Interesting new thesis from ScienceDaily:
A team of psychologists, kinesiologists and archaeologists at Indiana University and elsewhere are throwing new light on a longstanding archaeological mystery: the purpose of a large number of spherical stone artifacts found at a major archaeological site in South Africa.
IU Bloomington professor Geoffrey Bingham and colleagues in the United Kingdom and United States contend that the stones — previously thought by some to be used as tools — served instead as weapons for defense and hunting.
The research, which combines knowledge about how modern humans perceive an object’s “throwing affordance” with mathematical analysis and evaluation of these stones as projectiles for throwing, appears in the journal Scientific Reports.More. Paper. (public access) – Andrew D. Wilson, Qin Zhu, Lawrence Barham, Ian Stanistreet, Geoffrey P. Bingham. A Dynamical Analysis of the Suitability of Prehistoric Spheroids from the Cave of Hearths as Thrown Projectiles. Scientific Reports, 2016; 6: 30614 DOI: 10.1038/srep30614
See also: The search for our earliest ancestors: signals in the noise
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