Biface
Multipurpose tool
Lower Palaeolithic
In Europe, 800 000 to 300 000 years
An almond-shaped stone tool with two worked surfaces…
C. Farizy A. Leroi-Gourhan, Dictionnaire de la Préhistoire. P.U.F, Paris, 1988
Commentary :
A biface, or handaxe, has a robust cutting edge around most of its perimeter.
The least modified, and thus bluntest zone allows the tool to be held in the hand. This area is often located at the base, or occasionally on one of the two lateral edges.
This multi-purpose tool, which can be used unhafted, is perfectly adapted to dismembering, and disarticulating the carcasses of large herbivores, such as red deer, bison, horse and rhinoceros. Bifaces are complex tools, whose regular symmetric forms are difficult to produce and maintain. The abundance of these tools in Africa, Asia and Europe, reveal that the working of stone was mastered as early as the Acheulean by Homo erectus populations.