Abstract
In 2009, Hovers and Braun published in Springer’s Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology Series the volume “Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Oldowan,” stemming from the symposium of the 2006 SAA meeting in Puerto Rico. Many contributors focused on the description of the Oldowan as a lithic production system, showing the high technical variability of the techno-complexes. As pointed out by Braun and Hovers (2009: 4), even if most or all scholars agree that the study of Oldowan behaviors is fundamental to understand early hominin evolution, “not all would agree on a definition of the Oldowan.” Forty years after it was first defined (Leakey 1971, 1975), many sites scattered over approximately one million years are labelled as “Oldowan” in large-scale syntheses. While the available data are highly fragmented both in time and space, and the study of lithic assemblages follows different theoretical and methodological approaches, major overviews simply take for granted that a correlation among the East African assemblages is inescapable. However, the term Oldowan is still a vague concept , lacking a comprehensive definition of what an Oldowan technology is. Additionally, who were the authors of the Oldowan stone tools remains an open question.
Nine years after the publication of Hovers and Braun’s volume, this is a short overview and update of the current state of our knowledge of the Oldowan technical behaviors recorded in East Africa, to put in the proper perspective specific sites with “emerging” Acheulean.
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Notes
- 1.
I use in this paper the revised timescale approved by IUGS, in which the base of the Pleistocene is defined by the GSSP of the Gelasian Stage at 2.588 (2.6) Ma (Gibbard et al. 2010).
- 2.
Recently, Harmand et al. (2016) announced the discovery of 2.3–2.0 Ma sites in the Nasura Complex (West Turkana ), but detailed data are not yet available.
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I am very grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their comments which improved this manuscript. The revised version of this chapter benefited also from the detailed suggestions by Margherita Mussi.
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Gallotti, R. (2018). Before the Acheulean in East Africa: An Overview of the Oldowan Lithic Assemblages. In: Gallotti, R., Mussi, M. (eds) The Emergence of the Acheulean in East Africa and Beyond. Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75985-2_2
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