Recognizing the Emergence of Man

Abstract

Recognition of early human industries takes on significance with the realization that commitment to tools is the novel adaptive design accounting for the emergence of man. The most abundant evidence for the emergence of man consists of the stones that he refashioned. But recognizing these objects is a problem, as they are both rare and similar to the stones of the environments in which they occur. Because the validity of a procedural, or course-of-action, approach to the problem of recognition can be demonstrated, such an approach is preferable to the intuitive and heuristic approaches that have dominated attempts to deal with the possible traces of early man.