The Gray's Inn Lane Hand Axe is a pointed flint

hand axe A hand axe (or handaxe or Acheulean hand axe) is a Prehistory, prehistoric stone tool with two faces that is the longest-used tool in human history. It is made from stone, usually flint or chert that has been "reduced" and shaped from a larger ...

, found buried in gravel under

Gray's Inn Lane Gray's Inn Road (or Grays Inn Road) is an important road in Central London, located in the London Borough of Camden. The road begins at its junction with Holborn at the City of London boundary, passes north through the Holborn and King's Cross, ...

, London, England, by pioneering archaeologist John Conyers in 1679, and now in the

British Museum The British Museum is a Museum, public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human cu ...

. The hand axe is a fine example from about 350,000 years ago, in the Lower Paleolithic period, but its main significance lies in the role it and the circumstances of its excavation played in the emerging understanding of early human history.

Discovery and history

John Conyers was present at the excavation in 1679 of the remains of a supposed

elephant Elephants are the largest living land animals. Three living species are currently recognised: the African bush elephant ('' Loxodonta africana''), the African forest elephant (''L. cyclotis''), and the Asian elephant ('' Elephas maximus ...

at Battlebridge in gravel;Levine, p. 141. the site was near

, opposite "Black Mary's", and the remaining tooth was later thought to be of a

mammoth A mammoth is any species of the extinct elephantid genus ''Mammuthus.'' They lived from the late Miocene epoch (from around 6.2 million years ago) into the Holocene until about 4,000 years ago, with mammoth species at various times inhabi ...

or straight-tusked elephant.''British History Online''
/ref> A pointed flint

was found nearby, At the time, it was commonly thought that humans had been on Earth for a relatively short period of time, and that stone tools were used by people who simply lacked the knowledge to create metal tools. Conyers was the first to argue that it was a human artefact. After Conyers' death, John Bagford (c. 1650–1716) published the discovery, rejecting the idea that the assemblage of elephant bones and stone axe had originated from the time of Noah's flood, arguing instead for its origin in the Roman period under the Emperor Claudius; this was in a letter of 1715, in which Bagford accepted the human origin of the handaxe. With other items from Conyers' collection, the handaxe passed to the collection of Hans Sloane, whose own collection was one of the founding collections of the British Museum. The British Museum estimates that the hand axe is around 350,000 years old. Elephants were living in Britain at this time, during an

Ice age An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers. Earth's climate alternates between ice ages, and g ...

when the climate was similar to that of today. The hand axe is currently displayed in the "Enlightenment Gallery" of the British Museum, which is housed in the King's Library.

References

*Joseph M. Levine (1977), ''Dr Woodward's Shield: History, Science and Satire in Augustan England''

Notes

{{reflist, colwidth=30em Prehistoric objects in the British Museum Lithics Axes Stone Age Britain Individual weapons Holborn Gray's Inn Paleontology in England 17th century in science

Discovery and history

See also

References

Notes