What are we really good at?
The art of making is an activity that extends back beyond human culture. The oldest evidence found of stone tool use by humans is fossilised animal bones with tool marks, which are 3.4 million years old, and the oldest stone tools, excavated from a site in Kenya, date to 3.3 million years old. Many types of animals have also been able to shape natural objects to build their own tools, although the operations available to them were limited to smashing or breaking parts, trimming branches or bending sticks. These techniques didn’t require any particular tools and the animal would apply them by using their limbs or other parts of its own body.
Maybe it would be wise to make a few distinctions here. I would like to call, for the sake of usefulness, utensil any piece of material that turns out to be useful for a specific direct purpose. These utensils can be used as they come. In that case, the agent is the Utensil User. If this user can modify the utensil through the use of his own force, in order to improve its effectiveness, then he turns into the Utensil Maker. If he is capable enough to devise and create special pieces to help him make utensils, we are going to call these pieces tools, and the agent is a Tool Maker.
Then we can say that animals are only capable of using and making utensils. Tool-making is an ability restricted to humans.
A good explanation for this exceptionality could be that the mental processing one needs in order to shape something into an utensil is just to note by direct experience the practical problem to be solved, imagine the situation where it has been solved and how, and then figure out which element of those around you could be shaped to work out that solution. Creating a tool, on the other hand, seems to require the ability of abstract thinking. One has to understand the problem in more generic terms, imagine the physical property the final utensil should attain and figure out how to infuse it through the use of a tool, instead of concentrating on a match to the specific problem to tackle.
The first of these tools to be made were simple chunks of hard material that would help carrying out the previous operations easier. However, using hard bits to shape other hard bits allowed making things even easier and more accurate. For instance, the needle, one of the first of the revolutionary inventions, could only be created by building specific tools in the first place. In this example, the first sewing needles (utensils) were made of bone, using tools like primitive files and chisels.
Prehistoric hunters used their teeth to cut a number of things (like plant fibers or the softer parts of prey). Other pieces, on the other hand, like leather or thicker branches, required tools made of harder materials, worked in a particularly skilled way. This led to the creation of the first cutting tools, hammers and files.
- Trimming
- Breaking
- Cutting
- Filing
- Bonding
- Tying
- Sewing
- Pasting
- Shaping
- Forming
- Bending
- Forging
- Moulding