Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>Technological complexity and variability have long been central to archaeological inquiry, given their implications for human modernity, social networks, and cultural transmission. The reverse phenomenon, technological simplicity, has received comparatively less attention, despite being equally significant for understanding past human behaviour. Here we examine a 25,000-year record at Txina-Txina (Tx-Tx), an open-air site in the Limpopo basin of southern Mozambique. Our results show that across four Late Stone Age (LSA) units spanning the Late Pleistocene to Late Holocene, lithic production appears consistently oriented toward simple flake production on locally available raw material, with minor pulses of bladelet production emerging as a supplementary component from ~12 ka onward. Brainerd–Robinson similarity and Kendall's coefficient of concordance confirm that this organisation was maintained across all major technological variables. Where composition shifted, most notably in raw material, the underlying hierarchy of choices was preserved. Rather than reflecting limited adaptive capacity, we interpret this long-term simplicity as an efficient and resilient response shaped by both natural and human parameters. The Tx-Tx sequence departs from the cyclical alternation of flake and laminar phases established for the southern African LSA, documenting a regional trajectory in which simplicity itself was the sustained adaptive strategy.</p>