The Stone Battle Axe of Neolithic Europe 

Mjolnir= Molniya( lightning in Russian or probably old Slavonic language. ) Also, remember Indo- European languages are interconnected. Can't find clear word meaning in one Indo-European language than look for this word's meaning in another Indo-European language.

Yes there are many links in other IE languages.

@@rossmelnyk1900 Mjol = flour and -ir means it's someone who does something (like the -er in runner or dancer). So this name means "grinds things into flour". My guess is that Molniya is a loanword from Old Norse - vikings settled Russia, after all.

@@user-ms4cm4qf5j It is practically Church Slavic.

@@user-ms4cm4qf5j Russian language just like many other Slavic languages still contains many root words from old Slavonic language...

As an archer I'm deeply offended! Joke aside, I can tell indeed that having the whole warfare system centered around bows and arrows would be a mess, as only a few well placed arrows would cause the death or even incapacitate a human for the course of a battle, even if he'd die from infection days later. You could probably end with guys with mutliple arrows stuck in their bodies still goind around, waiting to be stabbed by the victors, or even carrying on fighting... On the other hand, you'd be surprised how precise you can get even with home-made primitive bows. I saw people doing it, I'm a traditional longbow guy myself but there's not much technology difference between an english longbow and primitive bows from the bronze age, and I can get the heart of a animal target at 25 yards. I have no doubt that the average archer back in the days were incredibly more skilled than me. So in ambush, a group of skilled archers could easily pick their target and dispose of a same sized group in a matter of seconds. Arrows to the heart or the neck at 15-20 yards would be terribly effective.

Nice!

Well it is best left to the thorough discussion on the warfare of the neolithic, maube they had shealds, or did ambushes or else. There's just to much things going on so the close combat and in the distance reqire proper tools

@@KroM234 It depend on who they're fighting and the development of defensive apparel. As an example, the Korean are a primarily bow and arrow culture and was praised for their accuracy and skills by the Japanese when they invaded. Well, the Korean lose most of the land battle and had it not due to the Korean Navy, Korea would probably be a Japanese core province by now. Just goes to show that bow and arrows may kills but it can't hold off a army of charging mad men, more so if they have decent armour.

@@KroM234 When I constantly practiced archery growing up (adulting takes up way to much time) I could shoot a U.S. Quarter off the top of our target at 30 yards every time. I shot and still shoot compound, longbow and short bow/recurve and have done so for over 35 years

Very cool.

Great story, I loved it. I only had one find, it was one half of a stone axe for normal use. In the mid 80's as I landed with the ferry at the small Danish island of Barsø, I noticed the gravel cliff to the right. I just felt it and said to the others "now I'm gonna find a stone axe", went right over there, looked for 10 seconds and picked it up. I never found another one. PS. Yours own channels video on Buster Kreaton in the Finnish press looks interesting, I'm gonna watch it. Greetings from Denmark.

@@larsrons7937 Great, I hope you enjoy it! I filmed it as part of the Buster Keaton Festival last year.

@@bang7764 Thanks. I am looking forward to it. As a child in the 1970's I enjoyed watching Buster Keaton on TV, and as I grew up I realised how much acting and work he put into his productions. A Buster Keaton festival, that would have been interesting to experience. I am used to my local Roskilde Rock Festival, that's not as silent as Buster Keaton.

legalized theft

almost as if to say "we remember"

Great stroy Communicating with ancestors, even if it is through a weapon, is an interesting and strange feeling

Although I really love the look of a finely knapped hand axe. Beautiful works.

I'm a Knapper. Most of my axes have a fairly uniform edge, percussion flaked. Havent used them like a prehistoric man would have had to but I've knocked down a couple trees. Never considered that it would be damaging to the piece, but on a small scale I'm sure its fine.

Have you ever considered that maybe a polished axe was better for striking wood to break up the fivers for easier fire building? I’ve been in the woods most of my life and have pounded sticks with rocks in the rain to get a fire going. Breaks down the pulp and pushes moisture out of the branches. Maybe they carried 2 different axes for different uses? We don’t know,we weren’t there,it’s all modern supposition by ‘experts’.

Have you tried it? I heard what the video said, but I'm trying to imagine actually using those axes to cut down trees. Still if that's the only axes they had, they must have used them for more than war.

@@dorasmith7875 I've tried it using polished and knapped heads. Either way is much slower than a steel axe head, taking 2-3 times as many swings with similar weighted heads. The polished head would smash the fibers of the wood, and removed material by breaking the chunks off rather than cutting through the fibers. The knapped piece needed to have the edge reworked after using it, there was a noticeable decline in performance during the experiment. The polished head did not have this problem. Of course, the steel axe head was much faster and did not require much resharpening.

Good point, thank you.

I had to make a short handle shock absorbing hammer myself, it's absurd that they are never sold in a mid length.

I have just read your comment about the accuracy of a short handled sledge over a longer handled. I have an acquaintance who was apprenticed quarryman at 15, who spent years driving rock drills in a ring of three men,who would disagree with you ! The usual reason for cutting down “flogging hammers” is space to swing.

@@CrimeVid I know what I'm talking about. And that maybe so but that doesn't change the fact that what I said is correct.

Popular with Ironworkers too. They call them Beaters. Something you can take up on the steel with you I guess.

The indoeuropean mind was devoted to status and wealth. And shiny things.

@@notexactlyrocketscience literally every human group on earth adorns itself. It’s one of the most human things.

@@gildedpeahen876 check out PIE vocabulary, there is like one entire sub-register devoted to shinies

"look at this guy! He's got fake casting seams on his stone axe! He can't even afford a copper axe, and his people call him 'big man'!"

You're right of course. I edited out the part talking about the literary sources - ie Snorri Sturluson - before going into the linguistic evidence. And what a wonderful name to have, it evokes such solidity.

Ditto in Sweden

There’s a famous American movie composer named Hammerstein.

What are the words for "stinky fart?"

In Finnish language the blunt side of axe head is called hamara.

Thank you.

lol

I wonder if they ever considered what could stop a bad guy with an axe..

Lol

@@blanketparty5259 they didn't need to wonder, they knew.

@@AusDenBergen smart people

Yeah that's absolutely true.

Every man has probably imagined what it would be like to strike an opponent with one. Trepanation is right

Ever picked up a long-handled felling axe? I love the feel of those!

@@ahuramazda32 more than just men. lol Trepanation, though, isn’t really possible with a hammer - it’s much slower and precise, usually done for surgery or ceremonial purposes. It’s still a method of releasing pressure from the brain today.

@@doubtful_seer I know

Childhood memory unlocked successfully I believe my grandma's one is somewhere in the house, i should look for it. It doubled as a sharpening stone also.

@@riograndedosulball248 i still remember when my father told me about them when i was a kid. How people usually retrieved these stones from the split trees that stopped their fall.

Yeah it's crazy good isn't it.

Donner is the name of the reindeer

Donner is the germanic, indo germanic word for thunder. Used today. Blitz means lightning. Thor is a later afterthought. The assumption of magical uses of axehammers is vastly overblown. Its a multitool to clear and also effective against wild pig, wolves and raiders. Lets not use the word warrior. Its raiders.

Wow!

Swedish,," ,Blixt och Dunder"

Now does this term come from the Indo-europan descendants who migrated there, or is it from the indigenous peoples?

@@torfinnzempel6123 if the land bridge theory is true, could be that the axe comes from the mammoth hunters of the north, adopted by the predecessors of their yamna children

and the tupi-guarani creation myth also tells about one of ñanderuvusu aspects: tupã, the thunder and creator of the mankind.

Thank you, Hugo. Yes you're right, one aspect of thunderstones I left out was the iron-rich pyrites that spark when struck with another stone. There is a fossil bed near me on the east coast where tons of the fossilised plant material - sticks and bark - is iron pyrite. And this was also an area where Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic people made their axes and tools. I often wonder what they made of these iron rich things coming out of the cliffs and from the earth.

@@DanDavisHistory I have been reading about the Neolithic/ Indo European era for about 35 years, trying, not very successfully, to get an understanding of it. Your channel really helps. Thanks!

That's great to hear, thank you.

Do stone axes throw sparks though? I think the spark you see when you hit stone with a steel hammer, is a tiny piece of steel that is sheared off and super-heated but the force of the impact.

@@JH-lo9ut Good point. It might be worth striking 2 stones together in the dark. Flint will definitely produce a spark.

Vasara, Avestan 'Vazra', Sankrit 'Vajra'. There's a whole lotta hammers and thunderbolts going on here, beratna. It's summer soon, so I'm going to catch some beautiful thunderstorms near the local bronze age graves, they tend to be on beautiful sites nearby with a nice ocean view. Greetings from Herttoniemi!

The Finnish word "hamara" likeness to "hammer" seems to be a coincidence - either that, or there may have been some interactions shaping the modern variant of the word. It seems to originally come from proto-Finno-Permic *šamᴈ, but this is apparently not certain.

@@tohaason If the axe-hammer thing were exclusive to stone age it could very well be a coincidence but axe-hammers were in use far into late medieval times too. Pole Axe is one easy example, long polearm with axe head on one side and hammer in the other. And crows beak, a hammer on one side and warpick on other. Hammer has been a combined with various tools and weapons through the history so the word Hamara could very well be derived from those. Personally I never realised this until today but now it seems so obvious. It could still be wrong, but until proven otherwise this is my headcanon from now on. 😁

@@MaaZeus Poleaxes and crows beaks are not altogether good examples. They appear pretty much simultaneously with plate armor which happens only in the 14th century and even then takes time to become common. Furthermore, their popularity was high with men-at-arms and knights whereas lower social classes often preferred bladed staff weapons such as halberds, billhooks, partisans, glaives or swordstaves. This can readily be seen from the surviving examples; Poleaxes are often of fine craftsmanship and decoration is not an uncommon feature. Billhooks and halberds are often plain to the point of visual crudeness, though the weapon itself retains it's effectiveness of course. In the context of earlier medieval armor, being less available to poorer classes overall and mostly consisting of chainmail and cloth armor such as gambesons, weapons such as spears, greataxes and swords appear in great prevalence and blunt weapons are relatively rarer and often used as sideweapons by heavy cavalry.

​@@tohaason Hyllested suggested that it's not a mere coincidence, but I'm sure you already knew this. There are plenty of words in Finnish from Proto-Germanic. But I know you knew that too.

Looks like your amazing work Dan is paying off! Near 80k now! Time to 10x again! You deserve all the success possible! Absolutely love your videos Dan! You are such an amazing storyteller, along with having such a passion for history, and knowing the actual facts well enough to know how to bend and embellish them respectfully with artistic intent within your own fiction! You can’t artfully do that without knowing the history deeply! Please keep these videos coming!

Absolutely. I've got an aluminum Tee-Ball (children's baseball for non North Americans) bat next to my bed. One of the best melee weapons one could ask for.

That is very interesting, I never thought to think of the sky as a plane of stone and it would be interesting to imagine how they viewed their heavens. I hope if you ever find yourself in a rock yurt that it is a one friend.

Same here!...:-)

Wonderful, thank you, I'm glad you found us.

That's great, I'm pleased the right kind of people are finding the videos.

Especially for game and using the whole animal. Breaking the spine away from the ribs, splitting large bones for the marrow and breaking muscle fibers to make tougher cuts prepared for cooking and eating. The speculation that they were used as grinders bothers me. It’s the hole in the head where a handle goes. If used as a mortar and pestle, then the wooden handle that sticks out the top would interfere. Maybe used without handle, but then the hole gathers the food you are trying to grind. You could still do it, just seems to be a pain. My first thought was root foraging. That and it being the general tool of the house, scraping, pounding, digging and snake killing. Gotta mix mud and straw to fix house, pound that with the mini axe. Need to prep whole grain dough for flat cakes, mini axe head. Have a vole in your tubar spot, mini axe head.

Thank you, glad you liked it.

Thank you.

Thank you!

Thank you.

Metal work=lame might alot to do with arsenical bronze being toxic to work with aswell as being the earliest and only form of "bronze"(really just copper with a small amount of arsenic added to make it harder) for quite awhile before true bronze(using tin) was discovered

Munja in Serbian. Comes to mind that flint stone is used to light a fire because - sparks (like lightning).

Agreed. A proto-Indo-European or Indo-European etymological dictionary is a necessity.

@@ShamanKish There used to be folk beliefs in ex Yugoslav countries (and probably elsewhere) up to the mid 20th century, that the Stone Age arrowpoints or axe-heads etc. dug up by in fields were remnants of thunderbolts. In some areas these were called St Elijah's arrows.

@@davidmandic3417 And St Elijah = Christian replacement for Perun.

@@ShamanKish There is a mountain top sort of near where I grew up still called Perun. Some hilltops are called St Elijah (Sv Ilija) so that's connected (probably)... like places around which clouds tend to gather so there's lightning etc.

Ha, no way. That's awesome. Thanks very much.

in guarani mythology, tupã is an emanation of the "almighty god" (ñanderuvusu) and he takes the lightning and thunder to manifest. interesting, tupã also creates the mankind and names the first man "rupave", and it means "the father of the people".

(i know these peoples and cultures are not related, but i think its interesting anyway)

lol... this is also the reply of the museum guide showing us the very ax george washington used to chop down the cherry tree!

Yeah that's the Trigger's broom quote, well spotted.

Sounds like a great idea.

Country boy here, made a few .. wooden mallets .. as a teenager, they sound like .. thunder .. when they hit tree trunks. Wicker branch shields cover in deer raw hide just don't hold up to a club/ hammer hit, not to bad at deflecting stone spears. You do not " block " with a shield, you counter hit/ deflect with a shield. The kinetic energy just travels into your forearm and leaves a lot of bruising or risk a broken bone if you block like they do in the movies. As a quick make, just buy an axe handle and cut a pair of 2"x6" board to double into a 4" to 6" thickness and drill a hole through the set and wood pug them together. If you want the .. real experience .. along with over a month worth of effort, create a bow drill and nap an arrow head for a drill bit instead of using a power drill.

@@krispalermo8133 nothing like a good tactile experience to drive the idea home

@@donjuanfrogprince8421 I had a really cool grandpa, and he was a descend from a few hundred year old German military family that was in control of forestry and timber lands and both of my grand mothers grew up on farms during the Great Depression. Coming out of the Cold War, they still didn't have a lot of faith in current society, so granny would taunt as grand children that we couldn't handle what life was like when she was a child. End result, by the time I was 17 years old, I bush craft a winter mud hut and grew a garden that could feed three on my own, along with learning how to smelt rusted steel into useful hand forge farm tools. Sad thing is, I know how easy it is to get your efforts vandalized and lose everything you worked for multiple times over. Some states/ counties are not friendly to homesteaders or those who seek to have a .. basic .. education in life. Lost one teenage friend in the 1990's that was bullied/ hounded into suicide by azz holes in school and the lack of empathy from his own family cause he was majoring in jet engineering. The rest just said .. F .. their parents leaving town and never came back. I stuck around to take care of my grand parents and now my dad in a wheel chair. My grandpa was a 1960's US Navy tech, he should us how to reshape metal fire place air duck fan blades to function as an air compressor. Render down bell pepper & onion juice into " vegetable " cooking oil and ferment it into alcohol and run his pre 1990's diesel riding law mowers with it. Mix the .. cooking oil .. with bacon lye and you can get some really hot fires. So using that as fuel for a jerry rig ram jet to feed air into a blast forge to cook your own steels and lime stone for concrete is a hot, dangerous, fun past time. Till someone wreaks it. Sorry for the short rant, just spreading ideals and reasons behind them. Hope you have a good weekend, and G*D bless.

@@krispalermo8133 wow, thats wild, probably a better story than what I'll out down

The name of the paper is in the description.

There is no evidence that vikings or other nordic people have been using psychoactive mushrooms. This is, as far as I've found, no more than a myth and a widely believed piece of misinformation. This factoid seems to derive from an assumption made by an 18'th century scholar, who presents no evidence whatsoever, and a misreading of a research paper by R. Gordon Wasson. Wasson wrote about Shamanisric use of fly agaric by reindeer herders. People assume this is the Sami people of northern Scandinavia, but it is not. Wasson's study was conducted in the far east of Russia. People have been trying to prove ancient use of hallucinogenic drugs in the old world for a long time, but there is very, very little hard evidence for it. Hallucinogenic mushrooms containing psilocybin were widely used in the Americas, but so far, we have no evidence of it in the old world before the 1940's, even if psilocybin mushrooms grow here. The hallucinogenic properties of the Fly agaric was known, but there is very little to no historical data on it's use. Refer to Dennis McKenna who probably is the worlds foremost expert in this field.

Thank you. Very cool!

@@DanDavisHistory I have found your videos immensely engrossing for a time which there is so much to learn about.

I thought the same. The German term is Spalthammer. Noteable how the heavy version of the tool is not really called an axe even today.

Agree. You may need a big heavy axe to kill someone wearing a medieval suit of armour , but this does not apply here , and I am sure someone swiftly jabbing at you with a spear is harder to avoid than someone swinging a big heavy axe .

They do look like that and surely they were used like that. However use wear testing shows that at least the ones from Britain were used as general tools, like the smaller ones. No one expected that, seems weird.

@@DanDavisHistory Sweet as. Thanks for replying.

Thank you.

Thank you. And I hope you enjoy the stories.

Do the gods lead us, or do we lead the gods?

People keep their first beliefs and over time adapt them to the things they discover or create. This happened to the Indo-European people wherever they went.

​@@doubtful_seer we lead them

@@alixpowrt3456 What I want to say is how something real turns into a religious myth over time

Thanks, Bro, I appreciate it. I honestly have no idea how you manage to make videos that are 2.5h hours long, doing half hour nearly ended me. Cheers!

Hammer axe is / was a name given to mauls in some places. These hammer axes were named and categorised from the 19th century onwards mainly in Germany and Denmark but also Britain. The tool we call a maul today has had other names in the recent past. And use wear testing shows they were used for cutting solid trunks - I don't think they tested splitting- but also all other homestead tasks like breaking smaller diameter branches, twigs, roots and soil, and bone. So they are general use tools - and probably weapons - used in the same way as the smaller ones and not just as mauls.

Double headed axes are lousy weapons. A guy with a pointy stick will poke you before you could even swing it. Battle axes are light unless they are designed to smash through armour. They didnt have heavy metal armour in the Neolithic. Those look like mails not weapons.

@@RobertStCyr-pe7ic it isn't a double headed axe though, it's essentially the same weapon as a war hammer. It has a blunt side for striking and the axe side is like the beak on the backside of a war hammer. Dunning Krueger in effect, try listening and learning before you speak.

I thought the exact same thing--it is very reminiscent of Migration Era/Viking period sword pommels, which require a different style grip on the sword than later medieval pommels allow for. It wouldn't be too surprising if the likeness was on purpose.

Thank you. I don't know who that is but I appreciate it.

Well, thank you very much. Yes I will cover many time periods. I already have a video on King John and another on the 1216 invasion of England on this channel. I need to make a video about Richard the Lionheart and another about William of Cassingham.

@@DanDavisHistory I didn't know he was a real figure. I thought he was one of your creations 👍 William, I mean.

Yeah not much is known about him but he's a remarkable figure. I talk about him a bit in my video "The Forgotten Invasion of England".

Me too. They're out there, just waiting to be found. There's a beach near me on the North Sea coast where they have been found before just by random nobodies like me. I will find one there one day.

@@DanDavisHistory I hope you do. And when you do, please share picks video of it and how you found it!

Similar to finding an arrowhead here from Native people. Hard to do unless you know where to look.

Thank you yes they were expert stone workers.

@@DanDavisHistory Wood drill bit, .. a.) Fire scrap a stick/ staff. b.) Once the stick is to size, soak the drill bit in water and cover with a bit of mud mix with a whole bunch of sand. " sand grinding bit." c.) To work the staff/ stick with more effect, use a bow drill worked by four people with one person holding the bit into proper place. d.) For greater effect rope a tree branch as a counter tug. Great grandfather was a German officer veteran of WW I from a few hundred year old military family that was also in change of forestry for building timber and hunting. He fled Germany to the USA after WW I for better work and a few generational blood feuds cause by Germany's 1800's civil war. He married a baker daughter. My Grandfather was a USA Navy tech engineer during the 1960's and later mortgage some old farm land with light forest hill ravines by the house. I was around five years old when I saw my grandpa take a hemp rope, soak it in water and cover it in sandy mud .. fun play time for a child, then he tied that rope to a tree branch and over a half a day of effort for him cut a good size few ton rock in half. As children we just thought we were playing. Then as a group of five year olds, we made a grass/ weed root rope and mud rope cut a few small trees down, where by grandma took a willow branch to us grandchildren. As by the age of nine after watching the movie " Clan of the Cave Bear," my grandpa taught me to hunt with a sling. And make small fire harden mud huts to bake bread in. When I become a teenager, we made tree/ shrub branch huts, mud plaster them with about half a foot to 30cm/1ft of mud, and fire harden them into over size bread ovens and smoke houses. Them could sleep four to five during winter and were very warm. Took close to a dozen tries to learn how to control the fire to keep from cracking the dry mud walls to create a solid shell. Deer landed on a few of them jump/ running out of the tree line and corn field from coyotes. Some of the other were wreak by city folk cause they were jerks claiming the huts were Un American & pagan un Christian witchcraft, " deep sigh .. blood fist fights.." The 1990's were a fun time to live in, so was the 80's. It is wonderful growing up bushcraft and reading or hearing from the teachers about some part of the pass history, and saying to yourself, .. " That is not right. That is not how it is done." I didn't mostly .. get .. along .. with the people that rode my school bus/ they lived in the two near by trailer park., but we did walked .. " Stony Creek, " .. yes that was the name of the water way, which had a lot of flat slate stone, perfect for .. water skipping/ difficult as to get for napping. But if you take a three pound stone and grind and edge around the stone and launch it from a sling, it can splitter small trees to fall over, and burry itself .. deep .. into a white tail buck rib cag. Over than having basic level video games in the early 1990's as teenagers, my .. neighborhood .. peer group did do a bit of grass root stone age hunting along with re smelting/ casting used rusted iron within homemade mud fire bricks. Nothing is finer being around someone where the two of you just want to beat the hell out of each other, but he is spending a night/ week at your grandparents house, for .. reasons .. Hope you are having a better time dealing with teenagers than what my grandparents had to deal with. Have a good up coming weekend and G*D bless the both of you, good night Eric.

they could have rubbed it with silk and used it to shock their brothers

Useless info: if a dog wears amber beads around its neck, it keeps it free from ticks and fleas, exactly because the fur gets loaded with electrostatic energy. For some reason, it doesn't work for cats. (I altered a bracelet for my pooch, and it really works.)

Thank you David.

The study only looked at the north of Britain - Northern England, southern Scotland and the Isle of Man. That's why they are there and not in the south, the study limited itself to those areas shown.

@@DanDavisHistory ah ok, thanks for the clarification 👍🏻

I'm sorry, I should have been clearer in the video or not used the images.

I doubt it.

At this point in time anything is just conjecture, but certainly possible - why would you go looking for a nut-cracking tool if you had one round your neck already?