposed. With the rapid advance of the Middle Paleolithic comes a much more developed approach to the production of tools and an increase in the complexity of social connections. Perhaps the artistic and symbolic images were outside of their consciousness, but they had burial rites and other rituals, testifying to their ability to think abstractly and to have a certain self-consciousness. The stone tools of this era are often called Mousterian, in honor of the cave Le Moustier in the south-west of France in the Dordogne department - some of the earliest and most complete collections were found there. Manual axes remained a standard tool, but that period was also characterized by scrapers — small pieces of silicon that had to be held with a hand at the blunt part, and the index finger wrapped around it created an effective tool for cutting. These scrapers were almost certainly used to make hides, and the remarkable ability to survive of both Neanderthals and reasonable people in the face of climate change suggests that people began to produce more sophisticated clothing.

Despite this, it is believed that Neanderthals died out about 40,000 years ago, at the very beginning of a very cold period in Europe. And from that moment, from the Upper Paleolithic to the Mesolithic, the manufacture of stone tools is characterized by a wide range, innovation and rapid development. Stone tools were not only more complex, they were used to create bone tools such as an awl and needles. All of this suggests a further development in clothes and the likelihood that clothes were sewn from different pieces for greater ergonomics and improved fit to the body. I often say to my acquaintances who are busy in the tailor’s business that their occupation turns out to be most of all indebted to a rational man from the Upper Paleolithic. Without these needles and custom-made clothes, we could not survive, as a species, in that cold period.

Also, certain local traditions are traced in stone implements, which is a sign that a reasonable person was able to adapt production to local environmental conditions. You can almost start talking about "cultures" due to the presence of differences in the decoration of fragmentation stones - those parts that flew away from the main stone during its trimming. It seems surprising that it took so long for people to realize that the fragments flying away from the stone are as sharp as the stone itself. In our courtyard in Haringi, it took only a few minutes for the barefoot neighbors to find out how sharp the fragments of stones can be. But the innovation was not in the fact that the tools were made from fragments, but in the fact that the main stone was specially hewn precisely in order to get the fragments of the desired shape. Also from the analysis of fragments, basic stones and platforms it is obvious that a whole set of different technologies were used for their manufacture. Indirect blows (instead of the usual method of hammer and chisel), pressure exfoliation, soft tapping (using, for example, deer antler) allowed Paleolithic stonemasters to create a huge variety of stone tools that supported their very complex interaction with the outside world. If you are interested in this story, I would recommend you sign up for an introductory course on cutting stones. It is easy to lose yourself in the rich world of strikes with a stone on a stone; this pastime has an extremely strong therapeutic effect, and allows you to forge a connection with your inner man of intelligence. There is no more authentic way to get back to basics.

The key technological development of this period should be considered hunting - placing the tip of a spear or arrow on the end of a stick. Evidence of the existence of such products is not obtained from the finds of weapons entirely - a wooden shaft with a blade - but from the shape of the treated stones and the presence of side and corner notches at their base. These grooves served as the anchor point for the length of rope used to tie the blade to the stick. Debates on whether stones were already planted on sticks in Mousterian culture were long enough, but recent excavations in Kathu Pan in South Africa revealed many stones to the world, the edges of which were obviously treated with blows rather than scraping or sawing. Moreover, the treatment of the bases of these stones corresponded to the shelling. The scientific method of dating shows the average age of the finds at 500,000 years — that is as much as 200,000 years earlier than previously thought, which forces us to reconsider our views on when a person turned from a victim into a hunter. It is clearly seen that these crude attempts at making tools did not come close to the complexity of throwing weapons that were made in the Mesolithic, or are still being made by some of the Amazon jungle aborigines.

Hunting - a technological opportunity to attach a stick to a stone - served as a point after which the craft became an evolutionary human opportunity forever. A composite instrument, or instrument, was born, and with it the opportunity to reach a higher level of development. This fruitful moment of creation of the weapon or the tool, in my opinion, is extremely important. This event signals a new dawn of technological advancement of man - in fact, the creation of the expansion of a limb - which is very well advanced in its development during the Mesolithic. But did it start 500,000 or 300,000 years ago, and I would like to go back to the heading in his last days, sometime in the 1950s, to my grandfather, who used to make golf clubs.

In the last couple of years I have given in to my desire; it was a subconscious aspiration with deep genetic inheritance. I started making sticks. And it delays - and, obviously, sits in my blood. I blame my paternal grandfather for this. He died when I was only 2 years old, so I didn’t know him personally. He was born, lived and died in St. Andrus, one of the world's golf centers, and was involved in the golf club industry. In this regard, he mainly made sticks, and made them quite skillfully. My father remembers how he, as a boy, watched his father with reverence as he sat in the backyard of the house and turned nut, ash or willow branches into canes. This story was repeated a generation later when I watched my father, who was sitting on the back porch, and planing sticks in the evening light. I do not remember such a moment that my father did not have one or two sticks in the process of processing, on which he carved complex figures on the arms and decorative patterns along the entire length. But I never thought that I could be in his place, wandering thoughts at a time when my hands are engaged in such work.



Among the many practical skills required to make a golf club, one of my grandfather’s specialties was the manufacture of joint sites for the head and handle of the club with its core using winding. The process was relatively simple, but it was absolutely necessary to do it absolutely correctly so that the place of articulation of the head and the rod did not break, did not crack and did not fall apart. This required wrapping the cord around the joint and winding it to reinforce the structure. With one hand, it was necessary to exert constant pressure on the cord and withstand maximum tension, and with the other hand it was necessary to slowly turn the club head to wind the cord. The task was carried out so as to hide the knot and get a smooth winding - both for beauty, and so that a piece of cord does not dangle outside, which could interfere with the work and weaken the winding. And although his grandfather was taken away the area in which he could use his skill, he passed it on to his son, and my father passed it on to me.

I had several instances to use this inherited multi-purpose skill - the last time I tried to make a model of a medieval fishing rod. In the Treatise on Fishing with the Hook, dated to the end of the 15th century, the rod made of hazel and a piece of horsehair rope is described in sufficient detail. Hazel is wonderfully suitable for making fishing rods. It grows in the shade and in moist, humus-rich soil, and can reach a length of up to 4 m, while remaining surprisingly thin. It is very flexible, so it can withstand the weight of a fish trying to get off the hook. Its weakness lies in the soft wood on the thin end. It breaks there at the slightest load. Therefore, it is necessary to wind a small stick of more durable wood - turn or apple - in the place where the hazel is still thick enough to withstand the joint. Two kinds of wood are woven together by winding a rope, which can also be used to create a handle on the bottom of the rod. When I finished with my fishing rod, at least it looked quite authentic. It is a pity that I did not have the skills and patience to use it for fishing.

When I first had to use winding, I realized how ancient this technology is. I tried to attach a flint tip of a spear, which I had been making from scratch for two whole days, on an ash-tree shaft, cleared by me of bark using a flintlock scraper. I internally smirked at this process, because it was precisely these things that I did as a child, along with my classmates, during the long hot summer days that we spent in the forests and groves surrounding the Pevensen bogs in Sussex. And now, when I became a scientist and became interested in experimental archeology, I could call this activity “research” to justify the many hours during which I returned to the serene days of my youth. I intended to do something in the spirit of the late Paleolithic; something that would allow me to jump out of a hedge and overwhelm a young reindeer - or at least I imagined it to myself.

In the process of making the arrowhead, I experimented with indirect blows and flaking under pressure, and used a purchase cord for winding. At first I hoped to make my own nettle net, but I was quickly running out of time - this often happens when you try to cram a Paleolithic into a three-day weekend. I sat on a wooden floor in spots of light and concentrated on winding, and then it occurred to me how far this technology, this skill, had advanced in time. It passed through hundreds of thousands of generations, crossed continents, stretched through epochs and performed many functions on its way. And so I used him, thanks to the time spent on him by my father and his father, who transferred this skill to him. It told us a story that is just as important to humanity’s understanding as any written story;talked about ordinary people who relied on such skills for their own survival. When the process in the Andrews golf club manufacturing industry took over, my grandfather lost his livelihood and a source of pride, but we, a wider section of society, lost a direct and tangible connection with our ancient heritage.

I would very much like to be able to conduct a parallel history of the evolution of sticks, starting from the early Paleolithic, because it is difficult to believe that Australopithecus, a skilled person, a straight-erect man, Neanderthals and a reasonable person would not bring this technology to the same heights as they reached in stone processing . But since the tree is incapable of being preserved in archaeological records, this story will forever remain untold, and will remain in the field of hypotheses issued by the same dreamy experimental archaeologists, like myself. But although we cannot build a graph of the development and diversity of the use of sticks in a primitive society, we must thank them, the silent satellites of the stone from the archaeological records, for the role they played in developing human cognitive processes.

– , . . «: » (Cræft: An Inquiry Into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts, 2017).