A technological investigation of biface origins in Africa: A novel geometric morphometric approach.

I will investigate biface origins at the start of the Acheulean: a technology which persists for 1.5 million years, coinciding
with a large increase in hominin brain size. As outlined in my research proposal, there are two main theories for its
appearance: use as cutting tools (particularly in butchery) and use as cores (to produce a greater number of flakes per
volume of raw material than preceding pebble cores). One advocate of this latter theory suggests that bifaces and pebble
cores can be placed on the same sliding scale of size and elongation (Shea 2010), which would make bifaces allometric
extensions of existing technologies. A logical corollary of this is that early Acheulean assemblages should show a
continuous range of variation in core technology, from simple pebble-cores to bifaces, not discrete breaks. I plan to test
this using 3D geometric morphometrics within early Acheulean assemblages. Furthermore, I will also carry out
experimental work to fill existing gaps in the literature. I wish to quantify the differences in number of useable flakes per
volume of core between pebble-cores and bifaces, as well as morphological differences in the flakes of each. Finally, I
will investigate the differences in cutting ability between bifaces and pebble-cores, because the latter possess many of
the characteristics that make bifaces good cutting tools, yet this has not been investigated. Similarities would undermine
an initial role for bifaces in cutting tasks.