The oldest hand-axes in Europe

Gary R. Scott and Luis Gibert ()
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Gary R. Scott: Berkeley Geochronology Center, 2455 Ridge Road, Berkeley, California 94709, USA
Luis Gibert: Berkeley Geochronology Center, 2455 Ridge Road, Berkeley, California 94709, USA

Nature, 2009, vol. 461, issue 7260, 82-85

Abstract: Bridging the gap A key transition in the history of technology was that from the simple chopper-like tools used by the earliest stone-using hominins to the more finely worked, bifacial artefacts known as hand-axes. The very long time lag between the appearance of hand-axes in Asia and their earliest records in Europe — about a million years — has long puzzled palaeoanthropologists. In general, the first hand-axes to appear in Europe have been thought to be about half a million years old. Gary Scott and Luis Gibert have reassessed the dating of two hand-axe-bearing Palaeolithic sites in southern Spain, and they come up with dates of 0.76 and 0.9 million years old for the La Solana del Zamborino and the Estrecho del Quípar rock shelter sites respectively, significantly closing the time gap between Asia and Europe.

Date: 2009
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DOI: 10.1038/nature08214

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