Use-Wear Analysis Shows Changing Handaxe Grip and Use Across Time at la Noira (France)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Handaxes — sub-oval bifacially flaked stone tools — were produced for over a million years across Africa, Europe, and Asia during the Lower Palaeolithic. Their relatively uniform shape across varied environments and over a million years raises the question of whether or not their function and purposes were also uniform. Previous studies suggested that handaxe shape might be related to patterns in use and maintenance, but the level of analysis may have been too coarse to tease out specific uses. This study investigates the function of handaxes from two successive Acheulean occupations at the la Noira site (France), separated by ca. 200 ka. This research aimed to find out how hominins generally used handaxes through microscopic use wear analysis. Specifically, we documented macro-wear characteristics such as type (micro-scars, edge crushing, striations, edge rounding, polish), and their relative position and distribution. We used a Geographic Information System (GIS) to translate these observations into wear location heatmaps — visual representations highlighting areas of intense or repeated use — and compared these across different occupation periods. The analysis revealed that similar handaxes were likely held in different ways and used for different tasks during the two phases of occupation at la Noira, at 700 ka and respectively 450 ka. These findings suggest a more complex scenario of handaxe use than previously understood, including changes in tool use modalities over time that reflect changes in handaxe function and hominin technical behaviors.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".