More Evidence of Complex Tool Creation By Archaic Homo sapiens

New excavations at Boxgrove, a site which dates from approximately 300 thousand years ago has yielded tools that show more complex creation strategies.  From the Independent:

The specific stone tools which were analysed as part of the study were sophisticated flint hand axes, which had required a special technique to shape them.

The technique is known to prehistorians as ‘platform preparation’. In most very early stone tools, the manufacturing process is a simple single-stage affair in which the toolmaker merely hits a lump of flint with a stone repeatedly to systematically knock bits off it until the lump has been reduced to a desired shape.

However, more sophisticated toolmakers employed a two-stage approach. First they would successively "soften up" small portions of the flint’s surface, so as to then be able to more accurately remove flakes from it, thus creating a much more sophisticated and effective tool with a better and more refined cutting edge.

Quite a bit of evidence is emerging that the group of hominins loosely called “archaic Homo sapiens” was considerably more technologically and socially advanced than we once thought. Whether or not they looked modern, they were beginning to act that way. 

Yes, the Neandertals Knew What They Were Doing...

Science Daily has a report from the University of Kent, in which researchers examined large numbers of Levallois stone tools to determine just how much “engineering” took place in the making of them. From the story:

Now, an experimental study – in which a modern-day flintknapper replicated hundreds of Levallois artifacts – supports the notion that Levallois flakes were indeed engineered by prehistoric hominins. By combining experimental archaeology with morphometrics (the study of form) and multivariate statistical analysis, the Kent researchers have proved for the first time that Levallois flakes removed from these types of prepared cores are significantly more standardised than the flakes produced incidentally during Levallois core shaping (called ‘debitage flakes’). Importantly, they also identified the specific properties of Levallois flakes that would have made them preferable to past mobile hunter-gathering peoples.

Dr Metin Eren, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University’s School of Anthropology and Conservation and the flintknapper who crafted the tools, said: ‘The more we learn about the stone tool-making of the Neanderthals and their contemporaries, the more elegant it becomes. The sophistication evident in their tool-making suggests cognitive abilities more similar to our own than not.’

This is not news to most palaeoanthropologists, who regard the Levallois core technology, which is found not just in Europe but in the Levant and Russia as well, as being a sophisticated method for mass-producing stone tools. I guess it is finally nice to get confirmation that the Neandertals were more complex than some people thought, even if Dr. Erin damns them with faint praise at the end.

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