I dunno, to me it just does not make sense that all along people were using regular meat cleavers and all of a sudden they went retarded and started making not so useful meatcleavers. All the classical books I had read when I was younger depiced them as we see them now, even today I checked my old Persian dictionary and surprisingly it had a drawing of a meatcleaver that looked as it does today. who knows, then again Western books gave many wrong names to items that make the local people
and wonder where in hell did they come up with that name for that item, since we don't know it by that name.