Over the past two decades, growing evidence indicates that the use by members of our lineage of unmodified or partially modified bone fragments preceded the emergence of fully shaped, standardized bone tools. But what were the major tipping points in their origin and development? And how did they contribute to the emergence of fully shaped, standardized bone tools? It is believed that these rudimentary tools, some of which date back to 2.4 million years ago (Myr), were used to dig, pierce, cut, or scrape. However, due to the lack of precise means to investigate these artifacts, it is difficult to reach definitive conclusions regarding their use. The development of replicable quantitative methods to infer their role in past cultural systems would allow a thorough documentation of their evolution in relation to other aspects of Pleistocene material culture. The objective of ExOsTech is to fill this gap. The methodology is based on the development and application of innovative principles such as the integration of tribology with artificial intelligence to study use-wear patterns present on expedient osseous tools. This methodological breakthrough relies on discriminant analysis of surface textural data (ISO 25178 and SSFA) acquired by confocal microscopy combined with image recognitions and multi-class neural network algorithms. We propose to apply this emerging method to study samples from Europe, South Africa, and East Asia dated between 1.8 Ma and 60 thousand years ago (ka). Cross-cultural comparisons of regional trajectories will help pinpoint (1) when expedient osseous tools became fully integrated in past cultural systems and (2) when standardized behaviours guiding their selection and use emerged in our lineage.
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