Systematic production of naturally backed "knives" from 290 to 110 thousand years ago: evidence from southeast Serbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Naturally backed “knives” represent one of the long-lasting types of stone tools produced by the different hominin species. Emergence of this phenomenon starts in the Lower Palaeolithic and continues, in different forms, even today. Term “backed” refers to the either cortical or non-cortical surface, opposite the cutting/working edge, that is used to form a better grip, both when tools have been hand-held or hafted. These technological advances have enabled a more efficient use of the tools. The systematic production of these artefacts shows the developed cognitive abilities of the Chibanian (Middle Pleistocene) hominins. While the appearance of this phenomenon is now well documented across Western and Central Europe, there are no such studies in the Southeast of the continent. This paper presents results of techno-morphological analysis of Velika Balanica (Layer 3), Mala Balanica (Layer 2) and Pešturina cave (Layer 4) assemblages. Dated respectively to 290 ka, 240 ka and 110 ka, these three assemblages represent the oldest record of systematic production of naturally backed artefacts in the Central Balkans. Results of the analysis are discussed regarding the raw materials used in backed artefact production, with the aim to shed more light of the methods employed, but also on the position of these artefacts within the techno-economic Neanderthal behaviour. Funding: This research has been supported by the NEEMO project of the Science Fund of the Republic of Serbia (7746827), and the MIRA project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada SSHRC (895-2024-1005).
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".