From Newsgroup: talk.origins

https://www.science.org/content/article/early-humans-turned-favored-rock-sites-toolmaking-assembly-lines

There is evidence for making stone tools by preparing stone cores and
then knocking blades off the cores back to 500,000 years ago in Africa. Neanderthals and Denisovans left Africa before this technology was
invented and Neanderthals had been interacting with Modern humans in
Europe for around 20,000 years before they finally adopted blade
technology, just before they went extinct. You can make many more stone
tools from the same amount of stone by first creating a blade producing
core. It has always made me wonder why it took Neanderthals so long to
adopt the technology. They had to collect and transport stone several
hundred kilometers from where they needed to use it, but they stayed
with the old technology nearly until the end of their existence.

This study is making a big deal about finding a spot where humans were
making stone cores for likely use somewhere else around 160,000 years
ago. It is simply what they had to do. Why would you take an
unprepared core with you and carry the excess weight that you will have
to knock off the stone to get it into the shape that you needed it to be
in, in order to knock blades off of it. It is better to just carry the functional cores back to where you need them. They needed different
sized cores for different length blades.

Ron Okimoto

--- Synchronet 3.21f-Linux NewsLink 1.2