I offer here from my collection a bifacially worked roundish hand axe in the Middle Stone Age style of the stone working methods of the migrant clans that inhabited various sites in the Jordanian Desert during the period of 50,000 to 80,000 years ago. This stone age tool shows that it is not only worked on both sides but it has aged in different ways on each side.

Looking at the photos one would assume that they are of different stone tools, but the brown patina shows the side that was exposed for the last many thousand years to the baking desert sun and extremes of the desert winter. Little potholes in the skin on the exposed side attest to the noonday demon of the desert sun causing explosions of the crystals in the rock that had been frozen in the middle of the night before. Turn the rock over and we see the smooth polish that resulted from being exposed either to human use over generations or simply being exposed to the air long enough to acquire the polish of the desert sand being blown across it at high speed then being turned over by a Spring gully washer to be protected while the 'top' side acquired the deep tan it now wears.

At the time I lived in Jordan, doing amateur surveys for possible surface artifacts, the people who had produced the stone age tools were nick-named the Jordanian Neanderthals, because they produced their tools using much the same techniques as the Mousterian period in Europe. The Jordanian Middle Stone Age technology lasted from about 80,000 to about 12,000 B.C. when the Upper Paleolithic refinement in the knapping and shaping of stone tools developed.

The archaeologists at the American Center for Oriental Research in Amman, Jordan estimated the age of this axe at circa 50,000 years old. This biface lay exposed to desert sun and sandstorms for millennia. It has a patina called desert sheen as a result. It feels polished, as indeed it is, all from natural forces. First, many thousands of years ago, it was left at the side of a stream where its owner, probably also its maker, had settled for a while with his clan. When we came across the site, the area was covered with beautifully worked bifaces, flakes, blades, burins, chert cores from which the tools had been knapped. We rarely found pointed tools except for the burins.

The tools were easily distinguished from the surrounding stones, because they showed a variety of colors that the local stone did not show. We learned to identify stone scatters of this type from the car window as we drove across the desert.

The label of WDC that you see marked on the hand axe is my identifying mark for cataloguing the article.

Measurements: 8 cm x 9.5 cm (3in x 3.5 in)