Subsistence and Stone Tool Technology: An Old World Perspective

1997 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 164
Author(s):  
Robert L. Kelly ◽  
Bradley J. Vierra
Keyword(s):  
Stone Tool ◽  
Old World ◽  
Tool Technology ◽  
World Perspective

Mode 3 Technologies and the Evolution of Modern Humans

1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Foley ◽  
Marta Mirazón Lahr
Keyword(s):  
Strong Association ◽  
Middle Stone Age ◽  
Stone Tool ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
African Origin ◽  
Biological Models ◽  
Modern Humans ◽  
Archaeological Interpretation ◽  
Mode 3 ◽  
Tool Technology

The origins and evolution of modern humans has been the dominant interest in palaeoanthropology for the last decade, and much archaeological interpretation has been structured around the various issues associated with whether humans have a recent African origin or a more ancient one. While the archaeological record has been used to support or refute various aspects of the theories, and to provide a behavioural framework for different biological models, there has been little attempt to employ the evidence of stone tool technology to unravel phylogenetic relationships. Here we examine the evidence that the evolution of modern humans is integrally related to the development of the Upper Palaeolithic and similar technologies, and conclude that there is only a weak relationship. In contrast there is a strong association between the evolution and spread of modern humans and Grahame Clark's Mode 3 technologies (the Middle Stone Age/Palaeolithic). The implications of this for the evolution of Neanderthals, the multiple pattern of human dispersals, and the nature of cognitive evolution, are considered.

Stone Tools

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodney Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Stone Tools ◽  
Stone Tool ◽  
History Of Archaeology ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Old World ◽  
Material Culture Studies ◽  
History Of

The focus of this article is stone tools. The history of stone tool research is linked integrally to the history of archaeology and the study of the human past, and many of the early developments in archaeology were connected with the study of stone artefacts. The identification of stone tools as objects of prehistoric human manufacture was central to the development of nineteenth-century models of prehistoric change, and especially the Three Age system for Old World prehistory. This article draws on concepts derived from interdisciplinary material culture studies to consider the role of the artefact after being discarded. It suggests that it is impossible to understand the meaning or efficacy of stone tools without understanding their ‘afterlives’ following abandonment. This article aims to complement contemporary metrical studies of the identification of stone tools and the description of their production. A brief history of the stone tools is explained and this concludes the article.

Evolution of Cognitive Archaeology through Evolving Cognitive Systems

2019 ◽  
pp. 79-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Original Work ◽  
Stone Tools ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Stone Tool ◽  
Cognitive Systems ◽  
Cognitive Evolution ◽  
Subsequent Work ◽  
Productive Research ◽  
Tool Technology

Tom Wynn’s original work that looked at the evolution of stone tool technology using Piaget’s developmental sequence was the beginning of productive research into the evolution of hominin and human cognition. In this chapter, I evaluate those beginnings and discusses recent attempts to provide a more satisfactory understanding of changes in stone tool technologies, including work by Philip Barnard and William McGrew, subsequent work by Tom Wynn, and my own work with various collaborators. It suggests that some of the previous understandings of cognitive evolution were shaped by the fact that approaches to stone tools were largely determined in the nineteenth century. I propose some new ways of looking at stone tools and the sort of story that allows for more productive models of the evolution of human cognition.

Plio-Quaternary palaeoenvironments in West Turkana (East African Rift System; Kenya): palaeolake fluctuations, palaeolandscapes and controlling factors

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexis Nutz ◽  
Mathieu Schuster ◽  
Doris Barboni ◽  
Ghislain Gassier ◽  
Jean-François Ghienne ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
East African Rift ◽  
Depositional Environments ◽  
Sediment Supply ◽  
Stone Tool ◽  
Rift System ◽  
East African Rift System ◽  
East African ◽  
The West ◽  
African Rift ◽  
Tool Technology

<p>The Turkana Depression consists of several Oligocene to Pliocene North-South oriented half-grabens that connect the Ethiopian and Kenyan rift valleys within the eastern branch of the Cenozoic East African Rift System. In the northern portion of the Turkana Depression, exposed on the west side of modern Lake Turkana, is the Nachukui Formation that consists of a > 700 m pile of fluvial-deltaic-lacustrine sediments deposited between 4.2 and 0.7 Ma. The Nachukui Fm is a world-class fossil-bearing succession into which more than 500 hominin fossils were discovered, including major discoveries for the understanding of Human evolution and more than 100 archaeological sites. Most significant discoveries include <em>Australopithecus anamensis</em>, <em>Kenyanthropus platyops</em>, <em>Paranthropus aethiopicus</em>, <em>Paranthropus boisei</em> and specimens of <em>Homo</em> (i.e., <em>H. rudolfensis</em> and <em>H. erectus</em>) and early members of <em>H. sapiens</em>, as well as the earliest evidence of Acheulean stone tool technology and, more recently, the most primitive Lomekwian stone tool technology.</p><p>            Palaeoenvironmental changes may have had a strong influence on evolution, including that of the human lineage. However, in the Turkana Depression, palaeoenvironments are still very partially reconstructed and the respective role of climate and tectonism is still debated. Here, we used the interpretation of depositional environments, the delineation of depositional sequences and a record of d<sup>13</sup>C in pedogenic carbonates (i.e. paleovegetation proxy) to reconstruct 1) palaeolake Turkana fluctuations between ca. 4 and ca. 1.2 Ma and 2) the successive sedimentary palaeoenvironments and resulting landscapes that characterized the West Turkana area during the same time interval.</p><p>            Facies and sequence analyses reveal that palaeolake Turkana experienced eight low-frequency transgression-regression (T-R) cycles between ca. 4 and ca. 1.2 Ma; superimposed lower amplitude and shorter duration T-R cycles are also locally identified revealing subordinate-order fluctuations. In the same time, two different palaeolandscapes (labelled type-1 and type-2) alternated through times revealing variations in sediment supply coming from the western rift shoulder. A statistical treatment of the d<sup>13</sup>C record using a modified k-mean clustering allows us to confront a paleovegetation proxy and the sedimentological record. This combined approach reveals that the evolution of rainfall over the Ethiopian dome (i.e., drainage basin of the Omo river) controlled long-term palaeolake Turkana fluctuations during the Plio-Quaternary period while tectonism likely controlled the occurrence of different palaeolandscapes in West Turkana forced by changes in the rate of sediment supply.</p><p>            Finally, our study shows that traditional methods of basin geology (i.e., facies and sequence analysis) are key tools to provide large-scale paleolandscape reconstructions and palaeolake fluctuations needed for investigating the interactions between hominins and palaeoenvironments. Such a powerful procedure, however, is rare for hominins sites and has yet to be integrated in the workflow utilized by the paleontology and archeology communities.</p><p>This is a contribution of the Rift Lake Sedimentology project (RiLakS).</p>

Late Middle Pleistocene Levallois stone-tool technology in southwest China

Nature ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 565 (7737) ◽  
pp. 82-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yue Hu ◽  
Ben Marwick ◽  
Jia-Fu Zhang ◽  
Xue Rui ◽  
Ya-Mei Hou ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Southwest China ◽  
Stone Tool ◽  
Middle Pleistocene ◽  
Tool Technology ◽  
Late Middle Pleistocene
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