Purposeful tool use in early lithic technologies

Abstract

Tool use can be considered in terms of purposeful behaviour. This emphasis on ‘purpose’ hides a host of assumptions about the nature of cognition and its relationship with physical activity. In particular, a notion of ‘purpose’ might assume that this is teleological which, in turn, requires a model of a desired end state of an action that can be projected onto the environment. Such a model is fundamental to traditional descriptions of cognition and a version of this can be found in the ‘template’ theory of stone-tool production (i.e. where the maker of the tool has a model in mind and attempts to reproduce this model in stone). Against this cognitive perspective, a number of approaches have been proposed that share their roots in the work of Gibson (i.e. ecological psychology) or Bernstein (i.e. dynamic systems). From these perspectives, ‘purpose’ is not a matter of a projection but opportunity; put simply, an action is performed until it need not be performed further. Trivial though this might sound, it has implications for how we define purpose and how this might apply to our understanding of tool use. We argue from a dynamic systems perspective and demonstrate the use of tools to crack bones for marrow extraction.

Deep structure in the Acheulean adaptation: technology, sociality and aesthetic emergence

“…McPherron (2000, 2006) analysed biface assemblages in terms of factors determining patterns of form, including especially retrimming processes. Others, more recently, have carried out experiments considering, for example, cutting performance of handaxes, and the role of symmetry relative to performance (Key & Lycett, 2011, 2017; Machin et al, 2007; McNabb & Cole, 2015), with size being an important but often underappreciated variable (Tumler et al, 2017), while Baber and Janulis (2020) underline an underlying appreciation of purpose in the application of stone tools to tasks.…”

“…A long explication is not desirable here, but two points may be set out briefly: (1) the fixity of the mental template term is at odds with both psychological accounts of image formation and retention (e.g. papers in Denis et al, 2001), and the consistent presence of fields of variation in handaxe sets; and (2) the complexity of handaxes and their variation is such that considerable and somewhat adjustable instruction sets must be required for their manufacture (Baber & Janulis, 2021;Gowlett, 2006Gowlett, , 2011Wynn, 2002). The ideas that an individual could stumble across the design or that it is created by an archaeologist's viewpoint not the original action-set, both struggle when set against objective evidence of sets of bifaces.…”

Ergonomic clusters and displaced affordances in early lithic technology

“…Experimental work (see, for example, Baber & Janulis, 2021) and the range of forms suggest that hominins regularly deployed stone tools at two different scales—a heavy-duty scale that consisted of one- and two-handed pounding and perhaps heavy slicing and piercing; and a light-duty scale that consisted primarily of slicing with precision grip, but also scraping, piercing, and prising. Microwear analyses of stone tools this old rarely yield clear patterns.…”

“…These are intuitive suggestions only; they are not intended to be exhaustive and are for discussion purposes only. They require testing through actualistic studies (see Baber & Janulis, 2021).…”