Chose one of them - Article Example

The describes how stone tool analysis and research on human origins is manipulated by archaeological professionals to suit their own needs. He relates various avenues where archaeological evidence is construed based on personal whims rather than the use of any scientific methods. The author has placed a modified excerpt from another text and has used it to satirically relate the mishandling of facts to suit personal whims. The first argument presented by the author states that stone tools are similar to animal tracks.

Stone tools can be used to track down human evolution just as animal tracks can be used to track down animals. In writing this, the author has ended up comparing apples to oranges to form a path of discovery. Later in the passage, the author admits to the limitations offered by stone tools in order to discover more about human origins. There the author relates that our pens, markers and personal digital assistants would be able to reveal little about us except that we write. In stating this, he is absolutely right.

Stone tools can only indicate that human beings were using tools to achieve certain ends. Further down the line, the author has expressed sentimentally that recent investigation proves that stone tools can offer only limited insight into human evolution. However, the author seems disappointed in such an argument because he holds initially that stone tools offer sizable insight into human evolution. Given that this text is an academic investigation, it hardly makes any sense for the author to display his personal sentiments in order to deliver a point of view held by certain professionals.

This text is also differentiated because the author has modified an excerpt from C. S. Lewis’ novella The Screwtape Letters. The modified text is satirical and has been used rather injudiciously to criticise fellow archaeologists and their unsound professional practices. The problems with archaeological research on stone tools, the retaining of stone tools so that they are not accessible to other researchers, hiding statistical data so that it cannot be evaluated for consistency and other issues have been brought forth using the text.

While the author successfully drives home his point, but it is hardly a fitting method to use your personal whims to evaluate other people’s work. The irony is that the author is condemning other archaeological professionals of presenting findings without sound investigation and with the use of this text the author does just the same thing without even realising it. The author also argues that the stone tools classification schemas in use are outdated and date back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

He feels that the classification schemas ought to be more updated. Furthermore, the migration of primitive man from region to region poses another set of problems. Stone tools have been found as far as a few hundred kilometres away from their actual creation areas. He relates that advances in technology such as flint analysis and microbiological investigations can help determine how the stone tools were created and what use they were put to. This argument of the author is highly sound and reasonably built upon.

He further relates that certain archaeologists create stone tools on their own and try to compare the results of their creation with primitive stone tools as a means of discovering how these stone tools were created. This approach is a rather shallow treatment of primitive stone tools. There are inconsistencies in research from associated field as research from stone tools. For example, as the size of the primitive man’s brain increased, there is little evidence to show that his skill at producing stone tools increased with it.

Furthermore, discoveries in Australia and the Americas are not consistent with research elsewhere. Only Africa provides consistency with research in terms of the timeline. These and other arguments by the author are placed rather reasonably and are justified just the same. His arguments are both sound and coherent and there is little reason to differ with them. As in other scientific investigation, these mysteries are often solved as more data becomes available through the expansion of research.