Not That Much Technological Complexity: Revisiting The Lower Pleistocen Type Section Assemblages of Peninj (Lake Natron, Tanzania)

Inferences on human cognitive evolution have been gathered through a
variety of research avenues, among which stone tools have constituted a major
area of interest. One sign of mental complexity and technological skill is
related to the concept of predetermination in lithic knapping. Predetermination
has been defined as a process of core exploitation that implies a number
of technical actions aimed at predetermining the shape of flakes. In recent
years, some authors (de la Torre et al., 2003) have claimed that the Lower
Pleistocene hominins that inhabited the western margin of Lake Natron
(Tanzania) between 1.6 and 1.4 Ma exhibited a quite complex technological
behavior, which included the recurrent display of the concept of flake predetermination
in their complex hierarchical reduction strategies (what has been
defined as a bifacial hierarchical centripetal exploitation strategy). This perspective
considered as well that many of the cores retrieved from the Type
Section represented the continuity of a single technological sequence and
that this sequence could be reconstructed.

Despite the implications that such complex technological operations
could bear on the study of the technical capabilities of Lower Pleistocene
homininn, the proposed reduction model has never been experimentally
tested and remains highly conjectural. Thus, we present here the first attempt
to reproduce experimentally the centripetal hierarchical model. For this purpose,
we have undertaken a revision of the archaeological collections so far
retrieved from the Type Section, accompanied by a program of experimental
work reproducing alternative models. The goal was to compare the flakes
experimentally obtained through different knapping methods with the archaeological
collection and understand what exploitation strategies are represented
in it.