A Dataset Describing the Manufacturing of Stone Tools Over 3 Million Years

Abstract

This dataset is the product of an attempt to summarize the complexity and variability of tool-making sequences spanning the past 3 million years of hominin evolution. Each of the 155 entires in the dataset represents one technology, or one set of technologies, reported in the literature, and coded in terms of presence or absence of any one of 33 possible procedural units, or tool making techniques. The data were generated by coding published descriptions of technologies in the literature following the standards in a codebook. In total, 100 archaeological sites were sampled in addition to five non-human primate tool making behaviors, and five technologies produced in controlled flintknapping experiments. This is one of the primary datasets developed over the course of the Leakey Foundation funded project: Estimating the reliability of stone tools in reconstructing cultural relationships in prehistory. This dataset should be useful to researchers interested in studying technological variability at large spatio-temporal scales.

Keywords

• stone tools
• technology
• cultural evolution