Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c6.s3.28

c6.s3.28

We are on surer ground in East Africa with Leakey's 'Oldowan' pebble-industry, which is ascribed to the lower part of the Middle Pleistocene but may be somewhat earlier. Here crude choppers made by the removal of flakes in two directions along one side of the pebble seem to merge logically into very simple pebble-handaxes flaked in three or four directions so that two jagged cutting edges intersect in a point at one end. Subsequently, as at Victoria West, some of the implements display rostro-carinate characters, with the flat ventral surface and keeled dorsal surface described above. These characters combine with those of the bi-convex handaxes, and finally a mature Acheulian type, based on cores or large flakes, is achieved. It is possible here to regard the whole process from pebble to Acheulian handaxe as organic and evolutionary. With the Acheulian handaxes, other elements of more disputable ancestry—straight-edged cleavers, tortoise cores and Levalloisian flakes—complete the conventional assemblage. But it is not unimportant to add that simpler pebble-tools remained in use long after the handaxe complex was fully developed.