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TY - JOUR AU - Scott, Gary R. AU - Gibert, Luis PY - 2009 DA - 2009/09/01 TI - The oldest hand-axes in Europe JO - Nature SP - 82 EP - 85 VL - 461 IS - 7260 AB - A key transition in the history of technology was that from the simple chopper-like tools used by the earliest stone-using hominins to the more finely worked, bifacial artefacts known as hand-axes. The very long time lag between the appearance of hand-axes in Asia and their earliest records in Europe — about a million years — has long puzzled palaeoanthropologists. In general, the first hand-axes to appear in Europe have been thought to be about half a million years old. Gary Scott and Luis Gibert have reassessed the dating of two hand-axe-bearing Palaeolithic sites in southern Spain, and they come up with dates of 0.76 and 0.9 million years old for the La Solana del Zamborino and the Estrecho del Quípar rock shelter sites respectively, significantly closing the time gap between Asia and Europe. SN - 1476-4687 UR - https://doi.org/10.1038/nature08214 DO - 10.1038/nature08214 ID - Scott2009 ER -