This book tells the story of both the ancient humans who made handaxes and the thoughts and ideas of scholars who have spent their lives trying to understand them.

Mark J. White is Professor of Palaeolithic Archaeology at Durham University, where he has taught since 1999. He specialises in the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic periods, and is the author of more than 120 academic papers and seven books, including The British Palaeolithic (Routledge 2012) and William Boyd Dawkins and the Victorian Science of Cave Hunting (2017).

Chapter 1: The Making Of An Archaeological Icon; Chapter 2: Enlightening Deep History, 1673-1859; Chapter 3: Inventing the Palaeolithic, 1859-1872; Chapter 4: The Fall and Rise of the Acheulean, 1873-1900; Chapter 5: Palaeolithic Series and Pleistocene Sequences, 1900-1918; Chapter 6: The Global Culture-History of the Lower Palaeolithic 1919-1939; Chapter 7: Cold Reflections on the Palaeolithic, 1940-1962; Chapter 8: New Perspectives in Archaeology: Process, Adaptation and Behaviour 1962-1980; Chapter 9: Not Very Much Like US: Frames of Reference for a Processual Palaeolithic, 1980-1999; Chapter 10: Social Archaeology and The Millennial Handaxe, 1994-2020; Chapter 11: A Future Shaped by the Past.