An understanding of the uniquely human behavior of stone tool making tackles questions about hominins’ ability to culturally transmit and expand their base of social and practical knowledge and their cognitive capacities for advanced planning. The appearance of stone tools has often been viewed as a threshold event, impacting directly and profoundly the later course of cultural and social evolution. Alternatively, it has been understood as a prelude to significant succeeding changes in behavioral, social and biological evolution of hominins. This book presents a series of recent enquiries into the technological and adaptive significance of Oldowan stone tools. While anchored in a long research tradition, these studies rely on recent discoveries and innovative analyses of the archaeological record of ca. 2.6–1.0 million years ago in Africa and Eurasia, dealing with the earliest lithic industries as manifestations of hominin adaptations and as expressions of hominin cognitive abilities.

The earliest traces of proto-human technology emerged over 2.5 million years ago on the African continent. Called the Oldowan after the famous site of Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, these technologies herald a major evolutionary shift in the human lineage. The Oldowan: Case Studies into the Earliest Stone Age provides a critical look at early archaeological sites and their evidence. This volume also shows how a range of probing, multidisciplinary, experimental investigations - including experimental tool-making, comparative studies of ape technologies, biomechanical analysis, and PET studies of brain activity - help us evaluate this tantalizing prehistoric evidence and appreciate its relevance to human evolution.

This edited volume presents current archaeological research and data from the major early Acheulean sites in East Africa, and addresses three main areas of focus; 1) the tempo and mode of technological changes that led to the emergence of the Acheulean in East Africa; 2) new approaches to lithic collections, including lithic technology analyses; and 3) the debated coexistence of the Developed Oldowan and the early Acheulean. The chapters are the proceedings from the workshop titled “The Emergence of the Acheulean in East Africa”, held at University of Rome “La Sapienza” on September 12–13, 2013. The aim of the workshop was to bring together researchers currently working in this field in East Africa, in order to define the characteristics and the evolution of the early Acheulean. The volume was expanded with some chapters on the preceding Oldowan, on the African fauna and on paleovegetation, on the Acheulean in Asia and, eventually, on the Acheulean in Europe. The book is addressed to the scientific community, and will be of interest to researchers, graduate students, archaeologists, paleontologists, and paleoanthropologists. This volume is dedicated to the memory of Jean Chavaillon (March 25, 1925 - December 21, 2013), the leading archaeologist and Quaternary geologist who researched with unfailing enthusiasm the earliest human cultures and directed from 1965 to 1995 the French Archaeological Mission at Melka Kunture.

This book provides a concise overview of human prehistory. It shows how an understanding of the distant past offers new perspectives on present-day challenges facing our species - and how we can build a sustainable future for all life on planet Earth. Deborah Barsky tells a fascinating story of the long-term evolution of human culture and provides up-to-date examples from the archaeological record to illustrate the different phases of human history. Barsky also presents a refreshing and original analysis about issues plaguing modern globalized society, such as racism, institutionalized religion, the digital revolution, human migrations, terrorism, and war. Written in an accessible and engaging style, Human Prehistory is aimed at an introductory-level audience. Students will acquire a comprehensive understanding of the interdisciplinary, scientific study of human prehistory, as well as the theoretical interpretations of human evolutionary processes that are used in contemporary archaeological practice. Definitions, tables, and illustrations accompany the text.

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Innovation and creativity are two of the key characteristics that distinguish cultural transmission from biological transmission. This book explores a number of questions concerning the nature and timing of the origins of human creativity. What were the driving factors in the development of new technologies? What caused the stasis in stone tool technological innovation in the Early Pleistocene? Were there specific regions and episodes of enhanced technological development, or did it occur at a steady pace where ancestral humans lived? The authors are archaeologists who address these questions, armed with data from ancient artefacts such as shell beads used as jewelry, primitive musical instruments, and sophisticated techniques required to fashion certain kinds of stone into tools. Providing ‘state of art’ discussions that step back from the usual archaeological publications that focus mainly on individual site discoveries, this book presents the full picture on how and why creativity in Middle to Late Pleistocene archeology/anthropology evolved. Gives a full, original and multidisciplinary perspective on how and why creativity evolved in the Middle to Late Pleistocene Enhances our understanding of the big leaps forward in creativity at certain times Assesses the intellectual creativity of Homo erectus, H. neanderthalensis, and H. sapiens via their artefacts

The Stone Age is now beginning to be recognised as vital in establishing who we are and where we have come from. This period has long been neglected.