Oldest Known Axe Discovered In Australia: Study

A small piece of the oldest axe ever discovered was created up to 49,000 years ago, say researchers. It was found in Australia, undercutting the idea that technology was born in Europe. It showed that when people entered Australia, they developed complex tools.

Though it was excavated in the early 1990s from a cave in the Windjana Gorge national park in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, it was examined only recently. New analysis and dating indicate that it is a piece of the cutting edge of an axe with a handle that was used between 46,000 and 49,000 years ago.

Presently, estimates of the time that humans entered Australia range from 50,000 to 55,000 years ago.

While simpler and sharpened stone tools were used by other species of humans millions of years earlier, it was only during this period that such complex tools combining stone and wood seem to have been created.

Peter Hiscock from the University of Sydney, who made the discovery, said that it is not so significant that it is only a chip. "The great thing about it is it's really distinctive - it has both polished surfaces coming together on the chip. While you don't have the axe, you actually have a really good record of what the contact edge looks like."

"This is the earliest evidence of hafted axes [axes with a handle] in the world. Nowhere else in the world do you get axes at this date," said Sue O'Connor from the Australian National University, who excavated the tool in the 1990s.

"In Japan, such axes appear about 35,000 years ago. But in most countries in the world they arrive with agriculture 10,000 years ago," she said.

The invention had probably happened in Australia, as similar tools in south-east Asia, from where the migrants arrived, have not been found.

 "We're looking at people who moved through south-east Asia, where they probably used a lot of bamboos, which are sharp and hard and fantastic for tools. But when they get to Australia, there's no bamboo, so they're inventing new tools to help them adapt to the exploitation of this new landscape."

Hiscock adds that the discovery validates the point that humans colonised the world not due to some particular skill that they could apply in all areas, but because of their creativity and innovativeness.

"It's a fascinating inversion of what European scholars thought in the 19th century. Their presumption was that all the innovations happened in Europe and far-flung places like Australia were simplistic and had little innovation. And it's turned out that there's a long history of the discovery of axes of progressively earlier ages. This is the place where that sort of technology was invented and it only reached Europe relatively recently," he added.