The invention of Stone Tools

2020

This paper was written in order to study the development of stone tool technology throughout the Paleolithic. It finds the technology developed, with the simplest discoveries being made first and more complex discoveries being made later. The chemical structure and the properties of the raw materials determined that stone tools could be useful to humans and over time people learnt to make better and better stone tools. The improvements occurred in an order that was necessary and inevitable, with later improvements building upon earlier improvements, and is an illustration of how increasing human knowledge changes technology and human social and cultural history.

Oxford Research Encyclopedia, 2018

From at least 3.4 million years ago to historic periods, humans and their ancestors used stone as the raw material for tool production. Archeologists find stone tools on all the planet's habitable landmasses, even in its cold and ecologically sparse Arctic regions. Their ubiquity and durability inform archeologists about important dimensions of human behavioral variability. Stone tools' durability also gives them the ability to contribute to the study of long-term historical processes and the deeper regularities and continuities underlying processes of change. Over the last two millennia as ceramics, livestock, European goods, and eventually Europeans themselves arrived in southern Africa, stone tools remained. As social, environmental, economic, and organizational upheavals buffeted African hunter-gatherers, they used stone tools to persist in often marginal landscapes. Indigenous Africans' persistence in the environment of their evolutionary origins is due in large part to these "small things forgotten." Stone tools and their broader contexts of use provide one important piece of information to address some of archaeology and history's "big issues," such as resilience in small-scale societies, questions of human mobility and migrations, and the interactions of humans with their environments. Yet, stone tools differ in important ways from the technologies historians are likely to be familiar with, such as ceramics and metallurgy, in being reductive. While ceramics are made by adding and manipulating clay-like substances, stone tools are made by removing material through the actions of grinding, pecking, or fracture. Metals sit somewhere in between ceramics and stone: they can be made through the reduction of ores, but they can also be made through additive processes when one includes recycling of old metals. Stone-tool technologies can also be more easily and independently reinvented than these other technologies. These distinctions, along with the details of stone tool production and use, hold significance for historians wishing to investigate the role of technology in social organization, economy, consumption, contact, and cultural change.

Oldowan: Rather more than smashing stones

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.

Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2002

I claim that the increase in complexity in the (known) trace of Paleolithic stone tools can be parsimoniously explained by postulating the emergence of effective mechanisms for the social transmission of representations. I propose that Paleolithic tools, similar to more contemporary tools, were subject to a process of evolution by artificial selection based on functionality.

Journal of the Royal …, 2005

There is growing evidence that some species other than the human have behaviour that should be called cultural. Questions arise, then, of how human (and, perhaps, ape) cultures are different from those of other animals and how they have become so different. Human cultures are creative, generating new patterns of behaviour from those learned from others. Stone tool making provided a niche for the recruitment of tools and toolmaking processes from one function to another. This is something not yet recorded for apes. This article explores the possible role of stone tools in the emergence of this creativity. Figure 1. Chimpanzees at Mahale doing grooming hand clasp 1975. (Photo C.E.G.Tutin from W.C. McGrew collection, reproduced with permission.)

Developments in experimental and cognitive archaeology in the last two decades, together with those of comparative psychology, allow us to determine in more detailed how the mind of hominids worked right from the beginning of human evolution. This is done through the study of the only artefacts they left behind: stone tools; and the study of great apes cognitive behavior. While all approaches acknowledge the existence of boundaries in the cognitive abilities of the great apes in respect to humans, there is a lack of agreement about which of those abilities make us really human or when they appear. Partly because of their inability to understand the nature of cognition.

In memory of Lewis Binford, whose many contributions about the nature of culture informed us all and stimulated us to think more carefully about the way we do archaeology. I particularly remember his phrase "tool-assisted animal behavior" as a way of thinking about early hominins. It inspires many of the thoughts in this paper.

Journal of Human Evolution, 2013

The importance of the transport of stone artefacts in structuring Neandertal lithic assemblages has often been addressed, but the degree to which this led to fragmentation of lithic reduction over Middle Palaeolithic landscapes has not been explicitly studied thus far. Large-scale excavations of Middle Palaeolithic open-air sites and refitting studies of the retrieved assemblages have yielded new, highresolution data on the mobile aspects of Neandertal stone tool technology. In this paper, we integrate lithic technology and raw material data from recent studies of Middle Palaeolithic open-air and rock shelter sites in Western Europe. We demonstrate that the results of a variety of typological, technological (especially refitting), and lithological studies have important consequences for our knowledge of the acquisition of raw materials and subsequent production, usage and discard of stone artefacts in the Middle Palaeolithic. Neandertal production and use of stone tools was fragmented in three domains: the spatial, the temporal and the social domain. We show that this versatile segmentation of stone artefact handling strategies is a main determinant of the character of the Neandertal archaeological record. Our data testify to ubiquitous and continuous transport of stone artefacts of a wide variety of forms, picked by Neandertals using selection criteria that were sometimes far removed from what archaeologists have traditionally considered, and to some degree still consider, to be desired end products of knapping activities. The data presented here testify to the variability and versatility of Middle Palaeolithic stone tool technology, whose fragmented character created very heterogeneous archaeological assemblages, usually the product of a wide variety of independent import, use, discard and/or subsequent transport events.

2017

We have learned much about tool use in nonhumans since the discovery of Oldowan stone tools. Despite the ongoing debate over whether tool use in other animals requires cultural transmission, it seems clear that, today, humans show a quantitative, if not qualitative, difference in our ability to transmit information socially through cultural transmission. This ability makes cumulative culture possible. Although comparative studies provide relevant insights, we must look to the Paleolithic archaeological record to address when, where, and ultimately why this shift to high-fidelity social learning occurred. Yet here the frequent assumption that even the earliest stone tools serve as evidence of high-fidelity cultural transmission hinders investigation more than it helps. We pragmatically suggest resetting the null hypothesis for the processes underlying early stone tool production. The null hypothesis that we prefer is that early stone tools might have been so-called latent solutions rather than cultural material that derived from—and depended upon—modern human- like high-fidelity cultural transmission. This simple shift in perspective prioritizes the systematic investigation of more parsimonious potential explanations and forces us to demonstrate, rather than presume, that stone tools could not have existed without high-fidelity cultural transmission.