Getting species diagnoses non-destructively from collagen
A neat paper by Naomi Martisius and coworkers in Scientific Reports: “Non-destructive ZooMS identification reveals strategic bone tool raw material selection...
All posts tagged with Middle Paleolithic
Some cool bone tools from an ancient Chinese site
Today’s reminder that stone tools are not all that matter in human behavior: “Discovery of circa 115,000-year-old bone retouchers at Lingjing, Henan, China”.
Link: Neandertal burial ritual with antler hearths
A Neandertal “burial ritual” at Des-Cubierta Cave? “Cave fires and rhino skull used in Neanderthal burial rituals”.
Neandertal stone circles at Bruniquel Cave
I want to reflect for a moment on the first passage in the recent paper by Jacques Jaubert and colleagues (2016). The paper describes a series of circular st...
Returning to the pollen of Shanidar
Marta Fiacconi and Chris Hunt have undertaken an analysis of pollen samples from the surface of the sediments of Shanidar Cave, Iraq.
The Manot 1 skull and how we now look at Neandertal ancestry in early modern humans
Israel Hershkovitz and colleagues report in Nature today on a partial cranial vault from Manot Cave, Israel. The key arguments in their paper are well-expres...
Notable: Ballistic study of hafted points
Notable paper: Wilkins J, Schoville BJ, Brown KS (2014) An Experimental Investigation of the Functional Hypothesis and Evolutionary Advantage of Stone-Tipped...
Notable: The cranial injury of Qafzeh 11
Notable paper: Coqueugniot H, Dutour O, Arensburg B, Duday H, Vandermeersch B, Tillier, A-M. (2014) Earliest Cranio-Encephalic Trauma from the Levantine Midd...
Denisovans and the Middle Paleolithic of India
Sheila Mishra and colleagues have a new paper discussing the antiquity of microblade industries in India, focusing on the site of Mehtakheri in Madhya Prades...
Photo: Qafzeh 11 and Qafzeh 9
This week I’ve been at the Vienna Natural History Museum to do some work. It’s one of the great museums of the world, and they have a new human evolution exh...
LRJ as a transitional industry
I was reading this morning an interesting paper from last year by Damien Flas Flas:2011, who considered the context of archaeological assemblages grouped as ...
Reindeer hides and Neandertals
In reference to the post below about Quina Mousterian and reindeer specialization (“Paleoclimate and shifting Neandertal strategies”), let me add this great ...
Shellfish gathering, paleoanthropological strawman
We have known for many years that Lower Paleolithic people were using shellfish, fish, and littoral resources at sites across the Old World, from Trinil Joor...
Neandertal band of brothers
Carles Lalueza-Fox and colleagues Lalueza-Fox:patrilocal:2010 have a new analysis of the mitochondrial DNA from El Sidrón, Spain. The site has a minimum numb...
The Neandertals of Mount Doom
Well, I already snarked on the science headlines that have been claiming volcanoes “wiped out” the Neandertals. Some variation of this story, swapping in a d...
Crete again, again, again
Julien Riel-Salvatore has written more about the supposed Middle Paleolithic-age stone tools from Crete: “The final (?) word on those handaxes from Crete”.
Sketchbook
Today’s sketchbook:
The Darra-i-Kur temporal bone
Wouldn’t it be fun to compile a list of skeletal specimens that might prove interesting for DNA analysis? Near the top of my list is the only Middle Paleolit...
Crete again
I wrote about Crete twice last month (“Crete: Pleistocene port of call?”, “More tools from Crete”). Now John Noble Wilford writes about Strasser and Panagopo...
More tools from Crete
After last weekend’s post about Thomas Strasser’s work on Crete (“Crete: Pleistocene port of call?”), I’ve heard from a reader who forwarded some earlier rep...
Crete: Pleistocene port of call?
Bruce Bower reports on excavations by Thomas Strasser on the Mediterranean island of Crete: “Ancient hominids may have been seafarers”.
Just ducky
A week or two ago, I was pointed by a press release to some recent research from Bolomor Cave, Spain, where the levels occupied by early/pre-Neandertals have...
Neandertals, plants, and fish
I don’t read Spanish well, but I’m going to go ahead and link a news article in a Spanish journal about Neandertal diet and cooking at the Spanish site of El...
Thrown or not thrown by Neandertals
Jennifer Viegas reports on a new study by Jill Rhodes and Steve Churchill:
Cultural impedance, demographic growth, effective population size
This is a complicated story with many interlocking parts. Telling the whole story may well take me fifty posts. There’s a lot of new science hiding in here w...
Pigment use and symbolic behavior in the Neandertals
Some months ago I was taking some notes about Neandertal pigment use, drawn from a recent article by Marie Soressi and Francesco d’Errico. I got distracted a...
Early ochre mining in Southern Africa
I was reading back through Bednarik's "Concept-mediated marking in the Lower Palaeolithic," for some background on the ochre-shellfish post, and I ran acros...
Long-distance Mousterian raw material transport
Slimak and Giraud report Comptes Rendus Palevol that a small proportion (<1%) of artifacts from the Mousterian of Champ Grand, in central France, come fr...
At last, the death of the Toba bottleneck
It is no secret that I really don't like the hypothesis that the massive ancient eruption of Mt. Toba, Sumatra, wiped out much of the worldwide human popula...
Shell beads at three corners of Africa
Bouzouggar et al. (2007) report on a series of perforated Nassarius shell beads found in a layer dating to ca. 82,000 years ago in Grotte des Pigeons, Moroc...
Origami chaine operatoire
The New Yorker has a nice profile of origami artist (and physicist) Robert J. Lang. My print edition of Discover had a profile of Lang earlier this year, wh...
Looking for MSA rock art in Botswana
The Research Council of Norway has issued a press release about Sheila Coulson's work in the MSA of Botswana:
MSA projectile weapons
Brooks and colleagues (2005) describe evidence for distance weaponry from late MSA contexts in eastern and southern Africa. They discuss the size of points ...
Eemian subsistence patterns
Gaudzinski (2004) reviewed evidence from four sites from the German Eemian, to see what conclusions could be drawn about Neandertal subsistence. The interes...
Trade in MSA Africa
I was looking through some MSA literature, and ran across a paper earlier this year by Negash and Shackley (2006) concerning long-distance movement of obsid...
The giant camel hunters
This is from Reuters:
A Neandertal structure
After the press report earlier this week about Eemian Neandertals hunting elephants in France, we now have a story from Der Spiegel (German) about a Neander...
About those holes…
We checked the Krapina mollusc shells for holes, since they are here and all. No holes. But most of them probably come from the earlier levels before human ...
Old shell beads in Dorothy Garrod's stuff
It's a really short paper in Science by Marian Vanhaeren and colleagues:
And then there was Levallois
Noble and Davidson (1996:200-201) have a great passage on the lack of relevance of the Levallois technique to interpreting ancient cognition. It has an atte...