ICArEHB researcher Li Li has won the “Highly Commended” award in the 2023 Journal of Human Evolution Early Career Researcher Paper Prize for her article “Did Early Pleistocene hominins control hammer strike angles when making stone tools?”, co-authored with Jonathan Reeves, Sam Lin, David Braun, and Shannon McPherron.

Their paper studied tool-making behavior and the evolution of hominin cognitive capabilities during the Oldowan-Acheulean period in East Africa. Using Early Pleistocene flake assemblages from 1.95 to 1.4 Ma, Li et al. focused on how hammerstone striking angle, which plays a major role in knapping outcome, became more consistently related to other flake size variables and came to mirror Middle Paleolithic assemblages. These results suggest that by about 1.5 Ma, hominins began to understand how this important tool-making variable affected flake size and implies increased awareness of cause and effect and technical ability.

Congratulations Li Li!

Read the article here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/…/pii/S0047248423001069