Excavations for the construction of thermal pools at Poggetti Vecchi (Grosseto, Tuscany, central Italy) exposed a series of wooden tools in an open-air stratified site referable to late Middle Pleistocene. The wooden artifacts were uncovered, together with stone tools and fossil bones, largely belonging to the straight-tusked elephant The site is radiometrically dated to around 171,000 y B.P., and hence correlated with the early marine isotope stage 6 [Benvenuti M, et al. (2017) 88:327-344]. The sticks, all fragmentary, are made from boxwood () and were over 1 m long, rounded at one end and pointed at the other. They have been partially charred, possibly to lessen the labor of scraping boxwood, using a technique so far not documented at the time. The wooden artifacts have the size and features of multipurpose tools known as "digging sticks," which are quite commonly used by foragers. This discovery from Poggetti Vecchi provides evidence of the processing and use of wood by early Neanderthals, showing their ability to use fire in tool making from very tough wood.

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The lithic assemblage from Shizitan 29, a late Upper Paleolithic open-air site in Shanxi, China, provides evidence for the earliest, well-dated microblade production in East Asia, ca. 26/24 Ka cal BP. To pursue a behavioral rather than traditional typological understanding of this key adaptive technology, we apply a techno-functional approach that enables us to reconstruct the entire operational sequence in behavioral terms through the derivation of technical objectives. This methodology can serve as a model to be applied to other assemblages for greater understanding of the origins and spread of the broadly distributed eastern Asian Late Pleistocene microblade industries. Within the eight cultural layers at Shizitan 29, microblade production abruptly appears at the top of Layer 7 following earlier core-and-flake production, supporting hypotheses of microblade technology arising within adaptive strategies to worsening Late Glacial Maximum environments. Significantly, reconstruction of the operational sequence supports microblade technology being introduced into the North China Loess Plateau from regions further north. It also allows us to re-think microblades’ relationship in behavioral terms with earlier limited examples of East Asian blade production and the evolution and spread of microblade technology, providing new insights into the adaptive relationships between subsequent microblade productions.

The techno-functional approach has been employed to better understand one of the more relevant artifact types generally found in Lower Palaeolithic sites: so-called small tools. Particularly, some Italian sites, such as Ficoncella, Isernia and others, have been the subject of specialized studies which provide evidence of an unexpected complexity of technical behaviours mainly related to highly specialized functional properties of the small tools. In this paper, we aim to enhance the debate on the topic by presenting a technofunctional study of the entire lithic assemblage coming from one of the most renown Middle Pleistocene sites in southern Europe, the open-air site of Fontana Ranuccio (Central Italy). Five groups of retouched tools have been identified: cutting tools, where retouch is usually applied to isolate a cutting edge on the blank; pointed tools, where retouch isolates a pointed edge; scrapers; and few other types of retouched tools such as notches and denticulates. We discuss a reconstruction of the reduction sequence in association with the functional features of the produced stone tools in order to better understand these Middle Pleistocene hominin behaviours. Broadly speaking, retouch seems to be used as a real technical process, not distinguishable from the reduction sequence. What seems relevant here is the need to modify the original morphology of flakes and cores in order to shape them into the final objectives of the production. In this perspective, blank production (débitage) and tool shaping (façonnage) are tightly interconnected one on the other.