Cut marks and stone tools
My last post elicited comments that some of the sites I included in my map were dubious or debatable. And you know what? That's true. What's more, the mere fact that stone tools and cut bones occur together does not by itself indicate that humans were once present there. We've known for a long time that other creatures can make tools that look kind of like Oldowan flake tools (like chimpanzees ). In fact, I would expect that some early human traces would have a sort of dubious quality to them, where they just don't stand out enough from the background to be conclusively recognized. As I went down the Google Scholar rabbit hole looking up papers on the sites from my last post, I stumbled onto the fascinating world of automatic identification of tool marks on bones. I've known about this new field for a while, but reading about some of the recent applications really grabbed my attention. The techniques are fairly straightforward. Researcher...