I got to hold a 500,000 year old hand axe at the museum today.
It’s right-handed
I am right-handed
There are grooves for the thumb and knuckle to grip that fit my hand perfectly
I have calluses there from holding my stylus and pencils and the gardening tools.
There are sharper and blunter parts of the edge, for different types of cutting, as well as a point for piercing.
I know exactly how to use this to butcher a carcass.
A homo erectus made it
Some ancestor of mine, three species ago, made a tool that fits my hand perfectly, and that I still know how to use.
Who were you
A man? A woman? Did you even use those words?
Did you craft alone or were you with friends? Did you sing while you worked?
Did you find this stone yourself, or did you trade for it? Was it a gift?
Did you make it for yourself, or someone else, or does the distinction of personal property not really apply here?
Who were you?
What would you think today, seeing your descendant hold your tool and sob because it fits her hands as well?
What about your other descendant, the docent and caretaker of your tool, holding her hands under it the way you hold your hands under your baby’s head when a stranger holds them.
Is it bizarre to you, that your most utilitarian object is now revered as holy?
Or has it always been divine?
Or is the divine in how I am watching videos on how to knap stone made by your other descendants, learning by example the way you did?
Tomorrow morning I am going to the local riverbed in search of the appropriate stones, and I will follow your example.
The first blood spilled on it will almost certainly be my own, as I learn the textures and rhythm of how it’s done.
Did you have cuss words back then? Gods to blaspheme when the rock slips and you almost take your thumbnail off instead? Or did you just scream?
I’m not religious.
But if spilling my own blood to connect with a stranger who shared it isn’t partaking in the divine
I don’t know what is.
This is the axe
My knuckle rests exactly in the triangular plane just above the orange intrusion, and my thumb on the plane with the white patches.
How many hands held it just like that? How many generations was this passed down? Were you lost? or did you fall into disuse when technology improved?
Do you still desire to be held?
This was the axe that made me ugly cry in the museum. It was created half a million years ago by either Erectus or Heidelburgensis, and was passed down from person to person, long enough that somehow a neanderthal picked it up, and passed it down to their family.
It has now felt 3 generations of human species hands, it’s smooth but still sharp except where the very tip has been broken off, but it shows that this axe was loved and taken care of. And it is still being taken care of! It was used to teach archaic children to build, to carve meat, to break bones, and now it is being used to teach us about all those people who came before us and put their hands right where we put ours.
The fact that @gallusrostromegalus and I put our hands on the same place and felt the same rush of emotions only days apart is amazing, but its not new. People loved this axe, it belonged to their loved ones and it’s full of all those emotions. And if there’s anything to take away from humanity, new and old, it’s that we love a good rock.
Hello! You and I never met, but I feel like we’ve held hands now, the same way that we held hands with everyone else who’s held that axe, and I think that’s lovely :)
