Material Culture, History of

Earliest Tools

Archaeological remains show that starting in the earliest times, humans' use of material objects included attention to style as well as function. Just as in the 21st century, ancient people deliberately made and decorated objects through conscious decisions about form, function, projected lifespan, and the potential of the object to serve as a gift or as a statement of social status. Styles and forms can change rapidly, resulting in the frequent turnover of styles, which is interpreted as a language-like code by others in the social group. Sophisticated understandings of style and its changes can result not only in the adoption of new styles and designs but also the return of “retro” styles as a fashion or social statement.

Stone tools constitute the first evidence of human transformation of natural materials. The first crude pebble chopping tools date to approximately 2.5 million years ago, associated with the skeletal remains of hominids whose cranial capacity was a fraction of contemporary humans. The subsequent elaboration of both stone tools and brain size suggests that there was a mutually causal relationship between cranial capacity, cognitive sophistication, and material culture use.

By 1.65 million years ago, the Acheulian hand axe was developed: a leaf-shaped, bilaterally symmetrical stone tool that is found in many regions of Asia, Africa, and Europe. The repetitive aspects of the hand axe have led to suggestions that it had both a cultural and a physical function, perhaps even being used as a social signal of competence and reproductive fitness.

Ancient people also made objects from feathers, fur, wood, gourds, bone, leather, bark, and wax, although perishable objects are less visible in the archaeological record. Exceptional cases of preserved objects show the diversity of natural resource use, such as fire-hardened wooden spears from Germany dated to 400,000 years ago associated with butchered animals' remains.

Art and Agriculture

By around 65,000 years ago, the archaeological record shows the emergence of objects that were made primarily for a social rather than a technical function, such as beads and other ornaments meant to decorate the body. One widely used material was ostrich egg shell, which was made into containers as well as beads in Africa and in the Indian subcontinent. In this era, humans also created figurines and rock art for the first time.

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