Though I'm not an archaeologist I find Pettitt and White's recent publication "The British Paleaolithic" very intriguing. The authors present a very large number of details about the surprisingly extensive finds of cultural artifacts from humans in all periods in Britain - 10,000 years to 980,000 years ago. They reconstruct the climate, geology, fauna and flora of each period to give a unified account of the island's pre-history.
In the Lower Paleolithic times (550 - 300 thousand years ago), humans in Britain would construct sharp handaxes and spears, even in an industrial sense, which would be used to successfully hunt large mammals such as horses and rhinoseros.
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The antler hammer, made from made from the stem of an antler of the giant deer Megaloceros dawkinsii, tells a different story. According to Pitts and Roberts, this piece had been laboriously shaped long before it was actually needed, and had been used so extensively - perhaps to make over a hundred handaxes - that wear had rendered the end almost unrecognizable. This is clearly a tool that had formed part of a knapper's personal equipment, a tool to make tools that was carried around the landscape over long periods and which rendered the owner ready for action and able to produce a range of stone implements whenever opportunity required. A degree of forward planning is clearly demonstrated, showing that the long-held view that archaic hominins acted in the "here and now" and had limited planning abilities (e.g. Binford 1979, 1985 inter alia) was unfounded.
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