Handaxes And Smart Cities

What if communication and community have declined because we are not using our hands as much? And if they are all in decline, how smart can our smart cities be?

- Poon King Wang

In our societies, there is a creeping sense we are communicating less, and connecting less as a community. This has mirrored a decline in the use of our hands, at home and at work. We cook less, build less, and repair less. Instead we eat out, buy ready-made, and throw away (and buy again).

It may be a pure coincidence they are all happening at the same time.

Or maybe not.

Here’s why.

The clue lies in what a million-year old handaxe at the British Museum has taught us about us.

Found in Tanzania’s Odulvai Gorge, this Odulvai Handaxe does not look like the axes most of us have seen. It looks more like a tear drop, but with elongated edges that are sharp and cutting. The book A History of the World in 100 Objects calls it a “supreme hitech stone” -- it could drill, scrape, cut, and kill. It was the “Swiss Army knife of the Stone Age”. It was an awesome tool.

But what is most amazing is the Handaxe’s tear drop shape mirrors that of our hands today. Hold up your hand and you can see in your mind’s eye, this early tool of modern man. Our hand as we know and have today has been making and using such high tech tools for over a million years.

To do so required imagination, dexterity, and learning. It also required a capacity for communication and community. When scientists scanned the brain of a modern stone tool maker (i.e. a stone knapper) while he was shaping such a handaxe, they found that “the areas of the modern brain activated... overlap considerably with those you use when you speak”.