Explore

Earliest handaxe in Britain

Teaching ideas

Before students have seen the handaxe, challenge them to design a cutting tool. What materials would they use? What shape would it be? Would it use electricity? After they have made and presented their designs, show them the photo of the Happisburgh handaxe and the Hoxne handaxe from the A bigger picture tab. Ask students to work out what they are made of and to identify what aspects of their shapes are the same and what are different. Compare the handaxes with the chopping tool from Olduvai Gorge in For the classroom.

Show the reconstruction image of Happisburgh 850,000 years ago on the For the classroom tab on the whiteboard and use the list of features to observe to help students work out what is happening and what it would have been like when the early humans walked to Britain.

Show the reconstruction image of Happisburgh 850,000 years ago on the For the classroom tab on the whiteboard and use the list of features to observe to help students work out what is happening and what it would have been like when the early humans walked to Britain.

Show students the photos of the footprints and the video about finding and recording the footprints at Happisburgh in For the classroom. Recreate the footprints and taking casts of them using washing up tubs lined with newspaper and then filled with wet sand. Get students to take their shoes off and stand in the sand. After they have carefully stepped out, mix some plaster of Paris and pour it into the sand. Leave them to set for a day before lifting the plaster casts out. Use them to recreate the Happisburgh footprints in a display.

The next two ideas use the images from A bigger picture.

Print out photos of the handaxes and provide the information about where they were found. Ask students to pinpoint on maps of Europe and Africa where these handaxes were found. Find out more about Olduvai Gorge.

Ask students to create a visual timeline of the development of handaxes. Put the handaxes in chronological order. Ask them to write on the timeline if and how the handaxes have changed over time.

Show students the Natural History Museum slideshow of different animals found in Britain over the last 700,000 years in For the classroom. Ask students to pick one animal and write a story about what happened when a human or group of humans met it. Did the humans hunt the animal? Or did the animal hunt the humans? Did they meet in a dark cave, grassland or the woods? Was Britain warmer than now or colder?

Use the interactive game from the BBC in For the classroom to explore the evolution of humans and how they coped with challenges. The game includes a section on the use of tools such as handaxes and chopping tools.

Who were the makers and users of handaxes? The first makers of handaxes were not modern humans, Homo sapiens, but were earlier species. Using the BBC resources in the For the classroom, ask students to try to work out which species may have made the handaxes in Olduvai Gorge 1.2 million years ago, the artefacts in Happisburgh 850,000 years ago and the handaxes at Boxgrove about 500,000 years ago.

What did Britain look like in the far past? Britain has gone through a cycle of being islands or a peninsula of the continent as the sea levels rose and fell over the last million years. The climate has also changed and so have the courses of rivers and the locations of lakes. Use the slideshows from the Natural History Museum in For the classroom to explore what Britain looked like 850,000-1 million years ago.

Show the BBC Class Clip in For the classroom about coastal erosion at Happisburgh. Divide the class into three groups: residents of the modern village of Happisburgh, archaeologists trying to find more evidence of early humans as the cliffs are eroded and Environment Agency staff with responsibility for coastal defences. Ask them to discuss whether the village at Happisburgh should be allowed to crumble into the sea.

Next section: For the classroom
05-main-banner

Earliest handaxe in Britain