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Acheulean (; also Acheulian), from the French ''acheuléen'', is an archaeological industry of stone tool manufacture characterized by distinctive oval and pear-shaped "hand-axes" associated with early humans. Acheulean tools were produced during the Lower Palaeolithic era across Africa and much of West Asia, South Asia, and Europe, and are typically found with ''Homo erectus'' remains. It is thought that Acheulean technologies first developed in Africa out of the more primitive Oldowan technology as long ago as 1.76 million years ago, by ''Homo habilis''. Acheulean tools were the dominant technology for the vast majority of human history.〔〔Ian Tattersall, ''Masters of the Planet, the search for our human origins'', 2012, Palgrave Macmillan, chapter 6, pp. 124-125, ISBN 978-0-230-10875-2〕〔 ==History of research== The type site for the Acheulean is Saint-Acheul, a suburb of Amiens, the capital of the Somme department in Picardy, where artifacts were found in 1859.〔''Oxford English Dictionary'' 2nd Ed. (1989)〕 John Frere is generally credited as being the first to suggest a very ancient date for Acheulean hand-axes. In 1797, he sent two examples to the Royal Academy in London from Hoxne in Suffolk. He had found them in prehistoric lake deposits along with the bones of extinct animals and concluded that they were made by people "who had not the use of metals" and that they belonged to a "very ancient period indeed, even beyond the present world".〔Frere, John. Archaeologia 13 (1800): 204-205 (in Grayson (1983), 55-56, and Heizer (1962), 70-71 ).〕 His ideas were, however, ignored by his contemporaries, who subscribed to a pre-Darwinian view of human evolution. Later, Jacques Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes, working between 1836 and 1846, collected further examples of hand-axes and fossilised animal bone from the gravel river terraces of the Somme near Abbeville in northern France. Again, his theories attributing great antiquity to the finds were spurned by his colleagues, until one of de Perthe's main opponents, Dr Marcel Jérôme Rigollot, began finding more tools near Saint Acheul. Following visits to both Abbeville and Saint Acheul by the geologist Joseph Prestwich, the age of the tools was finally accepted. In 1872, Louis Laurent Gabriel de Mortillet described the characteristic hand-axe tools as belonging to ''L'Epoque de St Acheul''. The industry was renamed as the Acheulean in 1925. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Acheulean」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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