Read the last sentence of their abstract: "Identifying a fifteenth-century painting of a handaxe does not change what we know about Acheulean individuals, but i

Read the last sentence of their abstract: "Identifying a fifteenth-century painting of a handaxe does not change what we know about Acheulean individuals, but it does push back the evidence for when handaxes became a prominent part of the ‘modern’ social and cultural world." That clearly Indicates the authors believe the painter and his contemporary society of modern 15th century peoples already had a culture of appreciation for the objects as pre-historic axes, that their so-called finding "pushes back the date" for this appreciation. That is literally their thesis and conclusion. That argument is reductive. They are saying that the painting is evidence that early modern people believed axe-theory because the authors have identified the rock in the painting as an axe from axe-theory. Everything else is speculation. It is complete garbage with a motive to push archeological axe-theory for academic crumbs. It is a desperate attempt to scrape empirical evidence for imaginary archeologies.