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Development of Tools Throughout Time Essay

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Development of Tools Throughout Time Our world today has many different kinds of tools. I realized this when I was walking through The Home Depot a few weeks ago. On one isle are nails, and screws, the next isle there are power drills to go along with power saws and power sanders. Now imagine the world with no tools, no nails or screws. It would be pretty difficult to do most anything. We would have no houses to live in, no cars to travel to work in, and we would have no place of employment in which to work. Without tools our world would be nothing. This is the world our ancestors faced, and they had nothing but rocks and sticks. Homo Habilis had the challenge of being the first hominid with a larger brain, which allowed him to …show more content…

Close examination has shown, however, that much of the variation among chopping tools was due to the deliberate production of flakes which then could be used as knives, scrapers, or other tools. "Tool makers apparently were concerned mostly with producing sharp flakes without any regard to shape(Leaky 55)."
These tools could be used to make clothes, woodwork, gather products, and process meat.
Crude as they were, Oldowan choppers and flakes mark an important technological advance for early hominids; previously they depended on found objects that required little or no modifications (Wallbank 3). The advent of these Oldowan blades made possible the addition of meat to their diet on a more frequent basis.

The next grouping of early hominids is Homo Erectus, discovered in Java in
1891. Associated with the remains of Homo Erectus are tools of the Acheulean tradition. The Acheulean period lasted from 1.5 million until between 200,000 and 150,000 years ago. The most prominent characteristic of this period are hand axes: pear shaped tools pointed at one end with a sharp cutting edge all around. "The subtriangular hand ax probably had a wide range of use such as cutting, digging, and scraping, and was often shaped into a neat but very efficient tool(Burenholt 75)."
These hand axes weighed as much as 20 pounds a

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