15 ka old evidence of pressure flaking in the Congo basin, Democratic Republic of Congo
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We analyze two technically sophisticated stone points dated between 15,580 and 14,319 cal. BP discovered at the open-air site of Mitshakila, Democratic Republic of Congo, combining diacritic analysis, experimentation, and traditional morphometrics. Diacritical analysis is applied following techno-functional (also called "morpho-structural") and productional approaches. An experimental corpus consisting of pieces produced by both a knapper from northeastern Angola in the 1950s and two lithic specialists aims at improving the identification of techniques. Finally, traditional morphometrics is used to compare Mitshakila points with several shaped points from the Late Pleistocene of sub-Saharan Africa including Tshitolian, Lupemban or Still Bay points among others. At Mitshakila, we report an early occurrence of the well-mastered use of pressure technique, “scarf-shaped” retouch (also called “ripple-flake” retouch or in French “ retouche en écharpe ”) and proximo-lateral short shoulders. Its presence at Mitshakila marks an important technical shift during the Final Pleistocene in the Congo Basin. • An extremely rare well-dated Central African Late Pleistocene lithic assemblage. • Earliest described and contextualized evidence of pressure flaking in the Congo Basin. • Evidence for an early complex projectile weapon in Central Africa. • Specialized technical skills in stone tools manufacture. • Detailed methodology combining technological, techno-functional, morphometric and experimental data.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".