From the mid-nineteenth century the discovery of a pre-historic past led archaeologists to classify the development of humans on the basis of stone tools and comparative anatomy.
Tools, which extended the capacity of the body, were considered one of the defining aspects of the development of Homo sapiens. The different shapes of ingeniously flaked axes were arranged into sequences showing the process of evolution over 2.5 million years, from the early hominids such as Homo habilis and Homo erectus of the early Palaeolithic period, to the Mesolithic and the Neolithic and our own species, Homo sapiens.
