The Fauresmith and Cultural Dynamics at the End of the Southern African Earlier Stone Age
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The Fauresmith refers to a poorly defined archeological entity that is transitional between the Earlier and Middle Stone Age in southern Africa and that has tentatively also been identified in East Africa. Recent research on sites in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa supports the validity of the Fauresmith while indicating that there is considerable variation in the lithic assemblages. There are significant cultural developments associated with the Fauresmith, including a shift from a stone tool technology focused on large bifacial tools toward flake tools produced using prepared core techniques, the use of stone-tipped spears, and the use of places and objects, including ochre, associated with particular sensory properties. The chronological position of the Fauresmith is the subject of ongoing research but currently appears to be situated between 500,000 and 300,000 years ago. No hominin fossils have yet been recovered from a Fauresmith context. The Fauresmith is best understood within the context global patterns in the hominin and archeological record in the period during which Homo erectus was replaced by an increased diversification of hominins, including modern humans. It is also important to recognize that the Fauresmith raises major questions about the nature of archeological entities and the epistemological validity of these conceptual tools.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".