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Re: Hey - what about my bolas???
Gerrit Hanenburg (ghanenbu@inter.NL.net)
Fri, 23 Jun 1995 19:34:18 GMT
In article <3s7m80$bq1@studium.student.umu.se>,
Ludvig Mortberg <Agneta.Guillemot@historia.umu.se> wrote:
>I have read in several popular textbooks on paleoanthropology that
>completely round stones, obviously manmade, have been found associated
>with early australopithecine hominid remains in africa. They are often
>interpreted as beeing stones used for boolas (!). Can this realy be true?
>Is'nt the bola a relatively late invention like the bow? Could they
>instead have been used for grinding seeds, bark, nuts etc?
In "Making silent stones speak - Human evolution and the dawn of
technology" by K.D.Schick and N.Toth,I read that these bolas stones
can be produced by using unmodified quartz chunks as hammers.
They found that after approximately four hours of percussion these quartz
hammers assumed a remarkably spherical shape without any necessary intent
or predetermination.An angular chunk of quartz can be transformed into
a virtually perfect spheroid,just by being used as a hammer stone.
Gerrit.
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