Stone Tools in Human Evolution

John J. Shea is Professor of Anthropology at State University of New York, Stony Brook. He is the author of Stone Tools in the Paleolithic and Neolithic Near East: A Guide (2013) and co-editor of Out of Africa 1: The First Hominin Colonization of Eurasia (2010). Shea is also an expert flintknapper whose demonstrations of stone tool production and other ancestral technology skills appear in numerous television documentaries and in the National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC, as well as in the American Museum of Natural History, New York City.

• List of figures; List of tables; List of boxes; Preface; Acknowledgments; Introduction. Little questions vs big questions; 1. Why archaeologists misunderstand stone tools; 2. How we know what we think we know about stone tools; 3. Describing stone tools; 4. Stone cutting tools; 5. Logistical mobility; 6. Language and symbolic artifacts; 7. Dispersal and diaspora; 8. Residential sedentism; 9. Conclusion; Appendix 1. Traditional age-stages and industries; Glossary; Bibliography; Index.

'A useful counterbalance to hidebound Paleolithic systematics, Stone Tools in Human Evolution implements a better-grounded descriptive approach. It shows a way forward and therefore deserves close study.' Current Anthropology