Paul Salopek is walking the global trail of the first humans who migrated out of Africa in the Stone Age. His continuous 21,000-mile foot journey, called the “Out of Eden Walk,” is recorded in dispatches.
Homo sapiens is the ultimate tool-making animal.
The planet has been reshaped by our technology: by the fiber optic cable, by nuclear fission, by the agricultural combine, by the hyperlink, by the plastic bottle, by the predator drone, by the smart phone.
Yet we forget: For about 96 percent of our species’ 200,000-year-long history, only one material provided most of our needs: malleable stone. We rose to primacy above all the other hominins—we took possession of the Earth from them—in large part because of the superb quality, refinement, and adaptability of our stone tools. Put another way: If the existence of humankind were compressed into 75 years—the average life span of a modern person—then Stone Age technology served and saved us for 96 percent of our biography as a species. We abandoned this complex knowledge, the art of the rock scraper, the geometry of the flint knife, the physics of the obsidian arrowhead, only yesterday, at age 72. (With the metallurgy revolution.)
A master’s work: stone tools made by Astafyev.
Paul Salopek
“We think that Stone Age people were primitive or less intelligent,” says Andrey Astafyev, an archaeologist based in Aktau, Kazakhstan. “But I think it is just the opposite. They were smarter than we are. They had to invent their way through landscapes, to think their way through making tools every day. Today most of us just use the tools we buy or are given. We don’t know how they were made. We are ignorant.”
The focus of Astafyev’s research is western Kazakhstan, an immense Central Asian region of wild steppes and arid mountains that has been traversed through the millennia by fierce Bronze Age horsemen, wily Silk Road traders, mystic Islamic hermits, and thirsty imperial Russian foot soldiers. But in his spare time, he tries to reenter the Pleistocene mindset of the earliest sapiens hunters who roamed these grasslands the longest: the Stone Age ancestors who blazed our first trails across continents across vast epochs of time, yet who left few clues behind and thus remain constant strangers.
Astafyev has unearthed 8,000-year-old shell beads so tiny—their holes are one millimeter, or 004 inches, across—that he has no idea how they were manufactured. He chips away at this chasm of mystery, of silence, one flint cobble at a time. He tests striking angles. He calibrates the pressure of an antelope’s antler against the glass-like edge of a flake of stone.
Watching Astafyev’s deft hands at work, listening to the tak-tak-tak of the bone hammer blows, is mesmerizing. In his palm a stone blade takes shape. The sight kindles a strange but pleasing familiarity. You find yourself nodding: Yes.
