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When, why, and how did humans develop the extreme right-handedness found in this species? As reviewed in this chapter, several hypotheses have been proposed to explain the distribution of handedness in humans. The social learning hypothesis posits that similarity in hand configuration between demonstrator and learner facilitates learning; the fighting hypothesis states that a left-hander minority is maintained by an advantage in close combat; and the task complexity hypothesis proposes that task complexity increases hand preference. The three hypotheses are compared in terms of how they might be detected in the stone tool record. The power of the archaeological record is carefully considered to address hand preference and handedness at the level of individuals and groups, and how stone tools can help to test the predictions of the various hypotheses for the evolution of right-handedness in our species.

This chapter focuses on the importance of understanding how a researcher’s long-term relationships within in a community and willingness to accept other ways of being and learning make space for intersubjective exchanges and deeper understandings of technological ontologies. Borada-Gamo lithic practitioners of southern Ethiopia shared with me bit by bit their perception of stone as living beings, their proverbs, and their technological practices, which have the potential to reshape archaeological discourse surrounding lithic technology. It is critical that we privilege non-Western theories of the human and nonhuman world to acknowledge a wide range of intellectual contributions that produce inclusive and meaningful narratives of the past.

The Carson Mounds Group, a large mound center located near the Mississippi River in northwestern Mississippi, has produced a complex suite of traits which suggest direct Cahokia contact. These traits include raw material, lithic technology, projectile point styles, ceramics, and architecture. This chapter describes these artifacts and their place within the Carson sequence.

Understanding the cognitive abilities of ancestral hominins remains challenging, despite the many advances of recent years, including new fossil discoveries and paleogenetic data. However, the primary route to accessing the behavioral and cognitive worlds of our hominin ancestors still remains firmly rooted in the archaeological record, particularly stone tools, the direct products of hominin actions grounded in the physical, social, and cognitive worlds occupied by the knappers. A theory of mind (ToM) has long been considered a key component of the human condition, linked to both language and the development of abstract thought. There must therefore be a point (or perhaps multiple points) in our evolutionary history when hominins gained a ToM. This ability should, in turn, be reflected in the archaeological record. To date, however, only limited attempts have been made to correlate the two. This chapter thus explores the relationship between the various stone tool traditions and ToM.

Convergent evolution is the independent evolution of similar traits in different species, resulting from adaptation to separate ecosystems. Two Acheulean giant core methods, discussed in this chapter, illustrate this mechanism in an early stage of human cultural evolution. Victoria West core method was used only in central South Africa, while the Tabelbala-Tachenghit method is confined to the Western Sahara Desert of North Africa. Although the Victoria West and Tabelbala-Tachenghit core methods differ to a degree in their technological character and in the morphology of their resulting products, they bear great resemblance. These core methods were decidedly similar solutions to the same needs experienced by different groups of Acheulean large flake makers. The fact that core methods closely resembling one another in technology and design were developed by different Acheulean populations in remote and disconnected geographical regions provides us with a very early example of convergent cultural evolution.