Early tools in hominid and human history and my Acheulean HandAxe

Through the years, living and working in various countries, I acquired an odd assortment of items, things prized for no reason other than their having caught my imagination, been affordable and small enough to carry away with me. My house is full of them and they need to be catalogued so my children will know what they are and why they are here. (I’ve already described and pictured the ani-ani, here, an agricultural tool relevant to my work in Indonesia.)

I begin with my Acheulian Handaxe (or Biface), found in a Paris antique shop. As I wrote in an earlier essay, in the early 1980s I lived on the Place du Pantheon and did my daily shopping on rue Mouffetard, one of the oldest shopping streets in Europe.

To reach La Mouff I walked on rue Clotilde, along the side of our apartment building, turned left onto rue de L’Estrapade and rue Blain to the Place de La Contrascarpe at rue Mouffetard, each time passing by the antique shop, sometimes checking out the window display, a few times going in to look around, and one time finding something that caught my interest – a small basket at the back of the store, on the floor, filled with oddly shaped stone objects. I called the shop owner over and she explained that her son had brought these things home from an archeological project where he worked one summer. From my anthropology courses in the early 1950s and many hours spent in museums, I recognized the basket’s contents as stone age tools but had little more information than that for understanding exactly what they were. Since my field had been cultural anthropology, not archeology or physical anthropology, the study of human evolution, I had not kept up with that particular academic literature after leaving teaching and the academic life. Still, I searched through the basket and picked out my handaxe, 5½ in. by 4in., chosen because I found the shape and color pleasing and it fit into my hand like a tool I could imagine a man or woman having used many thousands of years ago.

On reflection, I picked up a second object, a heavy lithic core, I think of quartzite, something I knew of and remembered having seen pictured in anthropology textbooks. I guessed that razor sharp blades would have been struck off from the core, which is,

Upper Paleolithic cylindrical blade core. France, Burke Museum

roughly described, a cylinder shaped piece of worked stone, about 6 inches long by about 4 inches deep, and along its length an approximately flat surface of three parallel blade size indentations. On each end of the cylinder is a worked platform. The core looked to me as if it could no longer yield proper blades and had been abandoned, but it was the only core there and I liked the idea of owning it. (In an essay on the history of cloth and clothing I remarked on flint blades, and the pictured bone needles, technology from the Upper Paleolithic, being used in ancient Egypt for cutting, and sewing, cloth to make the first known dress.)

I paid the owner a hundred francs, put both oddities in my shopping cart, along with groceries from the rue Mouffetard shops, and on reaching home found a place on the upper shelf of a cupboard to store them. If I showed them to Ravi he soon forgot; he had more relevant matters on his mind.

Years later, in the early 1990s, when Ravi and I went driving through the French countryside on vacation, mostly in the Dordogne, we visited Le Musée National de Préhistoire in Eyzies-de-Tayac, and Lascaux II, an exact copy of the Lascaux caves, all of which brought to mind my two prehistoric stone possessions and had me wondering about their provenance.

The lithic core was relatively easy for me to place within its context.

Solutrean blades

Modern human beings, Homo Sapiens, came on the scene between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago as hunter-gatherers using stone tooles with a culture known in archeology as the Upper Paleolithic. The blades they struck off from the stone core was a basic, highly significant step forward in technology, as explained here. Judging from their art — the cave paintings, carvings, ornaments and figurines — we assume the people were fully modern human beings with language, social order and religion.

And their tools were beautifully made, aesthetic beyond functional necessity. The Solutrean blades are especially lovely.  In an essay considering folk art and aesthetics, here,  are photos of a Lascaux cave painting and of the early native American’s Clovis point.

But what about the handaxe I found so pleasing to look at and hold? Finally, in the museum of prehistory I was able to place it in time and in a tool tradition. The time is some 150,000 years ago and the tools are Lower Paleolithic, in the Acheulean tradition, the  Acheulean handaxe. And how or what should I call the individuals who made and used the Acheulean handaxe?

Homo Georgicus

They were premodern hominins, Homo Erectus, that preceded both Homo Sapiens and Neanderthal in Europe and Asia. (and Denisovans?). The fossil evidence for Homo Erectus is scant and complex. To me, the best understanding of who or what these pre-modern beings were is best shown in this skull, the skeletal reproduction, and the reconstruction of a female. (Do I call her a woman, as if she were human?) They are called Homo Erectus because they stood and walked erect, upright. Did the Acheuleans have language? We know they used fire and may have cooked their food, but no clear, uncontroversial evidence of cultural traits, such as art, ornaments, clothing or habitation has been found. Even tools other than the handaxe are missing, and because one cannot know for certain just how a “handaxe” was used, many archeologists now refer to it as a “biface”, a term that does not imply its function. In fact, the Acheulean handaxe may well be a lithic core from which hominins struck off flakes that, with their sharp edges, were the real stone tools Homo Erectus used for cutting meat, vegetation, wood.

I discovered an article, no longer available, marvelous both in content and writing style, by Tony Baker, a highly knowledgeable amateur archeologist specialized in Paleoamerican stone tools, in which he presented an argument I draw upon here for a brief discussion of the handaxe.

Baker wrote that most archeologists have long considered the Acheulean handaxe, because of its size and symmetry, an intentionally manufactured tool, and this despite the fact that problems arise when studying variations in size and shape of the many handaxes found across Europe and Asia, variations that seem unrelated to function, to changes through time or to locations where the hominins would have camped. Alternatively, a smaller group of researchers hold that the handaxe is a flake core, the by-product of flake extraction. In hominid evolution, the idea of the tool preceded Homo Sapiens. Even chimpanzees make and use a stick as a tool, explained here by Jane Goodall.

Baker, who had studied bifaces from the Solutrean and other Upper Paleolithic Age tool traditions and worked, as well, with an experienced knapper, agreed with this latter view of the handaxe. He considered the unchanging morphology of the handaxe a consequence of it being a core and as the natural outcome of the limited physical capabilities, especially limited manual dexterity, of Homo Erectus in striking flakes from it. The Achuelean handaxe is a crude, early stage biface found at the sources of the lithic material near what would have been water and gravel, i.e. fluvial deposits, and not scattered over the land where the hominins would have had their campsites.  Baker dated the handaxe from between 1,600,000 and 150,000 years ago.

This and much more I learned from reading Tony Baker’s ingenious investigation into the nature of the handaxe and its history. I look at my handaxe/biface, contemplate the scars left from flakes extracted, none as large as those in this drawing, and wonder about the beings who made and used the flakes, the first deliberately made stone tool I know of. I suspect my handaxe/biface, like my Upper Paleolithic core, had reached its inherent limit for producing useful flakes.

But I must add a sad note – From reading his blog post, I had taken a great liking to Tony Baker and looked forward to expressing to him my admiration of his intelligence and wit, only to discover that he died in 2012. Obituaries from friends and colleagues confirm my high regard for him and his work.

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Kedi — a delightful documentary on the street cats of Istanbul and the people they deign to befriend

I’ve had trouble writing about Kedi. It tells a story about two things from my past, cats and Istanbul, that resonate with me. Thoughts and memories from decades and decades ago come flooding back, more than I can easily manage. Also, there’s another complication. I now live surrounded by trees and greenery, which is lovely but I’m a city person at heart. I miss living in a neighborhood like that in Kedi, in a city, on a street, in an apartment from where one can walk about, people watch, go into shops and chat up those who work there, admire or deplore the local architecture, discover the city’s history.

As a child in the 1930s I lived in various houses on the outskirts of towns, near wooded areas and always had cats and kittens around to play with. They were just there, not pets anyone brought into the house or regularly fed, but friendly enough for a child to pick up and cuddle. I read that in American cities today feral cats are part of an urban wild life the municipal government must monitor and control. Ornithologists warn that cats are a threat to the birds. Humane Society activists, using the term “community cats” instead of feral, and citing cat control of mouse and rat infestation, advocate for cat population control through kittens being taken to an animal shelter for adoption and adult cats being trapped, neutered, vaccinated for rabies and returned to the street. It’s all too complicated for me to think about as I fret over the deer, rabbits, moles and voles that take over my garden and eat the flowering plants. Raccoons, squirrels, foxes and snakes are out there, too. The birds and butterflies are a joy.

The film has me recalling the cats that on occasion wandered into my life, to keep me company for a while. It happened twice in our house in Mogadiscio and once in Jakarta where for two weeks I sat all day in a room near a guest house kitchen writing a long, detailed report, accompanied by the cat that sat patiently on the table among my stacks of note pads and documents, reminding me every hour or so to pay attention and pet her. I did not encounter street cats in any of the American cities where I lived. I have no memories of cats in India, just of dogs barking at night. In Paris, I once saw a woman feeding cats in a small wooded area of the 16th arrondissement. Otherwise no street cats. In Ankara we lived in Kavaklidere, a neighborhood of apartment buildings and a shopping street that replaced vineyards or gardens, too new to have an urban history, let alone a history of cats. Photos of Kavaklidere here

For the film’s Istanbul neighborhood and the street cats that decorate it, quoting from an introduction to the persons who made Kedi, plus photos of the cats and a nice YouTube trailer to watch —  “Hundreds of thousands of Turkish cats roam the metropolis of Istanbul freely. For thousands of years they’ve wandered in and out of people’s lives, becoming an essential part of the communities that make the city so rich. Claiming no owners, the cats of Istanbul live between two worlds, neither wild nor tame — and they bring joy and purpose to those people they choose to adopt. In Istanbul, cats are the mirrors to the people, allowing them to reflect on their lives in ways nothing else could.”   

Kedi premiered at an Istanbul Film Festival in 2016, arrived the following year in North American theaters and on the YouTube Red streaming service. Time magazine listed it as one of its top ten films of 2017.  From the review, “Ode to the Street Cat — ”… Kedi, which means “cat” in Turkish, is a loving, gorgeously filmed documentary.”

Sheila O’Malley has written a wonderful essay on the film. She describes the individual personality of each of the film’s cats and how it relates to each person it has chosen to favor. “The focus is on the cats, but Kedi is really a portrait of community. (The Director) gives a sense of life in Istanbul, its diversity and beauty, its storefronts and waterfronts, its people.”

This review expresses my thoughts on why I delight in all things feline and one reason I so enjoyed Kedi.  —  “ … Kedi is the “Citizen Kane” of the (cat films). Though technically a sophisticated, artful documentary from Turkish filmmaker Ceyda Torun, Kedi will automatically find devout fans among anyone who delights at all things feline. …  Kedi is ultimately a movie about a mystery. It’s impossible to fully explain how cats and people truly connect, considering their lack of a shared language.  (I wrote here about my favorite pet ever and how and why humans and cats communicate.) One interviewee argues that the relationship between cats and people is the closest we might get to understanding what it’s like to interact with aliens. If so, Kedi goes a long way towards making first contact. Then again, dog people may find themselves in the dark.”

From Kenneth Turan, Feb. 16, 2017, in The Los Angles Times — ” … one of “Kedi’s” virtues is the picture it provides of modern Istanbul, giving us a dawn-to-dusk tour of the metropolis and showing us neighborhoods that feel very much like the real, everyday Istanbul, not the tourist mecca we usually see. …”

I love Istanbul and must remark on it. Istanbul is one of the world’s great cities, has innumerable beautiful things to see, and moreover, a long, complex history highly relevant to our contemporary world. Kedi brings the city to life in thoroughly charming and memorable ways and leads me irresistibly into remembering. My husband, Ravi, the kids and I lived in Ankara from 1968 to 1972 and in the 1980s I returned several times on consultancies for the rural health care system. I visited Istanbul as a tourist, as often as possible. Aziz, the boy who came into our family when we lived in Mogadiscio, was for four years a student in the American curriculum Roberts College and my granddaughter studied for a year in the Francophone Galatasaray U.

I wrote in an earlier post of my Istanbul memories, of Mimar Sinan, the great architect, and two of his mosques, but this time will focus on maps. Thinking about Istanbul has to begin with taking into account the city’s extraordinary location and its relation to the Mediterranean Sea that was, until recent centuries, the center of the western world.

Like the original city, Constantinople, Istanbul spans the Bosporus Strait, a narrow waterway linking

Swallow’s Nest in Crimea

the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara, the Aegean Sea and finally to the Mediterranean. Look at this map of the Black Sea and consider the five Eastern European countries that border it, plus the European rivers, including the Danube, that flow into the sea and think of all the people from those landlocked countries who thereby gain access to the Mediterranean through the Bosporus Strait, through Istanbul.

Additionally, the Bosporus is recognized as the border between Europe and Asia, making Istanbul/Constantinople both European and Asian.

Another waterway, the Golden Horn, a long estuary lined with deep and sheltered natural harbors, opening into the Bosporus, creates a peninsula where the great city was destined to develop, grow and change over the millennia. Constantinopolis was the capital city of the Roman/Byzantine Empire (330–1204 and 1261–1453), followed by a brief Latin (1204–1261) Empire (the Crusaders), and in the Ottoman(1453–1923) Empire became Istanbul.

On its peninsula side of the city there’s the Hagia Sophia, a church built in 537 AD, its dome an engineering marvel, and the Ottomans’ fabulous Topkapi complex,

The New Mosque at the Galata Bridge

the beautiful and beloved Blue Mosque, the Grand Bazaar, the New Mosque with the Spice Market at the Galata Bridge. (It must be noted that Constantinople was the western terminus of the Silk Road from Xi’an, China) The endlessly significant and interesting historical sites one should visit are too many to list, at least here. Parts of the very impressive city walls are still standing. (I wrote of my discovering the walls of Paris.)

The Galata Bridge across the Golden Horn, the Marmara on the horizon, a view from Beyoglu. The Galata Tower, built by the Genoese in 1348, overlooks the Bridge.

Across the Golden Horn, linked by the Galata Bridge to the Historic Peninsula, is Istanbul’s ancient residential city, the area known as Beyoglu, the Istanbul of the documentary and where a traveler is likely to stay. We stayed at Taksim Square in the Gezi Hotel, no longer there.

Arun, my son, was recently in Istanbul, stayed in the Cihangir mahalle/quartier (pronounced JEE-hahn-geer) and informs me that Kedi was filmed there. As he walked about he took a liking to the cats and photgraphed them. By Istanbul standards, Cihangir is fairly new. It remained a royal forest for hunting and recreation until the last half the 19th century, a time when Venetians, Genoese, Greeks, European Jews, Armenians, Christians from the eastern Mediterranean began moving in, a good many of them in engaged in commerce, welcomed by the Ottomans, living a European bourgeois lifestyle in European style apartment buildings that lined the narrow streets. With the onset of World War II and in its aftermath, many of these inhabitants left and working class people from Anatolian towns and villages moved in. As the area became unfashionable, perhaps somewhat unsafe, and rents were low, students and artists and intellectuals followed, such as the novelist and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, but Cihangir has attractive residential architecture to be renovated, a view over the Bosphorus and access to the shore. It is gentrifying. The film shows a vibrant and diverse urbane quartier made richer and more humane by its feline residents.

 

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