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This study indicates that the East African Rift System in northern Kenya may be closer to breaking apart than previously thought and that its development played an important role in the preservation o...

Measuring technological complexity across species, as well as across temporal and spatial scales, is an ongoing challenge among authors who work on primatological, archaeological, and/or ethnographic questions. Researchers in these individual fields have developed a number of innovative ways of approaching this issue that reflect the specific affordances of their data with a known set of limitations. However, comparability between these approaches is often difficult. One such field-specific approach is the techno-unit method of Oswalt et al. (1976), which has had a massive impact on our interpretation of ethnographic technology over the fifty years since its publication. Nevertheless, this method has issues with its compression of variability and the different pathways to “complexity”. Here, we review a number of different ways technological complexity has been measured in non-human primates, the archaeological record, and modern human foragers, in order to identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of each. We suggest that the approach deployed in any given study should continue to follow the data and research questions under consideration, but that we lack an easily-applicable method that allows explicit comparisons between fields of study. In this context, we introduce the Tool Systems Approach as one possible way of doing so, which decomposes tool manufacture into its constituent steps (i.e., Tool Systems Total) and discrete forms of action (i.e., Total Discrete Actions). We apply the approach to a number of different technologies across the three fields, to explore the practicalities of its application, as well as its limitations. Plotting these different technologies with regards to their maximum complexity through time reveals trends that may map onto important changes in cognitive evolution, which are also reflected in ever-growing variability in the complexity of individual artefacts. The ramifications for the study of technological complexity as a whole are discussed.

Despite decades of replicative experiments, the fundamental question “how long did it take to make an Acheulean handaxe” remains poorly understood. Archaeologists routinely base influential Pleisto...

With its attribution to Paranthropus, a 2.6-million-year-old partial mandible expands the range of the genus into the Afar region of Ethiopia and adds to our understanding of hominin evolution in east...

The Local Organizing Committee is excited that almost 70 sessions and workshops will occur at PanAF Moz 2026. Pan-African Association members and non-members are welcome to submit paper abstracts t…

A continuous record of early human stone tool production - Volume 4

By Ryan McRae and Briana Pobiner 2025 has been quite the wild year! With more exciting stories in human evolution than we…

An archaeologist studying 1,000-year-old dog burials reflects on the need for evidence and imagination in archaeology.

Ochre use in burial practices in Thailand, from the Neolithic to the Iron Age

Analyses of newly discovered hand and foot bones of a Paranthropus boisei specimen provide insight into possible tool use and other palaeobiology characteristics among Plio-Pleistocene hominin species...

Applications are invited for a 12-month Project Co-ordinator position on the NG'IPALAJEM project, funded by the ERC. The project aims at collecting new palaeontological, archaeological and geological

As the most numerous manifestations of technology across the Palaeolithic record, linking stone tool artefacts to past hominin cognition and expertise…

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...