Middle Palaeolithic stone toolmaking skill of experimental and archaeological Levallois flakes

The behaviour, skills, and cognition of past hominins can be reconstructed from the traces of their technologies preserved in the archaeological record. Stone tools are one of the most abundant sources of this information. However, stone toolmaking expertise in the archaeological record is most frequently explored at the two extremes of skill, either the most remarkable feats of lithic technology, or the most obvious mistakes. Here, we instead explore knapper skill via the more frequent and more mundane aspects of lithic technology: unretouched flakes. We use a suite of 3D geometric methods to quantify higher versus lower skill in recurrent Levallois flakes. First, we demonstrate that these methods reliably differentiate the group of flakes made by an expert and an intermediate experimental knapper, and then we apply them to a pilot sample of recurrent Levallois flakes of three Middle Palaeolithic sites (Nesher Ramla, Qafzeh, and Kebara) belonging to three populations of Homo. Our results show that Middle Palaeolithic Levallois knapping was highly skilled, with careful control of Levallois flake volume, shape, edges, and symmetry. The Levallois flakes we examined from Kebara and Qafzeh were indistinguishable in how skilfully they were made, suggesting that, at least according to the metrics used here, these populations of Homo shared comparable levels of Levallois-making skill.