Finn Stileman

The artwork that illustrated our PNAS paper on the oldest wooden tools was made by Gleiver Prieto, who has also worked with me on illustrations for previous projects, including the paleoenvironmental reconstruction of Marathousa 1.
Gleiver's art really brings Pleistocene Megalopolis to life ✨ 🤩

Evidence for the earliest hominin use of wooden handheld tools found at Marathousa 1 (Greece) | PNAS The Middle Pleistocene (MP; ca. 774 to 129 ka) marks a critical period of human evolution, characterized by increasing behavioral complexity and th...

It was such a privilege to get to work on this amazing material from an incredible site and team - now the earliest handheld wooden tools in the archaeological record, taking evidence back to 430,000 years! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Technological innovations and hafted technology in central China ~160,000–72,000 years ago - Nature Communications Stone tools illustrate behavioural complexities in Middle Pleistocene hominin populations. Here, the authors present small dimensional flakes and hafted tools from Xigou, central China, dated to ~160–72 thousand years ago that demonstrate early, complex technological advancements.

Early humans in central China may have been making sophisticated stone tools as early as 160,000 years ago, according to research in Nature Communications. This discovery challenges the perception that stone tool technology in Asia lagged behind Europe and Africa during this period. 🏺 🧪

Rock art from at least 67,800 years ago in Sulawesi - Nature A hand stencil painted on a cave wall on a small island off the coast of Sulawesi more than 67,800 years ago suggests a very early occupation of Wallacea.

🧪🏺 WOWWWW
New dates in SE Asia for rock paintings - major implications:
- nature of early aesthetics, innovations
- relationship to oldest known Australian settlement?
- and (IMO) impacts claims that cave art in Europe >50 Ka is necessarily work of #Neanderthals
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My mum just came back from a walk around a field with this, saying it’s probably not old but she wanted to show me just in case. It’s an early medieval stirrup mount! Landowner contacted and shortly off to local Finds Liaison Officer! Always worth keeping one eye on the ground!

Prehistoric tool made from elephant bone is the oldest discovered in Europe A remarkable prehistoric hammer made from elephant bone, dating back nearly half a million years ago, has been uncovered in southern England and analyzed by archaeologists from UCL and the Natural His...

More Breaking Palaeo-news!
🐘 Boxgrove preserved oldest Elephant Bone beyond Africa.
🐘 Early Neanderthals using bone to shape beautiful tools.
🐘 New research from Simon Parfitt @uclarchaeology.bsky.social Silvia Bello of the @nhm-london.bsky.social.
🦣🏺🐘https://share.google/20WUjY5TybDAr4QoT

Latest paper: Boxgrove is a key European site dating to 480,000 years ago. At GTP17, hominins knapped handaxes and then butchered an adult female horse. A fragment of the horse's scapula appeared to have evidence of impact from a wooden spear.....
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Please join us next week, Thursday 13h November, for our next talk. We will be joined by Finn Stileman, University of Cambridge. More details 👇

Please register here: liverpool-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/regi...
We hope to see you there!

Animal engravings

Animal engravings

Excavations

📣 PUBLISHED OPEN ACCESS 📣

An international team, including our own Finn Stileman, have published a new study in Nature Communications on a monumental rock art tradition in northern Arabia dating between 12,800 and 11,400 years ago.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📸 @finnstileman.bsky.social

New discovery! Here @mariaguagnin.bsky.social and our team report on 12,000-year-old life-size camel rock art engravings in the Saudi desert. #GreenArabia @griffith.edu.au www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Monumental rock art illustrates that humans thrived in the Arabian Desert during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition | Nature Communications Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

Our new paper is out! www.nature.com/articles/s41... 12,000 year old camel engravings marked water sources in the desert. A great team effort @mdpetraglia.bsky.social @finnstileman.bsky.social @stewiestewart.bsky.social et al!

Was great to present a poster at #ESHE2025!

I commissioned it from Thalia Nitz Illustration!

While risk aversion can have short term benefits, this will limit long term skill acquisition and technological ceilings. We suggest that late Acheulean handaxe forms required tolerance of greater learning costs via deliberate practice, indicating 'mental time travel' and social support for learners

Simply, novices should cease knapping soon after a cutting edge is established, with further attempts at shaping tools tool increasing risk of a poor functioning tool. The novice rough-outs are similar in attrivutes to early Acheulean handaxes from Ubeidiya, which could reflect similar risk-aversion

Additionally, novice handaxes were more likely to break before completion, happening for 26% of attempts by novices and 7% for experts.

Edge crushing was recorded from handaxes and was three times higher on novice tools (1/3 of circumferences). Crushing % negatively correlates with rate of successful flakes for novices but not for experts. This indicates that knapping errors can be reversed by experts but they accumulate for novices

Recorded sequences of successful flake removals and mistrikes show clear differences between expert (top) and novice (bottom) knappers. Mistrike rate rapidly decreases for novices, outnumbered successful strikes by the end of the rough-out stage.

A PCA analysis of 3D shape and morphometric data show that expert handaxes improved much more than novices' from rough-out to final stages. Showing greater value of continued knapping for experts

We recruited 10 expert and 10 novice knappers, asking them each to replicate 4 flint handaxes, mimicking a target form. We 3D scanned handaxes as starting blanks, rough-outs (i.e. a biface prior to shaping) and finished forms. Flaking Sequences were also extrapolated from experiment footage.

When less is more: risk, reward and optimisation in Acheulean handaxe manufacture and the impact of skill As the most numerous manifestations of technology across the Palaeolithic record, linking stone tool artefacts to past hominin cognition and expertise…

Happy to share the first paper from my PhD! Open access in a special issue of JAS, 'The Mind in Deep Time: Interdisciplinary explorations of cognitive evolution'

When less is more: risk, reward and optimisation in Acheulean handaxe manufacture and the impact of skill

share.google/hj43OR6QWXtc...

Hominin glacial-stage occupation 712,000 to 424,000 years ago at Fordwich Pit, Old Park (Canterbury, UK) - Nature Ecology & Evolution The authors report Acheulean hominin occupation of eastern Britain during glacial marine isotope stages 17–16 and again in glacial marine isotope stage 12 via stone tools in sediments dated to 712,000...

Thrilled to share our latest article on the Lower Palaeolithic occupation of Fordwich Pit, Old Park - including at least one likely glacial occupation in MIS12! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

More ceramics! So fun to work with!

Picked up a stone-textured dish at a pottery market that perfectly nests a porcelain handaxe; makes me think of the tool latent within a nodule before being shaped to fruition

🏺🧪🦣
#Neanderthal Fat Factory!
V. exciting to see new, massive evidence of this grease-rendering behaviour which we've long believed was going on.

(someone once commented I use the word "fat/fatty" a lot in the narrative/poetic sections of #Kindred, THIS IS WHY)

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

#Neanderthals Ran “Fat Factories” 125,000 Years Ago. Groundbreaking discovery by @paleomonrepos.bsky.social @unileiden.bsky.social @leizarchaeology.bsky.social and the LDA in Saxony reveals large-scale fat processing by Neanderthals:
idw-online.de/de/news854632

#archaeology #paleolithic #prehistory

My latest weekend pastime has been to model clay replicas for my little museum! Particularly fond of the Neanderthal (La Ferrassie 1) skull!

Stone Age boomerang is oldest in Europe — and possibly the world A new analysis of a carved mammoth tusk first discovered four decades ago reveals it may be the world's oldest boomerang.

40,000-year-old mammoth tusk boomerang is oldest in Europe — and possibly the world www.livescience.com/archaeology/...

Finally got round to finishing this drawing of a 300,000 year old #handaxe from Stoke Newington, London, found by S.H. Warren in 1894. Now this little-un, along with others from Stoke Newington that I've drawn, lives at the British Museum

This is the first ever confirmed skull of a Denisovan Finally, we can put a face on a Denisovan.

'Scientists discovered a new kind of human with its pinkie bone. Now we have a skull' www.nationalgeographic.com/history/arti...