ArticleEvolutionary anthropology
The Acheulean handaxe: More like a bird's song than a beatles' tune?
Article in Evolutionary anthropology. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Costs of Early Stone Toolmaking cannot Establish the Presence of Know-how Copying.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- When is a handaxe a planned-axe? exploring morphological variability in the Acheulean.PloS one · 2024Article
- The transition from animal to human culture-simulating the social protocell hypothesis.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The evolution of hierarchically structured communication.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Archaeological evidence for thinking about possibilities in hominin evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Article
- A proof of concept for machine learning-based virtual knapping using neural networks.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Middle Pleistocene fire use: The first signal of widespread cultural diffusion in human evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Naïve, unenculturated chimpanzees fail to make and use flaked stone tools.Open research Europe · 2021Article
- Materiality, Agency and Evolution of Lithic Technology: an Integrated Perspective for Palaeolithic Archaeology.Journal of archaeological method and theory · 2021Article
- Children and innovation: play, play objects and object play in cultural evolution.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Review
- Baldwin effects in early stone tools.Evolutionary anthropology · 2020Article
- Innovation, life history and social networks in human evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- The zone of latent solutions and its relevance to understanding ape cultures.Biology & philosophy · 2020Article
- Birch tar production does not prove Neanderthal behavioral complexity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- High handaxe symmetry at the beginning of the European Acheulian: The data from la Noira (France) in context.PloS one · 2017Article
- Major transitions in human evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The goal of this paper is to provoke debate about the nature of an iconic artifact-the Acheulean handaxe. Specifically, we want to initiate a conversation about whether or not they are cultural objects. The vast majority of archeologists assume that the behaviors involved in the production of handaxes were acquired by social learning and that handaxes are therefore cultural. We will argue that this assumption is not warranted on the basis of the available evidence and that an alternative hypothesis should be given serious consideration. This alternative hypothesis is that the form of Acheulean handaxes was at least partly under genetic control.
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