"Tools"

[uniface]

There is a pretty common misconception among people interested in artifacts that only bifaces (flaked on both sides) with more or less recognizable forms are really "artifacts" and everything else "just rocks."

I'm here to point out that this idea completely collapses when an attempt is made to apply it to tools made previously to the very end of the Pleistocene (the "ice age"), anywhere. In fact, and completely unsuspected by most people in the Western Hemisphere in general, elaborate categories exist of flaked stone tools have been compiled by archaeologists, made and used over the course of a much longer time than people are supposed to have been here -- and they look nothing like the hafted points, knives and scrapers we assume were the only ones that were "real" artifacts.

A useful little teaser bearing on this appeared this morning:
https://www.sott.net/article/408923...Neanderthal-workshop-with-17000-flint-objects

Notice also (in the picture) the number of round, water-worn pebbles found in association with these.

The point isn't that there were the Neanderthals here who made these; it's that the things they left for us to find were, and no doubt about it, tools. That being the case, the argument that similarly unsophisticated items found here could not have been tools collapses.

Anyone interested could easily start by looking up (search term) Mousterian and clicking on Images. From there, one thing leads to another.

FWIW

 

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[Fred250]

Being new you don’t get that almost everyone sees the face, only a few will admit it.

 

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[uniface]

re. "expedient tools" -- a term that never should have been chosen to subsume ad hoc tools, because it was expedient for them to do everything they ever did. Up to and including making hafted points, knives, axes &c.

Intentional re-flaking edges of flakes only shows the freshly-struck edges were dulled by use : no bifacially worked edge is ever as sharp as the edge of a thin flake. Which is why they were made and used. Assuming these can be written off as knapping debitage requires a leap of faith that the folks doing things the old way don't support. Several people I recall have described skinning out an entire bison using one flake, with there being no evidence that it was used visible to the naked eye.

If people want to create their own tool/non-tool categories based on edge re-working, it's a free country I guess (although that's getting debatable). But pushing that on new people isn't warranted, IMHO.

A lot of things I've seen posted here that self-assured tool-definers have shot down could well have been tools. And that's as close as you can come -- in the grey areas, short of microscopy, declaring that they were and weren't are matters of belief. Not fact.

 

[quito]

Yeah I can see a face in some pics, but they are a natural feature of the rock and Nothing special.

 

[Gaspipe]

Yeah I can see a face in some pics, but they are a natural feature of the rock and Nothing special.

I see faces in clouds all the time.

 

[arrow86]

Being new you don’t get that almost everyone sees the face, only a few will admit it.

I’d say your definitely mistaken on that one .... I always give these “see faces “ post a chance but I have yet to see any that I can see what they are talking about .... iv tried squinting, sideways , upside down and have no clue what people are seeing .... once again I defer back to the NAs were so skilled take a look at the work involved with a banner stone if they wanted you to see a face there would be no doubt about it

 

[Fred250]

I’d say your definitely mistaken on that one .... I always give these “see faces “ post a chance but I have yet to see any that I can see what they are talking about .... iv tried squinting, sideways , upside down and have no clue what people are seeing .... once again I defer back to the NAs were so skilled take a look at the work involved with a banner stone if they wanted you to see a face there would be no doubt about it

I agree with you, which is why I have always believed it to be older/different in some way. Most examples posted here I can’t really tell either and I’d like to think I’ve developed an eye for it. I have and have posted stuff which is hard to deny the intentionality of if one is honest, but stopped pestering you all with it and kind of lost interest myself. I just don’t think telling people they are seeing things clouds is the best way to handle the problem.

 

[Charl]

I don't see any problem with telling people that they are experiencing pareidolia, and not seeing a man made effigy or image. I think it helps people learn. If they want to learn. Many people do not want to learn. Still other people may be "victims" of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which basically is simply thinking one knows more then one actually knows:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect

Especially in this age of severe erosion of any trust or confidence in any source of "authority", be it political authority, scientific authority, religious authority, it's not all that uncommon for people to simply assume their own authority. I exaggerate this trend at times by suggesting we will eventually get to the point where, a patient needs open heart surgery, lets go out on the street and ask the first person, "yo, you wanna try your hand at heart surgery? Follow me". No patient would ever accept any such thing, but nowadays many will settle for the opinion of anyone except people actually trained for decades in just the subject they are interested in. Perish the thought, lol. Add to that a transition to a so-called Post Truth landscape, and they'll be no point in learning anything at all. Whatever you want to believe will be true to you, and if people with greater knowledge disagree, well they can always pound salt, lol.


But anyway, I'm old fashioned. I think telling people it's not a man made face, it's pareidolia, should help, not hinder.


Look, someone actually won an Ig Nobel award for that kind of research, lol:


https://www.utoronto.ca/news/jesus-toast-study-wins-ig-nobel-prize-u-ts-kang-lee



https://www.utoronto.ca/news/seeing-jesus-toast-man-moon-youre-not-alone-or-crazy



https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945214000288

 

[southfork]

Maybe it takes being stoned ?

 

[Fred250]

I readily concede lesser knowledge of artifacts to almost anyone here. If I wasn’t sure about it, I wouldn’t argue it. Too many cloud images from one spot to have doubt. I took a new job with random testing and still see the faces, so it wasn’t the dope, but I’m sure it helped and certainly miss it. Legal in the state but not in the company, go figure.

 

[Fred250]

How many people with the same “sickness” does it take before you start to have doubt.. Only been here a short time compared to most and I’ve seen plenty. In America we don’t let the individual drown to save the masses, that’s a commie thing. The old ways aren’t going to work in the Information Age.

 

[The Grim Reaper]

I see the faces, I just know they aren't man made.

 

[justonemore]

So why was a member banned for his comments on this thread? The only one that appears political or disparaging is the one about letting someone drown and commies.
I'm confused, only certain people or types of people are allowed to make comment or have opinions?

The point of the original post was presented to create comment and argument about something we can't readily prove but presented as fact nonetheless. Then it just went off the tracks and became an, I found it/ can pick it up/ fits in my hand/ found on a known site with lots of other artifacts/ look at the marvelous work put into this face/bison/bird/squirrel/cloud on this rock. All responses were respectable, reasonable and yet somebody gets banned?

 

[Buckleberry]

How many people with the same “sickness” does it take before you start to have doubt.. Only been here a short time compared to most and I’ve seen plenty. In America we don’t let the individual drown to save the masses, that’s a commie thing. The old ways aren’t going to work in the Information Age.

What a bunch of garbage.

 

[Jon Stewart]

I remember when I started collecting many years ago I would show our friends a piece and they knew it wasn't an artifact they would respond by saying, "it can be anything you want it to be" which was a very polite way of saying that it was a "leave a right" so I would toss it. There are folks on here that really know their stuff and I respect their opinions greatly.

 

[dognose]

Uniface states;
"The point isn't that there were the Neanderthals here who made these; it's that the things they left for us to find were, and no doubt about it, tools. That being the case, the argument that similarly unsophisticated items found here could not have been tools collapses. ."

In my view, Toby Morrow stated it well in the publication "Stone tools of Minnesota". This publication focuses on stone tools almost exclusively, but also discusses chipped tools.

Toby writes:
Among the most common “artifacts” shown to archaeologists are oddly shaped rocks that are most remarkable to their owners because they “fit perfectly in your hand.” Typically, these rocks have no obvious modification from flaking, pecking, or grinding, they show no wear resulting from use, and, even more condemningly, they usually seem to have little or no actual functional capacity–just what was it that people were supposed to be doing with this so-elegantly-designed tool? The reader may recall reading earlier in this book that many stone tools were set in handles, meaning fitting in one’s hand is a weak argument for a rock being a tool.


To summarize, the human hand is such a remarkably flexible and adaptive structure that it is probably more difficult to find a cobble that will not fit in the hand.


Thats my emphasis on the last sentence.

Clearly by the discussions here, virtually everyone has an opinion on stones where no apparent alteration has been done by early man, yet some claim them to be tools.

 

[uniface]

Notice something, Dog. She (wisely) avoids the question of whether or not they could have been tools. What she focuses on is the absence of diagnostic evidence that they were. This is par for the course in a culture that assumes that any question of that sort can be settled by playing "Prove it."

What's overlooked in that is that there were probably hundreds of specific jobs people with that technology had to do that we honestly don't have much of a clue about. You can see the same problem with 18th & 19th century farm tools offered by antique stores in New England. It takes a real old tools expert to identify some of these. Once that's done, it's obvious. But before that, they leave people scratching their heads. And those are purposely shaped metal (mostly iron) implements. Back that up hundreds of years further to include stones pretty obviously carried in from somewhere else because they were ideal shapes and sizes (sometimes materials) for some task or other we can't imagine and you have a handle on the real issue. Which isn't "prove it" but "what did they have in mind for this when they picked it up and carried it back to where they were living ?"

Even with knapped chert tools, if I recall, Jacques Bordes identified something like 63 specific tool forms made in the Mousterian era. There are trays in museums full of all of these, each type as similar to each other as hafted points are to us. Yet people in this country, unfamiliar with them, deny that they even could have been tools at all, and get upset of you disagree with them. What they're really doing is operating on the assumption that "The truth is whatever I happen to be thinking at the moment." They even argue themselves into being firmly convinced that, if there were anything more to know about it, they'd know it already. And since they don't, they know everything there is.

But there's always something more to know. That's why convictions change.

I think a good counter-question to the "prove it" mentality that dismisses finds that are just stones would be, "OK. So why did they carry this x miles from where it occurs naturally all the way back to where they were living" ?

And when the answer to that is "We don't really know," the follow up would be, "Why not just leave it at that, then" ?

 

[southfork]

This ongoing discussion on rocks is why I try to post tools with obvious wear and shape . I have found thousands of stones on camps that were carried in I could build A house with them . But when I examine the artifact if it doesn't have the shape and wear that I recognize as an artifact I leave it . Here's a example of a hammer stone that has finger grooves pecked and ground into the tool .

 

[Timberwolf81470]

These are all Uniface Tools from one site. These are everywhere if you take the time to pick them up and keep them. I actually find these Tools in piles of Flint other hunters throw down.

All of these have an edge worked on them somewhere and some of them have very fine flaking along the edges.

Also, for those that see faces you'll have a couple surprises in there. lol

i see some prismatic blades in there, do you think they are hopewell or paleo?... i'm envious of ohio flints, most from my area is quartzite and kanawha black... i have a few quartzite prismatics... is the last pic a paleo end scraper with graver?

 

[Fred250]

Uniface, I apologize for ruining your thread, I can’t help myself sometimes. Please continue to share your knowledge and I will stay out of your posts.

 

[uniface]

You didn't wreck anything, Fred.

Full speed ahead !