I was sorting through my parents storage when I came across a box labeled as "rocks". I opened this up and my dad tells me about all these arrowheads and stone tools my dad and grandfather found in Libya during the early 1960s. There are dozens of arrowheads, scrapers, awls, petrified ostrich eggs, and mortar and pestles. My dad was pretty young at the time, but he recalls being deep in the Saharan desert and them finding all these stone arrowheads and tools in the sand. He suspects they came from a battle field and are obviously very old.
Does anyone have any idea what age these could be from? How common are artifacts like this? From what I can tell, they are ancient and resemble relics I've seen in museums. I'm not sure what to do with them at this point and any information would be appreciated.
I don't have any experience studying stone age toolmaking traditions, so I can't identify what tradition these tools belong to or how old they might be. I doubt that there is someone on this subreddit who is familiar with North African lithics.
However, I was able to look through African Archaeology by David Phillipson, and he lists several traditions that existed in Cyrenaica, including Aterian (130,000-70,000 years ago), Levalloiso-Mousterian (60,000-40,000 years ago), Dabban (40,000-14,000), Eastern Oranian (14,000-10,000 y.a.), Lybico-Capsian (12,000-8,500 y.a.)
Of course, there are even more recent lithic traditions in Libya, but Phillipson doesn't seem to cover them.
Again, I don't have the expertise to tell what traditions these tools belong to. I suspect it would take a careful eye, and some expertise to say, for instance, that the mortar and pestle is characteristic of one of these traditions.
It is also unfortunate that the exact location these were found doesn't seem to be remembered. More information like "in the far south of libya" or "near the tunisian border" or "near the egyptian border" might help rule in or rule out certain traditions.
But, in this situation, where the artefacts have been sitting in a box for 50 years, they aren't informative from an archaeological standpoint. The arrowheads and tools by themselves tell us far less than if we had detailed information about their location, what soil-layer they were in, if there was any other pottery or organic materials around, etc.
Of course, it is also possible, even likely that these tools were exposed at the surface in the open desert. In that context, from what I have read, it can be harder to date such materials in the absence of pottery or botanical clues.
As to how common such artefacts are (i.e. stone arrowheads without context, from the Sahara), they are pretty common. Googling around for "sahara stone arrowheads" turns up forums for arrowhead collectors, and anecdotes about buying them in the thousands for 10-20 dollars.
For what to do with them, I'd recommend you just treat them as a neat piece of family history.