Culture and industry of the Acheulean Age

Abstract

The readers of Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences are presented with reflections on volumes III and IV of the fundamental multivolume summarizing work on the Paleolithic by the outstanding archaeologist and historian Academician A.P. Derevyanko. The main stages in the development of humankind and its technology, known from preserved ancient sites, are described. The finds at the sites consist mostly of remains of the stone industry and crushed bones of animals hunted by ancient humans. A great piece of luck is the discovery of the remains of humans. Volumes III and IV of Derevyanko’s book are devoted to the Acheulean age, a period marked by the beginning of complex interactions between representatives of the first and second waves of migrants from Africa: Homo erectus with the Oldowan tradition of stone processing and Homo Heidelbergensis of the second wave of migrants, who possessed the world’s first universal tool of a standard almond shape, i.e., the hand axe. Following the pattern of the distribution of the Heidelberg man and the hand axe, the author of this article comes to the conclusion that volumes III and IV of Derevyanko’s book clearly reflect the complex picture of interactions between the carriers of the two different technological cultures. The Acheulean age sees, for the first time in history, the formation of local cultural provinces of primitive human communities coming from different origins, which raises, also for the first time, the issue of interactions between different races and cultural traditions.