What's new on the Italian Middle Paleolithic?

I'm traveling this week, participating in the Roundtable of the Middle Palaeolithic of Italy hosted by the Center for Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies(http://camnes.org), which takes place in Florence this coming Thursday and Friday (Feb. 9-10, 2012). I'm really looking forward to it, and looking at the final program, it sounds like a good range of perspectives and regional records will be discussed, which should make for good discussion. This is important given that an underappreciated dimensions of the Italian MP is how varied it is, which really is not al that surprising when you consider the topographic and geographic variability of the peninsula (see e.g., Milliken 2007 for a summary). If possible, I'll try to live blog some of the conference, and I should mention that the organizers have said that the conference presentations should be streamable in real time... I'll update this post accordingly when I have the final details.

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.

A Mousterian wooden spade from Abric Romani, Spain

A group of researchers from the IPHES (Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social) reports on the discovery of a handheld wooden implement from Mousterian deposits at Abric Romaní, Spain. The tool was found in Level P which dates to about 56,000 years BP, and its morphology suggests that it might have been a small spade/shovel, or perhaps a poker, given its association to a hearth. In the interest of clarity, let me emphasize that what was recovered is actually a travertine impression of that tool. However, that impression is so detailed that it was possible to identify the precise morphology and dimensions of the spade- or poker-like object (I actually think it looks more like some kind of spatula or knife - it'd be interesting to run some experimental work on the functional and ergonomic properties of this object), as well as the fact that it was made out of the wood of a coniferous species, likely pine.

A view of the travertine impression found in Level P, along with a reconstruction of the wooden object that left it.
© Jordi Mestre/IPHES.

Detail of the impression of the Level P wooden object. © Jordi Mestre/IPHES

This is not the only wooden object that was recovered from the Mousterian levels of Abric Romaní. For example, last year, I discussed the finding of a worked wooden pole that was likely used as part of a structure in level N dating to ca. 55kya (Vallverdu et al. 2010). In that case, the impression indicates that the object was over 5m in length, and shows clear evidence of having been whittled down to a specific morphology, namely that it is devoid of branches, and that it shows a slight tapering from 6cm in width at its base to 3cm in width at its top. This pole-like morphology suggests to Vallverdu et al. (2010: 143) that it was probably used as part of a structure like a fairly simple lean-to.


What I didn't discuss in that post is that there are other levels at Abric Romaní that have yielded evidence of wooden implements: Level H (~45-49kya) contained two dish-like wooden objects (one  32cm by 22cm in dimensions, the other about 22cm by 17cm and elliptical in outline). The larger object was made of juniper wood, and it was flat on its underside and bore a depression in the center of its top surface, reinforcing the idea it might have been a vessel of some sort. That level also yielded a third wooden object. This one was also flat, but displays a pointed end. This odd morphology made it more difficult to attribute it a possible function, but it certainly suggest that it had been worked by humans. These finds are described in details by Carbonell and Castro-Curel (1992). 

Three years later, the same researchers reported on the existence of wood pseudomorphs from Level I at Abric Romaní (Castro-Curel and Carbonell 1995). This layer dates to about 46-49kya, again the tail-end of the Mousterian in the region. In contrast to Level H, it wasn't wood fragments per se that were recovered in Level I, but rather hollows in the travertine that were later filled with plaster to produce casts of the objects that decayed and left their (very detailed) impression in the travertine at the site. Here, one of the pseudomorphs was a worked, tapering tree trunk (3.5m in length, 109cm wide at its base, 45cm wide at the top - both ends of the tree had been hacked off in the Mousterian). But the most striking recovery in that level is that of Pseudomorph 2, which was a set of three straight, rod-like pieces of wood recovered in a roughly triangular arrangement overlying a hearth. It was interpreted by the authors as most likely representing a tripod used in 'food processing' - probably cooking/boiling  (Castro-Curel and Carbonell 1995: 378). 

So, what's the big deal about this new find? Well, a few things. First, it's the only object like it known from the Paleolithic. There are other wooden implements known from a few sites - for instance, the well-known Schoeningen spears (Thieme 1997) - but this is, to my knowledge the first evidence of such a portable pointed object clearly intended to be used in one hand. Its morphology is also unique: according to a report in El Mundo that provides additional information on the find, its handle was 17cm long by 4cm wide, while its 'blade' was 15cm long by 8cm wide, and triangular and pointed in outline. Given that there is now plenty of evidence that some stone tools were hafted by Neanderthals, it should come as no surprise that there are functionally distinct components in this tool. However, what is really striking is that, in spite of Paleolithic archaeologists' obsession with stone tools, Neanderthals seem to have been perfectly content to use wood as the 'active' component of at least some of their tools.

Second, along with the other evidence for use of wooden objects at Abric Romaní, it suggest that the use of wood as a building material was a constant of Neanderthal adaptation. The importance of this is not fully appreciated since wood only rarely preserves, but the peculiar sedimentary conditions at Romaní (especially the conspicuousness of carbonate/travertine accumulations) give us an unparalleled look at the prevalence and diversity of how wood was used by Neanderthals for other things than fueling fire and hafting stone tools. Although naysayers will point out that one of the most common traces of use identified on stone tools has been linked to woodworking, I've never felt that researchers gave those observation their full consideration. Finding actual wooden implements shows what Neanderthals might have been making out of wood, and the range of these objects found at Romaní broadens our view of how diverse and important wood technology must have been for Middle Paleolithic foragers.

Lastly, it tells us something about how Neanderthals considered some of their material culture. In this instance, there is no indication that the object was broken. Yet, it seems to have been discarded rather unceremoniously by tossing it into a smouldering and partly extinguished fire (per El Mundo) that only partly carbonized it instead of consuming it completely. While we lack information about how Level P was occupied (i.e., was it occupied, say, long-term as a base camp, or fleetingly as a task site), the find indicates that there were certain contexts in which Neanderthals were perfectly OK with the notion of discarding objects that were still usable. Maybe spade/pokers like this one were relatively easy to manufacture and were considered unimportant or too bulky to be worth carrying from one site to another. Whatever the case may be, it suggests some labor-intensive objects could be considered disposable at least under certain circumstance, and it provides us with a really provocative glimpse into the nature and breadth of Neanderthal technology and how they thought of it.

Via: Millán Mozota.

References

CARBONELL, E., & CASTRO-CUREL, Z. (1992). Palaeolithic wooden artefacts from the Abric Romani (Capellades, Barcelona, Spain) Journal of Archaeological Science, 19 (6), 707-719 DOI: 10.1016/0305-4403(92)90040-A  

Castro-Curel, Z., & Carbonell, E. (1995). Wood Pseudomorphs From Level I at Abric Romani, Barcelona, Spain Journal of Field Archaeology, 22 (3), 376-384 DOI: 10.1179/009346995791974206  

Thieme, H. (1997). Lower Palaeolithic hunting spears from Germany Nature, 385 (6619), 807-810 DOI: 10.1038/385807a0  

Vallverdú, J., Vaquero, M., Cáceres, I., Allué, E., Rosell, J., Saladié, P., Chacón, G., Ollé, A., Canals, A., Sala, R., Courty, M., & Carbonell, E. (2010). Sleeping Activity Area within the Site Structure of Archaic Human Groups Current Anthropology, 51 (1), 137-145 DOI: 10.1086/649499

Multimillennial Neanderthal occupation at La Cotte de St. Brelade

The BBC has a brief news story about some of the results of new excavations conducted at the site of La Cotte St. Brélade (Jersey, Channel Islands). The site is perhaps most famous for having yielded clear evidence for the systematic slaughter of mammoths and wooly rhinos by Neanderthals, which prompted a reevaluation of their hunting abilities (Scott 1980). That analysis, however, suggested that these animals were accumulated at the site over brief timespans.

The question of how long Neanderthals occupied La Cotte is where the overview of this new research project gets especially interesting:

"La Cotte's collapsed cave system contains intact ice age sediments spanning a quarter of a million years, revealing a detailed sequence of Neanderthal occupation and occasional abandonment, against a background of changing climate.

"The site is the most exceptional long-term record of Neanderthal behaviour in North West Europe," says Dr Matt Pope from the Institute of Archaeology at University College London.

"At La Cotte, we get to see far more than a glimpse of their behaviour, we get to see generation upon generation of Neanderthals returning to the same place under lots of different environmental conditions."

In other words, this new fieldwork (including investigations at other sites, btw) is shedding very interesting new light on how Neanderthals occupied the sites under different conditions, and - most importantly - why their behavior varied over time. As someone who's argued for a long time for the need to develop methods that allow us to develop long-term diachronic perspectives in order to understand the full range of Paleolithic lifeways (e.g. Riel-Salvatore and Barton 2004, Riel-Salvatore et al. 2008), I'm very excited about such reports. It'll also be extremely interesting to see how the artifacts collected in older excavations compare to those found by the new project. This new project, incidentally, has a nifty little web site that provides a lot of pertinent information about the new project at La Cotte and nearby sites, as well as other components of their research agenda, including some underwater survey. Check out The Quaternary Archaeology and Environments of Jersey project (which includes one team member who's commented on this blog before).

References

Riel-Salvatore, J., & Barton, C. (2004). Late Pleistocene Technology, Economic Behavior, and Land-Use Dynamics in Southern Italy American Antiquity, 69 (2) DOI: 10.2307/4128419

RIEL-SALVATORE, J., POPESCU, G., & BARTON, C. (2008). Standing at the gates of Europe: Human behavior and biogeography in the Southern Carpathians during the Late Pleistocene Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 27 (4), 399-417 DOI: 10.1016/j.jaa.2008.02.002

Scott, K. (1980). Two hunting episodes of middle Palaeolithic age at La Cotte de Saint-Brelade, Jersey (Channel Islands) World Archaeology, 12 (2), 137-152 DOI: 10.1080/00438243.1980.9979788

Neanderthals and ornaments, birds of a feather?

© Mauro Cutrona.

M. Peresani and colleagues (2011) report on the discovery of cut-marked bird bones from the latest Mousterian levels at Grotta di Fumane, located in the Veneto region of NE Italy. They interpret the fact that these cutmarks are almost exclusively found on wing bones of only a subset of the 22 species of birds found at Fumane as evidence that Neanderthals there specifically targeted wings and feathers to be used in the manufacture of ornaments (check out Cutrona's fantastic picture of what they may have looked like just above).

Alert readers will remember that I've talked about Fumane before on this blog, mainly in reference to its early Aurignacian art and its transitional industry that's been likened to the Uluzzian. This new finding makes Fumane even more remarkable by providing strong evidence for Neanderthal use of personal ornamentation. Equally important, in my view, is that Neanderthals were somehow able to procure birds, a topic I'll return to below.

But first, let's talk ornamentation. The authors claim that a decorative use of the feathers targeted by Neanderthals is the most likely interpretation. Specifically, they rule out the use of these feathers in fletching since Neanderthal spears would not have benefited from it. Likewise, they rule out an alimentary interpretation since the cut mark are found almost only on wing bones, which yield relatively little meat. They also emphasize that some of the birds whose feathers were sought were raptors which are rarely consumed by humans. They therefore rule out the two main alternative interpretations of their findings.

To sum up, Neanderthals clearly were collecting feathers, specifically remiges, the long and sturdy flight feathers of four main types of birds, including bearded lammergeiers, red-footed falcons, common wood pigeons, and Alpine choughs. A cutmarked bone of the European black vulture was also found in a lower Mousterian level (A9) at the site. What is interesting here is that the collected feathers create a visual palette of colors that include gray, blue-gray, orange-slate gray, and black. These are visually striking but certainly more subdued colors than the reds and orange recently identified in ochres used by slightly older (ca. 50kya) Neanderthals in southern Spain (Zilhao et al. 2010), which I discussed in an earlier post and that would have been complemented by the hues of seashells. The reason why the Fumane color scheme is interesting is that it is very different from that identified for southern space. From there, it is only one step to start thinking that maybe these color preferences had some kind of cultural meaning, especially considering the much wider range of birds available around Fumane than the five species from which remiges were collected.

To expand on that idea a bit, the use of feathers as parts of ornaments at Fumane also indicate that the behavior of decorating one's body among Neanderthals was fairly flexible. Up to now, we only had evidence of coloring minerals like the ochre I just mentioned but also including manganese in SW France and of shells being used as bodily decorations. By adding feathers to the roster of items used by Neanderthals to adorn themselves, the Fumane evidence suggests that Neanderthals were able to use a fairly broad range of materials to embody and visually broadcast some dimension(s) of their identity. The fact that you see some regional variability in what material were used in what region also suggest that maybe these choices reflect social conventions bound by the resources available in specific region, maybe even in a way that anticipates similar decisions about what kinds of materials to manufacture beads from during the Aurignacian (Vanhaeren and d'Errico 2006). Admittedly, this is speculative, but the ever widening array of materials used by Neanderthals to decorate themselves certainly suggests that this was a well ingrained behavior that was filtered by locally available resources. In this, it severely undermines the credibility of the idea that Neanderthals were only able to pick up the idea of personal ornamentation from modern humans during the Transition Interval, a point Peresani et al. (2011) themselves emphasize in their conclusions.

Another thought-provoking question raised by the ca. 660 bird bones recovered from these Mousterian deposits is just how Neanderthals caught them. By all appearances, most of their hunting technology would have been, quite literally, overkill for hunting birds. Heavy spears could have also damaged the feathers that were the ultimate goal of the Neanderthals. The authors suggest that maybe they collected dead birds, though the amount of processing manifest on the bones suggests to me that this is unlikely, as all of these birds would have had to be extremely fresh if they had been scavenged, which seems a bit unrealistic. So this opens the possibility that Neanderthals were actively procuring birds, though exactly how is still very much an open question. If I had to venture a guess, I'd say it's likely that Neanderthals had some form of cordage, and that maybe they were able to fashion nets out of it.

Now, why does it matter if Neanderthals directly procured birds? It matters a great deal in the context of recently proposed views that state that Neanderthals lacked sexual division of labor (Kuhn and Stiner 2006). In large part, that view is based on the apparent lack in Neanderthal sites of plants and fast-moving small game that could reflect the labor of one segment of the population as opposed to the large game hunting practice by the other, presumably male segment. Well, if Neanderthals procured birds, that provides some fairly clear evidence of small game hunting, and when you consider the recent direct evidence for Neanderthals having consumed (and cooked!) a diverse array of plants (Henry et al. 2010), you've got some data that could be used to challenge the view of Neanderthals as lacking sexual division of labor.

And to think, all of this from some cutting, scraping and snapping marks on bird bones!

References:

Henry, A., Brooks, A., & Piperno, D. (2010). Microfossils in calculus demonstrate consumption of plants and cooked foods in Neanderthal diets (Shanidar III, Iraq; Spy I and II, Belgium) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108 (2), 486-491 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1016868108

Kuhn, S., & Stiner, M. (2006). What’s a Mother to Do? The Division of Labor among Neandertals and Modern Humans in Eurasia Current Anthropology, 47 (6), 953-981 DOI: 10.1086/507197

Peresani, M., Fiore, I., Gala, M., Romandini, M., & Tagliacozzo, A. (2011). Late Neandertals and the intentional removal of feathers as evidenced from bird bone taphonomy at Fumane Cave 44 ky B.P., Italy Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1016212108

VANHAEREN, M., & DERRICO, F. (2006). Aurignacian ethno-linguistic geography of Europe revealed by personal ornaments Journal of Archaeological Science, 33 (8), 1105-1128 DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2005.11.017

Zilhao, J., Angelucci, D., Badal-Garcia, E., d'Errico, F., Daniel, F., Dayet, L., Douka, K., Higham, T., Martinez-Sanchez, M., Montes-Bernardez, R., Murcia-Mascaros, S., Perez-Sirvent, C., Roldan-Garcia, C., Vanhaeren, M., Villaverde, V., Wood, R., & Zapata, J. (2010). Symbolic use of marine shells and mineral pigments by Iberian Neandertals Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107 (3), 1023-1028 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0914088107

Independent Neanderthal Innovation - Some Additional Considerations

One of my upcoming papers (Riel-Salvatore 2010) was written-up in a series of mainstream news outlets, including the New York Times, the BBC, Discovery News, AOLNews, MSNBC and sundry others. The original, reproduced in Science Daily, was published under the headline "Neanderthals More Advanced Than Previously Thought: They Innovated, Adapted Like Modern Humans, Research Shows." In the original UC Denver press release, I'm quoted as saying, among other things, that this study helps 'rehabilitate' Neanderthals by showing that they were able to develop some of the accoutrements of behavioral modernity independent of any contact with modern humans. While I've caught a bit of flak from some friends and colleagues for that turn of phrase, I stand by my statement -this study helps to cast Neanderthals in a much more positive light than they have been for a long while now.

In any case, it's always exciting to see your work written-up, but also a bit daunting. In a few days, I'm going to try to put together a post on the whole 'going to the press' experience, but I figured I'd seize the opportunity to provide a bit more detail on the paper currently making the rounds in various news outlets, to clear up confusion and preemptively answer some of the questions it might raise. Here goes...


So,  what is it I did? The short answer: I showed that, among, other things, around 42,000 calendar years ago (ca. 36.5 radiocarbon years BP), a new culture (better, behavioral adaptation) - the Uluzzian - emerged in southern Italy and is widely believed to have been made by Neanderthals. The thing is, the Uluzzian is associated with bone tools, stone armatures likely used as part of composite projectile weapons, shell ornaments, coloring material (ochre, limonite), and possible evidence of small game exploitation. These features are all generally associated with modern human groups, not so much with Neanderthals. Because the timing of the origins of the Uluzzian matches that of the appearance of the Aurignacian generally attributed to modern humans, many people (e.g., Mellars 2005) have argued that the Uluzzian was the result of Neanderthals being acculturated by modern humans, and creating hybrid cultures that ultimately proved to be too little, too late for the Neanderthals.

Here's the rub, though: for acculturation to be a likely explanation, two conditions need to be met, proximity in time (i.e., they need to overlap in time) and proximity in space (they need to be found next to one another). As I show in the paper, for the Uluzzian, while proximity in time to the Aurignacian is established, proximity in space isn't. That's because when the earliest Aurignacian appears in northern Italy and the Uluzzian appears in southern Italy ca. 42,000 years ago, the center of the Italian peninsula is occupied by Neanderthals making the Mousterian tools they'd been making for over 100,000 years. So, in essence, you have a 'Mousterian buffer' (and a long-lasting one at that) between the regions where the Aurignacian and Uluzzian develop. If the acculturation scenario was right in this case, you would expect the Uluzzian to first spring up immediately next to where you find the Aurignacian. Since the condition of proximity in space is not satisfied, it is very unlikely that acculturation is the explanation for the origins of the Uluzzian.

Given that the Uluzzian is assumed to have been made by Neanderthals, this implies that Neanderthals developed it on their own, independent of modern human influence. If that's the case, though, a natural follow-up question is why the Uluzzian should emerge at the same time as you first see the Aurignacian implant itself in northern Italy. To answer this, in my view, you have to consider the ecology of that time period. To keep it short, it's one of the most climatically turbulent periods of the Late Pleistocene, which was climatically turbulent to begin with. In southern Italy, this translated into cooler, more arid conditions that stand in contrast to the Mediterranean scrub-woodland that characterized the region earlier. Given the suddenness with which conditions shifted between one and the other (there was a lot of fluctuation), people would have had to develop behavioral strategies that allowed them to cope with uncertainty so as to minimize the risk of not being able to find the resources they needed to survive. The Uluzzian seems to fit that description, what with stoneworking strategies that minimize production waste; new tools that would have allowed people to better hunt at a distance; mobility patterns that reflect a conscious effort to provision hospitable spots with resources they may have lacked; the exploitation of a wider range of animals; and the development of artifacts to ease social friction when other groups were encountered.

It's hard to establish with certainty a link between paleoenvironments and behavioral innovation. In fact, naysayers would probably point out that Neanderthals were perfectly able to survive shift of the magnitude of those documented ca. 42kya. That's true but it ignores the fact that what Neanderthals hadn't been faced with previously, however, is the close spacing at which these fluctuations started happening ca. 42kya (Finlayson and Carrion 2007) - that was something new, and something that would stress any population, setting the stage for a moment where technological innovation could have been selected for. Now, this is an interpretation based on correlation as opposed to causation; however, any explanation for the origins of the Uluzzian (and the Aurignacian in northern Italy for that matter) that doesn't at least take them into consideration is likely oversimplistic.

Overall then, what I'm proposing in this paper is that climatic instability selected for behavioral innovation, one manifestation of which was the Uluzzian in southern Italy. If Neanderthals are responsible for the Uluzzian, that means they reacted in very 'modern' ways to these conditions by developing some of the very same innovations that seem to have made modern humans so evolutionary successful in the long term.

On to the preemptive questions and answers to them...

OK, but the paper's 33 pages long, is that all you're saying?

The short answer to that is no. The paper is an effort to use niche construction theory (Odling-Smee et al. 2003) as a conceptual framework in paleoanthropology to yield new insights on how to best integrate behavioral, ecological and biological evidence. It's by using that approach, however, that I'm able to propose an alternative explanation for the emergence of the Uluzzian that accounts for its timing, the lack of spatial proximity to the Aurignacian, and the paleoecological evidence. Because it explains more of the evidence, I argue that it's a much more parsimonious explanation than any of the ones that have been proposed in the past, which mostly focus on social factors.

The main advantage of using NCT as a conceptual framework here is that it encourages people to move beyond the identification of single prime movers to explain the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition and the eventual disappearance of Neanderthals from the fossil record. Specifically, I argue that it's only by documenting the changing relationship between behavioral, ecological and biological dimensions of the record that we're likely to get at how this process really unfolded. In this case, I suggest that we can identify three phases of the transition interval, each of which is characterized by distinct dynamics between these three systems of inheritance, that are in part influenced by the interactions between them in earlier phases.

I get it... so is this the same mechanism that accounts for the origins of the Chatelperronian of the Franco-Cantabrian region?

Not exactly. The situation of the Chatelperronian, another 'transitional' industry attributed to Neanderthals and for many decades argued to be the result of their acculturation by modern humans, is slightly different. In that case, the condition of proximity in space is met. In other words, you find Chatelperronian sites in and next to regions where Aurignacian assemblages are found. What people like d'Errico and Zilhao have shown, however, is that the condition of proximity in time is not met, since the earliest Chatelperronian appears to predate the appearance of the Aurignacian in those regions by several thousand years (d'Errico et al. 1998, Zilhao 2006).

Therefore, while an origin independent of modern human influence can be postulated for both the Uluzzian and the Chatelperronian, the evidence for why this is the case is different in the two cases. For the Uluzzian, the reason is that, geographically, its only neighbors appear to have been Neanderthals. It is perhaps not surprising that a consideration of ecological conditions has come to the forefront in models for the development of these 'transitional' industries, which are called transitional, because they fall within the interval of the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition, starting some 45,000 years ago.

But wait! Aren't there reports of Uluzzian occupations in northern Italy? How does this affect your conclusions?

Peresani and colleagues have recently been making a case for an Uluzzian presence in level A3 and A4-I at Grotta di Fumane, in the Veneto region of NE Italy (Peresani 2008; Higham et al. 2009). I talk about Fumane briefly in the paper, but let me discuss it in a bit more depth here. These are intriguing data. I've seen the material described as Uluzzian presented at a conference but I'm still uncertain about how closely it compares to what is found in southern Italy, since I haven't had a chance to see a detailed typological and technological publication of these objects and since I don't feel right using figures/numbers based on ongoing analyses that I've only seen fleetingly during a talk. Chronologically, they'd fit right in, no question. But there are a number of possibly contemporaneous assemblages in northern Italy associated with some evidence bipolar technology and with backed knives that somewhat resemble Uluzzian crescents (e.g., La Fabbrica, Paina) but that otherwise more closely align themselves with Late Mousterian assemblages, notably La Fabbrica (Bietti and Negrino 2007). So for the time being, it's not really possible to exclude that the Fumane assemblages claimed to be Uluzzian belong to this distinctive Mousterian tradition.

That said, let's consider for a moment what it might mean if Fumane A3 and A 4-I were to be shown to be Uluzzian. For one thing, it doesn't invalid the gist of what I have argued, namely that the Uluzzian could very well be an independent development. That's because in this case, while the condition of spatial proximity would be met (i.e., there are Aurignacian assemblages in the vicinity), the condition for proximity in time wouldn't since the earliest Uluzzian (dated to about 43,000BP) predates any Aurignacian assemblage in the region by as much as 2,000 years (Higham et al. 2009). Furthermore, the Uluzzian in southern Italy lasts until almost 35,000 calibrated years BP, while it would seem to not last beyond 40,000 BP at Fumane. This raises the question of the relationship of the Uluzzian in the two regions, and why it isn't found at all in Central Italy. Could the Uluzzian have originated in northern Italy? If so, how did it reach southern Italy? One obvious explanation would be to argue that people with Uluzzian technology sprinted down the Northern Adriatic Plain exposed during OIS3. However, since that area is now under water, we're unlikely to ever be able to demonstrate this one way or the other. Additionally, it still doesn't explain why Central Italy wouldn't have been explored by these people. The argument that they stuck to the coast is pretty weak in light of the fact that in southern Italy, Uluzzian assemblages are found along the Western coast of the Salento peninsula in the Bay of Uluzzo, and in southwestern Italy, in the foothills of the Alburni Moutains.

One possible explanation is that the Uluzzian originated somewhere else and diffused both in northern and southern Italy from that original homeland. The assemblage from Level 5 at Klisoura Cave, Greece has been proposed as one such potential source of origin. There are two problems with this, however: First, technologically, Klisoura 5 is very different from the Uluzzian in southern Italy. Notably, it displays much less bipolar technology, an almost complete reliance on blade technology, many more microliths, and a different way of making microliths. Second, in light of new dates from Fumane, the timing might be a problem since the assemblages would be almost contemporaneous. Third, there is nothing even remotely resembling an Uluzzian assemblage between the Peloponnese and the Italian peninsula. On the basis of current evidence, then, there is little solid data on which to base a solid link between Level 5 at Klisoura and the Uluzzian as a whole (Papagianni 2009). If that's the case, there are currently no assemblages on which to base the notion of an extra-Italian origin of the Uluzzian.

I'll buy that. But if Neanderthals were so smart and able to innovate in the face of change, what happened to them and their Uluzzian culture?

That's a good question, and before I answer it, let me highlight a few things. First, the Uluzzian is by no means a flash in the pan... currently available dates indicate that it lasted some 7,000 years. If a generation lasts 20 years, that's 350 generation of 'Uluzzians' - that's a hell of a long time, if you think about it, almost as long as the entire Gravettian. That means that, just because it disappears doesn't mean that the Uluzzian wasn't a successful adaptation. So there's that. Second, what I propose in the paper is that the Uluzzian is ultimately supplanted by a series of assemblages that have traditionally been called 'proto-Aurignacian' (a label for the earliest Aurignacian along the Mediterranean coast), but that really bear little in common with 'proto-Aurignacian' assemblages from northern Italy. For one thing, the proto-Aurignacian is characterized by very high frequencies of retouched bladelets in their tool inventories. In fact, as I detail in the paper, formal tools in most proto-Aurignacian assemblages in northern Italy on average comprise about two-thirds retouched bladelets. "Proto-Aurignacian" assemblages in southern Italy, in contrast, comprise on average only about 25% of retouched bladelets. In fact the bladelet frequency of the most bladelet-rich southern assemblages doesn't even surpass that of the least bladelet-rich northern assemblage. In addition, southern Italian 'proto-Aurignacian' assemblages tend to be associated with proportionally more evidence of bipolar technology (an Uluzzian trait in the region). These observations suggest that whatever comes after the Uluzzian in southern Italy may not, in fact, be the same as the proto-Aurignacian in the north, but really more of an amalgam or a form of cultural 'middle ground' between the two traditions.

This means that the makers of the Uluzzian probably weren't dispatched by people making proto-Aurignacian technology. Rather, it seems they were probably absorbed in the growing population from the north that would have been slowly spreading southwards over many millennia. This 'incorporation' makes sense of both the archaeological record, fossil evidence that there was some interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals (Trinkaus et al. 2003), and recent genetic research that shows that Neanderthals contributed a small portion (1-4%) of modern non-African populations (Green et al. 2010).

I only see the dates you mention in support of your argument for a lack of geographical proximity graphed in Fig. 2. Are the raw dates available?

All of the dates used in Fig. 2 are already published (see Riel-Salvatore and Negrino 2009, Table 1), with the exception of a series of dates from Grotta del Cavallo. These are reported in my PhD dissertation (Riel-Salvatore 2007), which is available upon request. These new dates will soon be published in full with colleagues from the University of Siena. In the meantime, they're presented here in graphical form to underscore a point, but since they're not the central thesis of the paper, the raw dates are not included in the paper itself.

What about recent claims that the Chatelperronian wasn't made by Neanderthals? Do they have any impact on your conclusions? 

The short answer here is not directly. I'm the first one to admit that the fossil evidence for the 'transition interval' in Italy is extremely scant. The attribution of the proto-Aurignacian to modern humans is based on a couple of loose while the attribution of the Uluzzian to Neanderthals is based on three milk teeth from two layers in one site, Grotta del Cavallo. The only certainty seems to be for central Italy, where Neanderthal remains are associated with some of the Late Mousterian assemblages. In the past, the consensus view - no doubt in part informed by the Chatelperronian situation - has been that some of those teeth from Cavallo display some affinities to Neanderthals, in spite of the lowermost tooth originally having been described as more modern in appearance (Palma di Cesnola and Messeri 1967), although recent revisions suggest that it falls within the Neanderthal range (Churchill and Smith 2000).

Whatever the case may be, the fossil record is extremely thin here, and while people have traditionally been comfortable with the proto-Aurignacian = modern human and Uluzzian = Neanderthal equations, my own preference is to remain agnostic about who made what industry during the transition interval in the Italian peninsula (Riel-Salvatore 2009). However, because the generally accepted view is that the Uluzzian was made by Neanderthals, I've used it as an operating assumption in this new paper, even though I derive none of my hypotheses from that assumptions. In fact, I think that considering whoever made the Uluzzian first and foremost as foragers helps to avoid predetermining interpretations about what the Uluzzian was, how it came to be and how it disappeared.

That said, it's worth considering what the implications would be for my new paper of a modern human authorship. First, would it alter my main conclusion, that the Uluzzian was developed independent of proto-Aurignacian influence. Here, the answer is a clear no. Authorship has no fundamental impact on what the Uluzzian was. Even if it turned out to have been made by modern humans, it would seem to emerge in southern Italy independently of whatever was going on in the north at that time. The only wrench modern human authorship really would throw in my interpretation would relate to where those modern humans would have come from - in that case, people would probably start looking east towards Klisoura with renewed attention, but as I've detailed earlier, this is an unlikely source for the Uluzzian, unless we're willing to accept that modern humans diffused along the northern coast of the Mediterranean without a single defining industry. While not impossible, this scenario opens a whole new can of worms, though, because then you need to demonstrate the modern human authorship of everything between the Peloponnese and southern Italy, which would be no small feat.However, given that the homogeneity of most new cultures associated with modern humans during the transition is generally interpreted as a positive indication of their adaptability (Roebroeks and Corbey 2000), we'd then have to explain why this feature was not selected for in that specific region, and why/how the Uluzzian grew out of this strategy to last for several millennia. As a thought exercise, though, it is interesting to ponder the ramifications of what it might mean if the Uluzzian had been made by modern humans in the context of the traditional acculturation scenario, since Homo sapiens-Homo sapiens confrontation is not usually taken to be a feature of the transitions... (Riel-Salvatore 2009: 390-391)


OK, I'm posting this now so that it's available for interested readers to peruse in order to complement the press coverage this has been getting... if you have questions/comments, feel free to leave them below, and I'll answer them in short order... if they're substantive enough, I might even incorporate them in the list of questions comprised in this post!


References

Bietti, A. and F. Negrino. 2007. ‘‘Transitional’’ Industries from Neandertals to Anatomically Modern Humans in Continental Italy: Present State of Knowledge. In Transitions Great and Small: New Approaches to the Study of Early Upper Paleolithic ‘Transitional’ Industries in Western Eurasia, edited by J. Riel-Salvatore and G. A. Clark, pp. 41–59. Archaeopress, Oxford.

Churchill SE, & Smith FH (2000). Makers of the early Aurignacian of Europe. American journal of physical anthropology, Suppl 31, 61-115 PMID: 11123838

d'Errico, F., Zilhao, J., Julien, M., Baffier, D., & Pelegrin, J. (1998). Neanderthal Acculturation in Western Europe? A Critical Review of the Evidence and Its Interpretation Current Anthropology, 39 (S1) DOI: 10.1086/204689

FINLAYSON, C., & CARRION, J. (2007). Rapid ecological turnover and its impact on Neanderthal and other human populations Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 22 (4), 213-222 DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2007.02.001

Green, R., Krause, J., Briggs, A., Maricic, T., Stenzel, U., Kircher, M., Patterson, N., Li, H., Zhai, W., Fritz, M., Hansen, N., Durand, E., Malaspinas, A., Jensen, J., Marques-Bonet, T., Alkan, C., Prufer, K., Meyer, M., Burbano, H., Good, J., Schultz, R., Aximu-Petri, A., Butthof, A., Hober, B., Hoffner, B., Siegemund, M., Weihmann, A., Nusbaum, C., Lander, E., Russ, C., Novod, N., Affourtit, J., Egholm, M., Verna, C., Rudan, P., Brajkovic, D., Kucan, Z., Gusic, I., Doronichev, V., Golovanova, L., Lalueza-Fox, C., de la Rasilla, M., Fortea, J., Rosas, A., Schmitz, R., Johnson, P., Eichler, E., Falush, D., Birney, E., Mullikin, J., Slatkin, M., Nielsen, R., Kelso, J., Lachmann, M., Reich, D., & Paabo, S. (2010). A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome Science, 328 (5979), 710-722 DOI: 10.1126/science.1188021

Higham, T., Brock, F., Peresani, M., Broglio, A., Wood, R., & Douka, K. (2009). Problems with radiocarbon dating the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition in Italy Quaternary Science Reviews, 28 (13-14), 1257-1267 DOI: 10.1016/j.quascirev.2008.12.018

Mellars, P. (2005). The impossible coincidence. A single-species model for the origins of modern human behavior in Europe Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 14 (1), 12-27 DOI: 10.1002/evan.20037

Odling-Smee, F.J., Laland, K.N. & Feldman, M.W. 2003. Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution. Monographs in Population Biology. 37. Princeton University Press.

Papagianni, D. 2009. Mediterranean southeastern Europe in the Late Middle and Early Upper Paleolithic: modern human route or Neanderthal refugium? In The Mediterranean Between 50-25,000 BP: Turning Points and New Directions, edited by M. Camps i Calbet and C. Szmidt, pp. 115-136. Oxbow, Oxford.

Peresani, M. (2008). A New Cultural Frontier for the Last Neanderthals: The Uluzzian in Northern Italy Current Anthropology, 49 (4), 725-731 DOI: 10.1086/588540

Riel-Salvatore, J. 2007. The Uluzzian and the Middle-Upper Paleolithic Transition in Southern Italy. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Arizona State University, 351 pp.

Riel-Salvatore, J. 2009. What is a 'transitional' industry? The Uluzzian of southern Italy as a case study. In Sourcebook of Paleolithic Transitions, (M. Camps, P. Chauhan, eds.), pp. 377-396. Oxbow, Oxford. DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-76487-0_25.

Riel-Salvatore, J. (2010). A Niche Construction Perspective on the Middle–Upper Paleolithic Transition in Italy Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory DOI: 10.1007/s10816-010-9093-9

Riel-Salvatore, J. and F. Negrino. 2009. Early Upper Paleolithic Population Dynamics and Raw Material Procurement Patterns in Italy. In The Mediterranean Between 50-25,000 BP: Turning Points and New Directions, edited by M. Camps i Calbet and C. Szmidt, pp. 205–224. Oxbow, Oxford.

Roebroeks, W. and R. Corbey. 2000. Periodizations and double standards in the study of the Palaeolithic. In Hunters of the Golden Age (W. Roebroeks, M. Mussi, J. Svoboda and K. Fennema, eds.), pp. 77-86. Leiden University, Leiden.

Trinkaus, E. (2003). An early modern human from the Pestera cu Oase, Romania Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100 (20), 11231-11236 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2035108100

Zilhão, J. (2006). Neandertals and moderns mixed, and it matters Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 15 (5), 183-195 DOI: 10.1002/evan.20110

Quote of the day: Bears, scrapers and points, oh my!

I'm co-teaching a seminar on Neanderthals and the origins of modern humans at UCD this fall, and so far having a really good time. Today, I introduced the topic of Mousterian stone tool technology to my students, including this classic tip on how to distinguish convergent scrapers from Mousterian points...

"In fact, the major problem in classifying Mousterian points is distinguishing them not from other point types but from convergent scrapers... Bordes (1961) himself offered a light-hearted "functional" criterion, writing that the best way to decide is to haft the piece and try to kill a bear with it. If the result is successful, then it is a point; if not, then it should be considered a convergent scraper. One of the problems with this approach is that it can quickly exhaust the available supply of bears or typologists, depending on the nature of the assemblage." (Debénath and Dibble 1994: 62).

Reference

Debénath, A. and H.L. Dibble. 1994. Handbook of Paleolithic Typology Volume One: Lower and Middle Paleolithic of Europe. University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

New data on the Middle Paleolithic of Iran

There's been a glut of interest on the Middle Paleolithic of Iran in recent years, in part because of how distinctive the 'Zagros Mousterian' lithic industry is from more traditional European assemblages (e.g., Lindly 2005), and because the Shanidar Neanderthals were found in the area (though on the other side of the Iraq-Iran border), including the much debated 'Flower Burial' at Shanidar (Solecki 1971). In the past, this blog has touched on some recent discoveries on the Mousterian of that region, too.

The Zagros Mousterian is generally seen as being dominated by heavily retouched stone tools including scrapers and Mousterian points, though it does have some internal variability (Lindly 2005). This view has been extrapolated to much of the Iranian Middle Paleolithic, but recent research is starting to show that Middle Paleolithic technology was much more variable than previously believed, which is frankly unsurprising given the size of Iran and the topographical and environmental variability its modern boundaries encompass. Contributing to this finer grained understanding of the Middle Paleolithic, and presumably of Neanderthal behavior, in that region, are two new but very brief reports in the freely accessible Project Gallery of Antiquity, detailing the newly discovered sites of Mirak and Tapeh Mes.

The open-air site of Mirak is located some 220km east of Tehran at the edge of the Iranian Central Desert and stands out especially due to its sheer size (Rezvani and Vadhati Nasab 2010). The investigators report that the site extends over four hectares and comprises tens of thousands of stone tools, many of which are diagnostic Mousterian and Levallois types. The presence of such a large site in an open and arid setting and which contains so many implements very distinct from the heavily retouched tools clearly underscore how variable Middle Paleolithic occupations were in Iran. In addition, this new site along with many others cited in the report leads the authors to conclude that

"There is a common misconception that hominins spent most of their times in caves and rockshelters during the Upper Pleistocene. This idea has arisen largely from the difficulty of defining other types of site and their vulnerability today. But the new discoveries suggest that open-air sites were by far the more abundant."

Middle Paleolithic point from Mirak, Iran (from Rezvani and Vadhati Nasab 2010).

This view is certainly borne out by the report on Tapeh Mes, another open-air site but this one found a few hundred kms south of Tehran (Eskandari et al. 2010).Tapeh Mes is much smaller than Mirak: only 85 implements were recovered from an area of about 100x150m, including several centripetal Levallois cores on which an attribution to the Middle Paleolitihc is based. What is striking about Tapeh Mes is its location: it's found at an altitude of 2184m asl on the central plateau of Iran. Here, the morphology of the implements (and the absence of predetermined Levallois products) conforms much better to the idea of the Zagros Mousterian, as does the site's location in a high altitude setting. What sets it apart, though, is the fact that it is an extensive open-air locality, whereas most prior knowledge of the Zagros Mousterian was based on assemblages recovered either from caves and rockshelters.

Much of this material remains undated and only published in very summary form, but it testifies to how active Paleolithic research is in Iran these days. These reports, along with some of the work of other Iranian researchers such as F. Biglari (click for some free pdfs), is really providing us with an increasingly refined understanding of the behavioral variability of Middle Paleolithic hominins in the area. This is quite important as it fleshes out our understanding of these behavioral dynamics in what would have been part of the eastern end of the Neanderthal range, which is arguably the most poorly known.


References

Eskandari, Nasir, Akbar Abedi, Nazli Niazi, and Sa'di Saeediyan. 20010. Tapeh Mes: a possible Middle Palaeolithic site in the Delijan Plain, central Iran. Antiquity 84 (323): http://antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/eskandari323/

Lindly, John M. 2005. The Mousterian of the Zagros: A Regional Perspective. Anthropological Research Paper, Arizona State University, Tempe.

Rezvani, Hassan, and Hamed Vahdati Nasab. 2010. A major Middle Palaeolithic open-air site at Mirak, Semnan Province, Iran. Antiquity 84 (323): http://antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/resvani323/

Neanderthal wooden structures, sleeping areas and group size at Abric Romaní

Well, what do you know... it looks as though Neanderthals in Mediterranean Spain were up to all sorts of interesting stuff ca. 55-50kya! Hot on the heels of the news that ornaments and coloring materials were found in Mousterian deposits at Cueva Anton and Cueva de los Aviones, we get news that Neanderthals at Abric Romaní (Spain, near Barcelona) appear to have had well defined sleeping areas that bear striking resemblance to those found in rockshelters used by extant hunter-gatherers (Vallverdú et al. 2010). But wait, there's more! The evidence reported by Vallverdú et al. (2010) also includes the impression of a ca. 5m-long worked wooden post (see image below) likely used as part of some kind of ephemeral wooden structure like a lean-to or a hut/tent pole. And as if that wasn't enough, an analysis of the hearths and occupied area suggests that level N (dated to ca. 55kya by U series) formed as the result of repeated occupations by small groups of 8-10 hominids who used the for brief periods of time, one of the first empirically derived for Neanderthal group size.

From Vallverdú et al. (2010:141) - color image available from the

online edition of Current Anthropology.

There's a lot to digest in that preliminary report. First, the sleeping areas. This is important since it relates to the structured use of space, which is often argued to be something that differentiates modern humans from Neanderthals. Of course, the recent paper on Lower Paleolithic spatial organization at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in Israel has done a lot to dispel that preconception lately, but it's still framing how many researchers conceptualize Neanderthals. The Romaní investigators identified 19 hearths in Level N (you can see them as the dark patches in the picture above), and identified that they were arranged in three distinct areas within the rockshelter: inner (closest to the backwall), frontal (around the largest travertine accumulations), and frontal (in the center of the shelter). An analysis of the hearths indicates that they were used repeatedly in a smouldering manner for brief periods of time. As well, the distance between the hearth and the distance between the hearths and the backwall in the inner zone all combine to "suggest that this space represents a sleeping-and-resting area in the Romaní record (Vallverdú et al. 2010:142). As the authors emphasize, there is a small but growing number of studies that have documented similar types of spatial organization at other Middle Paleolithic sites, including notably Tor Faraj, Jordan (Henry et al. 2004). These all suggest that Neanderthals were able to segregate their activities as well as to use the thermal characteristics of shallow hearths and rockshelter morphology to create comfortable sleeping areas, including at sites like Abric Romaní that faces N/NE and would not have mostly shaded and humid without such effective accommodations.

The wooden pole that the authors describe was identified on the basis of its impression in travertine deposits (see part b of the picture above which also shows what appears to be the pattern created by bark on the impression). "The travertine wood imprint measures 510cm in length and 6cm in width at one end and 3cm at the other. It has a rectilinear form, an absence of branches, and it ir fragmented, indicating probably that this piece of wood was subject to human modifications" (Vallverdú et al. 2010:140). Its position at the edge of the inner zone which is where evidence for a sleeping area was identified suggest to the authors that it was part of some sort of larger structure, maybe "a simple triangular structure leaning against the wall' (Vallverdú et al. 2010:143). Here, I'll simply point out that there is evidence for wooden structures at other Middle Paleolithic (and by extension Neanderthal) sites in Europe, including notably at the site of La Folie, France (which I discussed at length in another post), and which dates to ca. 57.2kya, roughly the same age as Level N at Abric Romaní.

The aspect of the paper which I thought was especially thought-provoking concerns the estimation of Neanderthal group size. Based on the size of the inner zone, the authors "assume that a density of individuals using 1.5-2m2 each or a group of 8-10 hominids could occupy this area. Hearth spacing in sleeping areas [based on ethnographic examples - JRS] suggests an occupation number of 4-6 individuals." (Vallverdú et al. 2010:143). While this estimate is extremely interesting in light of what it may tell us about Neanderthal social organization, before people go out and use this paper to show that Neanderthals lived in extremely small groups, it is important to emphasize that this group size is characteristic of fleeting occupations of the site. If anything, this may be telling us something about the size of task group (or some similar social unit) more than anything about overall group size in Neanderthals. If Level N at Romaní reflects a satellite site to a larger 'home base' type settlement, then we may start extrapolating from that 8-10 person figure some more grounded estimates of the extent of Neanderthal social units broadly speaking. Fascinating.

References

Henry, D. O., H. J. Hietala, A. M. Rosen, Y. E. Demidenko, V. I. Usik and T. L. Armagan. 2004. Human Behavioral Organization in the Middle Paleolithic: Were Neanderthals Different? American Anthropologist 106:17-31.

Vallverdú, J., Vaquero, M., Cáceres, I., Allué, E., Rosell, J., Saladié, P., Chacón, G., Ollé, A., Canals, A., Sala, R., Courty, M., & Carbonell, E. (2010). Sleeping Activity Area within the Site Structure of Archaic Human Groups Current Anthropology, 51 (1), 137-145 DOI: 10.1086/649499

Mousterian plant and fish use at El Salt?

Belatedly catching up on some Paleolithic news, a short newspaper feature (in Spanish) from Alcoy in Mediterranean Spain describes some of the recent results from the ongoing research by B. Galván at the Mousterian site of El Salt (pictured below at the base of the overhang at the center left).



The site itself is very interesting, sitting as it does at an ecotone and containing some substantial Mousterian levels, but what especially piqued my curiosity is the mention that collaborations with specialists in organic chemistry have allowed the extraction of animal fats from stones associated with some of the hearths at the site that indicate that deer and wild goats were cooked at the site. These analyses also have yielded fatty residues from plants that suggest some cooking/burning of plants at the site. Also of note is the reported presence, in the same hearths, of some burnt fragments of fish bones, which suggest that food resource may have been excavated at El Salt as far back as 50,000BP, when only Neanderthals were present in Europe. Not much else in the way of details, unfortunately.

H/T: Mundo Neandertal

Paleolithic papers in Near Eastern Archaeology

The June 2006 issue of Near Eastern Archeology contains four papers, all of which deal with the Paleolithic. Included in this fine lot is a paper by the team of Mike Bisson, one of my colleagues at McGill, about their recent work in Jordan. I'm providing the abstracts of all these papers here:

The Pleistocene Peopling of Anatolia: Evidence from Kaletepe Deresi
By Ludovic Slimak, Damase Mouralis, Nur Balkan-Atli, Didier Binder, and Steven L. Kuhn
Anatolia has been called the crossroads of Eurasia, forming as it does a land-bridge between Europe, the Levant, and central Asia. Historical documents and the region's rich archaeological record provide ample testimony to frequent movements of people, ideas, and goods across Anatolia over the last few millennia. A range of evidence, both circumstantial and direct, suggests that humans and human ancestors repeatedly traversed the region in even more remote times.


Late Acheulian Variability in the Southern Levant: A Contrast of the Western and Eastern Margins of the Levantine Corridor
by Gary O. Rollefson, Leslie A. Quintero, and Philip J. Wilke

One of the fascinating aspects of the archaeology of very ancient times is that it offers glimpses of extinct lifeways. We find this particularly true for the cultural behavior of hominids during the Lower Palaeolithic. Interestingly, relatively little is known about the daily habits of people during the fairly well-studied period of the Acheulian in the Levant, in spite of numerous site discoveries of considerable note. Much of this deficiency results from a lack of preserved perishable goods; these seldom survive time depths in the hundreds of thousands to well over a million years. But also lacking is clear understanding of the behavioral significance of those objects that do survive the wear and tear of time, specifically the numerous stone artifacts. This article presents new research that assists our quest for understanding of these ancient lives.


Human Evolutions at the Crossroads: An Archaeological Survey in Northwest Jordan
by Michael S. Bisson, April Nowell, Carlos Cardova, Regina Kalchgruber, and Maysoon al-Nahar
Human evolution can be traced back 7,000,000 years. Modern humans evolved in Africa 160,000 years ago and as recently as 26,000 years ago we shared parts of the world with at least one other species - the Neanderthals. Since the discover of the first Neanderthal in 1856 in Germany, this species has generated controversy; specifically, there are questions concerning their genetic relationship to modern humans, their capacity for language and artistic expression, or the reasons for their extinction. Resolving thse debates in the long term depends on an accumulation of evidence for how Neanderthals adapted to the physical and cultural environments around them. In other words, in order to understand why they died, we need to first understand how they lived.

Shelter or Hunting Camp? Accounting for the Presenceof a Deeply Sratified Cave Site in the Syrian Steppe
By Bruce Schroeder

No abstract available.

The latest issue also contains a paper on the Lower Paleolithic of Iran:

The Lower Paleolithic Occupation of Iran
By Fereidoun Bigalri and Sonia Shidrang

Iran is a natural bridge connecting Western Asia to South and Central Asia and therefore, we might expect it to have been a main route for hominin expansion eastwards. Despite its strategic location, however, it has so far produced little evidence for early hominin occupation. The authors present here the results of new investigations in the region that affirm the archaeological potential of this region for understanding Lower Paleolithic hominin adaptaton to their environment.

This should all help shed greater light on the Pleistocene record of the Near/Middle East, which is always good, especially in light of some of my current projects. I'm especially excited about the Schroeder paper, since there haven't been a whole lot of publications about his work at Jerf Al-Ajla, which contains an important Middle-Upper Paleolithic transitional sequence (as well as some late Acheulean material).

Newsflash: Neanderthals could build stuff

The Mousterian site of La Folie, which is located just north of Poitiers (France), is the subject of an extremely well-done website (in French, unfortunately with no English translation). The site is dated by TL to about 57.7 +/- 2.4 kya and had thus far been the subject of a few preliminary reports that emphasized its contextual integrity and the identification of activity areas within it (Bourguignon et al. 2002, 2006). One of the key aspects of the site is that a number of approaches were combined to confidently establish the existence of regularly spaced postholes around its periphery (indicating the existence of a relatively large man-made structure) and discrete activity areas within the area circumscribed by this structure (slightly under 250 squared meters, over a thickness of about 10 cm). The absence of evidence for a central or transversal posts that would have been needed to support a roof suggests that the structure was a large (i.e., ca. 10m in diameter) windbreak rather than a tent or hut. The postholes were surrounded by limestone blocks used to anchor the wooden posts used in the structure, traces of which have clearly been identified through micromorphological analysis in at least one of the holes. Likewise, micromorphology identified a large area along one side of the structure that was devoid of archaeological remains, save for decomposed plant materials, which suggest that it represents a bedding area.

Use-wear and technological analyses show that the lithic industry used at the site is characteristic of the Mousterian of Acheulean Tradition, and that it included a Levallois production strategy aimed at producing sharp flakes used to work a variety of materials (e.g., wood, skin, soft plant material). A few of these blanks were retouched to produce, among other things, retouched backed knives, but most of the lithics appear to have been produced and used relatively expediently. The investigators argue that the site served as a task site likely used in food procurement, although there are only scant details about this interpretation provided on the website.

All in all, this is a very eloquent presentation of the results of this excavation and it demonstrates how relatively dry archaeological data can be presented in an engaging way to the public at large. On a more technical level, as had already been documented at the Middle Paleolithic site of Tor Faraj in Jordan (Henry et al. 2004), this confirms that Neanderthals were able to partition and clearly organize their living space, in contrast to claims that "well organized sites" only appear in the Upper Paleolithic.

References:

Bourguignon, L., Sellami, F., Deloze, V., Sellier-Segard, N., Beyries, S., Emery-Barbier, E. 2002. L’habitat moustérien de « La Folie » (Poitiers, Vienne) : synthèse des premiers résultats. Paléo 14:29-48.

Bourguignon, L., Vieillevigne, E., Guibert, P., Bechtel, F., Beyries, S., Émery-Bariber, A., Deloze, V., Delahaye, C., Sellami, F., Sellier-Segard, N. 2006. Compléments d’informations chronologiques sur le campement moustérien de tradition acheuléenne du gisement de la Folie (Poitiers, Vienne). Paléo 18:37-44.

Henry, D. O., H. J. Hietala, A. M. Rosen, Y. E. Demidenko, V. I. Usik and T. L. Armagan. 2004. Human Behavioral Organization in the Middle Paleolithic: Were Neanderthals Different? American Anthropologist 106:17-31.