NewAtlas: Giant Ice Age hand-axe unearthed in the UK’s Medway Valley

The archeological excavation of the new Paleolithic site at Manor Farm in Frindsbury, Kent, began in early 2021, ahead of the development of the site into a new school called the Maritime Academy.

While digging into sediment thought to have been part of a tributary of the River Medway from the Middle Pleistocene age, a treasure trove of stone artefacts was unearthed – including two large flint hand-axes.

One of those – labeled Registered Find 50 – came in at a massive 230 mm (9 in) in length, though its tip was missing. But it was Registered Find 53 that really impressed, measuring 296 mm long (11.6 in), and sporting a thick butt end that gives way to an “extensively and carefully worked” blade-like tip with a shallow concave profile and sharpened edges that makes up around half of the roughly symmetrical tool’s length.

I have made hand axes, and dug them up in Kenya. That thing is a monster.

Read the whole thing at NewAtlas.com