Two million years of flaking stone and the evolutionary efficiency of stone tool technology

Temporal variability in flaking stone has been used as one of the currencies for hominin behavioural and biological evolution. This variability is usually traced through changes in artefact forms and techniques of production, resulting overall in unilineal and normative models of hominin adaptation. Here, we focus on the fundamental purpose of flaking stone-the production of a sharp working edge-and model this behaviour over evolutionary time to...