“…EC have become the dominant method for studying activity due to the perception that they record specific muscle use, that recording them involves low levels of intra‐observer and inter‐observer error (Hawkey & Merbs, ), and the apparent idea that they do not have a multi‐factorial aetiology. This has led to their use to study many aspects (often more than one in each study) of life in the past, for example, the effect of subsistence strategy changes or differences (Hawkey, ; Churchill & Morris, ; Steen & Lane, ; Eshed et al , ; Papathanasiou, ; Clapper, ; Doying, ; Villotte et al , ; Stefanovic & Porcic, ), cultural changes or differences (Chapman, ; Al‐Oumaoui et al , ; Groves, ; Lieverse et al , ; Zabecki, ; Lieverse et al , ; Rojas‐Sepúlveda et al , ; Shuler et al , ), tool use, specific or habitual activities (Lai & Lovell, ; Peterson, ; Whittle et al , ; Lovell & Dublenko, ; Lukacs & Pal, ; Jordana et al , ; Molnar, ; Cope, ; Weiss, ; Molnar, ; Üstündağ & Deveci, ), sexual differences in labour (Jiménez‐Brobeil et al , ; Perry, ; Rodrigues, ; Aranda et al , ; Hagaman, ; Peterson, ), occupational differences (Villotte et al , ; Milella et al , ), social stratification (Rodrigues, ; Porčić & Stefanović, ; Havelková et al , ; Palmer, ) and disability (Hawkey, ). They have also been analysed in early hominids and non‐human primates (Belcastro et al , ; Drapeau, ; Cashmore, ; Mariotti & Belcastro, ) as well as other mammals (Bendrey, ).…”