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A Very Remote Period Indeed
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- August 26, 2010
- 01:22 PM
- 44 views
Why flour matters
by Julien Riel-Salvatore in A Very Remote Period Indeed
A couple of days ago, I mentioned how excavations at a Paleoindian site in Utah has revealed that the site's occupants had been milling various seeds to produce different kinds of flours. In that post, I mentioned how this discovery re-emphasized the fact that hunter-gatherers in general hunt as well as gather. In fact, outside of the highest latitudes, plant foods often account for a majority of... Read more »
Aranguren,Biancamaria, Becattini, Roberto, Mariotti Lippi, Marta, & Revedin, Anna. (2007) Grinding flour in Upper Palaeolithic Europe (25000 years bp). Antiquity, 81(314), 845-855. info:/
HILLJR, M. (2008) Variation in Paleoindian fauna use on the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains of North America. Quaternary International, 191(1), 34-52. DOI: 10.1016/j.quaint.2007.10.004
- August 24, 2010
- 01:21 AM
- 43 views
Portrait of the artist as a Neanderthal
by Julien Riel-Salvatore in A Very Remote Period Indeed
In a recent paper, O. Moro Abadia and M.R. Gonzales Morales (2010) argue that an important component of the 'multiple species model' (MSM) that sees Neanderthals as having essentially 'modern' behavioral capacities and that originated in the late 90's is based not so much on new discoveries as it is on new ways of looking at the archaeological record. Specifically, they make the case that part of... Read more »
MORO ABADÍA, O., & GONZÁLEZ MORALES, M. (2010) REDEFINING NEANDERTHALS AND ART: AN ALTERNATIVE INTERPRETATION OF THE MULTIPLE SPECIES MODEL FOR THE ORIGIN OF BEHAVIOURAL MODERNITY. Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 29(3), 229-243. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0092.2010.00346.x
White, R. (1992) Beyond Art: Toward an Understanding of the Origins of Material Representation in Europe. Annual Review of Anthropology, 21(1), 537-564. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.an.21.100192.002541
White, R. (2006) The Women of Brassempouy: A Century of Research and Interpretation. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 13(4), 250-303. DOI: 10.1007/s10816-006-9023-z
- August 20, 2010
- 11:25 PM
- 109 views
Paleolithic whodunnit: Who made the Chatelperronian?
by Julien Riel-Salvatore in A Very Remote Period Indeed
The Chatelperronian is a lithic industry that springs up for several thousand years during the transition from Middle to Upper Paleolithic industries. Its precise age is debated, but it clearly is associated with this interval. One of the reasons the Chatelperronian is the subject of so much debate is because, since the discovery of a Neanderthal in a Chatelperronian level at the site of
St. ... Read more »
Bar-Yosef, O., & Bordes, J.G. (2010) Who were the makers of the Châtelperronian culture?. Journal of Human Evolution. DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2010.06.009
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
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
Morin, E., Tsanova, T., Sirakov, N., Rendu, W., Mallye, J., & Lévêque, F. (2005) Bone refits in stratified deposits: testing the chronological grain at Saint-Césaire. Journal of Archaeological Science, 32(7), 1083-1098. DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2005.02.009
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
- August 19, 2010
- 05:04 AM
- 52 views
The final (?) word on those handaxes from Crete
by Julien Riel-Salvatore in A Very Remote Period Indeed
While everybody was busy talking about unexpectedly old cutmarks and other Pleistocene goings-on last week, the paper by Strasser et al. (2010) describing the discovery of quartz handaxe assemblages on Crete quietly came out in Hesperia. This is a topic that was discussed at length on this blog, in several posts that generated a large amount of comments a few months back. The sticking point of ... Read more »
Strasser, T., Panagopoulou, E., Runnels, C., Murray, P., Thompson, N., Karkanas, P., McCoy, F., & Wegmann, K. (2010) Stone Age Seafaring in the Mediterranean: Evidence from the Plakias Region for Lower Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Habitation of Crete. Hesperia, 79(2), 145-190. DOI: 10.2972/hesp.79.2.145
- August 16, 2010
- 05:32 PM
- 59 views
Ape-man the hunter?
by Julien Riel-Salvatore in A Very Remote Period Indeed
Well, at least the butcher, if not the tool-maker... McPherron et al. (2010) report the discovery of four bone fragments bearing marks left by stone tools from the the Dikika-55 locality in Ethiopia (dating to between 3.24-3.42 million years BP), a stone's throw from where the juvenile Australopithecus afarensis dubbed Selam was found. This is a pretty monumental discovery, in that it pushes back the evidence for the use of stone tool technology by about 800,000 years, and associates it fairly c........ Read more »
McPherron, S., Alemseged, Z., Marean, C., Wynn, J., Reed, D., Geraads, D., Bobe, R., & Béarat, H. (2010) Evidence for stone-tool-assisted consumption of animal tissues before 3.39 million years ago at Dikika, Ethiopia. Nature, 466(7308), 857-860. DOI: 10.1038/nature09248
Semaw S, Renne P, Harris JW, Feibel CS, Bernor RL, Fesseha N, & Mowbray K. (1997) 2.5-million-year-old stone tools from Gona, Ethiopia. Nature, 385(6614), 333-6. PMID: 9002516
Stout D, Quade J, Semaw S, Rogers MJ, & Levin NE. (2005) Raw material selectivity of the earliest stone toolmakers at Gona, Afar, Ethiopia. Journal of human evolution, 48(4), 365-80. PMID: 15788183
- June 18, 2010
- 07:00 PM
- 151 views
Heat treating stone for tools: Ethnoarchaeological insights
by Julien Riel-Salvatore in A Very Remote Period Indeed
I'm rereading a terrific paper by Kathryn W. Arthur (2010), in which she describes the acquisition and development of stone tool manufacture and maintenance among a group of Konso women in SW Ethiopia (the stone tools they produce they subsequently use in hideworking) . While I'll have much more to say about it in its own right, since I've been doing a bit of thinking about prehistoric heat treating of lithic raw material these past few days, I was struck by this passage:The majority of hidework........ Read more »
Arthur, Kathryn Weedman. (2010) Feminine Knowledge and Skill Reconsidered: Women and Flaked Stone Tools. American Anthropologist, 112(2), 228-243. info:/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2010.01222.x
Brown, K., Marean, C., Herries, A., Jacobs, Z., Tribolo, C., Braun, D., Roberts, D., Meyer, M., & Bernatchez, J. (2009) Fire As an Engineering Tool of Early Modern Humans. Science, 325(5942), 859-862. DOI: 10.1126/science.1175028
- June 11, 2010
- 12:55 PM
- 167 views
Humans in the Philippines 67,000 years ago
by Julien Riel-Salvatore in A Very Remote Period Indeed
So say Mijares and colleagues (2010), reporting the discovery of a small human third metatarsal from Callao Cave in the northern Philippines. The paper present a brief overview of fieldwork conducted at Callao since 2003 that exposed Pleistocene deposits at the site. The age of the layer in which the metatarsal was recovered was obtained through Electron Spin Resonance (ESR) and Uranium Series (U-Series) on two cervid teeth, one of which yielded an age of 66 +11/-9 kya.From Mijares et al. (2010:........ Read more »
Mijares, A., Détroit, F., Piper, P., Grün, R., Bellwood, P., Aubert, M., Champion, G., Cuevas, N., De Leon, A., & Dizon, E. (2010) New evidence for a 67,000-year-old human presence at Callao Cave, Luzon, Philippines. Journal of Human Evolution. DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2010.04.008
- May 11, 2010
- 06:38 PM
- 211 views
Neanderthals'r'us?
by Julien Riel-Salvatore in A Very Remote Period Indeed
By now, unless you live under a rock, you should have heard the news: New genetic studies indicate that Neanderthals and modern humans likely interbred: Among the findings, published in the May 7 issue of Science, is evidence that shortly after early modern humans migrated out of Africa, some of them interbred with Neanderthals, leaving bits of Neanderthal DNA sequences scattered through the genomes of present-day non-Africans. "We can now say that, in all probability, there was gene flow fro........ Read more »
Burbano, H., Hodges, E., Green, R., Briggs, A., Krause, J., Meyer, M., Good, J., Maricic, T., Johnson, P., Xuan, Z.... (2010) Targeted Investigation of the Neandertal Genome by Array-Based Sequence Capture. Science, 328(5979), 723-725. DOI: 10.1126/science.1188046
Eswaran, V. (2002) A Diffusion Wave out of Africa: The Mechanism of the Modern Human Revolution?. Current Anthropology, 43(5), 749-774. DOI: 10.1086/342639
ESWARAN, V., HARPENDING, H., & ROGERS, A. (2005) Genomics refutes an exclusively African origin of humans. Journal of Human Evolution, 49(1), 1-18. DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2005.02.006
Green, R., Krause, J., Briggs, A., Maricic, T., Stenzel, U., Kircher, M., Patterson, N., Li, H., Zhai, W., Fritz, M.... (2010) A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome. Science, 328(5979), 710-722. DOI: 10.1126/science.1188021
- May 4, 2010
- 04:17 PM
- 777 views
Aterian artifacts at 175,000 BP at Ifri n’Ammar, Morocco
by Julien Riel-Salvatore in A Very Remote Period Indeed
The Moroccan Ministry of Culture has a press release (in French) about the cave site of Ifri n’Ammar, about 50km south (i.e., away from the coast) of Nador, indicating that the Moroccan-German team that has been working there for the past seven years has identified Aterian levels dating to about 175,000 BP. If these dates are correct, they push back the age for the earliest Aterian assemblages by some 65,000 year, since to date, the oldest Aterian levels had been identified at the Moroccan sit........ Read more »
Barton, R., Bouzouggar, A., Collcutt, S., Schwenninger, J., & Clark-Balzan, L. (2009) OSL dating of the Aterian levels at Dar es-Soltan I (Rabat, Morocco) and implications for the dispersal of modern Homo sapiens. Quaternary Science Reviews, 28(19-20), 1914-1931. DOI: 10.1016/j.quascirev.2009.03.010
Shea, J. (2006) The origins of lithic projectile point technology: evidence from Africa, the Levant, and Europe. Journal of Archaeological Science, 33(6), 823-846. DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2005.10.015
- April 7, 2010
- 05:19 PM
- 221 views
Another brick in the wall: A Paleolithic stone structure from Theopetra, Greece
by Julien Riel-Salvatore in A Very Remote Period Indeed
There's a brief report at Discovery News that provides some detail about an artificial stone structure that appears to have been built at the entrance of Theopetra Cave (Greece) to protect its inhabitants from the elements. That, in and of itself is not news; what is news is the age of the thing: 23,000 years BP, obtained by optically stimulate luminescence (OSL)The structure is a stone wall that blocked two-thirds of the entrance to the Theopetra cave near Kalambaka on the north edge of the The........ Read more »
Rosenberg, Michael. (1990) Stone "Walls" and Paleolithic Tools: The MAC064 Site . Iran, 83-88. info:/
- March 17, 2010
- 05:13 PM
- 246 views
Quartz, Cretan handaxes and Paleolithic seafaring
by Julien Riel-Salvatore in A Very Remote Period Indeed
A couple of months ago, I posted on the recent discovery of quartz hand axes on Crete by Strasser and Runnels. That post spurred quite a bit of discussion, and I also provided some additional thoughts shortly thereafter, based on the colonization of Cyprus. Since then, we've learned that these implements will be described in detail in the June issues of the journal Hesperia, and some decent photographs of some of the implements in question were published, which provides some more convincing data........ Read more »
Broodbank, C. (2006) The Origins and Early Development of Mediterranean Maritime Activity. Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology, 19(2). DOI: 10.1558//jmea.2006.v19i2.199
- March 16, 2010
- 08:08 PM
- 256 views
Mad Neanderthals, peer review and scholarly publication
by Julien Riel-Salvatore in A Very Remote Period Indeed
There's been a growing rumble in the world of scientific publishing for the past several months, focusing especially on the nature and practices of the journal Medical Hypotheses. Briefly put, MH is a non-peer-reviewed journal that publishes original, controversial and thought-provoking ideas ("hypotheses" defined in the broadest possible sense, I guess you could say) about the medical realm sensu lato. Now, as reported by Science Insider, MH's editor, Bruce Charlton (here's his blog presenting ........ Read more »
Riel-Salvatore J. (2008) Mad Neanderthal disease? Some comments on "A potential role for Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies in Neanderthal extinction". Medical hypotheses, 71(3), 473-4. PMID: 18524493
UNDERDOWN, S. (2008) A potential role for Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies in Neanderthal extinction. Medical Hypotheses, 71(1), 4-7. DOI: 10.1016/j.mehy.2007.12.014
- March 9, 2010
- 12:46 AM
- 205 views
60,000 year old decorated ostrich eggshell canteens from Diepkloof, South Africa
by Julien Riel-Salvatore in A Very Remote Period Indeed
Sometimes, it's what a paper doesn't emphasize that's the most thought-provoking and has the most far-ranging implications. A case in point is the recent paper by Texier et al. (2010) on decorated (i.e., engraved/incised) ostrich eggshell fragments from the Middle Stone Age site of Diepkloof in South Africa. The paper provides a lot of information about the sequence of deposits at the site, as well as on their archaeological contents. They emphasize specifically the layers attributed to the Howi........ Read more »
Henshilwood, C., d'Errico, F., & Watts, I. (2009) Engraved ochres from the Middle Stone Age levels at Blombos Cave, South Africa. Journal of Human Evolution, 57(1), 27-47. DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2009.01.005
Texier, P., Porraz, G., Parkington, J., Rigaud, J., Poggenpoel, C., Miller, C., Tribolo, C., Cartwright, C., Coudenneau, A., Klein, R.... (2010) A Howiesons Poort tradition of engraving ostrich eggshell containers dated to 60,000 years ago at Diepkloof Rock Shelter, South Africa. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0913047107
- February 22, 2010
- 08:59 PM
- 220 views
Relics fail!
by Julien Riel-Salvatore in A Very Remote Period Indeed
This exchange between William of Baskerville and Adso of Melk, in The Name of the Rose seems pretty timely... “Some time ago, in the Cathedral of Cologne, I saw the skull of John the Baptist at the age of twelve”“Really?” I exclaimed, amazed. Then, seized by doubt, I added, “But the Baptist was executed at a more advanced age!”“The other skull must be in another treasury,” William said, with a grave face.I say timely because last week, a study reporting the results of genetic and........ Read more »
Nilsson, M., Possnert, G., Edlund, H., Budowle, B., Kjellström, A., & Allen, M. (2010) Analysis of the Putative Remains of a European Patron Saint–St. Birgitta. PLoS ONE, 5(2). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0008986
- February 1, 2010
- 05:56 PM
- 247 views
Neanderthal toothpicking - 100,000 year-old evidence from Poland
by Julien Riel-Salvatore in A Very Remote Period Indeed
There's an interesting newsreport that summarizes a recent paper on the discovery, context and characteristics of three Neanderthal teeth recovered from Stajnia Cave, in southern Poland. Urbanowski et al. (2010) suggest that, on the basis of the associated fauna, which comprises mostly reindeer as well as some red deer, horses and ibex, as well as some cut-marked cave bear bones, the most likely age for these remains falls towards the end of Oxygen Isotope Stage 5, somewhere between 80-100,000BP........ Read more »
Urbanowski, M., Socha, P., Dąbrowski, P., Nowaczewska, W., Sadakierska-Chudy, A., Dobosz, T., Stefaniak, K., & Nadachowski, A. (2010) The first Neanderthal tooth found North of the Carpathian Mountains. Naturwissenschaften. DOI: 10.1007/s00114-010-0646-2
- January 22, 2010
- 03:37 PM
- 316 views
Neanderthal wooden structures, sleeping areas and group size at Abric Romaní
by Julien Riel-Salvatore in A Very Remote Period Indeed
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 (Vallverd........ Read more »
Vallverdú, J., Vaquero, M., Cáceres, I., Allué, E., Rosell, J., Saladié, P., Chacón, G., Ollé, A., Canals, A., Sala, R.... (2010) Sleeping Activity Area within the Site Structure of Archaic Human Groups. Current Anthropology, 51(1), 137-145. DOI: 10.1086/649499
- January 18, 2010
- 12:45 PM
- 226 views
Early modern human parietal art at Fumane Cave
by Julien Riel-Salvatore in A Very Remote Period Indeed
The last three issues of the 2009 volume of L'Anthropologie are dedicated to prehistoric art, and one the papers contained in that special volume concerns five vault fragments from Fumane Cave (Veneto region, Italy) that were recovered during excavation and that bear designs made in red ochre. The art itself is already well known and has been published in great detail as part of a monograph a few years ago (Broglio and Dalmieri 2005), but this study presents some new data on the likely age of t........ Read more »
Broglio, A., De Stefani, M., Gurioli, F., Pallecchi, P., Giachi, G., Higham, T., & Brock, F. (2009) L’art aurignacien dans la décoration de la Grotte de Fumane. L'Anthropologie, 113(5), 753-761. DOI: 10.1016/j.anthro.2009.09.016
- January 15, 2010
- 02:16 PM
- 308 views
Prehistoric ballistics, or Mythbusters meets archaeology
by Julien Riel-Salvatore in A Very Remote Period Indeed
Nicole Waguespack and a bunch of others (including four of the Mythbusters gang, which leads one to wonder whether this will be the basis of a future episode) ask the question: "Given that so many hunter-gatherers use/d stone-tipped projectile, what are the advantages of a stone tip relative to one whose point is simply sharpened wood?" This is a good question to ask, since crafting an projectile point from stone consumes more time, effort and resources than simply sharpening the end of the shaf........ Read more »
Waguespack, N.M., Surovell, T.A., Denoyer, A., Dallow, A., Savage, A., Hyneman, J., & Tapster, D. (2009) Making a point: wood- versus stone-tipped projectiles. Antiquity, 786-800. info:/
- January 12, 2010
- 06:36 PM
- 253 views
Colorful Neanderthals on the half shell
by Julien Riel-Salvatore in A Very Remote Period Indeed
There’s been a lot of buzz about the new paper by Zilhão et al. (2010) on the use of pierced shells and pigments by Neanderthals at the sites of Cueva de los Aviones and Cueva Antón, in southern Spain some 50,000 years ago, so I thought I’d give a few comments about it here.This is a very significant study in that it strengthens the conclusions of previous research that suggests that Neanderthals habitually used pigments (e.g., Soressi and d’Errico 2007, which I discussed here). Importa........ Read more »
Zilhao, J., Angelucci, D., Badal-Garcia, E., d'Errico, F., Daniel, F., Dayet, L., Douka, K., Higham, T., Martinez-Sanchez, M., Montes-Bernardez, R.... (2010) Symbolic use of marine shells and mineral pigments by Iberian Neandertals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0914088107
- April 10, 2008
- 01:56 PM
- 611 views
A Meat-Eating Neanderthal from Jonzac
by Julien Riel-Salvatore in A Very Remote Period Indeed
There is a new isotopic dietary analysis of Neanderthals at the site of Jonzac (Chez Pinaud), in SW France, available in the Journal of Human Evolution (Richards et al., 2008). Here's the abstract:We report here on the isotopic analysis (carbon and nitrogen) of collagen extracted from a Neanderthal tooth and animal bone from the late Mousterian site of Jonzac (Charente-Maritime, France). This study was undertaken to test whether the isotopic evidence indicates that animal protein was the ma........ Read more »
M RICHARDS, G TAYLOR, T STEELE, S MCPHERRON, M SORESSI, J JAUBERT, J ORSCHIEDT, J MALLYE, W RENDU, & J HUBLIN. (2008) Isotopic dietary analysis of a Neanderthal and associated fauna from the site of Jonzac (Charente-Maritime), France. Journal of Human Evolution. DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2008.02.007
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