The Stone Age Institute Press:
The Oldowan





The Oldowan: Case Studies into the Earliest Stone Age, 2006 (340 pages)
Edited by Nicholas Toth and Kathy Schick

The earliest traces of proto-human technology emerged over 2.5 million years ago on the African continent. Called the Oldowan after the famous site of Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, these technologies herald a major evolutionary shift in the human lineage. The Oldowan: Case Studies into the Earliest Stone Age provides a critical look at early archaeological sites and their evidence. This volume also shows how a range of probing, multidisciplinary, experimental investigations -- including experimental tool-making, comparative studies of ape technologies, biomechanical analysis, and PET studies of brain activity -- help us evaluate this tantalizing prehistoric evidence and appreciate its relevance to human evolution.

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Introductions and Table of Contents

Chapter 1: An Overview of the Oldowan Industrial Complex: The sites and the nature of their evidence (Kathy Schick & Nicholas Toth)

Chapter 2: The Oldest Stone Artifacts from Gona (2.6-2.5Mya, Afar, Ethiopia: Implications for understanding the earliest stages of stone knapping (Sileshi Semaw)

Chapter 3: The North African Early Stone Age and the Sites at Ain Hanech, Algeria (Mohamed Sahnouni)

Chapter 4: The Acquisition and Use of Large Mammal Carcasses by Oldowan Hominins in Eastern and Southern Africa: A Selected Review and Assessment (Travis Rayne Pickering & Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo)

Chapter 5: After the African Oldowan: The Earliest Technologies of Europe (Fernando Diez-Martín)

Chapter 6: A Comparative Study of the Stone Tool-making Skills Pan, Australopithecus, and Homo sapiens (Nicholas Toth, Kathy Schick, and Sileshi Semaw)

Chapter 7: Rules and Tools: Beyond Anthropomorphism (Sue Savage-Rumbaugh & William Mintz Fields)

Chapter 8: Sex Differences in Chimpanzee Foraging Behavior and Tool Use: Implications for the Oldowan (Kevin Hunt)

Chapter 9: Oldowan Toolmaking and Hominin Brain Evolution: Theory and research using positron emission tomography (PET) (Dietrich Stout)

Chapter 10: Knapping Skill of the Earliest Stone Toomakers: Insights from the study of modern human novices (Dietrich Stout & Sileshi Semaw)

Chapter 11: Comparing the Neural Foundations of Oldowan and Acheulean Toolmaking: A pilot study using positron emission tomography (PET) (Dietrich Stout, Nicholas Toth, and Kathy Schick)

Chapter 12: The Biomechanics of the Arm Swing in Oldowan Stone Flaking (Jesus Dapena, William J. Anderst, and Nicholas P. Toth)