Archaeologists Dug Up World's Oldest Axe Fragment In Western Australia

Archaeologists have once again unearthed something that might help people understand the past. A thumbnail-sized fragment of a ground-edge stone axe was found in the remote Kimberley region of Western Australia. It predates previous discoveries by more than 10,000 years.

The axe fragment is estimated to be between 45,000 and 49,000 years old. Archeologists from the University of Sydney presumes it was invented soon after humans arrived in Australia about 50,000 years ago in response to new environmental contexts. According to Science Daily, the University of Sydney's Professor Peter Hiscock, the lead and corresponding author of a new analysis of the fragment said that the axe revealed that the first Australians were technological innovators.

"Since there are no known axes in Southeast Asia during the Ice Age, this discovery shows us that when humans arrived in Australia they began to experiment with new technologies, inventing ways to exploit the resources they encountered in the new Australian landscape," he said.

The researchers also noticed a similar sudden appearance of ground-edge tools in Asia when the Japanese archipelago was first colonized by people about 38,000 years ago. They said this might be an evidence of a pattern of innovation linked to the colonizing process. "Dispersing humans were often innovating as they entered new territories, rather than maintaining technologies that had been employed previously," they write in a journal paper.

Gizmag reported that the axe fragment came from a site called Carpenter's Gap 1 in Western Australia's remote Kimberley region which was initially dug up in the early 1990s led by Professor Sue O'Connor from the Australian National University (ANU) among a sequence of food scraps, tools, artwork and other artifacts place. However, the axe fragment itself was not discovered until 2014 by Professor Hiscock's team.

New studies of the fragment have showed that it came from an axe that had been shaped from basalt and polished by grinding it on another rock until it was very smooth. The fragment came from the polished edge when it was later re-sharpened. The team thinks the axe was most likely carried away to be used somewhere else, leaving the fragment behind.

"Polished stone axes were crucial tools in hunter-gatherer societies and were once the defining characteristic of the Neolithic phase of human life. But when were axes invented? This question has been pursued for decades, since archaeologists discovered that in Australia axes were older than in many other places. Now we have a discovery that appears to answer the question," said Professor Hiscock.