99% Invisible - 131- Genesis Object

Episode Date: September 10, 2014

In the beginning, there was design. Before any other human discipline, even before the dawn of mankind its self, design was a practice passed down from generation to generation of early humans. Today, everything that has been designed–space ships, buildings, … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In the beginning, there was design. At least according to designer and author will live well. Design is the oldest human discipline, older than humanity itself. And will believe that in this oldest of old disciplines, everything ever designed. Spaceships, buildings, pyramids, weapons, clothing, artwork, everything. Can be traced back to a single designed object, the first designed object. This is as close to a genesis object as we have, I mean, this is where it all began. If design had its own Cosmo series, this would be episode one.

I think this is the greatest, grandest, like most interesting story in the field of design. It has it all. Mystery, entry, controversy. We are on the edge of our seats, Will. Wait for it, I need like the drum roll here. The first design object was the Ashulian Handaxe.

The Ashulian Handaxe, ladies and gentlemen, actually it doesn't look like an axe at all. There's no handle, there's no metal. Honestly, it should be called the Ascholien pointy hand rock. A hand axe is made of rock and it's teardrop shaped. And if you join your hands together, is if to pray, fingers together and thumbs in, this is almost the exact shape in size. I'm an Ascholien hand axe.

The term Ascholien refers to where the first specimens were found, which was a dig site in St. Ashul, France, but they've been found in a lot of other places. We find that Ashulian tools are found almost exclusively in Africa, in Europe, and South Asia. This is Terence Deacon. I'm Terence Deacon, a professor of biological anthropology at the University of California Berkeley. And Berkeley has a whole bunch of samples of these hand axes.

There's another hand axe. You can see that it's not quite so symmetric and nice, although it's sharp at this edge. Some are sharp all along the entire perimeter, some aren't. Some are perfectly symmetrical and some are not. But those hand axes in the UC Berkeley Basement aren't actual primordial hand axes. These are replicas made by graduate students. Yes, graduate students. In fact, there have been courses here in which one of the challenges is to make tools.

And the point of this challenge for the graduate students is to see how involved this process is in making one of these pointy rocks, the way the early humans would have. If you break off big pieces with large rocks and large strikes, and then you break off these little edges, you shape the edge with smaller pieces. I just love the image of a bunch of grad students sitting around smashing rocks together, and sometimes they have to do it for a while. Someone really practiced at it can make a hand-axe in something like 15 minutes to a half hour. But to make a really fine tool, really carefully shaped tool, you're probably

talking about an hour to two hours. Ascholian hand-axes required time, effort and skill to make. They were a product of a design process, the first design process. But the Ashulian Handax was not the first tool. The first tool was basically a rock that is chipped with just a handful of major strikes to produce a few sharp edges, not very sophisticated tools. And they're probably just called these old wand tools. Our homohevelers ancestors used them to bash open bones and scrape meat off of them

around 2 million years ago, though this kind of technique isn't unique to humans. This can be done even by South American monkeys, the Caffage and monkeys. They get these large pine nuts and they have hammer stones that they can then lift up and bash these things until they open them. They know what they want to achieve, but they actually simply go out and select something that will accomplish that. Rather than actually design something.

Chimpanzes in, for example, stripping the leaves and the side branches off a little branch, they can stick it down, a termite nest and get the termites to bite it, as they can eat the termites that way. So this requires cunning, yes, but craft, not really. So early humans understood the importance of all the wand tools, those sharp rocks, and they realized that they could fashion more precise tools by sharpening rocks purposefully. So it's not just adventitious production, now it's planned production. So the hand axe is the first designed object, at least that we can find.

If there were any, say, wooden tools that our human-like ancestors made, those of long sense disintegrated. But even if there are other examples, hand-axes are really significant. With the Ascholian hand-axe, with the Ascholian technology showing up, we suddenly now find people making people, I say they're ancestors, making tools with an end in mind. They're making them in advance. They almost certainly have to carry them with them.

They don't just make them on the spot. They take time to make them, they take thought to make them, and you're shaping them towards a particular shape for some particular use, which we today don't know. We don't know. We don't know how they were used. That's the crazy mystery here. So this is where we get into the intrigue.

That's Will Lidwell again. Their ideas, right? So smart people are working on the problem and there are like three theories. There are more than three. If you want me to talk about more theories, I can talk about more theories, but I'll stop at three unless you tell me otherwise.

Will Lidwell has three favorite theories as to why the handaxe appeared. So all right, theory number one, right, of how is used is the multi-tool theory. So theory number one is that the Ashilin Handaxe was the original Swiss army knife, primarily used for butchering meat, but it's also good for

breaking open nuts and digging up grubs or whatever else you might need. And so the strength of this theory is that it fits with wear patterns that you see on a lot of the hand-axes that are found. Here's the problem with theory number one. In some cases, the full perimeter of the axe is sharp. And remember, this is a hand-axe that you're holding in the palm of your hand. So if you wanted to use it, there would be this sharp blade digging into your palm. Another problem with theory one is that some of the axes are symmetrical, which is a lot of extra effort

that isn't really necessary if you're just using it to break up nuts or cut meat. And so to address some of those problems, we get into theory number two. And this is my personal favorite. The sexy hand ax theory. The quote unquote sexy hand ax theory proposes that these tools didn't have a use per se. They were created mostly as a way of showing off.

Like the feathers of a peacock. The goal wasn't to create a functional tool for butchering, but a symbolic tool for made attraction. And making these things is really, really hard. Why spend so much time doing it, unless you're showing off, right? You're showing the opposite sex what you can do. But there are a lot of experts who are doubtful of this one, including anthropologist Terrence Deacon.

Not all of them are beautiful teardrop shapes. They were all that nice and neat and symmetrical. There is one interesting exception, and I mean one. One beautiful 350,000 year old exception. A hand axe was located at the bottom of a kind of well in southern Spain. It looks as though bodies were tossed down here and one of things that found in this well, so to speak, it's just a cave well, is a handaxe that was made of a kind of rose quartz looking stuff really pretty and it

doesn't look like it was ever used. Not a sexy handaxe, but this may be the first indications that they're beginning to sort of grieve over the death of someone or that there is some kind of ritual issue here in which a beautiful handaxe is something I'm playing a role. Okay, okay. The world's third favorite theory is still a really fun one. Number three is pretty fun. Number three in a close follow-on to my favorite, to sexy hand axes, the killer Frisbee theory. And so, in the killer Frisbee theory, right hand axes were made to be projectiles, so thrown in the fashion of the discus and the Olympics.

A lot of hand axes are found near river banks, and so the hypothesis goes that hunters would wait for herds of animals to come, and then they would bombard them with hand axes. This might not be enough to make a kill, but this don'ts would name a few and give the hunters an opportunity to charge. This hypothesis explains why it looks the way it does, right? Why the hand axes sharp all the way around, why it's so symmetrical, why it's so aerodynamic?

Well, again, not all of them are sharp all the way around and perfectly symmetrical. Was it used like a frisbee or was it used like a weapon? I really have my doubts about that. I like the Swiss Army knife view, in part because it looks like it's a one tool fits all. It was clearly something that we see again and again and again and again all over the world. That means it was very effective and if you don't find a lot of diversity of tools, it was almost certainly used for more than one thing. But whatever the Handaxe was used for, it must have done a really good job because this

basic design was used for a mind-blowingly long time. Hominid adults were literally teaching hominid children how to make hand-axes for more than a million years, passing the knowledge down from generation to generation. And so you compare that to any modern product life cycle, right? It's just crazy long. So long that our human minds can barely wrap our heads around it. We have no conception of what that time frame is. Our understanding of history is only what, maybe, 5,000, 10,000 years.

That's our biggest understanding of history. We're talking about something that stayed the same, a culture that was constant for a million years. That's pretty remarkable. And no matter what the Ascholian handaxe was actually used for, just the mere existence of a designed object that is so old has huge implications. I often have students or colleagues think that designs a new field, like a 20th century

invention, when in fact it's the most ancient of all academic disciplines. Before there was mathematics or engineering or science, or art or music or poetry, before there was philosophy, literature, religion, or even language, there was design. 99% invisible is produced by the Krakow-Jack team of Avery Trouffleman, Katie Mingle, Sam Greenspan, and me, Roman Mars. Whether you're building websites, you're doing industrial designer architecture to have that sense industrial designer architecture to have that sense of history, to have those roots to me as everything. Special thanks to Will Lidwell for bringing the whole Handak story to us.

Will's book, Universal Principles of Design, is one of my two go-to recommendations for books about design. It's fun, insightful, quick hit, and cyclopedia of all kinds of design principles I consulted all the time, I highly recommend it. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and produced at the offices of Ark sign, an architecture firm in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can keep up with all the comings and goings at 99PI on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and Spotify if you say hi. We usually say hi back.

And if you're chipping away your own hand acts, I recommend listening to an old 99% invisible. It's the perfect length for hand acts may keep. At 99PI.org. Radio tapio. From PRX.