ABSTRACT
[Abstract: Stone tools, their forms and the ways they were made and used, are central to the study of human evolution. They are the main source of evidence concerning the geography, ecology, and behaviour of early humans. For more than a century, broadly defined changes in stone artefacts have also been used to subdivide the Palaeolithic into a series of chronological stages, assumed to represent fundamental evolutionary developments in technologically-related behaviour. Continued adherence to these stage-systems channels the thinking of researchers in ways that are both counterproductive and contrary to the Darwinian theoretical stance of most paleoanthropologists. In this book, I propose an alternative approach to studying long-term changes in Palaeolithic technologies that is more in keeping with current evolutionary thinking. Avoiding conventional progressive stages of development, the book instead examines global trends in six separate dimensions of technological behaviour between 2.6 million and 10,000 years ago. The six dimensions include the number of parts that are combined in artefacts, the economics of raw material use, information content in artefacts, evidence of design, diversity at several scales, and the complexity of implements and procedures. This chapter summarizes the significance and broader implications of evolutionary changes in each of these dimensions. It concludes with a brief discussion of geographic coverage and sampling in the chapters which follow.]
