Giant handaxe recovered from fluvial deposits in the Medway Valley, Kent, UK
The Maritime Academy handaxe
The problem with being a devotee of a counter-factual superstition like creationism in order to feel important enough, is that reality keeps trying to intrude and make you wonder if you could be wrong and less important than you feel you should be. So, it's a characteristic of a creationist that they have to have a whole repertoire of mental gymnastics to continue to fool themselves into thinking practically every discovery by science isn't a problem, because, somehow, it isn't real.
One of these tactics is to tell yourself that you must be right because lots of others agree with you, regardless of the fact that even more people disagree with you, so you have to keep recruiting new members of your cult. In the childish belief that facts become truer the more people believe them, you have to plumb ever greater depths of dishonesty to fool gullible people into joining your cult by seeking out scientifically illiterate fools with a child-like thinking ability to misrepresents science to.
A fundamental counter-factual creationist belief is that a magic supernatural deity created everything out of nothing with you in mind, in just 6 days about 6,000 years ago, and all living species were created in one day without ancestors. And of course, it holds you in such high regard as the pinnacle of its creative ability that it did it all for you!
So, one of the problems you need strategies for dismissing is the evidence that Earth is several billion years old, there were tool-making hominins living on it several hundred thousand years ago every species, including modern humans, had ancestors. If you ever concede those facts, your entire counter-factual world disintegrates and leaves you not feeling important enough and feeling stupid for having been fooled into believing it in the first place.
So, to prick the pomposity of creationists again, here is solid evidence that hominins were creating stone tools in what is now Kent, in the UK, 300,000 years ago - some 294,000 years before Earth was supposedly created.
Since anatomically modern humans had not migrated out of Africa at that time and Neanderthals and Denisovans had not yet evolved in Eurasia, the descendants of an earlier migration, such as Homo heidelbergensis, H. antecessor or even H. erectus, must have made these tools.
These tools, some of the largest ever found in Europe, were discovered during a survey by archaeologists from University College London (UCL) of a site at Frindsbury, Kent on which it is planned to develop the Maritime Academy School.
A UCL press release explains the finding:
The excavations, which took place in Kent and were commissioned in advance of development of the Maritime Academy School in Frindsbury, revealed prehistoric artefacts in deep Ice Age sediments preserved on a hillside above the Medway Valley.The archaeologists' paper is published in Internet Archaeology:
The researchers, from UCL Archaeology South-East [ASE], discovered 800 stone artefacts thought to be over 300,000 years old, buried in sediments which filled a sinkhole and ancient river channel, outlined in their research, published in Internet Archaeology.ASE Senior Archaeologist Letty Ingrey inspects the largest handaxe
Amongst the unearthed artefacts were two extremely large flint knives described as “giant handaxes”. Handaxes are stone artefacts which have been chipped, or “knapped,” on both sides to produce a symmetrical shape with a long cutting edge. Researchers believe this type of tool was usually held in the hand and may have been used for butchering animals and cutting meat. The two largest handaxes found at the Maritime site have a distinctive shape with a long and finely worked pointed tip, and a much thicker base.
The site is thought to date to a period in the early prehistory of Britain when Neanderthal people and their cultures were beginning to emerge and may even have shared the landscape with other early human species. The Medway Valley at this time would have been a wild landscape of wooded hills and river valleys, inhabited by red deer and horses, as well as less familiar mammals such as the now-extinct straight-tusked elephant and lion.We describe these tools as ‘giants’ when they are over 22cm long and we have two in this size range. The biggest, a colossal 29.5cm in length, is one of the longest ever found in Britain. ‘Giant handaxes’ like this are usually found in the Thames and Medway regions and date from over 300,000 years ago.
These handaxes are so big it’s difficult to imagine how they could have been easily held and used. Perhaps they fulfilled a less practical or more symbolic function than other tools, a clear demonstration of strength and skill. 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.
Letty Ingrey, first author
Senior Archaeologist
Institute of Archaeology
University College London, London, UK
While archaeological finds of this age, including another spectacular ‘giant’ handaxe, have been found in the Medway Valley before, this is the first time they have been found as part of large-scale excavation, offering the opportunity to glean more insights into the lives of their makers.
The excavations at the Maritime Academy have given us an incredibly valuable opportunity to study how an entire Ice Age landscape developed over a quarter of a million years ago. A programme of scientific analysis, involving specialists from UCL and other UK institutions, will now help us to understand why the site was important to ancient people and how the stone artefacts, including the ‘giant handaxes’ helped them adapt to the challenges of Ice Age environments.
Dr Matt Pope, co-author
Institute of Archaeology
University College London, London, UK
The research team is now working on identifying and studying the recovered artefacts to better understand who created them and what they were used for.
One of the handaxes at the point of discovery on site.
Senior Archaeologist Giles Dawkes (UCL Institute of Archaeology) is leading work on a second significant find from the site – a Roman cemetery, dating to at least a quarter of a million years later than the Ice Age activity. The people buried here between the first and fourth centuries AD could have been the inhabitants of a suspected nearby villa that may have lain around 850 metres to the south.We, at Maritime Academy and the Thinking Schools Academy Trust, feel very lucky to be a part of this phenomenal discovery. We take great pride in our connection to our local community and region, with much of our school identity linked to the history of Medway. We look forward to taking advantage of this unique opportunity to teach our young people about these finds, creating a lasting legacy for those who came before us.
Jody Murphy
Director of Education
Thinking Schools Academy Trust
The team found the remains of 25 individuals, 13 of which were cremated. Nine of the buried individuals were found with goods or personal items including bracelets, and four were interred in wooden coffins. Collections of pottery and animal bones found nearby likely relate to feasting rituals at the time of burial.
Though Roman buildings and structures have been extensively excavated, cemeteries have historically been less of a focus for archaeologists and the discovery of this site offers potentially new insights into the burial customs and traditions of both the Romans who lived at the villa, and those in the nearby town of Rochester.
Location of the Maritime Academy Palaeolithic site. Top left shows the site’s location within the wider region. Top right shows the site’s position relative to current course of the Medway and the Palaeolithic sites of Cuxton and Frindsbury All Saints. The bottom image shows a plan of the site including the geoarchaeological test pits and mitigation areas discussed in the text.
Copyright: © 2023 The authors. Published by the Department of Archaeology, University of York. Open access. (CC BY 3.0)
SummaryOne last point, because a creationists is bound to claim this supports intelligent [sic] design because we can recognise that something like a handaxe could not have arisen by chance. We can recognise that these tools have been intelligently designed, because, unlike naturally evolved entities like living organisms, they are minimally complex and have a clear purpose, so meeting the criteria for good, intelligent design.
This article presents initial results from excavations at Maritime Academy, Frindsbury, which produced several handaxes, two of which can be classed as 'giant handaxes'. Artefacts were recovered from fluvial deposits in the Medway Valley and are thought to date from the Marine Isotope Stage 9 interglacial. This article focuses on the largest of these handaxes and presents metrical data for the artefact and initial comparison with similar artefacts from the British Palaeolithic.
Ingrey, L., Duffy, SM., Bates, M., Shaw, A. and Pope, M. 2023
On the Discovery of a Late Acheulean 'Giant' Handaxe from the Maritime Academy, Frindsbury, Kent
Internet Archaeology 61. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.61.6
Published by the Department of Archaeology, University of York. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY 3.0)
Can you imagine the mental gymnastics required to dismiss this sort of evidence of archaic hominins predating modern humans by several tens of thousands of years, in order to retain the superstition of Earth being magically created from nothing just 6,000 years ago?
Impossible though it might be to imagine that level of intellectual dishonesty, there will be creationists infesting the social media trying to fool scientifically illiterate and intellectually bankrupt fools into joining their loopy cult. These same frauds will also be trying to fool scientifically illiterate legislators into allowing them to teach their childish fairy tales as real science to school children at tax-payers' expense, in order to swell their numbers and ensure their fraudulent cult leaders' income streams are maintained.
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