Are hand axes works of art?

It's hard not to be fascinated by hand axes, those enigmatic guide fossils of the Lower Paleolithic. Hand axes were symmetrical tools produced by diverse species of hominids from about 1.7 million years ago. A small proportion of them are highly symmetrical, finely finished and polished, much beyond what you would expect for purely practical purposes. The beauty of such extreme hand axes has made some people muse whether they could be considered as artworks. For instance, the philosopher of art Gregory Currie describes a British hand axe as follows:

a piece of worked stone, shaped as an elongated tear drop, roughly symmetrical in two dimensions, with a twist to the symmetry which has retained an embedded fossil. In size and shape it would not have been a useful butchery implement, and is worked on to a degree out of proportion to any likely use. While it may be too much to call it an “early work of art,” it is at least suggestive of an aesthetic sensibility (Currie, 2009, 1).

Archaeologists have voiced similar sentiments:

If one stresses aesthetics […] at least a borderline, case of art before modern humans is provided by a tiny proportion of the billions of Acheulean handaxes produced in Africa and, subsequently, Eurasia from about 1.5 million to 35,000 years ago (if the Mousterian of Acheulean Tradition is included). An estimated 1 in 100, or perhaps even 1 per 50 (which is an enormous number, given the total amount of handaxes) shows up symmetry and regularity seemingly beyond practical requirements (Corbey, Layton & Tanner, 2008).

So can we go a bit further and argue that these hand axes are, or could be, works of art?

To decide this, we would need more information on the function and context in which hand axes were produced. Many institutional and historical concepts of art (e.g., Levinson's; Danto's) require that one have some idea about the intentions of the makers and the current art historical context. Here's where it gets tricky. Hand axes appear in a large part of the Old World, in Africa, Europe and Western Asia, but they are rare or absent in Asia beyond the so-called Movius line. Most hand axes are not particularly or finely finished (perhaps only 1 in 50 is), but even the rougher exemplars conform to standard of form. For instance, a recent analyses found that the proportion length to breadth of a large sample of handaxes from Europe and Africa falls within the golden ratio.

The wide occurrence of hand axes in Lower Paleolithic layers, often with high proportions of hand axes with very little or no wear traces, has given rise to speculations about a possible aesthetic function. Controversial but widely discussed is Mithen and Kohn's sexy hand axe theory, which proposes that hand axes are a form of courtship display. They were to ancient hominids what bowers are to bowerbirds, or tails to peacocks: an honest signal of mate quality. Recently, Penny Spikins proposed an alternative theory that proposes that the beauty of hand axes, combined with the expertise to make them, was a signal of trustworthiness, and a costly gesture of goodwill to others. Lower paleolithic hominids, which collaborated extensively, for instance in large game hunting, required reliable partners willing to go the extra mile, and displaying their trustworthiness was one way of achieving this.

If these analyses are correct, can we say that hand axes are artworks, for instance, using an institutional or historical concept of art? It's a bit challenging because most small-scale cultures do not have a term for "art" or "artist", although they do have concepts of beauty. I have argued in a recent paper in JAAC that a historical concept of artworks can be adapted to fit early artworks, such as the mammoth ivory sculptures of Swabia (Germany) (dated to ca. 40-30,000 years ago) or the rock paintings in the French Dordogne (dated to 30,000-12,000 years ago). Levinson holds that something is a work of art, if it is intended to be appreciated in the ways in which artworks have been hitherto appreciated. If hominids indeed appraised hand axes for their fine aesthetic qualities, one could argue that they were part of such a chain of artworks. However, one wants to avoid broadening the concept of art so that, say, bowers of bowerbirds - which are also objects created within a sexual selection context - fall into its extension (someone like Darwin would not have minded this, of course).