The small and short of it : minibifaces and points from Kilombe, Kenya, and their place in the Acheulean

The earlier Acheulean is often thought of as characterized by large bifaces, but small bifaces occur in assemblages even in early phases of the tradition more than a million years ago. We discuss here the presence at Kilombe in Kenya of extremely small specimens which can be termed ‘diminutive bifaces’ or ‘minibifaces’. The paper analyses the whole spectrum of bifaces in the site, and finds that the ultrasmall specimens are the tail of the distribution, and in effect the mirror-image of the length distribution of very long bifaces. They are therefore an integral part of the assemblage, but its extreme expression. They support the idea that Homo erectus often made tools that morphed across categories, rather than having sharp boundaries between types, and that the species was able to focus on delicate tasks as well as heavy-duty work.