ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
A 1.4-million-year-old bone handaxe from Konso, Ethiopia, shows advanced tool technology in the early Acheulean.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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15 citing papers in PubMed, 67 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Lower Paleolithic bone handaxes and chopsticks: Tools and symbols?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Reply to Barkai: Implications of the Konso bone handaxe.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
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8 authors at 7 institutions in 4 countries.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In the past decade, the early Acheulean before 1 Mya has been a focus of active research. Acheulean lithic assemblages have been shown to extend back to ∼1.75 Mya, and considerable advances in core reduction technologies are seen by 1.5 to 1.4 Mya. Here we report a bifacially flaked bone fragment (maximum dimension ∼13 cm) of a hippopotamus femur from the ∼1.4 Mya sediments of the Konso Formation in southern Ethiopia. The large number of flake scars and their distribution pattern, together with the high frequency of cone fractures, indicate anthropogenic flaking into handaxe-like form. Use-wear analyses show quasi-continuous alternate microflake scars, wear polish, edge rounding, and striae patches along an ∼5-cm-long edge toward the handaxe tip. The striae run predominantly oblique to the edge, with some perpendicular, on both the cortical and inner faces. The combined evidence is consistent with the use of this bone artifact in longitudinal motions, such as in cutting and/or sawing. This bone handaxe is the oldest known extensively flaked example from the Early Pleistocene. Despite scarcity of well-shaped bone tools, its presence at Konso shows that sophisticated flaking was practiced by ∼1.4 Mya, not only on a range of lithic materials, but also occasionally on bone, thus expanding the documented technological repertoire of African Early Pleistocene
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