Strange Rock In 15th Century Painting Identified As Over 160,000-Year-Old Stone Tool

Since ancient times people working in the fields occasionally stumbled over strange-looking objects made from stone. With an overall teardrop shape and pointy end, their true nature remained a mystery.

In some of the earliest written records dating back to the mid-1500s they were described as “thunderstones” and explained as rocks falling from the clouds during a storm. Swiss physician and naturalist Conrad Gessner included a print showing thunderstones in his De Rerum fossilium (1565) and classified them as “jokes of nature.” The figure, despite being of poor quality, has long been regarded as the earliest artistic representation of a prehistoric hand-axe.

But researchers from Dartmouth and the University of Cambridge have identified a strange object in the “The Melun Diptych” as possible stone-age axe. Painted by French artist Jean Fouquet around 1455, this painting predates Gessner’s print by over one century.

The Melun Diptych was commissioned by Étienne Chevalier, who was from Melun, France, and served as treasurer for King Charles VII of France. The diptych is comprised of two oil paintings on wood panels: “Étienne Chevalier with Saint Stephen” on the left, and “Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels” on the right. In the left panel, Chevalier is depicted wearing a crimson robe with his hands folded together as if he were praying while Saint Stephen, his patron saint, is standing next to him holding the New Testament and a—at a first glance—strange-looking object.

Art historians have always referred to the object as a “jagged stone” or a “large, sharp stone,” explaining it as an allegorical representation of death by stoning of Saint Stephen as a Christian martyr.

But no one had ever identified it as something human made. However, Steven Kangas, a senior lecturer in the Department of Art History at Dartmouth and study co-author, had a hunch that it wasn’t just a rock.

“I’ve known about Fouquet’s painting for years and I had always thought that the stone object looked like a prehistoric tool,” says Kangas. “So, this was always sort of stuck in the back of my mind, as something that I needed to pursue in the future.”

In 2021, Kangas attended an anthropological seminar at Dartmouth, meeting Charles Musiba, a professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado-Denver and expert on human origins in Tanzania and South Africa, and Jeremy DeSilva, a professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth. They both agreed that the object’s features shown in the painting likely are not random or made-up by the artist.

An infrared analysis of the painting revealed that Fouquet went to great care and detail to paint the stone, first preparing a sketch and later reworking the final figure.

The shown shape is consistent with the shape of 300,000 to 160,000-year-old stone-axes excavated by modern archaeologists in the region where the paintings were made. The color-variation on the object’s surface ranging from yellow, brown to red is also consistent with weathering of artifacts made from flint or other silica-rich rocks. The authors also counted 33 “scars” on the surface of the painted stone object, left behind by flakes knocked off by the unknown stone-age toolmaker.

“The data from our shape, color, and flake scar analyses of the stone object in the painting were remarkably consistent with that of other stone-age hand-axes from where Fouquet lived,” said co-author James Clark, a graduate student in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge.

Hand-axes made from stone are the longest-used tools in human history. The oldest known examples are over 1.6 million years old. They were slowly replaced by more sophisticated tools about 100,000 years ago.

“I love this idea of connecting a hand-axe—a utilitarian object that helped hominins survive half a million years ago—with a medieval French painting, which is so well-known that it’s taught in introductory art history classes,” says DeSilva. “From the Paleolithic Age to the Renaissance and beyond, hand-axes have been—and continue to be—part of human history.”

The study “Acheulean Handaxes in Medieval France: An Earlier ‘Modern’ Social History for Palaeolithic Bifaces” was published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal (2023). Additional material and interviews provided by Dartmouth College.

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