The roughly hewn goober had been strapped to the back of a logging truck, hauled across the country and parked near the White House.

“What the Acropolis was to Ancient Greece during her Golden Age, the new Civic Center now being hewn from the shabby slopes of Bunker Hill will be to Los Angeles,” The Times wrote in 1957.

Imagine running your fingers over the jagged grey marble from which two gladiatrices were hewn thousands of years ago.

Other kinds of complex technologies also developed in the Middle Pleistocene, including wooden structures constructed with logs hewn using hafted tools, which are stone blades affixed to wooden or bone handles.

Cars lie crushed and tossed aside where they were hewn out of the path of Israel's D9 armoured bulldozers.