Hand ax from Pratteln

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Hand ax from Pratteln

The Pratteln hand ax was found above Pratteln in the canton of Basel-Landschaft . At around 300,000 years old, it is considered to be the oldest tool in Switzerland .

Find

The "Hohle Gasse",
where the hand ax was found

On February 24, 1974, while searching for fossils on the embankment of the ravine, the student Christoph Hauser came across a large, yellowish-brown stone in the "Hohlen Gasse" south of Pratteln. The student realized that it couldn't have come from the area and took it home because of its striking color and shape. A neighbor discovered that it was a hand ax. In the Liestal canton museum it turned out that Christoph had found the first hand ax in Switzerland.

description

The hand ax is made of local brownish yellow flint , is 181 mm long and weighs 1126 g. The material comes from the vicinity of the site, as studies by Silex from the Hupper pit in Lausen have shown.

A hand ax was an all-purpose device. With its differently shaped edge sections, it was used for splitting, chopping, scraping and cutting. First, the stone was roughly worked with a hammerstone , then further worked with a mallet made of bone or antlers. Depressions for the hand made it easier to grasp and hold on, depending on the purpose. Bump marks and the heavily chipped tip indicate that the place where it was placed and where it was found do not match, i.e. the tool has been relocated with the surrounding gravel. The hand ax is kept and exhibited in Museum.BL in Liestal .

Age

Initial attempts to determine the age of the stone resulted in information between 120,000 and 400,000 years. In September 2012, exploratory tunnels were created on the ravine and sediment samples were taken from the remaining ice-age gravel, from which the hand ax presumably originated. Investigations by the University of Bern and the ETH Zurich using the aluminum-beryllium method revealed an age of around 300,000 years.

The surface and edges were damaged as a result of relocation processes within the ceiling ballast of the elevated terrace above Pratteln. It is therefore quite possible that he is even older. Depending on the age, it was used by Homo erectus , Homo heidelbergensis or Homo steinheimensis .

literature

  • Jürg Sedlmeier: Created by Homo Erectus - the old Paleolithic hand ax from Pratteln, Hohle Gasse . In: Reto Marti / Andreas Fischer, 50 years old - 50 finds, archeology in the canton of Baselland (Basel 2018) 18–19;
  • Rolf d'Aujourd'hui: An old paleolithic hand ax from Pratteln BL , in: Ludwig Berger et al. (Ed.): Festschrift Elisabeth Schmid on her 65th birthday . Regio Basiliensis 1977, pp. 1-14.
  • Jürg Tauber: The hand ax from Pratteln , in: Jürg Ewald, Jürg Tauber (Hrsg.): Tatort Past. Results from archeology today , Wiese-Verlag, Basel 1998, p. 94 f.

Web links

Commons : Pratteln hand ax  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Pratteln hand ax - a Paleolithic all-purpose device Website Canton Basel-Landschaft

Coordinates: 47 ° 30 '58.4 "  N , 7 ° 41' 59.9"  E ; CH1903:  six hundred and nineteen thousand six hundred eighty-seven  /  262,863