Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Early human cultural dynamics underpin the Plio-Pleistocene archaeological record and impact how we understand some of our earliest identifiable behaviours. One major outstanding question is whether Early Stone Age material culture represents a single lineage of cultural information, or did we ever lose the knowledge required to make stone tools? No single approach satisfactorily addresses this problem, but to date, objective analyses of temporal data have been absent from the conversation. Here, using a comprehensive database of dated African Oldowan archaeological sites, we demonstrate that there are no temporal breaks large enough, on a relative basis, to infer a loss of stone-tool-making cultural information. Therefore, alongside previously published data, we infer a continuous record of early human stone tool production in Africa from c. 3.3 to 1.5 million years ago. Stone tool-associated behavioural adaptations and evolutionary selective pressures were, therefore, likely to have been ever present during this period.
Source: Cambridge Prisms Extinction
Authors: Alastair Key, Eleanor M. Williams
Institution: University of Cambridge
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,893
Funder: H2020 European Research Council
OpenAlex ID: W4417488274
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