Size Reduction from the Stone Age to the Space Age

CHIMPANZEES AND NUT CRACKING

The history we give in this book begins at the start of agriculture, about 8000 bc, and it refers only to the activities of Homo sapiens. Size reduction, however, may actually have been pioneered long before that. For example, chimpanzees in some regions of West Africa have a culture of nut cracking that may extend back 2.6 million years:

In the Tai forest (Ivory Coast) mother chimpanzees teach their infants the tasty art of nut cracking which takes about seven years to master because about 1,000 kg of skillfully applied force are required to split the nut without pulverizing it. …The stone hammers—rocks—acquired by the chimps are carried to specific nut-cracking sites where the chimps pound the golf-ball-size nuts of the Panda oleosa tree to expose the three seeds within. (Trivedi 2002)

Powerful hits are required to initially crack the thick outer shell of the Panda nut; then a series of hits are precisely graded to crack the inner shells without shattering the almonds. The nut must be repositioned at least three times during this process.

(Calvin 1991)

HOMINIDS AND SIZE REDUCTION

Size reduction—the oldest engineering process-had its beginnings in prehistoric times, when early humans pounded grains and nuts with stones to free the edible inner parts from the hard protective shells. The mortar and pestle, a combination of a bowl-shaped container (the mortar) and a rod with a flat-surfaced hammer (the pestle), was the earli­est tool used for this task, and, in principle, has remained unchanged throughout the ages. It is still used today in chemical laboratories and pharmacies.

The remains of seven types of 780,000-year-old nuts have been found at the Gesher Benot site in Israel’s Hula Valley. The nuts and the stone tools found with them are the first evidence that various types of nuts formed a major part of man’s diet 780,000 years ago and that hominids had developed an assortment of tools to crack open nuts during the Early-Middle Pleistocene Period. …Some of the stones are the size of hammers while larger stones, some weighing as much as 30 kg could be used as anvils. (Goren-Inbar et al. 2002)

From Palaeolithic times onwards man has used stones to disintegrate food-stuffs like acorns, nuts and wild grasses by using a pear — or pestle-shaped stone to beat and rub the material laying on a flat stone sometimes showing a natural or an artificial depression. (Forbes 1955)

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During historic ages the globe had passed through four of the six thousand years of its recorded technology before any device other than the hand-stone was known for reducing the size of grains and breaking nuts. (Bennett and Elton 1898-1904)

The hand stone is still essential for producing food in many communities. Its importance was never better recognized than by the choice of a hand grinding stone as the centerpiece of the Women’s Memorial in Pretoria, South Africa, to commemorate the centuries of ardu­ous work by South African women (W. Cruise, personal communication; see Figure 1.1).

Stone grinding of ocher for pigments is also ancient. More than 40,000 years ago, Australian aborigines extracted high-grade ochers from iron oxide deposits and ground them with stones to a powder for use in cosmetics, body and artifact decorations, and cave paintings.

According to Fischer (1944), “In gradually changing form the world’s oldest machine (the grinding mill) has served men in every country for more than 100 centuries.”

Updated: 24.03.2016 — 12:06