By the beginning of the Neolithic era, the Ice Age had ended. Significant changes were occurring in people’s lives. During this era, mankind mastered new, softer, stone materials, such as slate and sandstone. Along with this, new methods of stone processing began to appear: sawing, grinding, and drilling.

Drilling is the most common method of processing any material. Holes are needed for architectural, household, jewelry, ritual, or symbolic purposes.

Based on archaeological finds, ancient people knew how to drill, and they did so diversely and effectively. The artifacts discovered by researchers indicate that people mastered the skill of drilling several thousand years ago.

The appearance of products with holes is dated by researchers to the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic. At the end of the Upper Paleolithic, numerous archaeological complexes featured pendants and beads made of stone, animal teeth, shells, and mammoth ivory with cavities created by drilling.

This technology developed from previously known methods of piercing and scraping depressions in stone materials. The manual method of rotating the stick by friction for drilling was replaced by a more productive method of rotation using a cord that was wound on a stick, and then alternately pulled from one end to the other.

By connecting the ends of a rope to a curved stick in the form of a bow, early humans discovered they could make reciprocating rotary movements of the drill with one hand while using the other hand for auxiliary tasks. This is how the methods of beam and inertial drilling emerged.

Stone and later bone were used as drill materials. Animal bones, usually hollow and of large diameter, were commonly used. Quartz sand was poured into the bone performing the role of an abrasive. It was a fundamental and important improvement that greatly expanded the drilling possibilities. As work progressed, the sand gradually poured out from the hollow of the drill under the edges of the crown, slowly grinding the drilled stone.

Since the success of drilling largely depended on the pressure applied, artificial weights were later used. This simple but effective construction is still used today by the peoples of the North for drilling wood, bone, and even sheet iron.