All the carefully focused and planned creativity required to make this axe implies an enormous advance in how our ancestors saw the world and how their brains worked. … The handaxe may also contain the evidence of something even more remarkable: this chipped stone tool may hold the secret of speech, and it may have been in making things like this that we learnt how to talk to one another.

Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 1…, loc. 96