Tools in the garden

BBC News: Front garden yields ancient tools.

The Britons of 250,000 years ago were a good deal more sophisticated than they are sometimes given credit for, new archaeological evidence suggests.  It comes in the form of giant flint handaxes that have been unearthed at a site at Cuxton in Kent.  The tools display exquisite, almost flamboyant, workmanship not associated with this period until now.  The axes - one of which measured 307mm (1ft) in length - were dug up from old sand deposits in a front garden.

"It is a site where there would once have been a slow-moving river," explained Dr Francis Wenban-Smith, from the Centre for the Archaeology of Human Origins at the University of Southampton.  "It would have periodically overflowed its banks; and there would have been occasional sand bars and islands that got exposed. Obviously, at some point, Palaeolithic man was doing something there, left his handaxes, and they got covered up."

The article has good pictures of the finds.  It would take skill to make a 30cm flint axe, especially ones as uniform in shape as these.