Middle Pleistocene lithic raw material foraging strategies at Kathu Pan 1, Northern Cape, South Africa
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is a general trend for increased selectivity and longer transport distances of lithic raw materials for flintknapping in the Middle Stone Age compared to the Earlier Stone Age. The Stratum 4a assemblage at Kathu Pan 1, Northern Cape, South Africa, which dates to ~ 500 ka, presents a unique opportunity for assessing Pleistocene raw material foraging strategies at the onset of the Middle Stone Age. In this paper, I identify potential primary and secondary sources for the raw materials used for lithic reduction at Kathu Pan 1 (KP1), and quantify raw material variability at nearby secondary sources. Patterns of raw material selection are identified within the KP1 Stratum 4a assemblage and compared to a sample from the underlying Stratum 4b, an Acheulean assemblage, to test for a temporal pattern. Raw material use during the Stratum 4a occupation of Kathu Pan, which is focused on abundant locally available resources for flintknapping, is consistent with the general pattern for Earlier Stone Age foraging strategies, and differs from evidence at some more recent Middle Stone Age sites that show longer transport distances and increased selectivity for certain high-value materials. While many aspects of technology change at KP1 ~ 500 ka, these technological shifts are not associated with a significant change in the kinds of raw material that were exploited. There are, however, differences in how the raw material was exploited. In Stratum 4a, there is evidence that hominins intentionally exploited the natural banding in banded ironstone formation in order to produce elongated products, and this evidence is lacking in the underlying Acheulean assemblage.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it