The neutral model of stone procurement developed by Brantingham (2003, 2006) provides a formal means to investigate the formation of lithic discard patterning under changing forager mobility conditions. This study modifies Brantingham's (2006) Lévy walk model to examine the influence of discard probability on the spatial distribution of raw material abundance. The model outcome shows that forager movement and tool discard probability have similar effects on the simulated patterns of raw material transport, so it is difficult—if not impossible—to differentiate the respective influence of the two factors from distance to source distributions alone. This finding of equifinality complicates the task of interpretating hominin mobility from archaeological distance to source data, particularly in settings such as the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition, which is marked by an important reorganization in hominin lithic technology that may have affected stone tool discard probability.

Brantingham (2003, 2006) 开发的石材采购中性模型提供了一种正式的方法来研究在不断变化的觅食者移动条件下石料丢弃图案的形成。本研究修改了 Brantingham (2006) 的 Lévy walk 模型，以检查丢弃概率对原材料丰度空间分布的影响。模型结果表明，觅食者移动和工具丢弃概率对模拟的原材料运输模式具有相似的影响，因此很难（如果不是不可能的话）仅从距离到源分布来区分这两个因素的各自影响。这种等值性的发现使从考古距离到源数据解释人类迁移的任务复杂化，