The use of fire is central to human survival and to the processes of becoming human. The earliest evidence for hominin use of fire dates to more than a million years ago. However, only when fire use ...became a regular part of human behavioral adaptations could its benefits be fully realized and its evolutionary consequences fully expressed. It remains an open question when the use of fire shifted from occasional and opportunistic to habitual and planned. Understanding the time frame of this 'technological mutation' will help explain aspects of our anatomical evolution and encephalization over the last million years. It will also provide an important perspective on hominin dispersals out of Africa and the colonization of temperate environments, as well as the origins of social developments such as the formation of provisioned base camps. Frequencies of burnt flints from a 16-m-deep sequence of archaeological deposits at Tabun Cave, Israel, together with data from the broader Levantine archaeological record, demonstrate that regular or habitual fire use developed in the region between 350,000–320,000 years ago. While hominins may have used fire occasionally, perhaps opportunistically, for some million years, we argue here that it only became a consistent element in behavioral adaptations during the second part of the Middle Pleistocene.
The timing of Neanderthal disappearance and the extent to which they overlapped with the earliest incoming anatomically modern humans (AMHs) in Eurasia are key questions in palaeoanthropology. ...Determining the spatiotemporal relationship between the two populations is crucial if we are to understand the processes, timing and reasons leading to the disappearance of Neanderthals and the likelihood of cultural and genetic exchange. Serious technical challenges, however, have hindered reliable dating of the period, as the radiocarbon method reaches its limit at ∼50,000 years ago. Here we apply improved accelerator mass spectrometry (14)C techniques to construct robust chronologies from 40 key Mousterian and Neanderthal archaeological sites, ranging from Russia to Spain. Bayesian age modelling was used to generate probability distribution functions to determine the latest appearance date. We show that the Mousterian ended by 41,030-39,260 calibrated years bp (at 95.4% probability) across Europe. We also demonstrate that succeeding 'transitional' archaeological industries, one of which has been linked with Neanderthals (Châtelperronian), end at a similar time. Our data indicate that the disappearance of Neanderthals occurred at different times in different regions. Comparing the data with results obtained from the earliest dated AMH sites in Europe, associated with the Uluzzian technocomplex, allows us to quantify the temporal overlap between the two human groups. The results reveal a significant overlap of 2,600-5,400 years (at 95.4% probability). This has important implications for models seeking to explain the cultural, technological and biological elements involved in the replacement of Neanderthals by AMHs. A mosaic of populations in Europe during the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition suggests that there was ample time for the transmission of cultural and symbolic behaviours, as well as possible genetic exchanges, between the two groups.
Although Neandertals lived in Europe and western Asia for more than 200,000 years, we know surprisingly little about them or about their everyday lives. Evidence of their behavior is largely derived ...from the surviving pieces of chipped stone and animal bone that resulted from their activities. One of the largest concentrations of stone and bone artifacts left by Neandertals was at the famous archaeological site of La Quina in southwestern France.This study of the significance of changes through time revealed by an analysis of the chipped stone at La Quina reports on the excavations of the Cooperative American-French Excavation Project from 1985 to 1994. It moves beyond the largely descriptive and subjective approaches that have traditionally been applied to this kind of evidence and applies several important quantitative analytical techniques. These new approaches incorporate the history of previous excavations at the site, the results of the work of the Cooperative Project, and the most recent scientific understanding of relevant climatic changes.This is a major contribution to our understanding of Neandertal behavior and industry. It adds new dimensions and perspectives based on innovative techniques of analysis. The analytic methods applied to lithic artifacts that form the heart of the book are the product of considerations about how to best interpret a sequence of multiple contextual samples. The author concludes the book with an extraordinarily useful chapter that places his findings into the larger context of our contemporary knowledge of Neandertal life in the region.The book comes with a compact disc, which includes coded observations used in the analysis in as many as 47 data fields for the more than 11,500 artifacts that will allow professionals and students to further explore the collection of lithic artifacts.
Recent excavations at the deeply stratified Late Pleistocene cave site of Tabun on Mount Carmel have yielded a long sequence of Middle and Lower Paleolithic industries and associated geological and ...environmental evidence that has important implications for the understanding of man's cultural and biological development in that period. An analysis of these materials strongly supports a continuity in cultural development at this site from about 130,000 to 50,000 years ago and suggests that a continuous biological evolution from Neanderthal to anatomically modern Homo sapiens took place in the southern Levant.
Despite the much briefer period of research and many fewer archaeologists involved, there is now clear and incontrovertible evidence of human occupation in Australia at a period significantly earlier ...than can be documented with comparable evidence from the New World. An explanation of the differences in the present record between these two regions that relies on an insufficient study of situations favorable to the preservation of earlier material in the New World seems inadequate in light of the total accumulated evidence.
A selection of 37 burnt flints from Jelinek's excavations at Tabun were dated by thermoluminescence. The results indicate that the bottom of unit I (Garrod's Layer C) should be given an age of 171±17
...ky
bp(transition from oxygen isotope stage 7 to 6) and that units XIII to II (Layers Ed to D) were deposited between
c. 330 and 210
ky
bp,
i.e.during the oxygen isotope stages 9-8 and the beginning of 7. These dates raise the possibility that: (a) a pre-Würmian Neanderthal population may have settled in the Levant during the oxygen isotope stage 6, and that (b) the transition from Mugharan (Acheuleo-Yabrudian, Yabrudian and Amudian) to Levallois Mousterian type lithic industries occurred at the end of stage 8, more than 200
ky ago. These early dates, whose reliability was consistent with isochron analysis of the data, are not that different from those now accepted for the development of the Levallois Mousterian industries in Europe.
The 1986 excavations at the Mousterian site of La Quina, Charente, France included a witness section left intact by an earlier researcher, Germaine Henri-Martin. Zooarchaeological study of material ...from this witness section was designed to evaluate the effects of a number of different natural and human factors. This analysis demonstrated that the assemblage was actually the product of a number of different processes, some natural and some human, operating one after the other. The first of these processes was the accumulation offaunal remains by humans, a process that included some damage to the bones and probably some effect on the relative frequencies of different elements. This wasfollowed by damage and probably partial destruction by carnivores, and then by small-scale displacement by stream action. This complex series of events obscured details of the human activities originally responsiblefor the accumulation, although some behavioral information could still be extracted.
