Mad about Science: Pickaxe

By Brenden Bobby
Reader Columnist

You could ask any kid today what a pickaxe is, and they’re likely going to regale you with an entire saga of their Minecraft adventures. A couple of sticks and some stone across the top and, voila, you’ve made your first pickaxe.

This was very likely a similar thought process shared by our ancient ancestors, but not for a very long time after having developed the earliest tools.

The first sharpened stones came in the form of the handaxe, which was essentially a triangular rock sharpened on two sides and held from the back. It was used for chopping and slicing things, and the first signs of its use date back more than 3 million years.

The first hafted tools began appearing in Africa 500,000 years ago, with evidence recovered from the Kathu Archaeological Complex near the town of Kathu, South Africa. The use of flintknapping, or forming rock with other rocks, seems to have predated the use of hafted tools considerably. 

You may be left wondering why early humans spent so long being very haft-averse. The appearance of hafts to give tools leverage is a multi-layered evolutionary conundrum. This is a form of early composite technology, merging two completely different mediums in order to create a new object. This alone is a complex mental feat in an age when humans were somewhere near the middle of the food chain. It requires planning and foresight, both of which were likely in short supply when early hominins were preoccupied with thoughts of avoiding turning into lunch for a Smilodon.

A second major problem was the availability of structurally sound adhesives. It wasn’t enough to wedge an axe head into a branch, you had to bind it with cordage and secure it with adhesive that would withstand intense percussive forces.

The final point is that unless kept under very precise conditions, wood is subject to decay, which has possibly left a gap in the archaeological record. Hafted tools may well have been developed long before the first ones we’ve found half a million years ago, but we wouldn’t know because the hafts could have decomposed without ever fossilizing. 

It’s fun to think about it this way: How often do you set a tool out and forget to put it back? I have my fair share of rusted pocket knives and crusty hammers simply because food distracted me long enough to abandon them on a project. How many grilled mammoth steaks may have led to an irreversible gap in the archaeological record and, more importantly, what would grilled mammoth steak have tasted like?

Pickaxes as we know them first entered the record around 2500 B.C.E. in Egypt. These tools were used largely for the same purposes as they are today: to dislodge stone and ore while also agitating soil. The pickaxe was also used as a weapon throughout much of its existence. This makes a lot of sense to me, as I can attest to the fact that it hurts really badly to get hit with one.

The usefulness of the pickaxe increased through antiquity and into the medieval period as metallurgy advanced. Metal pickaxes had a much greater benefit over stone pickaxes because of their strength and the leverage that could be exerted by creating a curved surface at the front and back, allowing miners to use the tool as a pry lever. This is still one of the most useful functions of a pickaxe.

The military pick found its footing on medieval battlefields, eventually evolving into the war hammer. Unlike fantasy depictions of war hammers, actual war hammers very closely resembled pickaxes with a pointy and a blunt end. The pointy end could punch through armor while the blunt end could deliver concussive force. While useful and lethal as a weapon, it also came with a serious liability: the pick itself was prone to getting stuck inside of armor after delivering a blow. Even if you had killed your adversary, you were left effectively disarmed and exposed while trying to pry your weapon from their dying body.

The invention of dynamite by Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel forever shifted the use of pickaxes in mining. A relatively small amount of the explosive could blast apart rock and minimize the need for miners to chip and dig their way through the earth. This didn’t greatly affect mining jobs, as laborers would spend more time hauling than digging. The pickaxe was still a vital tool for collecting ores and coal, as disintegrating these resources with high explosives was far from ideal.

Heavier machinery came to largely replace the pickaxe in mining today. Huge boring machines with rotating heads lined with metal teeth grind up rock and spit it out onto conveyors that either dump it in a spot or deposit it into trucks for hauling. Huge macerators grind up raw ore at processing facilities to help separate ore from stone. Explosives clear the way while machines haul huge amounts of stone from place to place.

Yet we never would have been able to make all of those big fancy machines had it not been for the humble pickaxe and its hundreds of thousands of years of service.

Stay curious, 7B.