Foreword

Abstract

The emergence of stone tool manufacture during the Early Pleistocene, the function of these tools, and the nature of hominin subsistence strategies (i.e., hunting/scavenging) have been debated for decades, and are among the issues that still need to be firmly understood and resolved. Further, critical questions regarding our understanding of ancestral human behavior, including stone raw material sourcing and selectivity, how fossil bones congregated along with stone tools at archaeological sites, and the agents responsible for these bone accumulations need to be firmly understood. Moreover, lack of agreement by taphonomists regarding interpretations of the surface modifications on fossils bones and the modes of hominin social organizations are among the issues that still need to be resolved in paleoanthropology