Chimpanzees learn to crack nuts faster than humans
Early this year, Christophe Boesch and coworkers released a paper describing their observations on how fast chimpanzees and humans learn to crack nuts. They ...
All posts tagged with stone tools
Quote: Darwin on chimpanzees and other primates using tools
Charles Darwin, in Descent of Man (1871) pp. 51–52:
Stone tools now 3.3 million years old
Sonia Harmand presented a talk at the Paleoanthropology Society meeting this week describing her team’s discovery of stone tools in a 3.3-million-year-old co...
Notable: Fat residues on elephant-butchering tools
Notable paper: Solodenko N, Zupancich A, Cesaro SN, Marder O, Lemorini C, et al. (2015) Fat Residue and Use-Wear Found on Acheulian Biface and Scraper Associ...
Link: Prep for paleo cuisine
Kristina Killgrove describes a great exercise in which she has her students prepare a whole dinner using only stone tools: “Hominin Iron Chef”.
Link: A visit to Ethiopian paleoanthropology
I’m frankly amazed I didn’t link to this Nautilus article when it came out last year: “Digging Through the World’s Oldest Graveyard”. In it, Amy Maxmen trave...
Notable: Raw material choice may not matter to handaxe shape
Notable paper: Eren MI, Roos CI, Story BA, von Cramon-Taubadel N, Lycett SJ. 2014. The role of raw material differences in stone tool shape variation: an exp...
Palming Homo erectus
New Scientist reports on Carol Ward’s presentation at the AAPA meetings, describing a new metacarpal of Homo erectus from West Turkana: “Stone tools helped s...
Behavior of the first North African humans
Mohamed Sahnouni and colleagues describe the archaeology of El-Kherba, Algeria. Sahnouni:2013. This locality is a paleontological exposure associated with th...
Cutmarks under the microscope
I’m trying to figure out why Science this week has a “perspective” piece on the identification of cutmarks on archaeological bone. It’s a nice brief but lack...
Cutmarked bones from Dikika critiqued
Manuel Dominguez-Rodrigo, writing with my University of Wisconsin colleagues Travis Pickering and Henry Bunn, has challenged the interpretation that two bovi...
Sink Australopithecus!
Dennis Etler has been going great guns on his blog, Sinanthropus.
Mailbag: The capuchin australopithecines
Re: australopithecine tools:
Australopithecus afarensis used stone tools
UPDATE (2011-09-06) Note: The conclusions of the research were later critiqued, I posted on that criticism after this post.
Fishy story from Koobi Fora
I have to credit a reader for that headline, and for forwarding the paper. It’s another case of the infamous PNAS release policy. The press that came from th...
Earlier arrival of stone tools on Flores
A new paper is pushing back the time of initial occupation of Flores by hominins to at least 1.0 million years ago. Adam Brumm and colleagues (2010) are repo...
The spotty Acheulean
Scott and Gibert report in today’s Nature on the “oldest handaxes” in Europe:
Handedness in ancient hominins
Michael Balter writes about the work of Liverpool archaeologist Natalie Uomini, who is studying the evolution of handedness by experiment and attempting to f...
Plant processing with early Oldowan tools
Ann Gibbons was at the AAPA meetings early last month, and she reports in the current Science on some of the research. Her article about the use of early Old...