Ah, when I read "very sophisticated" I was hoping to see something more than images of few stones.
To clarify: for a few days in my pre-adolescent years in India, I had gotten into a quirky habit of picking chipped-stones lying around (which I imagined could be from pre-historic ages). Finding some really interesting shapes wasn't all that difficult.
I'm genuinely curious about how archeologists/anthropologists come up with such definitive conclusions.
There's something called a Conchoidal fracture, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conchoidal_fracture ... the presence of which is technically diagnostic of material that's been artificially manipulated.
The WaPo article only makes a glancing reference to the fact that they look like Levallois tools, which require a more complex manufacture than simple knapping (including imagining the internal structure).
"Alison Brooks, a paleoanthropologist at George Washington University, said she's not convinced that the smaller tools described by Pappu and her colleagues are true Levallois points.
“It's still basically a single point in a giant continent,” she added — more discoveries are required to give context to this find"
To clarify: for a few days in my pre-adolescent years in India, I had gotten into a quirky habit of picking chipped-stones lying around (which I imagined could be from pre-historic ages). Finding some really interesting shapes wasn't all that difficult.
I'm genuinely curious about how archeologists/anthropologists come up with such definitive conclusions.