Let's read! We will often find out this sentence everywhere. When still being a kid, mom used to order us to always read, so did the teacher. Some books are fully read in a week and we need the obligation to support reading. What about now? Do you still love reading? Is reading only for you who have obligation? Absolutely not! We here offer you a new book enPDFd the perception of the visual world to read.

The Perception of the Visual World. By James J. Gibson. U.S.A.: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1950 (George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., London). Price 35s.

<p>University of Alabama at Birmingham</p>

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers (review)

Researchers who analyze stone tools and their production debris have made significant progress in understanding the relationship between stone tools and human organizational strategies. Stone tools are understood to be morphologically dynamic throughout their use-lives; the ever-changing morphology of stone tools is intimately associated with the needs of tool users. It also has become apparent to researchers that interpretations of lithic analysis are more productive when the unique contexts and situations for which lithic artifacts were made, used, modified, and ultimately discarded are considered. This article reviews the recent literature on stone tool production with an emphasis on raw material procurement, manufacturing techniques, and tool maintenance processes as they relate to adaptive strategies of toolmakers and users.

The Analysis of Stone Tool Procurement, Production, and Maintenance

Twenty-one years ago, a landmark exploration of mitochondrial DNA diversity popularized the idea of a recent African origin for all living humans.1 The ancestral African population was estimated to have existed 200 ka (thousands of years ago) plus or minus a few tens of thousands of years. A corollary was that at some later date the fully modern African descendants of that population expanded to swamp or replace the Neanderthals and other nonmodern Eurasians. The basic concept soon became known as “Out of Africa,” after the Academy Award winning film (1985) that took its title, in turn, from Isak Dinesen's classic autobiography (1937). Many subsequent genetic analyses, including those of Ingman and coworkers2 and Underhill and coworkers,3 have reaffirmed the fundamental Out of Africa model. The fossil and archeological records also support it strongly. The fossil record implies that anatomically modern or near-modern humans were present in Africa by 150 ka; the fossil and archeological records together indicate that modern Africans expanded to Eurasia beginning about 50 ka.

Out of Africa and the evolution of human behavior

Stone, tool assemblage variability is considered a reliable proxy measure of adaptive variability. Raw material richness, transport distances, and the character of transported technologies are thought to signal (1) variation in raw material selectivity based on material quality and abundance, (2) optimization of time and energy costs associated with procurement of stone from spatially dispersed sources, (3) planning depth that weaves raw material procurement forays into foraging activities, and (4) risk minimization that sees materials transported in quantities and forms that are energetically economical and least likely to fail. This paper dispenses with assumptions that raw material type and abundance play any role in the organization of mobility and raw material procurement strategies. Rather, a behaviorally neutral agent-based model is developed involving a forager engaged in a random walk within a uniform environment. Raw material procurement in the model is dependent only upon random encounters with stone sources and the amount of available space in the mobile toolkit. Simulated richness-sample size relationships, frequencies, of raw material transfers as a function of distance from source, and both quantity-distance and reduction intensity-distance relationships are qualitatively similar to commonly observed archaeological patterns. In some archaeological cases it may be difficult to reject the neutral model. At best, failure to reject the neutral model may mean that intervening processes (e.g., depositional time-averaging) have erased high-frequency adaptive signals in the data. At worst, we may have to admit the possibility that Paleolithic behavioral adaptations were sometimes not responsive to differences between stone raw material types in the ways implied by current archaeological theory.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3557105.pdf

A Neutral Model of Stone Raw Material Procurement

Movement is a universal part of human life. However, it normally leaves no material trace, so movements made in the past are difficult to investigate. Refitting artifacts across unusually long distances provides a robust method of reconstructing individual acts of movement. When there are multiple individual movements, it is possible to reconstruct patterns of movement, and to differentiate between different types of movement made for different purposes, even in prehistory.

Reconstructing Movement in Prehistory

For a period of some ten millennia, the stone-tool industries of North Africa were dominated by microlithic backed bladelets, sometimes almost to the exclusion of any other forms. They were made and used in very small, face-to-face, social contexts and so must have had a role in shaping and negotiating social identity. This can be best seen in the extreme consistency of their forms, both size and shape. Within each of the various cultural contexts, across half a continent, the backed bladelets are so unvarying as to raise the question of whether any determinants other than social negotiation were important. The answer seems to be that, like all things, such nonsocial factors remain possible, but they are very difficult to find.

Backed Bladelets Are a Foreign Country

It is now generally accepted that there are no human societies which are truly egalitarian; this also true of bonobos and chimpanzees, among whom rank is inherited. If it were true of the common ancestor of Homo and Pan, there would have been (inherited) social inequality throughout our hominin ancestry. The problem is how to find it. It is also accepted that artefacts play an active and important role in our social lives; thus, socially defined differences may be reflected among the very simplest of artefacts. A case study of flaked stone from southwestern Egypt, dating to about 7000–8000 years ago, suggests that social differences can, indeed, be identified within very simple artefacts — in this case, plain, unmodified stone flakes. Using unmodified stone flakes, I explore the possibility of identifying not merely social difference but, specifically, inherited social difference in the Upper Palaeolithic of Europe and among early African hominins more than 2,000,000 years ago.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0959774310000430

Inherited Social Difference at the Edges of Flakes

Northeast Africa is here taken to include Egypt and northern Sudan. It contains the arid heart of the Eastern Sahara, the driest region of the great desert, large parts of which now lie within the O-mm isohyet. Across this desert, however, there flows the River Nile, one of the world’s major rivers. The Nile is tightly confined within its steep-sided and cliff-lined valley, flowing through a land in which rainfall is a newsworthy event, so that the transition between the riverine valley and the desert proper is abrupt and measurable in meters. The modem environments of the valley and the desert could not be more different; similarly, the effects of the Pleistocene—Holocene transition upon these two zones could not have been more different.

Plus Ça Change

This is a response to other chapters in this volume and its content is largely determined by theirs. Gowlett and Chauhan tackle entire continents (Africa and South Asia, respectively) and vast periods of time. Gowlett synthesises the Plio-Pleistocene, during which nothing startling happened. Chauhan tries to do similarly for the Palaeolithic of South Asia, but is bedevilled by a lack of data. The chapters by Lycett and Blackwell et al. are methodological and I cannot assess them as fully as they deserve. Three of the seven chapters are confined to the Middle-Upper Palaeolithic transition in Europe (Clark, Soffer and Straus) and two of those (Clark and Straus) are further confined to southwestern Europe. Their emphases are deliberately upon cultural change. However, modern humans (“modern” in all respects) evolved in Africa and the European Middle-Upper Palaeolithic transition reflects their arrival in Europe and the rapid extinction of the Neandertals. I thus believe that decoupling cultural from biological change is what we should not do at this particular transition.

Angela E. Close

Papers

Reconstructing Movement in Prehistory

Backed Bladelets Are a Foreign Country

Inherited Social Difference at the Edges of Flakes

Plus Ça Change

DISCUSSION 1: An Overview of Matters Transitional, From the Outside Looking In