this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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[–] ProcurementCat@feddit.de 11 points 1 year ago (8 children)

These handaxes are so big it’s difficult to imagine how they could have been easily held and used.

While right now, we aren’t sure why such large tools were being made, or which species of early human were making them, this site offers a chance to answer these exciting questions.

I'd imagine that if you have a dead woolly mammoth with a 10cm layer of fat underneath an elephant-thick skin, it's really hard to cut through all of that to get to the meat. I'd suspect that the heavy weight of those tools made it relatively easy to cut through that, so that would only have to provide a sideways force.

I imagine it like this: You lift this large tool and jam it once into the mammoth's thick skin so that it sticks in it. Gravity is supplying most of the force necessary to cut, and all the human has to do is push and pull to the side to open up the animal to access the meat, which can then be processed with smaller hand held tools.

[–] Almonds@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Makes a lot of sense with larger creatures with tougher hides. Could they be big enough that 2 people would use it together? Wouldn't it be more probable the people at the time were smaller than us now?

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