Data and Code to Reproduce Plots in "The influence of cognitive evolution on handaxe making skill in the Acheulean"

This repository contains the data and code to reproduce the plots presented in the paper "The influence of cognitive evolution on handaxe making skill in the Acheulean" by Antoine Muller, Ceri Shipton, Gonen Sharon, and Leore Grosman.

Getting Started

Download all files and in 04MATLABscript (line 9) change the file location ('C:\...') to the folder where you downloaded the contents. Running the script will produce the plots in directory 02plots that were used to generate the results figures in the manuscript.

The code was run with Windows 11 and MATLAB version R2024b with the following toolboxes installed:

• curve_fitting_toolbox
• statistics_toolbox
• text_analytics_toolbox

Contents

01dependencies
Directory of MATLAB scripts accessed from MathWorks FileExchange

• plot_ellipse.m
• scatplot.m

References:
Ma, M (2005). plot_ellipse (https://se.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/8604-plot_ellipse), MATLAB Central File Exchange, Retrieved April 12, 2025

Sanchez, A (2005). scatplot (https://se.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/8577-scatplot), MATLAB Central File Exchange, Retrieved June 18, 2023

02plots
Directory of expected plots contained in figures including:
MATLAB Figure#    ManuscriptFig#

• Figure 1      Fig3 a
• Figure 2      Fig3 b upper
• Figure 3      Fig3 b lower
• Figure 4      Fig3 c upper
• Figure 5      Fig3 c middle
• Figure 6      Fig3 c lower
• Figure 7      Fig5
• Figure 8      Fig6
• Figure 9      Fig7 upper
• Figure 10    Fig7 lower left
• Figure 11    Fig7 lower middle
• Figure 12    Fig7 lower right
• Figure 13    Fig8 inset of a
• Figure 14    Fig8 a and b

03data
xlsx file containing all data needed to reproduce plots

• Sheet 1 - HandaxeData
• Sheet 2 - SiteDates
• Sheet 3 - CraniaData (Data from Dataset S04 of Püschel et al 2024)

Reference:
Püschel, T.A., Nicholson, S.L., Baker, J., Barton, R.A., Venditti, C., 2024. Hominin brain size increase has emerged from within-species encephalization. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 121, e2409542121. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2409542121.

04MATLABscript
MATLAB (R2024b) script for generating plots.