page_title: Nicholas Toth
section_title: Field and laboratory research
hierarchical_section_title: Nicholas Toth / Field and laboratory research
caption_attribution_description: English: Nicholas Toth flaking stone to create a replica of an Acheulean handaxe as a part of his experimental archaeology.
context_page_description: Nicholas Patrick Toth is an American archaeologist and paleoanthropologist. He is a Professor in the Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University and is a founder and co-director of the Stone Age Institute. Toth's archaeological and experimental research has focused on the stone tool technology of Early Stone Age hominins who produced Oldowan and Acheulean artifacts which have been discovered across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. He is best known for his experimental work, with Kathy Schick, including their work with the bonobo Kanzi who they taught to make and use simple stone tools similar to those made by our Early Stone Age ancestors.
context_section_description: Toth has engaged in field and laboratory research since the late 1970s, resulting in scientific publications on a variety of topics including human evolution, African prehistory, Paleolithic studies, the evolution of human intelligence, lithic technology, raw materials of antiquity, experimental archaeology, microscopic approaches to archaeology, faunal analysis, and taphonomy, geoarchaeology, ethnoarchaeology, primate studies, history of evolutionary thought, and Big History (studying and teaching history from the Big Bang to recent times).
  Toth has conducted archaeological field research and studied the lithic assemblages from Oldowan and Acheulean sites including Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia, Gona in Ethiopia, Middle Awash in Ethiopia, Nihewan Basin in China, Lake Natron in Tanzania, Ambrona in Spain, and Koobi Fora in Kenya. During investigations at Gona, Ethiopia in 1999, Toth discovered the fossil cranium of a Homo erectus individual which dates to about 1.2 million years ago.
  In his decades of experimental research into the manufacture and use of early stone tools, Toth has replicated thousands of Oldowan and Acheulean artifacts, many of which he has used in controlled experiments involving such things as cutting through thick hides and the butchering of large animals (all animals used in these studies had died of natural causes, no animals were killed for the purposes of this research). This research revealed that the most important tools to the early stone tool makers may have been the sharp-edged flakes that were removed from the choppers and pebble tools, rather than the choppers and pebble tools themselves, as had been previously supposed. Flake assemblages had been a largely ignored part of archaeological collections from sites of this time period because they were thought to have been a by-product of the manufacture of the more formal choppers and other pebble tools. Toth’s research supported the idea that these flakes were the simple, highly effective base of early stone tool technology.
caption: Nicholas Toth making an experimental Acheulean handaxe.
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