The Homa Peninsula, in southwestern Kenya, continues to yield insights into Oldowan hominin landscape behaviors. The Late Pliocene locality of Nyayanga (∼3–2.6 Ma) preserves some of the oldest ...Oldowan tools. At the Early Pleistocene locality of Kanjera South (∼2 Ma) toolmakers procured a diversity of raw materials from over 10 km away and strategically reduced them in a grassland-dominated ecosystem. Here, we report findings from Sare-Abururu, a younger (∼1.7 Ma) Oldowan locality approximately 12 km southeast of Kanjera South and 18 km east of Nyayanga. Sare-Abururu has yielded 1754 artifacts in relatively undisturbed low-energy silts and sands. Stable isotopic analysis of pedogenic carbonates suggests that hominin activities were carried out in a grassland-dominated setting with similar vegetation structure as documented at Kanjera South. The composition of a nearby paleo-conglomerate indicates that high-quality stone raw materials were locally abundant. Toolmakers at Sare-Abururu produced angular fragments from quartz pebbles, representing a considerable contrast to the strategies used to reduce high quality raw materials at Kanjera South. Although lithic reduction at Sare-Abururu was technologically simple, toolmakers proficiently produced cutting edges, made few mistakes and exhibited a mastery of platform management, demonstrating that expedient technical strategies do not necessarily indicate a lack of skill or suitable raw materials. Lithic procurement and reduction patterns on the Homa Peninsula appear to reflect variation in local resource contexts rather than large-scale evolutionary changes in mobility, energy budget, or toolmaker cognition.
The iconic Paleoindian projectile points of the northern portion of the North American Great Plains—Clovis, Folsom, Agate Basin, Plainview (Goshen), Hell Gap, Alberta, Scottsbluff, and Eden—span ...nearly 4,000 radiocarbon years. Here, we apply recent findings from experimental archaeology to a database of 343 Paleoindian points to better understand how well these point types potentially functioned relative to each other in terms of penetration. Given that tip cross-sectional area (TCSA) and tip cross-sectional perimeter (TCSP) inversely correlate with penetration depth, we measured and analyzed these two attributes on each specimen in our database. Our results indicate significant differences in the Paleoindian point types’ tip cross-sectional geometries, suggesting that these points were not equally effective at penetration and that there is not a progressive trend in penetration effectiveness from Early to Late Paleoindian times. We conclude with a discussion of hypothetical Paleoindian point evolution and the reasons for the possible selection for or against penetration. The results speak to the assessment of archaeological and ethnographic technologies with full knowledge of their performance potential as gleaned from experimental archaeology. Such knowledge will help anthropologists propose more robust hypotheses involving the evolution of technology and culture, both past and present.
•Pleistocene people used different raw materials in the production of their technologies.•We produced replica Clovis bone and stone points based off those from Sheriden Cave, Ohio.•We compared the ...bone and stone points in terms of target penetration depth.•The stone points outperformed the bone points.•Experiments do not provide archaeological answers.
Stone Age hunter-gatherers likely often had choices concerning the raw materials used in the production of their technologies. How different raw materials performed once transformed into tools was one potential consideration that influenced raw material choices. Here, we present an experiment comparing replica Late Pleistocene North American Clovis culture osseous weapon tips versus stone tips in terms of how well each penetrates a target. We focused our efforts specifically on bone and stone point forms similar to those from the Sheriden Cave site, Ohio. Our results show that the bone point form penetrated significantly shallower than the stone point form. This result is consistent with the hypothesis that penetration depth was not a motivating factor in the production of bone point forms at Sheriden Cave. We suggest that other factors, such as raw material availability, craftsperson skill and experience, or tool durability may better explain the presence of bone points at the site. However, more broadly, our study illustrates that experiments do not provide answers about the past, but instead should be employed as theoretical tools to help frame testing and interpretation of the archaeological record.
Although many species display behavioural traditions, human culture is unique in the complexity of its technological, symbolic and social contents. Is this extraordinary complexity a product of ...cognitive evolution, cultural evolution or some interaction of the two? Answering this question will require a much better understanding of patterns of increasing cultural diversity, complexity and rates of change in human evolution. Palaeolithic stone tools provide a relatively abundant and continuous record of such change, but a systematic method for describing the complexity and diversity of these early technologies has yet to be developed. Here, an initial attempt at such a system is presented. Results suggest that rates of Palaeolithic culture change may have been underestimated and that there is a direct relationship between increasing technological complexity and diversity. Cognitive evolution and the greater latitude for cultural variation afforded by increasingly complex technologies may play complementary roles in explaining this pattern.
South Africa and Lesotho (SAL) have been inhabited by tool-producing hominins for at least two million years. Most of the information we have about the activities and technological skills of Stone ...Age people is thanks to the durability of stone tools that not only provide evidence for the presence of humans, but more importantly, encode human technological achievements during more than 99% of the history of our genus. The characteristics of this long and probably continuous history of human occupation of an extensive landmass have been influenced to some extent by changes in demography, socioeconomic factors and environmental variations affected by geology, geomorphology, climate, fauna and flora. The result is an extraordinarily rich and complex record of social and technological changes throughout the Stone Age. Archaeological research over the past century or more has uncovered an ever-increasing variety of data, yet researchers continue to face the challenge of meaningfully describing the variability in stone tool manufacture through time and across space, and investigating the nature of, and reasons for, change. Classification schemes have been concerned with both form and function of stone tools, and have recently begun to pay more attention to the techniques of manufacture as well. The purpose of this short discussion paper and its Appendix is to examine the criteria for classification of stages in the Stone Age sequence, to draw together new information on dated assemblages to improve our knowledge of the technological sequence, and to propose a few adjustments to the nomenclature.
•First functional study on macrolithic tools from Ertebølle/ Funnel Beaker site.•Excellent organic preservation allows for high-resolution analyses.•Combined approach of analyses of use wear, ...residues, raw materials and experiments.•Potential of macrolithic tools for deciphering of daily activities.•Resource processing strategies at the transition to Neolithic.
We present the first techno-functional study on macrolithic tools from a late Mesolithic Ertebølle/ early Neolithic Funnel Beaker context: sandstone slabs from the submerged site Neustadt LA 156 (Northern Germany) have been investigated by a combined approach of use wear and residue analyses, including biochemical staining, FTIR and SEM/EDX. Checked against results from experiments with respective raw materials we reconstructed the use lifes of the slabs. The excellently preserved organic residues allow for high resolution reconstructions of the slab’s functions. The unmodified, inconspicuous stones have been versatilely used as tools in different settlement activities otherwise archaeologically invisible. These include the processing of plant foods as well as of animal tissues for crafting technologies. For these tasks, slabs of specific qualities have been selected as revealed by raw material analyses. The study proves the high potential of macrolithic tools for the deciphering of daily activities in resource processing in a context of complex land use strategies at the transition to the Neolithic. With this, they provide another example of the high diversity of Mesolithic and early Neolithic land use strategies, especially evident in waterlogged sites.
The discovery of the earliest known stone tools at Lomekwi 3 (LOM3) from West Turkana, Kenya, dated to 3.3 Ma, raises new questions about the mode and tempo of key adaptations in the hominin lineage. ...The LOM3 tools date to before the earliest known fossils attributed to Homo at 2.8 Ma. They were made and deposited in a more C3 environment than were the earliest Oldowan tools at 2.6 Ma. Their discovery leads to renewed investigation on the timing of the emergence of human-like manipulative capabilities in early hominins and implications for reconstructing cognition. The LOM3 artefacts form part of an emerging paradigm shift in palaeoanthropology, in which: tool-use and tool-making behaviours are not limited to the genus Homo; cranial, post-cranial and behavioural diversity in early Homo is much wider than previously thought; and these evolutionary changes may not have been direct adaptations to living in savannah grassland environments.
This article is part of the themed issue ‘Major transitions in human evolution'.
This paper uses events following the 1878 discovery of a rich Lower Palaeolithic 'living floor' at Stoke Newington, London, to explore the social and economic relationships and imbalances that ...existed within Palaeolithic archaeology in the mid to late nineteenth century. It explores in particular the role of the British working classes in amassing the extant record, the biases they might have introduced and the value of this archaeology to their own lives and livelihoods.
This study examines the fluting of two well‐known Late Pleistocene fluted point types in North America: Clovis and Folsom. Using scaling analyses, we assess the changing relationship between flute ...length and point length in a large sample of each type. Researchers use scaling to investigate the physical constraints of an object and determine how its dimensions change with size. We compare the strength and consistency of the scaling relationships between the older Clovis and the younger Folsom with the aim of shedding light on scaling differences, if any, over their temporal span. Our results show that there is a significant difference in the relationship of fluting length to point length between these types. In Folsom point manufacture, flute length increases nearly twice as fast with increasing point length than in Clovis. Importantly, the scaling of flute length to point length relationship is isometric (linear) in the Folsom sample, whereas it is allometric (sublinear) in the Clovis sample. In other words, Folsom flintknappers maintained a constant ratio of flute length to point length. Clovis flintknappers were less concerned about maintaining this ratio. We attribute this difference to a potentially increasing, or changing, functional role of fluting in Folsom.
•The Thessaloniki Toumba quartz tools analysis is the first large scale residue study in Greece.•The application of low power microscopy with EDXRF is a valid step for the inspection of residues.•The ...residue analysis is a promising research field in the quartz tools study.
Lithic residue analysis as a specialized field of research has gained increasing scholarly interest over recent years, although it still faces methodological challenges concerning its research protocols and standard practices. This paper explores the possible contribution of the method through a large-scale residue analysis of a vein quartz assemblage excavated in the Bronze Age settlement of Thessaloniki Toumba, in central Macedonia, north Greece. The quartz artefacts under study derived from an open space where multiple domestic and small-scale workshop activities took place. At the first stage of analysis, low-power optical microscopy approach was combined with the in situ application of non-destructive EDXRF-spectroscopy. As a result, the preservation of plant, iron oxides, possible animal and a variety of non-distinctive microresidues was documented. While only a few could probably be related to use, the microtopography of vein quartz artefacts seems to protect residues from diagenesis setting a step for further development of the rellevant research.
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