Palaeoproteomic identification of a whale bone tool from Bronze Age Heiloo, the Netherlands
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Identification of the taxonomic origin of bone tools is an important, but often complicated, component of studying past societies. The species used for bone tool production provide insight into what species were exploited, potentially how, and for what purpose. Additionally, the choice of species may have important implications for the place of the tool within the larger toolkit. However, the taxonomic identification of bone tools is often unsuccessful based on morphology. Here we apply three palaeoproteomic techniques, ZooMS, SPIN-like data analysis and a targeted database search to narrow down the taxonomic identification of an unusually large Bronze Age bone tool from Heiloo, the Netherlands, to the North Atlantic right whale ( Eubalaena glacialis ). Additionally, the tool was investigated for use-wear, which showed that it was likely used for the processing of plant fibres. The assignment of the tool as whale bone adds support to the exploitation of whales by coastal Bronze Age populations, not just for meat, as previously suggested, but also for bone as a resource for tool production. We know of no other parallel of a bone tool such as this in terms of size, use, hafting, and taxonomic identity.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".