What Ancient Hand Tools Do to Our Emotions

“Worn Out” - Cause of death on Ohio planemaker James Starr’s death certificate (1872)

Photo by Dan Lacroix. Check out more of the gorgeous planes he makes at www.joynerplanemaker.org.

Somewhere around 2.6 million years ago, our earliest ancestors smashed rocks together and made our first hand tools. These Oldowan choppers are the most ancient of technologies, and incredibly, modern humans seem to have a spontaneous emotional reaction when we handle them.

Toolmaking forever altered human evolution. Choppers take years of practice to learn to make. That process created new neural pathways in our brains that we would eventually use to develop language and complex societies. Tool use became such an integral part of us that when we pick up a tool today our brains perceive it as a literal extension of the body, as if our hand had suddenly grown to the same length as the tool.¹

Oldowan (A) and Acheulean (B) tools. Photo: "Electrodermal activity during Lower Paleolithic stone tool handling."

In a series of studies over the last few years, researchers monitored people’s electrodermal activity, tiny changes to the skin that indicate an emotional response, as they handled stone tools. Even if you don’t feel an emotion, electrodermal activity can show that your brain is still reacting. Oldowan tools elicited the strongest emotional response. Acheulean handaxes, which gradually began replacing choppers around 1.6 million years ago, created the second strongest reaction. Stone scrapers, made between 50,000 and 500,000 years ago, came in third.²

While electrodermal activity is interesting, it doesn’t show what type of emotion is being produced. And the studies’ authors point out there are several ways to interpret the results. I like their theory that the emotional response is one of recognition. We used choppers for more than 40,000 generations, a lineage of toolmakers molding and being molding by technology. We may have moved on to touchscreens, but sometimes, somewhere in the depths of our hominin brains, a tool feels just right, like we were born to use it.

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• What Ancient Hand Tools Do to Our Emotions
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