The Stone Age

In a partially-excavated archaeological dig, in the northern Vietnamese province of Hòa Bình, a squirrely archaeologist's intern brushes caked Red River sediment off a piece of flaked cobble. The stone's sharp edge indicates that a prehistoric human has knapped, or shaped, one side of the stone into a sharp blade-like edge. This stone shares its single-edge characteristic with many other stone pieces found here and at 120 other sites. The edge is worn down, which suggests ancient hands put it to work. Perhaps the tool was used to open shells or comb coiled clay into pottery, because traces of both were also found at the site.

The rock tool is tagged, bagged, then dragged into a lab. An arcane carbon-dating procedure reveals that this knife sliced through organic material roughly 8,000 to 10,000 years ago. This tool dates back to roughly the same time period as many other tools in the region. Their discovery suggests that the culture that made them was widely distributed around the Red River delta toward the end of the last ice age. We might never know what word these people used to refer to themselves. We simply call them Hòa Bình, because that's the name of the region where we find their artifacts.

We find similar stone tools in other regions. In Phú Thọ province, the artifacts represent a much older culture than Hòa Bình. The people of the Sơn Vi culture lived between 12,000 and 20,000 years ago. Their remains have been found at 160 sites in northern Vietnam. Their knives are distinctly different from the ones in Hòa Bình. They are smaller, and the knapping is more rough.

Elsewhere, in Thanh Hóa, which is the same province where Hanoi is located, the evidence suggests a more recent stone-age culture. Called Đa Bút, they thrived about five to six thousand years ago. Their pottery is more advanced than the earlier cultures, and their stones tools are polished. The midden piles at these sites tell us that the people hunted and fished, and they probably had livestock and grew rice.

All of these cultures were stone-age, and yet they were quite different from one another. This difference is because the stone age is a gradient of humanity's shift from hunter-gatherer societies into agrarian ones. We see this shift manifested in the artifacts. The middle period knives of the Hòa Bình are larger, sharper, and more refined compared to the earlier Sơn Vi period. The finely polished tools in Thanh Hóa are more advanced still.

These tool advancements over time reflected a change in the way people lived. During the early stone age, humans migrated about the land on the hunt for megafauna. As they found fewer and fewer large animals to hunt, they also discovered the little, fast ones were quite difficult to catch. So they began to domesticate animals, grow plants, and sculpt heavy earthen vessels, with which to store food. There was an advantage to staying in one place, and so, human society became agricultural. Toolmaking skills became more finely honed, and toolmakers made more sophisticated tools.

This change from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists happened gradually over millennia. However, whenever people settled in Vietnam remains a mystery. Our only option is to look at the things they left behind and make a guess. The tools of the Sơn Vi culture reveal to us that people were living in the Vietnam region at least 12,000 years ago, and as far back as 20,000 years. Whether they became the people we call the Hòa Bình, and eventually the Đa Bút people, the ancient tools cannot say.

Artifacts tell us some of what we want to know about their cultures, but not all. A stone knife or a midden of shells might give us a clue about what kind of food people ate. But the artifacts cannot give us details about the culture such as table manners, or how they used to say "please pass the clams."

The relics from the stone age give up few secrets about the transition into the bronze age. Perhaps the stone-age people learned about metal from a nearby civilization, but whether it was ancient Thailand to the west, or China to the north, scholars are still in disagreement. Or perhaps advanced foreigners settled in the rich river delta and shared bronze technology as they intermingled with the established stone-age cultures. It's also possible that the stone-age people were simply displaced by an aggressive, superior force. The artifacts don't say. The only thing we can say for certain is through their eventual disappearance--sometime around 5000 B.C.E., the stone-age gave way to the era of bronze.