A Critical Inventory and Associated Chronology of the Middle Stone Age and Later Stone Age in Northwest Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The study of human evolution and cultural patterns relies on empirical evidence provided by the archaeological record. Accessing dependable archaeological data from scholarly publications can often be challenging due to the variability in site documentation and the diversity of academic practices in publication processes. This study presents a comprehensive synthesis of the published literature documenting dated and undated archaeological materials from the Middle Stone Age and Later Stone Age in Northwest Africa, notably Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. No previously published open-access database exists for these chronocultural periods in the region. Our dataset encompasses 993 sites and 1152 dates spanning approximately 370,000 to 8,000 years ago. Through a critical evaluation of the dates, we reveal qualitative and quantitative disparities and highlight the potential of the current archaeological record. While only ~10% of sites are dated and ~4.5% have reliable dates associated with a human occupation, this database holds significant potential for demographic and taxonomic meta-analyses as well as for methodological studies associated with chronological data in archaeology.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.018 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".