Abbevillien
The Abbevillien (pronunciation [ abəvɪˈli̯ɛ̃ː ], also outdated Chelléen [ ʃɛleˈɛ̃ː ]) is the name for the oldest so-called hand ax industry in Europe . It dates between approx. 600,000 and 400,000 years ago and thus belongs to the Paleolithic , the geological older Middle Pleistocene . The oldest hand ax finds are limited to Africa and are around 1.5 million years old. The term Abbevillien was not used there.
The name goes back to the location in a gravel pit near Abbeville in France . This is where the local hobby researcher Jacques Boucher de Perthes found the first roughly worked hand axes to be recognized as such in the 1840s. In 1858 the Scottish geologist Hugh Falconer confirmed the authenticity of the collection.
The term Abbevillien, derived from the type locality , was only introduced in 1932 by Henri Breuil , who regarded the Abbevillien as the oldest archaeological culture in Europe. The subsequent hand ax culture of the Acheuléen was viewed by Breuil as a more highly developed stage and its beginning was set around 300,000 years ago. Recent research has refuted this sequence, since a gradual development of the hand ax shapes is not sustainable. In Boxgrove in southern England, for example, perfectly manufactured hand axes have been found since the 1990s, which date back to the late Cromer warm period and must therefore be at least 500,000 years old. This would have been stylistically placed in the developed Acheuléen without the secured temporal classification. The Boxgrove finds refute the evolutionist idea of an Abbeville as a preliminary stage of the Acheulean.
The Somme valley in the Abbeville site area shows a series of river terraces (two upper, one middle and two lower). In the second terrace from the top, which is assigned to the Elster Cold Age or Mindel Cold Age, a rich fauna was found towards the end of the 20th century. Warm age species ( European forest elephant , southern elephant , Etruscan rhinoceros ) as well as species that have long been extinct ( Machairodus ), however, indicate a relocation of the finds, which limits the reliability of the dating. A variety of tools have been found associated with animal bones.
