Our image today is of a worked flint flake, with its modern equivalent a utility knife.

Over spans of thousands of years, human history is mainly reconstructed from the discovery of similar flint tools, or the other variations on the scale and sophistication of objects that represent the flint-workers art.

Each of these tools represents intentional alteration and manipulation of the properties of flint, or other stones available in other parts of the world, to create cutting edges in the material that can be utilised for many purposes. Archaeologists have generated models of both the creative skills that went into each tool and the functions and social circumstances they were used in, individually or as part of a tool kit that can be recognised and classified in the archaeological record.

To a great extent prehistoric humans are known only by recognising the dexterity and technological repertoire of their tools, through analysing or recreating the actions that went into creating each one. Cultural and social organisation in these periods is projected from the way that  tools are grouped into sets and distributed over space and time.

Each flint, like the one in the image, preserves the action of a single unknown maker at a single point in time. The study of these actions, and the products of each of the makers, collectively preserves an echo of the whole way of life of an ancient society.