Flake tools in the European Lower Paleolithic: A case study from MIS 9 Britain

Studies of flake tools in the British Lower Paleolithic are rare owing to lower quantities of flake tools than handaxes and the perception that flake tool technology became more important in the succeeding Middle Paleolithic. In Britain, and Europe more broadly, MIS 9 (328-301 ka) has been characterized as a period of technological transition owing to the presence of early prepared core technology and the status of the period as the final interglacial prior to the onset of the Middle Paleolithic. It has been argued that the period demonstrates an increase in both the numbers and importance of flake tools, possibly showing emerging Middle Paleolithic behaviors. This study presents the results of a technological examination of flake tools in Britain during MIS 9, focusing on 25 sites, including 15 assemblages previously recorded as having higher quantities of flake tools. We use these assemblages to assess whether the flake tools of MIS 9 represent a transition toward the technology of the Middle Paleolithic. We consider factors including collection history, site formation, function, reduction, and cultural groups. We argue that in Britain the archaeological record of MIS 9 does not show an increase in the use of flake tools and demonstrates more continuity than change in relation to earlier periods of the Lower Paleolithic. There is a technological background of ad hoc retouch of simple flake tools with occasional evidence of more invasively retouched scrapers. Furthermore, aside from the introduction of Levallois technology, flake tools change little in the Early Middle Paleolithic. These results are contextualized within the broader evidence from Europe and comparisons to the longer sequences at key sites. We conclude that the major changes in technology began between MIS 13 and MIS 11 and these merely became cemented during MIS 9 and the following Middle Paleolithic.

One size does not fit all: Group size and the late middle Pleistocene prehistoric archive

The role of demography is often suggested to be a key factor in both biological and cultural evolution. Recent research has shown that the linkage between population size and cultural evolution is not straightforward and emerges from the interplay of many demographic, economic, social and ecological variables. Formal modelling has yielded interesting insights into the complex relationship between population structure, intergroup connectedness, and magnitude and extent of population extinctions. Such studies have highlighted the importance of effective (as opposed to census) population size in transmission processes. At the same time, it remained unclear how such insights can be applied to material culture phenomena in the prehistoric record, especially for deeper prehistory. In this paper we approach the issue of population sizes during the time of the Lower to Middle Paleolithic transition through the proxy of regional trajectories of lithic technological change, identified in the archaeological records from Africa, the Levant, Southwestern and Northwestern Europe. Our discussion of the results takes into consideration the constraints inherent to the archaeological record of deep time - e.g., preservation bias, time-averaging and the incomplete nature of the archaeological record - and of extrapolation from discrete archaeological case studies to an evolutionary time scale. We suggest that technological trajectories of change over this transitional period reflect the robustness of transmission networks. Our results show differences in the pattern and rate of cultural transmission in these regions, from which we infer that information networks, and their underlying effective population sizes, also differed.

Early Levallois technology and the Lower to Middle Paleolithic transition in the Southern Caucasus

The Lower to Middle Paleolithic transition (~400,000 to 200,000 years ago) is marked by technical, behavioral, and anatomical changes among hominin populations throughout Africa and Eurasia. The replacement of bifacial stone tools, such as handaxes, by tools made on flakes detached from Levallois cores documents the most important conceptual shift in stone tool production strategies since the advent of bifacial technology more than one million years earlier and has been argued to result from the expansion of archaic Homo sapiens out of Africa. Our data from Nor Geghi 1, Armenia, record the earliest synchronic use of bifacial and Levallois technology outside Africa and are consistent with the hypothesis that this transition occurred independently within geographically dispersed, technologically precocious hominin populations with a shared technological ancestry.