Knapping - Cutting-edge technology

A SON-IN-LAW of mine, living in the UK, has recently made a hobby of knapping.

That’s spelt with a ‘k’ and has nothing to do with taking 40 winks.

He makes beautiful (and potentially lethal) arrowheads, and fixes them to shafts of ash or hazel with sinew or string. The earliest examples of stone tool-making come from the Olduvai Gorge, where hominids fashioned stones into sharp chopping tools 2.6 million years ago.

The result of Andrew’s creative flint-knapping is a fascinating array of flint arrowheads, spearheads, knives and scrapers, a caveman’s arsenal and toolkit combined. What is impressive is not just the wonderful beauty but the functionality of these artifacts; they are as sharp as razors. Running one’s thumb along the edge of a stone knife would result in a lesion as surely as would running it along the edge of a Toledo blade. In fact, the stone knife would be more likely to wound, in that the edge is not only “razor” sharp, but finely serrated.

Skilled knapping achieves the keen edge and the serrations, made by striking chips off a piece of flint, chert or obsidian. The Stone Age craftsman, working in his factory (for there were ‘factories’, where the implements were produced for trade) first used a lump of limestone or quartz as a hand-held hammer to crack an unshaped flint into broad flakes suitably sized for sculpting into tools..

Then, with softer blows, he struck smaller flakes off these shards. The final knife-sharp edge was made by pressing heavily on the margins of these and splitting fine flakes off the stone. The favoured tool for this operation was the tip of an antler or a point of fire-hardened wood. Using this precise method, my son-in-law produces stone tools at his Hertfordshire home today.

In post-apocalyptic situations like those posited in books and films like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Suzanne Collin’s The Hunger Games mankind would, no doubt, turn again to flints for implements. Stone provides a limitless source of raw material for human exploitation. Without its contribution, our evolution to science might never have been achieved.

Our brains were stretched to ingenuity in fashioning stone, and our bodies were fed on high-protein meat hunted down with spears and arrows, butchered with flint blades and cooked in pits of water warmed by heated stones, as in our Fulacth Fia here in Ireland.

Stone is all around us, stones for all uses. The infinite bounty of nature made rock from gases, shaped rocks with fire, and gave life to sea creatures whose shells laid down chalk deposits where most flints, common in Britain but not here, are found. Some of the tools used by our Mesolithic Irish ancestors may have been imported from Britain. The first Mesolithic Stone Age groups arrived in Ireland soon after 7,000 BC. The earliest evidence of Mesolithic settlement was found in chalk deposits in County Antrim (coincidentally, Ireland’s only source of flint) and in Derry and Sligo. The country was covered in trees; stone axes cleared living space and corridors.

Two and a half thousand years later, between 4,500 and 4,000 BC, Neolithic (New) Stone Age people arrived. Farming and husbandry was, by this time, practiced in England, knowledge that arrived there from mainland Europe. The Neolithics brought cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, horses, and donkeys, probably carried across the Irish Sea on rafts towed by boats covered in cowhide (like St Brendan’s craft in the 6th century AD) or hollowed-out tree trunks.! Their arrival changed Mesolithic society fundamentally, and stone was the key. Stone axes cleared the forests for planting and grazing. A chert and flint industry developed on Dalkey Island in Dublin bay, using flint from Antrim, or flint pebbles that washed up as a result of longshore drift on a large scale. Other regions had flint-knappers too. In Mayo, Ceide Fields, the oldest known field system, and most extensive Stone Age site on earth, was developed by Neolithic farmers nearly 6,000 years ago on land cleared with stone tools. Unfortunately, without the rain-absorbing tree cover, the cleared land turned to bog in a few generations. The farmers, presumably, shouldered their stone axes and moved on to clear more land.