Much of the archaeological record in southern Africa occurs as open-air surface scatters of flaked stone artefacts. While historically prominent, these surface artefacts now play a very limited role in reconstructing human behaviour during the Middle and Later Stone Ages. Given suitable caveats, typologies allow links to be developed between open-air surface scatters and temporally controlled excavated samples, the latter often recovered from rock shelters. Among the limitations of this approach are the incomplete rock shelter record for developing type seriations, and the fact that technological behaviours may vary across a landscape, restricting the inferential capacity of assemblages from specific contexts. In this article, we describe four persistent core forms identified during surveys of the Doring River, and attempt to situate them in the regional archaeological sequence using previously excavated samples and intra-site spatial coherence with known culture-historical entities. O
The evolution of stone tools offers evidence about how early humans made things, how they lived, interacted with their surroundings, and evolved over time.
A recent study claims that the first tool handles, made about 2 million years ago, were more important than the wheel, which was only invented 6,000 years ago!
Another collection of stone tools dating back more than 50,000 years has been unearthed on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Details of the find, at a rock-shelter known as Leang Burung 2, are described in our paper out today in PLOS ONE.