Prehistoric stone handaxe

The Prehistoric stone handaxe serves as an example of how a tool can be made to do more than its practical task. In the account of sexual selection developed by Geoffrey Miller, its carefully shaped form is a costly display: usefulness is not necessarily the object’s original or primary purpose, but may follow from the making of an elaborate signal.

Appearance and Practical Use

At first glance, a handaxe appears to be a practical survival tool. The text distinguishes that recognizable use from modifications that exceed what direct utility requires, especially the costly perfection of its form and its symmetry. The handaxe is therefore not treated as a simple instrument whose appearance merely decorates an already settled function. Its form raises the possibility that the object’s visible workmanship served a purpose of its own.

Costly Display and Sexual Selection

The proposed explanation is that males produced handaxes as sexual displays. Their excessive refinement required energy without necessarily improving immediate practical use; precisely that cost could make the object an effective fitness indicator. The argument turns on a reversal: the effort that seems wasteful from the standpoint of survival utility becomes meaningful as a display of capacity. A handaxe can look like a tool while also testifying, through the cost of its making, to the maker’s strength and skill.

Toolmaking and Art

The handaxe is described as a possible first art object produced by human ancestors and as an especially clear example of sexual selection favoring artistic capacity. Its significance lies in the conjunction of categories that a purely utilitarian account would separate: instinct and learning, strength and skill, sex and survival, art and craft. Rather than appearing as a late refinement added to useful production, aesthetic display is presented as an early force in the making of objects. The handaxe’s potential utility may be a by-product of this more fundamental investment in form.

Form, Use, and Significance

This reading challenges the assumption that aesthetic display is merely a secondary supplement to an instrument’s function. In the handaxe example, the direction of explanation is reversed: costly display comes first, while usefulness can follow. The object thus makes visible a broader claim about material culture—that what something does cannot always explain why it was made in the form it has. Its significance is not that practical use disappears, but that use alone cannot account for the object’s deliberate excess.