The spatiotemporal distribution patterns of early hominins, as evidenced by fossil remains and lithic artefacts, provide critical insights into the range expansions and contractions of Pleistocene populations, from their African origins into Eurasia and beyond. Analyses of these patterns contribute to our understanding of both biological and cultural adaptations to diverse environments and to shifts in the human ecological niche. The primary data for reconstructing such distributions consist of hominin skeletal remains and, more frequently, stone artifacts. Utilizing these materials as reliable data points requires not only robust chronological frameworks but also clear identification of skeletal remains as hominin and the determination of whether lithic material is indeed of anthropogenic origin. The latter—distinguishing true artifacts from geofacts—has been particularly contentious and has fueled many debates, beginning with the eolith controversies of the 19th and early 20th centuries. At the heart of this lies the problem of equifinality—that is, the challenge of differentiating between similar end-products resulting from distinct processes—in this case “… the fact that such phenomena as the flaking of flints and occasional bulbs and also edge-knapping are produced by causes entirely apart from direct human effort. The likeness between the flaking produced by Nature and that produced by human agencies is sufficient to shift any burden of proof upon those who maintain the human origin of the stones; and this must be done not by a careful selection of picked specimens, but by a survey of the whole group” [(Warren, 1920), p. 250].

More than a century after Warren wrote this, debates regarding the artificial character of Lower Pleistocene lithic assemblages are still ongoing as well illustrated by the recent suggestion to use Antarctica as a ‘natural laboratory’ for the critical assessment of the archaeological validity of early stone tool sites (Eren et al., 2023). It is through the process of critical analysis of inferred artifacts as well as the dating evidence for early sites that our collective database is under constant maintenance (see e.g., [Muttoni et al., 2013; Wiśniewski et al., 2014; Duval et al., 2024]). Continuous evaluation of this database, at the level of the quality of individual sites as well as of larger geographical biases related to large-scale sedimentation and erosion processes as well as research history, is critical as it is the basis for the quality of our hypotheses. For example, the Late Pleistocene range expansion by modern humans is so striking as it can be compared to the distributions of a range of human populations inhabiting Eurasia for a period of roughly one million years before their arrival. For the earlier periods, at stake here, the spatiotemporal pattern of Pleistocene hominin presence and absence was recently interpreted as reflecting an “extreme scarcity of the available hominin fossil record in Africa and Eurasia between 950 and 650 kyr BP,” and prominently inferred to be related to the existence of an ancient severe bottleneck, with only about 1280 breeding individuals between around 930,000 and 813,000 years ago (Hu et al., 2023) (see for a critical genomic review of Hu et al.’s paper [Cousins and Durvasula, 2025] for a paleoclimate/archaeological record follow-up study [Muttoni and Kent, 2024]).

Such hypotheses are built on spatiotemporal patterns of hominin distribution, and the stronger these patterns, the more solid these interpretations. It is therefore essential to continuously test the quality of the data upon which such interpretations are based to further refine hypotheses or to reject them when predictions fail to be met.

In recent years, inferred traces of hominin interference with faunal remains—cut marks—are increasingly used as data points for a hominin presence in the absence of stone tools or human remains. This was prominently the case at the Dikika site in Ethiopia, where researchers claimed to have found at one location 3.4-Ma-old evidence for early hominin tool-assisted butchery of large-mammal carcasses, consisting of faunal remains with bone surface modifications (BSMs) interpreted as cut marks (McPherron et al., 2010). This claim led to a well-published debate (McPherron et al., 2010; Domínguez-Rodrigo et al., 2010, 2011; Thompson et al., 2015), in which Domínguez-Rodrigo et al. emphasized again the well-known fact that natural bone modification processes can closely resemble anthropogenic ones—a statement comparable to Warren’s ‘lithic equifinality’ comment cited earlier—again with a long history (see e.g., [Bunn, 1991]) and of great relevance to the site discussed here. As with the evaluation of inferred stone artifacts, context matters. After the death of an animal, bones undergo a wide range of taphonomic alterations that can mimic, modify, or even obliterate traces of hominin activity. Therefore, any claims of evidence for hominin interference with animal bones must be supported by a robust evaluation of the taphonomic processes involved in the formation of the faunal assemblage.