Arrow heads at Obi-Rakhmat (Uzbekistan) 80 ka ago
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract When they are occasionally found in Middle Palaeolithic Neanderthal settlements, lithic weapons heads are large and do not differ in size, shaping or type from those used for activities other than hunting, such as plant gathering or butchery. The presence in a same assemblage of various types of armatures, some of which are microlithic and designed for this purpose, has only been documented in Modern Humans sites. Recent studies show that light projectile points, which were to become the structuring element of Upper Palaeolithic lithic industries, were already present in its formative stages. However, they remain marginal in debates regarding the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition. We present here the first results of a search for weapon heads in the oldest layers of the Obi-Rakhmat rock shelter, at around 80 ka. This site, located in the western foothills of the Tian Shan Mountains, northeastern Uzbekistan, has yielded a blade-based lithic industry which is forming part of the continuity of the Levantine Early Middle Paleolithic but with several innovative traits. The assemblage is based on a systematic blade production (regular thick narrow blades from unipolar and bipolar sub-prismatic and narrow-faced cores, thin and wide blades from flat-faced Levallois-like cores) along with shorter pieces from convergent or centripetal Levallois cores, and bladelets from burin-cores and other small cores. Three types of projectile armature are identified from their impact marks: retouched points, bladelets and raw micropoints which were so far unseen due to their fragmentary state. The micropoints are too narrow for having been fitted to anything other than arrow shafts. They are similar to the armatures described in a pioneer settlement by Sapiens in the Rhône Valley, France, 25,000 years later.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".