Notable: Chimpanzee butchery to study ancient cannibalism
Notable paper: Saladié P, Cáceres I, Huguet R, Rodríguez-Hidalgo A, Santander B, et al. (2015) Experimental Butchering of a Chimpanzee Carcass for Archaeolog...
All posts tagged with Lower Paleolithic
Notable: Fat residues on elephant-butchering tools
Notable paper: Solodenko N, Zupancich A, Cesaro SN, Marder O, Lemorini C, et al. (2015) Fat Residue and Use-Wear Found on Acheulian Biface and Scraper Associ...
To fish or not to fish
This summer I pointed to an article about the FwJj20 locality at Koobi Fora, which provides the earliest known evidence of systematic fish exploitation in th...
The fish of Koobi Fora
A number of papers related to the hominin exploitation of aquatic resources are appearing soon in the Journal of Human Evolution. Two of these in the early o...
Photo: Qesem Cave
I’m writing from Israel this week, where I am visiting a number of archaeological sites. Yesterday Avi Gopher and Ran Barkai generously gave me a tour of Qes...
The hominin invasion of China
Earlier this month, Scientific Reports included an article by Hong Ao and colleagues reporting a date for the Shangshazui archaeological locality in the Nihe...
Oldowan hunting behaviors at Kanjera South
Joseph Ferraro and colleagues have done some neat analyses of the faunal remains from Kanjera South, Kenya Ferraro:carnivory:2013. Kanjera South is an archae...
Cutmarks under the microscope
I’m trying to figure out why Science this week has a “perspective” piece on the identification of cutmarks on archaeological bone. It’s a nice brief but lack...
Low-velocity spatter from the Neandertal palette
Paleolithic archaeology is the home of some of the best forensic work anywhere. I’ve often written about impressive analyses of stable isotopes, microscopic ...
Digging deeper into the earliest Acheulean
I’ve been ranting on Twitter all day about the new paper on the “earliest Acheulean” by Christopher Lepre and colleagues Lepre:Acheulean:2011, published in N...
Older and younger Acheulean in India
Shanti Pappu and colleagues Pappu:2011 report on date estimates resulting from new excavations at the old site of Attarampakkam, India. The news element is t...
Australopithecus afarensis used stone tools
UPDATE (2011-09-06) Note: The conclusions of the research were later critiqued, I posted on that criticism after this post.
Crete again, again
Julien Riel-Salvatore gives a good summary of the Crete stone tools: “Quartz, Cretan handaxes and Paleolithic seafaring.”
Mailbag: First Europeans
Regarding Lzignan-le-Cbe:
The spotty Acheulean
Scott and Gibert report in today’s Nature on the “oldest handaxes” in Europe:
Handaxes from under the North Sea
In case you needed a reminder that much of the territory occupied by Pleistocene humans is now beneath the waves, just take a look at this press release fro...
Earliest stone tools on Java
The current Science has meetings reports from the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association Congress, including this article by Richard Stone about excavations fr...
Social vs. nonsocial information and Lower/Middle Paleolithic
On the basis of a couple of student questions, I think it's worthwhile to reflect a bit on where I am going with this (also possibly made more clear in this...
Acheulean endings
There is no hard endpoint to the Acheulean; its tool types -- in particular the handaxe -- last well into the MSA/Middle Paleolithic. Here are some notes on...
How monolithic was the Acheulean?
I'm taking some notes on change and stasis during the Acheulean, and they're not entirely complete, but in the interest of clearing my desktop I'm going to ...
What won't a handaxe do?
I've had this working paper by Tony Baker on my desktop for awhile, and it has been discussed on some message boards. I wanted to link before I forget. It's...
Early human habitation in Britain
Parfitt et al. (2005) report in Nature (subscription) on stone tool debitage from the Cromer Forest-bed Formation of southeastern England, dating to approxi...