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Stone tools are going to probably be more common in places that are attractive to hominids. Those places would likely be the same whatever their level of technology. There is a difference in technological hominids when they start making hand axes and probably somewhat before that for whatever lineage eventually developed stone hand axes. They then had property or valuables so a fixed site was likely. I doubt they made only what they could carry since the best rocks needed to make them are going to be in specific places. They probably needed a supply of them. They probably had females that remained at the camp site and it follows that extra tools and probably other items would be stored there. The consequence of that is that the technological hunter gatherer is going to periodically change locations or campsites. They are more likely to camp at places that offered shelter like caves but they would eventually get around to their entire greater territory as apposed to the range they walk from the current camp so the stone tools would be everywhere. They would likely exhaust the local resources within range of their camp so they would change camps in a larger specific territory that they knew and come back to that place in a few years or however long it took for the food resources in the area to replenish. There is obviously a strong selection to eliminate other competitors in your territory and eventually expand it so more of you children can survive. They aren't going to want to allow other hominids around. That is the expected behavior of the dominant hominid but another less technological group would have less reason to make a fixed campsite. I think it very likely that the more technological hominid was dominant. Making a fixed site would expose your most vulnerable members and possessions to all being lost if you aren't dominant when the males go hunting. A better strategy might be for the less dominant and less technological hominid to not have a fixed site. They would likely do better keeping track of where the dominant group was as best they could and avoiding them in the larger territory. That would imply less members in the band also since they aren't getting the first choice of territory. They would have to move around in the territory of the dominant group. A fixed site for them would be a liability if they are sharing the same larger territory. Without the fixed site they have nowhere to store their possessions. There is less selection pressure for them to go down that evolutionary path. Those that do have to compete directly with the more technological hominid. That is how I see a cryptic species starting to evolve. Early Homo seems a logical time for it to happen since that is when there were apparently multiple species and the first significant tool use. I doubt that there was more than one significantly technological group 1.5 million years or whenever the first stone hand axes were made. It seems a likely time when the more cryptic form would evolve since they would logically be in significant danger from more technological hominids. Stone hand axes appear to be very effective weapons and may have even been thrown. That less technological group is likely to stay that way if they are forced to be elusive. They likely aren't going to be selected for technology since that brings them into direct competition with probably our ancestors. Over time the significantly technological hominids also radiated into new species and separate populations but there is no reason to assume that there still weren't some that weren't technological at all besides clubs and rocks. That is especially true if they don't have any significantly technological hominids in their ancestry. That assumption is based on the assumption of a non technological hominid living today. Since that isn't a common assumption, most anthropologists only see what they think of as human ancestors and why all Homo are assumed to be technological. It isn't like habilis was likely someone would think was human if you met them on the street. http://upload.wikime...o_habilis-2.JPG I certainly never argued that hominids didn't make the tools. The point was that you can't say any particular one of them was necessarily technological since you can't associate any particular group with the one made the tools. That is the circular reasoning that implies that all hominids in the genus Homo were technological. The logical assumption is that it was our ancestors who were technological and the other lineages less so or not at all. Early on that means that only one group was significantly technological. Which lineage that was our ancestor becomes dubious before about a million years ago. It was probably still something more closely related to erectus or ergaster. It becomes extremely dubious assigning technology when you are talking about a specific species like habilis or rudolfensis necessarily being technological when the common ancestor of all the Homo is before significant tool use. The only way you can do that is assuming they were all evolving into more technological hominids. It isn't normal in biology for radiating species to all have the same niche. It is also not the most reasonable assumption for other reason but they basically come back to the same biological reasons which have to do with avoiding competition.

I've been thinking on the issue of absence of BF in the fossil record of North America. One question that would need to be answered is "how old does a bone have to be in order to be considered a fossil"? According to Wiki it is arbitrary but in the range of 10,000 years old. To my knowledge that is just under how long we are supposed to have arrived here 13,000 YA or so. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil So I wonder if the absence of a fossil record of BF in NA is really a strong argument, particularly if it had less opportunity or a smaller population than humans.