Abstract
Despite a body of literature focusing on the functionality of modern and stylistically distinct projectile points, comparatively little attention has been paid to quantifying the functionality of the early stages of projectile use. Previous work identified a simple ballistics measure, the Tip Cross-Sectional Area, as a way of determining if a given class of stone points could have served as effective projectile armatures. Here we use this in combination with an alternate measure, the Tip Cross-Sectional Perimeter, a more accurate proxy of the force needed to penetrate a target to a lethal depth. The current study discusses this measure and uses it to analyze a collection of measurements from African Middle Stone Age pointed stone artifacts. Several point types that were rejected in previous studies are statistically indistinguishable from ethnographic projectile points using this new measure. The ramifications of this finding for a Middle Stone Age origin of complex projectile technology is discussed.
Highlights
Recent fossil discoveries and genetic analyses indicate that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa by at least 200 thousand years ago [1, 2]
Because the current analysis is primarily concerned with the potential African origins of complex projectile technology, only the point classes from the African Middle Stone Age are included (n = 1863; see Table 1)
We instead assume that tip cross-sectional area (TCSA) or tip cross-sectional perimeter (TCSP) values exceeding those of the ethnographic sample are outside the functional threshold of complex projectiles
Summary
Recent fossil discoveries and genetic analyses indicate that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa by at least 200 thousand years ago (ka) [1, 2] From this point until the present there are two very different patterns in both geographic range and behavior. That following this dispersal, Homo sapiens fossils are associated with a material culture more closely resembling that of ethnographic hunter-gatherers than that of previous hominins [11,12,13]. This dispersal has long been thought to mark a behavioral “revolution” or a significant shift to more complex behaviors unique to Homo sapiens. The mode and tempo of this dispersal are hotly debated topics in paleoanthropology (e.g., [4, 11, 14]), but it is generally assumed that these novel behavioral adaptations played an important role
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