How Do We Know When A Hunk Of Rock Is Actually A Stone Tool?
(via FiveThirty Eight) The archaeologists who study lithic technologies — “stone tools” to us lay primates — are used to making sweeping kinds of determinations. For generations they’ve been sorting out what is a tool, what isn’t, and what those tools mean, and they’ve been doing it largely by sight, by context of the objects and the site where they were found, and by experience. They learn the signs.
