This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

In the beginning, there was design. At least according to designer and author will

lid well. Design is the oldest human discipline, older than humanity itself. And will believe

that in this oldest of old disciplines, everything ever designed. Spaceships, buildings, pyramids,

weapons, clothing, artwork, everything can be traced back to a single designed object,

the first designed object. This is as close to a genesis object as we have. I mean,

this is where it all began. If design had its own cosmos series, this would be episode

one. I think this is the greatest, grandest, like most interesting story in the field of

life. It has it all. Mystery, entry, controversy, we are on the edge of our seats. Well, wait

for it. I think like the drum roll here. The first designed object was the Ashulian hand

ax. The Ashulian hand ax, ladies and gentlemen. Actually, it doesn't look like an ax at all.

There's no handle. There's no metal. Honestly, it should be called the Ashulian pointy hand

rock. A hand ax is made of rock and it's teardrop shaped. And if you join your hands together,

as if to pray, fingers together and thumbs in, this is almost the exact shape in size of

an Ashulian hand ax. The term Ashulian refers to where the first specimens were found, which

was a dig site in St. Ashul France, but they've been found in a lot of other places. We find

that Ashulian tools are found almost exclusively in Africa, in Europe and South Asia. This is

Terence Deacon. I'm Terence Deacon, a professor of biological anthropology at the University

of California Berkeley. And Berkeley has a whole bunch of samples of these hand axes. There's

another hand ax. You can see that it's not quite so symmetric and nice, although it's

sharp at the edge. Some are sharp all along the entire perimeter,

some aren't. Some are perfectly symmetrical and some are not. But those hand axes in

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