[Red Badger]

GGG Ping!........

[Inyo-Mono]

Very interesting, I thought my 70,000 years-old Neanderthal hand axe was old!

[ronnie raygun]

And subhumans use them todaya to lop off heads in the name of Allah, wont some things ever change?

[Bernard Marx]

This brings back a memory. In the early 1960s as a newspaper reporter I was assigned to interview Dr. Louis Leakey when he came to deliver a series of lectures at our local university. (The article says he did his work at Olduvai Gorge in the 1930s; he was still going strong and making important discoveries well into the 1960s).

He was charming and colorful and appreciated the fact I knew who he was and what he was doing. Near the end of the interview he fished into a battered leather bag and pulled out a crudely-fashioned quartzite chopper from a find at Olduvai. He plopped it into my hand and said: "You're now holding the oldest tool ever fashioned by man."

Even then I knew that his comment had as much to do with fund-raising publicity as anything, and that older tools would probably be found in the future. Still, I'll never forget the feeling I had when I held it, the very strong connection with a long-ago time when our ancient forebears' survival depended on such necessities. RIP Dr. Leakey!