![]() ![]() ![]() For example, when new flaked stone tools like sickles, axes, adzes, chisels, and hoes appear, they are prehistoric cultural markers for the creation of new agricultural niches. ![]() Niche construction is the process whereby organisms do not passively adapt to conditions in their environment, but actively modify their own and other species’ evolutionary niches (Laland et al., 2016, Odling-Smee et al., 2003). Trends in the production and use of lithic tools are correlated with shifts in subsistence and settlement patterns, ideology, and social organization at times when new human niches are constructed. New tools helped Dalton groups to create new niches as they settled into new woodland and riverine landscapes and laid the foundation for later Archaic and Woodland socio-economic systems. Dalton toolkits, often considered late PaleoIndian, are part of an Early Archaic horizon. Large distinctive Sloan points were exchanged within emerging Dalton social networks. Dalton toolkits are highly formalized, consisting of adzes, scrapers, awls, and points used both as projectiles and knives. Technological and microwear analyses reveals that the Dalton adze was made and used for heavy-duty woodworking-felling trees and likely for manufacturing dugout canoes. The functions of tools from Dalton sites and tool caches in Illinois and Arkansas are contrasted with typical Clovis tools. Subsistence remains are not abundant, but microwear and technological analyses of flaked stone tools can be used to infer production of dugout canoes and document trends that reflect new sustainable and resilient lifeways and complex social networks. Production and use of early Holocene Dalton adzes and other tools from sites and caches exemplify these adaptations. Innovations in tool technology during the early Holocene in the North American midcontinent are related to construction of a new human niche focusing on woodlands, water travel, and improved aquatic and terrestrial resources. ![]()
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