Review and reflection on the study of hand axes and other large cutting tools in China
Received date: 2024-02-06
Accepted date: 2024-06-15
Online published: 2025-04-15
Large cutting tools like handaxes, cleavers, picks and knives are the earliest standardized tools in human history, and their emergence reflects the leap in human cognitive ability and technological skills. Handaxes have been reported since the 1930s by foreign and domestic researchers, but at that time, both the number of discoveries and the extent of discussions were very limited. Since the 1950s, an increasing number of large cutting tools have been discovered in multiple regions in China like the Fen River Valley, Bose Basin, Luonan Basin, and Danjiangkou Reservoir Region. These assemblages have long received the attention of archaeologists, and at the same time, disagreements and controversies have arisen around them.
Based on a brief overview of the discoveries of large cutting tools in China, this paper intends to review the history and current situation of the study. Archaeologists have mainly focused on several issues, namely, whether handaxes existed in China, the manufacturing strategies of Chinese large cutting tools, the human behaviors reflected in these tools, and the relationship between Chinese large cutting tools and the Acheulean in the Old World.
Furthermore, this paper puts forward some reflections on the large cutting tools in China, specifically the chronological issues and regional diversities, to better interpret the information on human activities behind them. On the chronological issues, it must be noticed that current dating results show that the earliest Acheulean-like assemblage in China dates to around 900~800 kaBP, while the latest ones only date to about 30 kaBP, and there’s a missing link from 600~300 kaBP. This may be explained by the unbalance of fieldwork or the incompetence of current dating methods, but it is also possible that there are two different periods in which large cutting tools prevailed.
Regarding the regional diversity of large cutting tools, more attention also needs to be paid to the quantitative comparisons and comparative study of technological details of large cutting tools from different regions. Meanwhile, future researchers should also notice the differences of other cores, flakes, and small tools that co-exist with large cutting tools in different regions, to better understand the toolkits used by ancient humans.
At last, when comparing large cutting tools in China to those in Africa and the West of Eurasia, it is necessary to conduct the comparison based on individual regions instead of treating discoveries from different regions of China or of the Western Old World as a whole and simply compare the “east” and the “west”.
HU Haoyue . Review and reflection on the study of hand axes and other large cutting tools in China[J]. Acta Anthropologica Sinica, 2025 , 44(02) : 301 -315 . DOI: 10.16359/j.1000-3193/AAS.2024.0104
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