Neanderthals shellfishing 150,000 years ago

The news is out: the site of Bajondillo, in southern Spain, has yielded clear evidence of Neanderthals collecting and eating shellfish as far back as 150,000 years BP, and pretty much continuously, though at different intensities, after that. One obvious thing to point out: this is almost as old as the earliest evidence of modern humans collecting shellfish (Marean et al. 2007), and the way Neanderthals did it seems to have been constrained by very similar considerations, namely how far the beach was from a given site in the past. The paper itself (Cortés-Sánchez et al. 2011) is published in PLoS ONE, which means that it's freely accessible.

Today's kind of a hectic day (giving a free, non-technical talk at the Colorado Scientific Society tonight, levaing for a trip tomorrow), but this paper is a real game changer on several levels, so check back soon, cause I'll have much, much more to say about this. Exciting times for Neanderthal Studies, I'll tell you that much!

References

Cortés-Sánchez M, Morales-Muñiz A, Simón-Vallejo MD, Lozano-Francisco MC, Vera-Peláez JL, et al. 2011 Earliest Known Use of Marine Resources by Neanderthals. PLoS ONE 6(9): e24026. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0024026

Marean CW, Bar-Matthews M, Bernatchez J, Fisher E, Golberg P, et al. (2007) Early human use of marine resources and pigment in South Africa during the Middle Pleistocene. Nature 409: 905–908.

Paleolithic Mediterranean island living, part 2

There's been some good discussion spurred by my earlier post on the reports of potential Lower Paleolithic stone tools found on Crete (and John Hawks also brought some additional observations to the debate). I'll be posting a few more things about some of the issues raised by the Cretan evidence in the coming days, but as I was recently going through a recent volume on prehistoric human-environment interactions (Fisher et al. 2009), I came across some interesting tidbits in a paper by Alan Simmons (2009) , which seemed relevant to the topic at hand:

The Mediterranean islands produced some of the most sophisticated ancient cultures in the world, and yet we know relatively little about their early prehistory. Explicit anthropological approaches to the processes and consequences of their colonization are relatively recent developments (Patton 1996). The traditional view is that the islands were late recipients of Neolithic colonists who imported complete Neolithic packages but left few material linkages to their homelands. (Simmons 2009: 177)

And

The first human visitors to Cyprus, as reflected by the Akrotiri phase that is well documented thus far only at Akrotiri Aetokremnos (Simmons 1999), were either a late Epipaleolithic (roughly Natufian equivalent) or early Pre-Pottery Neolithic occupation. Akrotiri Aetokremnos assumes considerable importance because for many years claims for pre-Neolithic human occupation of many of the Mediterranean islands, including Cyprus, generally were unsubstantiated. While there are Epipaleolithic occurrences on some Aegean islands, these are relatively late. Furthermore, these islands are in proximity to the mainland (Broodbank 2000: 110-117; Cherry 1990, 1992; Patton 1996:66-72; Simmons 1999:14-27). [Simmons 2009: 179]

References

Broodbank, C. 2000. An Island Archaeology of the Early Cyclades. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Cherry, J. 1990. The first colonization of the Mediterranean islands.: A review of recent research. Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 3: 145-221.

Cherry, J. 1992. Paleolithic Sardinians? Some questions of evidence and methods. In Sardinia in the Mediterranean: A Footprint in the Sea (R. Tykot and T. Andrew, eds.), pp. 29-39. Sheffield University Press, Oxford.

Fisher, C.T., J.B. Hill, and G.M. Feinman (eds.). 2009.The Archaeology of Environmental Change. Socionatural Legacies of Degradation and Resilience.. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.

Patton, M. 1996. Islands in Time: Island Sociogeography and Mediterranean Prehistory. Routledge, New York.

Simmons, A.H. 1999. Faunal Extinctions in and Island Setting: Pygmy Hippopotamus Hunters of Cyprus. Kluwer, New York.

Simmons, A.H. 2009. The earliest residents of Cyprus: Ecological pariahs of harmonious settlers? In The Archaeology of Environmental Change (C. Fisher, B. Hill and G. Feinman, eds.), pp. 177-191. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.