Abstract
The ability to modify the environment through the transport of tools has been instrumental in shaping the evolutionary success of humans. Understanding the cause-and-effect relationships between hominin behavior and the environment ultimately requires understanding of how the archaeological record forms. Observations of living primates can shed light on these interactions by investigating how tool-use behaviors produce a material record within specific environmental contexts. However, this requires reconciling data derived from primate behavioral observations with the time-averaged nature of the Plio-Pleistocene archaeological record. Here, we use an agent-based model to investigate how repeated short-distance transport events, characteristic for primate tool use, can result in significant landscape-scale patterning of material culture over time. Our results illustrate the conditions under which accumulated short-distance transport bouts can displace stone tools over long distances. We show that this widespread redistribution of tools can also increase access to tool require resources over time. As such, these results elucidate the niche construction processes associated with this pattern of tool transport. Finally, the structure of the subsequent material record largely depends on the interaction between tool transport and environmental conditions over time. Though these results have implications for inferring hominin tool transports from hominin archaeological assemblages. Furthermore, they highlight the difficulties with connecting specific behavioral processes with the patterning in the archaeological record.
Highlights
The ability to modify the environment through the transport of tools has been instrumental in shaping the evolutionary success of humans
These lines of evidence suggest that the primate model of stone tool transport is a potentially relevant analog for the formation of the Plio-Pleistocene record[22]
We present a spatially explicit agent-based model (ABM), to address the primary research questions: (1) Under what environmental conditions do repeated bouts of small-scale transport result in long-distance movement of tools, and (2) how does such transport structure the resulting material record over time? In doing so, we modeled short-distance tool transport after real-world observations of chimpanzee nut-cracking b ehavior[29,51] in landscapes with varying numbers of resources requiring tool use and raw material sources to understand their effect on the displacement of tools
Summary
The ability to modify the environment through the transport of tools has been instrumental in shaping the evolutionary success of humans. Our results illustrate the conditions under which accumulated short-distance transport bouts can displace stone tools over long distances We show that this widespread redistribution of tools can increase access to tool require resources over time. The accumulation of stone hammers at nut-cracking localities has been argued to increase the number of tool use opportunities at any given site, creating a tool-using niche[37,38] These lines of evidence suggest that the primate model of stone tool transport is a potentially relevant analog for the formation of the Plio-Pleistocene record[22]. To understand the relevance of the primate tool transport model for hominin behavior, an understanding of the environmental conditions that facilitate long-distance movement of stone via aggregated small scale transport bouts, and how it structures the time-averaged archaeological record is needed. This would generate more nuanced expectations to investigate behavioral patterns and processes in the Plio-Pleistocene archaeological record
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