Human Physiology and Acheulean Handaxe Design
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Acheulean handaxes have played a leading role in our understanding of the cognitive and behavioural abilities of early hominins. An enormous amount of scholarly attention has been dedicated to better understanding the role these tools played in human evolution. Since the 1960’s, experimental archaeology and increasingly sophisticated quantitative analyses have brought us much closer to answering many fundamental questions about their true nature. Nonetheless, uncertainty remains about morphological differences, symmetry, and the meaning behind Acheulean handaxes’ remarkable longevity and spatial distribution. This dissertation presents the results of a series of experiments designed to study handaxe design and sources of shape variation using novel methodological approaches. The main goal is to examine their shape variation from a physiological perspective since most studies focus on functional and/or cultural aspects of handaxe manufacture and use. This is accomplished in two ways, one by looking at limitations in humans’ visual perception, and the second by examining how mass is distributed in Acheulean handaxes. The first goal examines limitations in humans’ visual perceptive abilities for distinguishing size differences between three-dimensional (3D) objects by using a series of different sized 3D printed models which were presented to participants who were asked to iii differentiate the size differences. The results indicate that our ability to distinguish size differences drops significantly below 3%. As such, it is suggested that this physiological limitation would introduce shape variation in handaxe assemblages. The second goal examines the role that balance played in handaxe design and manufacturing since neuroscience studies indicate that humans manipulate handheld tools according to their center of mass (CM) location and well-balanced tools reduce stresses and injuries in the hands, arms, and shoulders. Therefore, a novel methodology was developed that turns the CM location into a ratio that can be compared between handaxes. The results indicate that the CM location was tightly controlled and is less variable than any other shape trait and is relatively independent from symmetry. Furthermore, 3D geometric morphometrics and K-means clustering analysis was conducted on South African and British handaxe handaxes in order to examine shape variation at the assemblage level.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".