Atomies: Woodpiles

As the proud owner of a wood-burning stove, I've become a connoisseur of woodpiles, which ought to be more widely celebrated as symbols of renewable energy. It's hardly a practical alternative to flicking on the central heating, but collecting, storing, seasoning, chopping and sawing wood has made me appreciate a little bit more just how amazing it is to be able to switch on a light or a gas ring and have instant access to energy.

As well as reminding us how lucky we are in one respect, a woodpile stands as a link to our ancient past, to the development and evolution of the human mind. Although the chainsaw is now widely used, for most of human history the handaxe would have been the main tool with which to construct a woodpile. And to be clear, human in this context doesn't just mean H. sapiens sapiens, since we only appeared on the scene around 100,000 years ago, and the first handaxe was being used around 1.4 million years ago, by human species long since extinct.

In The Prehistory of the Mind (1995), Steven Mithen explores how the mind came to be able to "think about hypothetical objects and events" – a type of thinking that "is absolutely essential for the manufacture of a stone tool like a handaxe" (p. 35). It took a while (over a million years) for the first major technical innovation to occur, at around 250,000 years ago, with the appearance of a new production technique called the Levallois method (p. 131), and Mithen sums up this long period as one characterized by "the monotony of industrial traditions, the absence of tools made from bone and ivory, the absence of art" (p. 170).

The story of how we got from waiting a million years for an upgrade to the kind of obsolence we enjoy today is, of course, rather complicated, but rooted in the cultural explosion that began around 50,000 years ago and has been gathering pace ever since.

Chatsworth 12 September 2011

Peak District 10 April 2011

Skelgill 7 October 2011

Swinside 7 October 2011

Chatsworth 12 September 2011