Our human ancestors may have been sophisticated tool users 1.76 million years ago. Newly discovered hand axes from that period are the oldest examples of the complex Acheulean culture, 350,000 years ...

The object depicted was long thought to be a stone. A close-up of "The Melun Diptych", ca. 1455, Jean Fouquet. Courtesy Steven Kangas and authors. The Melun Diptych takes its name from the Northern ...

Around 1455, a medieval French painter and miniaturist named Jean Fouquet painted a small diptych with two panels, one of which depicts St. Stephen holding a strangely shaped stone—usually interpreted ...

Key and Clark compared the shape, color, and surface details of the stone in the painting with those of Acheulean hand axes found in northern France, where Fouquet lived and worked. They determined ...

A team of researchers from Japan, Hong Kong and Ethiopia has found a hand ax that they believe was made by a possibly direct human ancestor in what is now modern Ethiopia. In their paper published in ...