Investigating the evolution of bone technologies through quantitative method development

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program and is jointly funded by the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government.

SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal.

Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Danielle Macdonald at the University of Tulsa, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist developing innovative methods for bone tool studies by combining raw material properties analyses with 3D quantitative microscopy in order to investigate the evolutionary development of osseous technologies, objects created from hard animal tissues such as bone, antler, or ivory.

Bone tool use by some of our earliest ancestors has been documented as early as 2 million years ago, and over millennia, these technologies diversified in how they were made and for what purpose. This study lays the groundwork for studying bone artifacts and assesses how their manufacture and use may have differed. Bones used as tools on different materials often leave signature traces reflective of the interaction between both materials, which allows researchers to read those traces and translate them into interpretations about tool function.

These interpretations inform our understanding of how certain objects functioned in the past, but also have broader implications for human evolutionary behavior and the development of human decision-making and cognition. The study will produce reliable techniques to evaluate some of the earliest instances of bone tool production by our ancient relatives and provide insights into how and why human ancestors began to use bone for technological purposes, and how osseous technologies changed over time.

The overall objective of this project is to assess the utility of different parts of animal skeletons to determine which bones might be desirable for different tool types. Thus, the project assesses human decision-making and how this has developed and changed over broad timescales. The first steps for understanding these behaviors is to obtain an understanding of the fundamental differences in several skeletal elements and determine how they accumulate wear patterns under varying conditions.

Additionally, this project aims to establish quantitative methods for the study of surface traces on osseous materials, which will minimize issues of human error in the interpretation of these objects. This proposal is organized into four main project research aims: 1) to understand and isolate bone mechanical properties involved in the formation of wear traces on varying skeletal elements from different animals through the use of a modular material tester; 2) to develop controlled experiments using bones with different mechanical properties and specific worked materials under varying conditions; 3) to apply quantitative methods including confocal microscopy and 3D surface texture analysis to wear traces on the experimental pieces and statistically evaluate the association of wear and material properties; 4) to blind-test the statistical models against additional experimentally created bone tool assemblages in order to recognize diagnostic wear traces.

Overall, this project will incorporate knowledge from various academic viewpoints through collaboration with researchers focused on a variety of time periods and regions. This broad investigation into bone tool technologies will result in information and study protocols that can be applied to artifacts in varying archaeological contexts.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.