How Did Humans Turn Stone and Wood Into the World's First Axe?

How Did Humans Turn Stone and Wood Into the World's First Axe? The first axe was probably invented twice. And the gap between those two inventions? Over a million years. I dug into the full story — from a 3.3 million-year-old rock fragment in Kenya all the way to a thumbnail-sized piece of ground basalt found in an Australian rock shelter. What I found was stranger and more fascinating than any single "eureka" moment could ever be. • Why the earliest "axes" had no handle — and what they were actually used for • The Acheulean hand axe: 1.76 million years old, used for over a million years, and still not quite an axe • Why adding a stick to a stone is a harder engineering problem than it sounds • The 44,000-year-old fragment from Australia that counts as our oldest known true axe • How the axe unlocked wood — and why that changed everything about prehistoric life • Why the axe was probably invented multiple times by different people in different places The information in this video is based on published archaeological research and is intended for educational and entertainment purposes.