Lawrence H. Keeley

Both methods rely on examination of the smoothed down sections of blades, called "polishes," formed on the working edges of lithics.

[5] The methodology of this test was similar to other early microwear experiments, and it consisted of attempting to correctly determine tool function from analysis of lithics made and used by a researcher.

Keeley took up this test as a challenge from Mark Newcomer, a lecturer at London University's Institute of Archaeology and a skeptic of microwear analysis, to demonstrate the reliability of the method.

[9] Running a blind test granted their results objectivity and turned the experiment into an argument for the general use of microwear analysis in archaeological research.

He wrote of a series of blind tests run by London University, "there has been no convincing demonstration that anyone can consistently identify worked materials by polish type alone.

Using microwear and use-wear analysis, the pair narrowed their research to 54 lithic flakes from among the oldowan, which they used to understand the at least 1.4 million year-old civilization.

[14] Keeley discovered that these nine flakes, which would have been overlooked by most traditional studies, were actually used as stone tools themselves and were not simply debitage from the creation of lithic cores.

He also stated that the development of flake tools was crucial in the evolution of human intelligence, a theory that has found support even outside of archaeology.

War Before Civilization reinvigorated classic arguments regarding human nature, largely inspired by Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's perspectives on the subject.