Penmaenmawr
Penmaenmawr is a town and community in Conwy County Borough, in the parish of Dwygyfylchi. It is on the North Wales coast between Conwy and Llanfairfechan and was an important quarrying town, though quarrying is no longer a major employer; the population of the community was 4,353 including Dwygyfylchi and Capelulo. The town itself having a population of 2,868, it was named after Penmaenmawr mountain, which stands above the sea west of the town. Much of its rounded top has been quarried away, leaving the present-day lower flat top; the town was bypassed by the A55 Expressway in the 1980s, losing its old Edwardian period promenade in the process, replaced by a modern one. Penmaenmawr is noted for coastal walks. Nearby are the popular attractions of Bwlch Sychnant and Mynydd y Dref, the town lies within Eryri, the Snowdonia National Park; the name Penmaenmawr is the Welsh for'Head of the Great Stone', or'Great Headland of Stone' contrasting with Penmaenbach. The villages that make up Penmaenmawr are Penmaenan and Pant Yr Afon on the west and Dwygyfylchi and Capelulo on the east.
They are on a small coastal plain about 2 miles in length and half a mile deep facing Conwy Bay and the Irish Sea to the north. The bay is sheltered by the south-east tip of Anglesey and Ynys Seiriol to the north-west and the limestone headland of Pen-y-Gogarth to the north-east; the sea is shallow here between the Conwy estuary. The beach is extensive, consisting of a wide expanse of sand. Two headlands separate Penmaenmawr from its neighbours. In the west the bulk of Penmaen Mawr lies between the town neighbouring Llanfairfechan and the wider coastal plain extending to Bangor. To the east the smaller but no less rugged headland of Penmaen Bach divides Dwygyfylchi from Conwy Morfa. Penmaenbach is the most northerly tip of the Snowdonia National Park, which covers a large part of Dwygyfylchi and Capelulo. To the south an arc of hills and uplands extends east to west from Capelulo to Penmaen Mawr, beginning with Yr Allt Wen above Dwygyfylchi, Bwlch Sychnant and Pen-sychnant at Capelulo; the rounded hill of Foel Lys, Gwddw Glas, Bryn Derwydd and the head of Cwm Graiglwyd and Penmaen-mawr.
Foel Lus rises to 362 metres. The coastal plain is nearly divided by Trwyn-yr-Wylfa, which marks the boundary between Pant-yr-afon and Penmaenan in the west and the "Hen Bentra" or "Old Village" of Dwygyfylchi and Capelulo in the east. Two small rivers flow through the area; the first, Afon Pabwyr, runs down from wooded Cwm Graiglwyd under the town centre, Pant-yr-afon, to the beach. The uplands above the town have many prehistoric remains, including the site of prehistoric polished stone axe factories on the west slopes of Cwm Graiglwyd near the top of Penmaen-mawr; this was once one of the most important stone axe manufacturing sites in Europe, together with the Langdale axe industry in the Lake District, Tievebulliagh in County Antrim and other sites across Britain. There is evidence that axes from Graiglwyd were exported 5,000 years ago, examples having been found as far afield as Cornwall and south-east England; the nearby Meini Hirion, known in English as Druid's Circle, is a prehistoric stone circle.
A prehistoric trackway from Bwlch-y-ddeufaen to Conwy runs by the circle. The summit of Penmaen-mawr, from which the town takes its name, was 1,500 feet above sea level until reduced by modern quarrying; the summit area was crowned by Braich-y-Dinas, one of the largest Iron Age hill-forts in Europe, comparable with Tre'r Ceiri near Trefor on the Llŷn peninsula. However, nothing remains today. According to tradition, the 5th- or 6th-century saint Seiriol, after whom Ynys Seiriol is named, had a hermit's cell in Cwm Graiglwyd. A declivity, Clipyn Seiriol, above the modern road tunnel through Penmaen-mawr bears his name, as does the modern church of St Seiriol's near the town centre; the older church of St Gwynin's in Dwygyfylchi is the parish church today. Penmaenmawr is associated with Saint Ulo, Capelulo being at the foot of Sychnant and reputedly the site of an early medieval chapel. From the early Middle Ages onwards the parish has been part of Arllechwedd Uchaf, this ancient Welsh cwmwd, which together with neighbouring Arllechwedd Isaf makes up the cantref of Arllechwedd, is still used by the church as an administrative unit today.
The industrial quarrying of igneous rock at Penmaenan began in 1830 with the opening of the Penmaen Quarry and the subsequent, competing Graiglwyd and'Old' quarries which were amalgamated by 1888 under Colonel Darbishire. Most of the production in these early years was of setts and paving, but from 1881 the advantage of crushed rock for railway ballast was demonstrated and new crushing mills were built to provide for that market. In 1911 Darbishire merged these operations with the quarries of Trefor to form the Penmaenmawr & Welsh Granite Co.. As the industry grew and their families flocked to Penmaenmawr from all over north-west Wales and beyond; the link was strong with Trefor, the home of Trefor granite quarry on the sl
English Heritage
English Heritage is a charity that manages over 400 historic monuments and places. These include medieval castles, Roman forts and country houses; the charity states that it uses these properties to ‘bring the story of England to life for over 10 million people each year’. Within its portfolio are Stonehenge, Dover Castle, Tintagel Castle and the best preserved parts of Hadrian's Wall. English Heritage manages the London Blue Plaque scheme, which links influential historical figures to particular buildings; when formed in 1983, English Heritage was the operating name of an executive non-departmental public body of the British Government titled the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England, that ran the national system of heritage protection and managed a range of historic properties. It was created to combine the roles of existing bodies that had emerged from a long period of state involvement in heritage protection. In 1999 the organisation merged with the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England and the National Monuments Record, bringing together resources for the identification and survey of England's historic environment.
On 1 April 2015, English Heritage was divided into two parts: Historic England, which inherited the statutory and protection functions of the old organisation, the new English Heritage Trust, a charity that would operate the historic properties, which took on the English Heritage operating name and logo. The British government gave the new charity an £80 million grant to help establish it as an independent trust, although the historic properties remained in the ownership of the state. Over the centuries, what is now called'Heritage' has been the responsibility of a series of state departments. There was the'Kings Works' after the Norman Conquest. Responsibility subsequently transferred to the Ministry of Public Building and Works to the Department of the Environment and now the Department for Culture and Sport; the state's legal responsibility for the historic environment goes back to the Ancient Monuments Protection Act 1882. Central government subsequently developed several systems of heritage protection for different types of'assets', introducing listing for buildings after WW2 and conservation areas in the 1960s.
In 1983 Secretary of State for the Environment Michael Heseltine gave national responsibility for the historic environment to a semi‑autonomous agency to operate under ministerial guidelines and to government policy. The Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission was formed under the terms of the National Heritage Act 1983 on 1 April 1984; the 1983 Act dissolved the bodies that had provided independent advice – the Ancient Monuments Board for England and the Historic Buildings Council for England and incorporated these functions in the new body. Soon after, the commission gained the operating name of English Heritage by its first Chairman, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu. A national register of historic parks and gardens, was set up in 1984, a register for historic battlefields was created in March 1995.'Registration' is a material consideration in the planning process. In April 1999 English Heritage merged with the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England and the National Monuments Record, bringing together resources for the identification and survey of England's historic environment.
By adoption this included responsibility for the national record of archaeological sites from the Ordnance Survey. These, together with other nationally important external acquisitions, meant that English Heritage was one of the largest publicly accessible archives in the UK: 2.53 million records are available online, including more than 426,000 images. In 2010–2011 it recorded 4.3 million unique online user sessions and over 110,000 people visited NMR exhibitions held around the country in 2009/10. In 2012 the section responsible for archive collections was renamed the English Heritage Archive; as a result of the National Heritage Act 2002, English Heritage acquired administrative responsibility for historic wrecks and submerged landscapes within 12 miles of the English coast. The administration of the listed building system was transferred from DCMS to English Heritage in 2006. However, actual listing decisions still remained the responsibility of the Secretary of State for Culture and Sport, required by the Planning Act 1990 to approve a list of buildings of special architectural or historic interest.
Following the Public Bodies Reform in 2010, English Heritage was confirmed as the government's statutory adviser on the historic environment, the largest source of non-lottery grant funding for heritage assets. It was retained on grounds of "performing a technical function which should remain independent from Government"; however the department suffered from budget cuts during the recession of the 2010s resulting in a repairs deficit of £100 million. In June 2013 the British Government announced plans to provide an £80 million grant to enable English Heritage to become a self-financing charity; the national portfolio of historic properties remain in public ownership, but the new English Heritage will be licensed to manage them. The change occu
Bronze Age
The Bronze Age is a historical period characterized by the use of bronze, in some areas proto-writing, other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the second principal period of the three-age Stone-Bronze-Iron system, as proposed in modern times by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, for classifying and studying ancient societies. An ancient civilization is defined to be in the Bronze Age either by producing bronze by smelting its own copper and alloying with tin, arsenic, or other metals, or by trading for bronze from production areas elsewhere. Bronze itself is harder and more durable than other metals available at the time, allowing Bronze Age civilizations to gain a technological advantage. Copper-tin ores are rare, as reflected in the fact that there were no tin bronzes in Western Asia before trading in bronze began in the third millennium BC. Worldwide, the Bronze Age followed the Neolithic period, with the Chalcolithic serving as a transition. Although the Iron Age followed the Bronze Age, in some areas, the Iron Age intruded directly on the Neolithic.
Bronze Age cultures differed in their development of the first writing. According to archaeological evidence, cultures in Mesopotamia and Egypt developed the earliest viable writing systems; the overall period is characterized by widespread use of bronze, though the place and time of the introduction and development of bronze technology were not universally synchronous. Human-made tin bronze technology requires set production techniques. Tin must be mined and smelted separately added to molten copper to make bronze alloy; the Bronze Age was a time of developing trade networks. A 2013 report suggests that the earliest tin-alloy bronze dates to the mid-5th millennium BC in a Vinča culture site in Pločnik, although this culture is not conventionally considered part of the Bronze Age; the dating of the foil has been disputed. Western Asia and the Near East was the first region to enter the Bronze Age, which began with the rise of the Mesopotamian civilization of Sumer in the mid 4th millennium BC.
Cultures in the ancient Near East practiced intensive year-round agriculture, developed a writing system, invented the potter's wheel, created a centralized government, written law codes and nation states and empires, embarked on advanced architectural projects, introduced social stratification and civil administration and practiced organized warfare and religion. Societies in the region laid the foundations for astronomy and astrology. Dates are approximate, consult particular article for details The Ancient Near East Bronze Age can be divided as following: The Hittite Empire was established in Hattusa in northern Anatolia from the 18th century BC. In the 14th century BC, the Hittite Kingdom was at its height, encompassing central Anatolia, southwestern Syria as far as Ugarit, upper Mesopotamia. After 1180 BC, amid general turmoil in the Levant conjectured to have been associated with the sudden arrival of the Sea Peoples, the kingdom disintegrated into several independent "Neo-Hittite" city-states, some of which survived until as late as the 8th century BC.
Arzawa in Western Anatolia during the second half of the second millennium BC extended along southern Anatolia in a belt that reaches from near the Turkish Lakes Region to the Aegean coast. Arzawa was the western neighbor – sometimes a rival and sometimes a vassal – of the Middle and New Hittite Kingdoms; the Assuwa league was a confederation of states in western Anatolia, defeated by the Hittites under an earlier Tudhaliya I, around 1400 BC. Arzawa has been associated with the much more obscure Assuwa located to its north, it bordered it, may be an alternative term for it. In Ancient Egypt the Bronze Age begins in the Protodynastic period, c. 3150 BC. The archaic early Bronze Age of Egypt, known as the Early Dynastic Period of Egypt follows the unification of Lower and Upper Egypt, c. 3100 BC. It is taken to include the First and Second Dynasties, lasting from the Protodynastic Period of Egypt until about 2686 BC, or the beginning of the Old Kingdom. With the First Dynasty, the capital moved from Abydos to Memphis with a unified Egypt ruled by an Egyptian god-king.
Abydos remained the major holy land in the south. The hallmarks of ancient Egyptian civilization, such as art and many aspects of religion, took shape during the Early Dynastic period. Memphis in the Early Bronze Age was the largest city of the time; the Old Kingdom of the regional Bronze Age is the name given to the period in the 3rd millennium BC when Egypt attained its first continuous peak of civilization in complexity and achievement – the first of three "Kingdom" periods, which mark the high points of civilization in the lower Nile Valley. The First Intermediate Period of Egypt described as a "dark period" in ancient Egyptian history, spanned about 100 years after the end of the Old Kingdom from about 2181 to 2055 BC. Little monumental evidence survives from this period from the early part of it; the First Intermediate Period was a dynamic time when the rule of Egypt was divided between two competing power bases: Heracleopolis in Lower Egypt and Thebes in Upper Egypt. These two kingdoms would come into conflict, with the Theban kings conquering the north, resulting in the reunification of Egypt under a single ruler during the second part of the 11th Dynasty.
The Middle Kingdom of Egypt laste
Time Team
Time Team is a British television programme that aired on Channel 4 from 16 January 1994 to 7 September 2014. Created by television producer Tim Taylor and presented by actor Tony Robinson, each episode featured a team of specialists carrying out an archaeological dig over a period of three days, with Robinson explaining the process in lay terms; the specialists changed throughout the programme's run, although it included professional archaeologists such as Mick Aston, Carenza Lewis, Francis Pryor and Phil Harding. The sites excavated ranged in date from the Palaeolithic to the Second World War. In October 2012, Channel 4 announced that the final series would be broadcast in 2013. Series 20 was screened from January–March 2013 and nine specials were screened between May 2013 and September 2014. At the start of the programme, Tony Robinson explains, in an opening "piece to camera", the reasons for the team's visit to the site and during the dig, he enthusiastically encourages the archaeologists to explain their decisions and conclusions.
He tries to ensure. The site is suggested by a member of the viewing public. Time Team uncover as much as they can of the history of the site in three days. Excavations are not just carried out to entertain viewers. Robinson claims that the archaeologists involved with Time Team have published more scientific papers on excavations carried out in the programme than all British university archaeology departments over the same period and that by 2013, the programme had become the biggest funder of field archaeology in the country. A team of archaeologists led by Mick Aston or Francis Pryor, including field archaeologist Phil Harding, congregate at a site in Britain; the original Time Team line-up from 1994 has altered over the years. Historian Robin Bush was a regular in the first nine series, having been involved with the programme through his long friendship with Aston. Architectural historian Beric Morley featured in ten episodes between 1995 and 2002. In 2005, Carenza Lewis left to pursue other interests.
She was replaced by Anglo-Saxon specialist. The regular team included: Stewart Ainsworth, landscape investigator. Guy de la Bédoyère has been present for Roman digs, as well as those involving the Second World War such as D-Day and aircraft. Architectural historian Jonathan Foyle has appeared in episodes relating to excavations of country estates. Paul Blinkhorn, Mark Corney and Jackie McKinley have appeared from time to time. Mick ‘the dig’ Worthington, an excavator in the early series returned as a dendrochronologist, whereupon he was dubbed'Mick the twig'. Margaret Cox assisted with forensic archaeology between 1998 and 2005. Other specialists who appeared from time to time include historian Bettany Hughes, archaeologist Gustav Milne, East of England specialist Ben Robinson and David S. Neal, expert on Roman mosaics. Local historians joined in when appropriate. In February 2012, it was announced; the disputed changes included hiring anthropologist Mary-Ann Ochota as a co-presenter, dispensing with other archaeologists and what he thought were plans to "cut down the informative stuff about the archaeology".
"The time had come to leave. I never made any money out of it. I feel really angry about it." He told British Archaeology magazine. Time Team producer Tim Taylor released a statement in response to the news reports saying "His concerns are of great importance to me. We have addressed some of them" and that "you’ve not heard the last of Mick on Time Team". More recent regular team members included archaeologist Neil Holbrook, Roman coins specialist Philippa Walton, historian Sam Newton. Younger members of Time Team who made regular appearances include: Jenni Butterworth. Time Team developed from an earlier Channel 4 programme, Time Signs, first broadcast in 1991. Produced by Taylor, Time Signs had featured Harding, who went on to appear on Time Team. Following that show's cancellation, Taylor went on to develop a more attractive format, producing the idea for Time Team, which Channel 4 picked up, broadcasting the first series in 1994. Time Team has had many companion shows during its run, including Time Team Extra, History Hunters and Time Team Digs, whilst several spin-off books have been published.
The programme features special episodes documentaries on history or archaeology and live episodes. Time Team America, a US version of the programme, was broadcast on PBS in 2009 and co-produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting and Videotext/C4i; the programme has been exported to 35 other countries. Time Team was commissioned by Channel 4 Television and made in partnership between VideoText Communications Ltd and Picturehouse Television Co. Ltd. Formed Wildfire Television was involved in the production of The Big Roman Dig and The Big Royal Dig, it was produced by the show's originator, with Robinson as associate producer. On 13 September 2007, during the filming of a jousting reenactment for a special episode of Time Team, a sp
West Sussex
West Sussex is a county in the south of England, bordering East Sussex to the east, Hampshire to the west and Surrey to the north, to the south the English Channel. West Sussex is the western part of the historic county of Sussex a medieval kingdom. With an area of 1,991 square kilometres and a population of over 800,000, West Sussex is a ceremonial county, with a Lord Lieutenant and a High Sheriff. Chichester in the south-west is the only city in West Sussex. West Sussex has a range of scenery, including wealden and coastal; the highest point of the county is at 280 metres. It has a number of stately homes including Goodwood, Petworth House and Uppark, castles such as Arundel Castle and Bramber Castle. Over half the county is protected countryside, offering walking and other recreational opportunities. Although the name Sussex, derived from the Old English'Sūþsēaxe', dates from the Saxon period between AD 477 to 1066, the history of human habitation in Sussex goes back to the Old Stone Age; the oldest hominin remains known in Britain were found at Boxgrove.
Sussex has been occupied since those times and has succumbed to various invasions and migrations throughout its long history. Prehistoric monuments include the Devil's Jumps, a group of Bronze Age burial mounds, the Iron Age Cissbury Ring and Chanctonbury Ring hill forts on the South Downs; the Roman period saw the building of Fishbourne Roman Palace and rural villas such as Bignor Roman Villa together with a network of roads including Stane Street, the Chichester to Silchester Way and the Sussex Greensand Way. The Romans used the Weald for iron production on an industrial scale; the foundation of the Kingdom of Sussex is recorded by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year AD 477. The foundation story is regarded as somewhat of a myth by most historians, although the archaeology suggests that Saxons did start to settle in the area in the late 5th century; the Kingdom of Sussex became the county of Sussex. With its origins in the kingdom of Sussex, the county of Sussex was traditionally divided into six units known as rapes.
By the 16th century, the three western rapes were grouped together informally, having their own separate Quarter Sessions. These were administered by a separate county council from 1888, the county of Sussex being divided for administrative purposes into the administrative counties of East and West Sussex. In 1974, West Sussex was made a single ceremonial county with the coming into force of the Local Government Act 1972. At the same time a large part of the eastern rape of Lewes was transferred into West Sussex; until 1834 provision for the poor and destitute in West Sussex was made at parish level. From 1835 until 1948 eleven Poor Law Unions, each catering for several parishes, took on the job. Most settlements in West Sussex are either along the south coast or in Mid Sussex, near the M23/A23 corridor; the town of Crawley is the largest in the county with an estimated population of 106,600. The coastal settlement of Worthing follows with a population of 104,600; the seaside resort of Bognor Regis and market town Horsham are both large towns.
Chichester, the county town, has a cathedral and city status, is situated not far from the border with Hampshire. Other conurbations of a similar size are Burgess Hill, East Grinstead and Haywards Heath in the Mid Sussex district, Littlehampton in the Arun district, Lancing and Shoreham in the Adur district. Much of the coastal town population is part of the Brighton/Worthing/Littlehampton conurbation. Rustington and Southwater are the next largest settlements in the county. There are several more towns in West Sussex; the smaller towns of the county are Arundel, Petworth and Steyning. The larger villages are Billingshurst, Crawley Down, Henfield, Hurstpierpoint, Lindfield and Storrington; the current total population of the county makes up 1.53% of England's population. West Sussex is bordered by Hampshire to Surrey to the north and East Sussex to the east; the English Channel lies to the south. The area has been formed from Upper Jurassic and Lower Cretaceous rock strata, part of the Weald–Artois Anticline.
The eastern part of this ridge, the Weald of Kent and Surrey has been eroded, with the chalk surface removed to expose older Lower Cretaceous rocks of the Wealden Group. In West Sussex the exposed rock becomes older towards the north of the county with Lower Greensand ridges along the border with Surrey including the highest point of the county at Blackdown. Erosion of softer sand and clay strata has hollowed out the basin of the Weald leaving a north facing scarp slope of the chalk which runs east and west across the whole county, broken only by the valleys of the River Arun and River Adur. In addition to these two rivers which drain most of the county a winterbourne, the River Lavant, flows intermittently from springs on the dip slope of the chalk downs north of Chichester; the county makes up 1.52% of the total land of England, making it the 30th largest county in the country. West Sussex is the sunniest county in the United Kingdom, according to Met Office records. Over the last 29 years it has averaged 1902 hours of sunshine per year.
Sunshine totals are highest near the coast wi
Stone tool
A stone tool is, in the most general sense, any tool made either or out of stone. Although stone tool-dependent societies and cultures still exist today, most stone tools are associated with prehistoric cultures that have become extinct. Archaeologists study such prehistoric societies, refer to the study of stone tools as lithic analysis. Ethnoarchaeology has been a valuable research field in order to further the understanding and cultural implications of stone tool use and manufacture. Stone has been used to make a wide variety of different tools throughout history, including arrow heads and querns. Stone tools may be made of either ground stone or chipped stone, a person who creates tools out of the latter is known as a flintknapper. Chipped stone tools are made from cryptocrystalline materials such as chert or flint, chalcedony, obsidian and quartzite via a process known as lithic reduction. One simple form of reduction is to strike stone flakes from a nucleus of material using a hammerstone or similar hard hammer fabricator.
If the goal of the reduction strategy is to produce flakes, the remnant lithic core may be discarded once it has become too small to use. In some strategies, however, a flintknapper reduces the core to a rough unifacial or bifacial preform, further reduced using soft hammer flaking techniques or by pressure flaking the edges. More complex forms of reduction include the production of standardized blades, which can be fashioned into a variety of tools such as scrapers, knives and microliths. In general terms, chipped stone tools are nearly ubiquitous in all pre-metal-using societies because they are manufactured, the tool stone is plentiful, they are easy to transport and sharpen. Archaeologists classify stone tools into industries that share distinctive technological or morphological characteristics. In 1969 in the 2nd edition of World Prehistory, Grahame Clark proposed an evolutionary progression of flint-knapping in which the "dominant lithic technologies" occurred in a fixed sequence from Mode 1 through Mode 5.
He assigned to them relative dates: Modes 1 and 2 to the Lower Palaeolithic, 3 to the Middle Palaeolithic, 4 to the Advanced and 5 to the Mesolithic. They were not to be conceived, however, as either universal—that is, they did not account for all lithic technology. Mode 1, for example, was in use in Europe. Clark's scheme was adopted enthusiastically by the archaeological community. One of its advantages was the simplicity of terminology; the transitions are of greatest interest. In the literature the stone tools used in the period of the Palaeolithic are divided into four "modes", each of which designate a different form of complexity, which in most cases followed a rough chronological order. KenyaStone tools found from 2011 to 2014 at Lake Turkana in Kenya, are dated to be 3.3 million years old, predate the genus Homo by half million years. The oldest known Homo fossil is 2.8 million years old compared to the 3.3 million year old stone tools. The stone tools may have been made by Australopithecus afarensis —also called Kenyanthropus platyops— the species whose best fossil example is Lucy, which inhabited East Africa at the same time as the date of the oldest stone tools.
Dating of the tools was by dating volcanic ash layers in which the tools were found and dating the magnetic signature of the rock at the site. EthiopiaGrooved and fractured animal bone fossils, made by using stone tools, were found in Dikika, Ethiopia near the remains of Selam, a young Australopithecus afarensis girl who lived about 3.3 million years ago. The earliest stone tools in the life span of the genus Homo are Mode 1 tools, come from what has been termed the Oldowan Industry, named after the type of site found in Olduvai Gorge, where they were discovered in large quantities. Oldowan tools were characterised by their simple construction; these cores were river pebbles, or rocks similar to them, struck by a spherical hammerstone to cause conchoidal fractures removing flakes from one surface, creating an edge and a sharp tip. The blunt end is the proximal surface. Oldowan is a percussion technology. Grasping the proximal surface, the hominid brought the distal surface down hard on an object he wished to detach or shatter, such as a bone or tuber.
The earliest known Oldowan tools yet found date from 2.6 million years ago, during the Lower Palaeolithic period, have been uncovered at Gona in Ethiopia. After this date, the Oldowan Industry subsequently spread throughout much of Africa, although archaeologists are unsure which Hominan species first developed them, with some speculating that it was Australopithecus garhi, others believing that it was in fact Homo habilis. Homo habilis was the hominin who used the tools for most of the Oldowan in Africa, but at about 1.9-1.8 million years ago Homo erectus inherited them. The Industry flourished in southern and eastern Africa between 2.6 and 1.7 million years ago, but was spread out of Africa and into Eurasia by travelling bands of H. erectus, who took it as far east as Java by 1.8 million years ago and Northern China by 1.6 million years ago. More complex, Mode 2 tools began to be developed through the Acheulean Industry, named after the site
