Amazing - congratulations! I've always been a fan of the 'multifunctionality' argument for many early tools, it's great to see some formalised evidence-based results of that. 👏

As do you. I recently had a non-archaeology academic colleague get wrapped into an email thread with archaeologists, and they messaged me to comment on how awful archs are to each other. 😬

That doesn't of course mean there's no scope for being critical, especially when a correction is in order, but one can be decent and fair in critiques.

exactly

lack of confidence

It's really interesting, isn't it. We know they provide important nutrients. What surprised me when doing the hammerstone experiment was that the grease and marrow was so liquid - not how we usually think of marrow. Outram also mentioned it in papers on horse.

Thanks Marc, it's nice to finally get these experiments 'out there'.

By extension, this supports a recent proposal in the monograph on GTP17 that an entire group, including pregnant/lactating mothers and youngsters (for whom such fat and grease is especially necessary), may have been present and actively engaged.

Paper here:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Rather, in terms of metrics and morphology, it matches best to impact from a hammerstone, likely used to access the liquid within-bone nutrients such as marrow and bone grease.

Through a series of experiments, microscopy, 3D analysis and statistics, we tested this hypothesis. We show that wooden spears - both in thrusting and throwing- are effective hunting weapons for large prey. However, we found it unlikely that this particular damage was caused by spear impact.

Thank you!

Thank you!