Archaeologist explains innovation of 'fluting' ancient stone weaponry
phys.org
phys.org
"explain the flint knapping technique of "fluting" the Clovis points, which could be considered the first truly American invention."
American as in North + South America [1] but it's not a universally accepted idea that the origin was there[1].
It is also more likely that the fluting was done to make it more useful for projectile use. The ones that were not fluted might have broken and hence we don't see record for it as much. Not sure if circumstantial bias is a term but we shouldn't come to drastic conclusions.
"It's amazing to think that people 12,000 years ago were flaking shock absorbers and engineering stone weapons in a way that it took 21st century modern engineering to figure out," Eren said.
They weren't designing shock absorbers, their design just happen to have that as a secondary function if the experiments done suggests it does.
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The section in the linked WP article discussing the origin of the technique does not contain any references. you seem to be familiar with the topic, do you know of any other resources for this claim?
Academic articles like this make me miss my university account access.
"The vituperative debate ended only when strong evidence for a pre-Clovis settlement turned up in Chile in the late 1990s." "Clovis may no longer be the oldest American culture, but it remains the oldest American culture we know much about."[0]
This article talks about how the smaller "clovis" was probably part of projectile weapon like a throwing spear as well.
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[0] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-clovis-point-and-t...
[1] http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/taima-taima-text3....
... of course there is also SciHub...
The flute may well have been intended to make the head easier to attach, but that's not the point. If such a head were brittle and failure-prone (per the hypothesis in the article), its users would have collected less food and left fewer descendants to use their particular favored technology.
The fact that the technology was pervasive and widespread means that it has some clear advantage. And it's the advantage the archaeologists are looking for, not the intent. And it turns out, I guess, that such heads turn out to be less fragile on impact because the longitudinal force is better distributed. So these heads are more likely to drive deep and deal a fatal blow, leading to more food for their users and more children to instruct in spearmaking, and ultimately more spear heads in the archaeological record.
Engineering implies forethought. If they didn't want to imply forethought, they should have used different words.
It acts as a crumple zone, like we have in cars now to protect occupamts in a crash. For the spear points, the fluting "crumple zone" protected the important cutting edges from breakage. The shaft would break loose at the fluting, damaging a small amount at the butt of the stone but allowing the main body to be reused.
Without fluting, at a hard impact the breakage was more likely at the tip, ruining any potential to reuse the point.
probably they just had more food and resources on the new land so a distinctive traid on the tools that is status only could be aforded by most of the community.
imagine someone looking 500 years from now at us. They will see all the expensive cars in LA and bay area and wonder why those two societies needed such larger engined while all other societies had smaller ones. I'm surr they will inspect the remains of all those BMWs and find practical advantages over a fiat, but we all know it was chosen just for the looks and disposable income.
I bet it was the same with the spears.
And I want to make some of these now - does anyone know which stones (besides flintstones) can be used? They're hard to find in my area.