The point of your quest was to indicate how many more artifacts there are per person, however. And I think that’s a lot easier to make funny and apparent by such things as “how many knives in the kitchen compared to your number of heads?”.

But drinking glasses and mouths work just as well.

Something that indicates starkly how many more “things” a person has than their one person would indicate numerically.

Therefore you see vastly more artifacts, and those artifacts would also be less disturbed by scavengers, unless the rats were REALLY smart and worked out how to use an arrowhead to mug the cats, so you would see the “speciation” of tools used far earlier than the speciation by body parts left behind.

Triply so because not only are there more of them, but that they also don’t get scattered as much, and lastly that they tend to be more durable. We don’t use skulls to bash other people’s heads in because stones are harder and work better for that use.

So skulls may be found every thousand years of speciation in good enough condition to tell the morphology of the species, but you’ll see the speciation of tools left behind on a number-of-decades-scale. Most of the time, therefore, the tools predate the skulls of the hominid species that made them.

The short answer is, remarkably, no. The various main lithic technologies, across the world, and across time, all seem to be applied in roughly the same way no matter what the material is.

Having said that, the material does end up mattering in ways that overlay that fundamental pattern. There are super fancy things made in some more recent cultures that are made only on some materials. The clovis people seem to have been special snowflakes when it came to clovis points, eschewing local materials very often, while other folks in other places bent crappy local materials to their will.

So, at a medium to fine cultural level, and in certain specific areas, it mattered, but much, much less than one would ever have expected.

Wow, that is a good example. However, I’m not sure if burial of the dead is the key feature here, but it could matter.

Count the number of glass drinking glasses and relate that to the mass of the food eaten at all the meals the drinking glasses were used at, and relate that to the bodies of the people who all had those meals.

We try to bury our dead. This makes finding skulls out in the open harder, unless you’re going to walk into a cemetary, in which case your argument falls down because you find a lot of skulls there but not a lot of tools, or even just any junk.

But you find humans and their tools in the kitchen. So count ’em up.

NOTE: The UK had a kids program called “Educating Henry” where aliens came to earth to talk to the dominant life form on the planet and presumed that this was furniture, given their massively greater numbers, so one of them came down to converse with these lifeforms and took on the likeness of one of the species: a dinner chair.

Humans have many more chairs than bums.