Is Hafting Technology a Driving Force of Difference in Paleolithic Technological Evolution Between East and West? A Novel Hypothesis

The contrast in technological trajectories between East and West has stimulated debates about the reasons for such differences since the proposal of the Movius Line in the 1940s. We rephrase the East–West contrasts from ergonomic and functional perspectives: (1) the long-lasting use of handheld tools in the East versus the emerging use of hafted tools in the West around the early Middle Pleistocene or later, and (2) stone-tipped hunting tools were becoming popular in the West during the Middle Stone Age/Middle Paleolithic, whereas they were nearly absent in the East before the Late Paleolithic. By evaluating the impacts of hafting technology and stone-tipped weapons on the morphology and structure of lithic parts, we consider that they may have initiated a new technological path based on hafting. We propose that the scarcity of hafting technology, especially hafted hunting tools, may help explain the limited advances in lithic technology in the East.