Corey Logan Johnson

COREY JOHNSON, then a graduate student at University of California, Davis, California, received a grant in April 2022 to aid research on “Diachronically Modeling Flake Cutting Edge Efficiency Trends at Shuidonggou Locality 2, China,” supervised by Dr. Nicolas Zwyns. The Paleolithic archaeological record of East Asia is characterized by considerable stone tool technological variation. Nonetheless, one of its most enigmatic features are generic stone flake assemblages. Previous work has invoked demographic, cultural, and ecological factors to explain this unique archaeological pattern. Less work has gone toward understanding the economic factors of stone tool production in the region that would have affected the evolutionary fitness of toolmakers and users. To this end, we analyzed the cutting edge efficiency of five flake assemblages from Shuidonggou 2, China, dating between ca. 34,000-28,000 years ago, using a Bayesian statistical approach. Flake cutting edge efficiency is a technological parameter that describes how much effort past tool makers put into economizing stone raw materials to produce sharp edges for use in subsistence-based cutting tasks. Our results suggest that cutting edge efficiency was relatively stable at Shuidonggou 2 over time, even considering the effects of flake production accidents and changes in strategies of stone raw material selection. This suggests that observed changes in raw material selection at Shuidonggou 2 were unlikely motivated by a need to increase cutting edge efficiency, and that behaviors underlying cutting edge efficiency in the region may have been under stabilizing selection.