• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Lower Palaeolithic / Early Stone Age Finds & Theories

Mighty_Emperor

Gone But Not Forgotten
(ACCOUNT RETIRED)
Joined
Aug 18, 2002
Messages
19,408
See also:

Earleist occupation of Britain:
forteantimes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13143
Link is obsolete. The current link is:
https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...-human-occupation-of-the-british-isles.13143/


Earliest art:
forteantimes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9527
Link is obsolete. The current link is:
https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...-art-statuette-may-be-500-000-years-old.9527/

----------------------
Tehran: 15:59 , 2005/06/08

400,000-year-old stone tools discovered in Mazandaran


TEHRAN, June 8 (MNA) -- Recent discoveries by a team of archaeologists indicate that the coast of the Caspian Sea in Mazandaran Province was home to the earliest hominid habitation in that region.

Archaeologist Ali Mahforuzi said on Wednesday that 400,000-year-old stone tools discovered in the valleys of Shuresh near the Rostam Kola, Huto, and Kamarband caves are the oldest ever found in the area.

The previous studies had dated human settlement in the region to have begun about 50,000 years ago.

“The recent studies conducted by a joint team of archaeologists from the Mazandaran Cultural Heritage and Tourism Department and archaeologists from the Mazandaran National Museum led to the discovery of several stone tools.

“The primary studies on the tools did not reveal their exact age, so the tools were sent to Professor Marcel Otte of the University of Liege in Belgium. He happened to be in Iran and he dated the tools to be 400,000 years old,” Mahforuzi explained.

Archaeologists are currently following up their studies to learn more about the people who made the tools.

www.mehrnews.ir/en/NewsDetail.aspx?NewsID=192883
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Last Supper Of The Hominids Establishes Times They Lived At Sites
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 103526.htm

In the French cave of Arago, an international team of scientists has analyzed the dental wear of the fossils of herbivorous animals hunted by Homo heidelbergensis. It is the first time that an analytical method has allowed the establishment of the length of human occupations at archaeological sites. The key is the last food that these hominids consumed.

For many years, the mobility of the groups of hominids and how long they spent in caves or outdoors has been a subject of discussion among scientists. Now, an international team headed by researchers from the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES) in Tarragona has based its studies on the dental fossils of animals hunted by hominids in order to determine the vegetation in the environment and the way of life of Homo heidelbergensis.

Florent Rivals is the main author and a researcher from the Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA), attached to the IPHES in Tarragona. "For the first time, a method has been put forward which allows us to establish the relative length of the human occupations at archaeological sites as, up until now, it was difficult to ascertain the difference between, for example, a single long-term occupation and a succession of shorter seasonal occupations in the same place", he explained to SINC.

In the study, recently published in the Journal of Human Evolution, the researchers analyze the dental wear of the ungulates (herbivorous mammals) caused by microscopic particles of opaline silica in plants. These marks appear when eating takes place and erase the previous ones. This is why they are so useful.

Thanks to the "last supper phenomenon", the scientists have been able to analyze the last food consumed by animals such as the Eurasian wild horse (Equus ferus), the mouflon (Ovis ammon antiqua) and the reindeer (Rangifer tarandus). "This method allows us to confirm the seasonal nature of the occupation", Rivals added. According to the team, the microwear of the teeth is sensitive to seasonal changes in the diet.

The application has allowed the researchers to estimate the length of the occupation of the site from the Lower Paleolithic Age in the cave of Arago (France) by the number of marks on the fossils and, therefore, the variation in the diet of several species of herbivores, as "each season presented food resources which were limited and different in the environment", the paleontologist clarified.

High and low periods of occupation

After confirming the hypothesis in present-day animals whose age and date of death was known to the scientists, the researchers demonstrated that, if a group of animals is seen during a specific season (a short-term occupation), the signs of dental wear undergo little variation. But if the occupation lasts several seasons, the dental marks are more diverse.

"If the animals are hunted during long periods of occupation, more variable dental wear would be expected", Rivals declared. In the case of the French cave of Arago, the study of the dental wear confirms that it was occupied in different ways. "With this method, we were able to prove that at the site, which belonged to Homo heidelbergensis, there is evidence of differing mobility, as there were highly mobile groups and others with little mobility", the scientist confirmed.

The Spanish and German researchers have combined this application with multidisciplinary studies of archaeological sites in order to apply it to other settlements of the Mid-Paleolithic Age such as Payre (France), Taubach (Germany) and Abric Romani (Spain).


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Journal reference:

Rivals et al. A new application of dental wear analyses: estimation of duration of hominid occupations in archaeological localities. Journal of Human Evolution, 2009; 56 (4): 329 DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2008.11.005

Adapted from materials provided by FECYT - Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology.

EDIT: Titled shortened by WJ
 
'Paleolithic tombs discovered' in Yemen
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-16477111

Related Stories

Vienna celebrates Venus centenary
Scientists find 300,000 year old footprints

Two hundred Paleolithic tombs have been discovered in the western al-Mahwit region of Yemen, reports say.

The tombs contain embalmed mummies and other funerary relics, according to the state-run Saba news agency.

They were carved into the rock and have one or more chambers depending on how many bodies they held, Mohammad Ahmad Qassim, head of antiquities for Al-Mahwit province, told Saba.

Among the objects found in the tombs were earthenware utensils and weapons.

The artefacts were very effectively preserved and were put in niches carved in the walls of the tombs.

Over 1,000 other Paleolithic artefacts were also found in the Bani Saad area, Mr Qassim added.

The findings point to the existence of a developed culture in the region at the time, Saba reports.

The Paleolithic period, the larger part of the prehistoric Stone Age, is thought to have begun over 2m years ago and ended around 8,000 BC.
 
Archaeologists uncover Palaeolithic ceramic art
July 25th, 2012 in Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils


Leg and torso from the model of a four-legged animal, possibly a deer or horse. This is one of 36 ceramic items recovered from Vela Spila, Croatia. Credit: Rebecca Farbstein

(Phys.org) -- Evidence of a community of prehistoric artists and craftspeople who “invented” ceramics during the last Ice Age – thousands of years before pottery became commonplace – has been found in modern-day Croatia.

The finds consist of 36 fragments, most of them apparently the broken-off remnants of modelled animals, and come from a site called Vela Spila on the Adriatic coast. Archaeologists believe that they were the products of an artistic culture which sprang up in the region about 17,500 years ago. Their ceramic art flourished for about 2,500 years, but then disappeared.

The study, which is published in the journal PLoS ONE, adds to a rapidly-changing set of views about when humans first developed the ability to make ceramics and pottery. Most histories of the technology begin with the more settled cultures of the Neolithic era, which began about 10,000 years ago.

Now it is becoming clear that the story was much more complex. Over thousands of years, ceramics were invented, lost, reinvented and lost again. The earliest producers did not make crockery, but seem to have had more artistic inclinations.
The Vela Spila finds have been the subject of intensive investigation by researchers at the University of Cambridge and colleagues in Croatia since 2010. Their report, published this week, suggests that although earlier ceramic remnants have been found elsewhere, they had no connection with the site, where the ability to make these artefacts appears to have been independently rediscovered by the people who lived there.

“It is extremely unusual to find ceramic art this early in prehistory,” Dr. Preston Miracle, from the University of Cambridge, said.

“The finds at Vela Spila seem to represent the first evidence of Palaeolithic ceramic art at the end of the last Ice Age. They appear to have been developed independently of anything that had come before. We are starting to see that several distinct Palaeolithic societies made art from ceramic materials long before the Neolithic era, when ceramics became more common and were usually used for more functional purposes.”

Vela Spila is a large, limestone cave on Kor?ula Island, in the central Dalmatian archipelago. Excavations have taken place there sporadically since 1951, and there is evidence of occupation on the site during the Upper Palaeolithic period, roughly 20,000 years ago, through to the Bronze Age about 3,000 years ago.
The first ceramic finds were made back in 2001. Initially they were almost overlooked, because it is so unusual to find ceramic in the Upper Palaeolithic record. As more ceramic emerged, however, examples were set aside for careful analysis. Researchers meticulously checked the collection for tell-tale evidence of modelling on the artefacts which would confirm that they had been made by a human hand. In all, 36 cases were identified.

Broadly, the collection belongs to a material culture known as “Epigravettian” which spanned 12,000 years, but radiocarbon dating has allowed scholars to pin down the Vela Spila ceramic collection to a much narrower period, between 17,500 and 15,000 years ago. Those which can be identified appear to be fragments of modelled animals.

The ceramics were clearly made with care and attention by real craftspeople who knew what they were doing. One of the better-preserved items, which seems to be the torso and foreleg of a horse or deer, shows that the creator deliberately minimised the number of joins in the model, perhaps to give it structural strength. They were also marked with incisions, grooves, and punctured holes, using various tools, probably made from bone or stone. Finger marks can still be seen where the objects were handled while the ceramic paste was wet.

As well as being the first and only evidence of ceramic, figurative art in south-eastern Europe during the Upper Palaeolithic, the collection’s size, range and complexity suggests that Vela Spila was the heart of a flourishing and distinctive artistic tradition. Although the finds bear some similarities with ceramics discovered in the Czech Republic, which date back a further 10,000 years, there are enough structural and stylistic differences – as well as separation by a huge gulf in time – to suggest no continuity between the two.

The older, Czech finds were also typically found near hearths, which were possibly kilns. Some researchers have even gone so far as to suggest that they were deliberately destroyed in the fire as some sort of ritual act. The Vela Spila finds, on the other hand, appear to have undergone no such ritual destruction – at least not in the same way.

As a result, the Cambridge-Croatian team believes that these ceramics came from a hitherto unknown artistic tradition that flourished for about two millennia in the Balkans. Like their Neolithic descendants, these people may have had no knowledge of ceramics before they invented the technology for themselves. And like their Palaeolithic ancestors, over time they either forgot or rejected that technology – only for it to be rediscovered again. The next evidence of ceramic technologies at Vela Spila appears 8,000 years later in the record, and comprises functional pottery items rather than art.

“The development of this new material and technology may have been a catalyst for a more general transformation in artistic expression and figurative art at this site thousands of years ago,” Dr Rebecca Farbstein, from the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge added. “Although we often focus on utilitarian innovations as examples of societies transforming as a result of new technology, the ceramic evidence we have found here offers a glimpse into the ways in which prehistoric cultures were also sometimes defined and affected by artistic innovations and expression.”

More information: dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0041437

Provided by University of Cambridge

"Archaeologists uncover Palaeolithic ceramic art." July 25th, 2012. http://phys.org/news/2012-07-archaeolog ... c-art.html
 
Modern culture began in South Africa 44,000 years ago
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2 ... s-ago.html

20:00 30 July 2012 by Hannah Krakauer

Call it the end of the late late show. The Later Stone Age technology was thought to have made its first appearance in South Africa much later than it did in Europe. A new analysis of South African finds suggests modern culture emerged in both areas at the same time.

In Europe, the Upper Palaeolithic – another term for the Later Stone Age – is commonly dated to around 45,000 years ago. In South Africa the archaeological evidence suggests the Later Stone Age did not begin until much later – around 22,000 years ago.

Perhaps no longer, though. Paola Villa of the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History in Boulder, and her colleagues, have delved deep into the layers of Border Cave in South Africa, and found that Middle Stone Age tool-making techniques were giving way to Later Stone Age technology by 44,000 years ago. For instance, stone spear points – a hallmark of Middle Stone Age technology – were replaced by bows and bone arrows.

A companion paper, headed by Francesco d'Errico of the University of Bordeaux, France, found organic evidence that pointed to a similar date, including ornamental ostrich eggshell beads, digging sticks, and beeswax wrapped in fibres – the oldest recorded use of beeswax as an adhesive for attaching tools to handles. It's likely that these organic artefacts represent the beginning of the modern-day San hunter-gatherer society in South Africa.

The Border Cave evidence also shows a striking trend of internal evolution. Though Later Stone Age technologies could theoretically have spread rapidly to the north and south from a source in East Africa, Villa's evidence suggests otherwise. The South African finds suggest a gradual shift into the Later Stone Age, while retaining a few elements from earlier times in the form of notched bones, bone awls and marine shell beads. That points to the South African populations evolving many of their later tools independently.

"To prove internal evolution, you need a place like Border Cave that has a long sequence, many layers, is well dated, and all use the same materials to make artefacts," says Villa.

Journal references: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1202629109 and 10.1073/pnas.1204213109
 
13,800yo rule-breaking rock drawing of Paleolithic life found in Spain

566309b3c46188344c8b45a3.jpg

© Marcos García-Diez, Manuel Vaquero / PLOS

Possibly the earliest known picture of a pre-historic settlement has been unearthed near Barcelona, Spain. An ancient artist broke a tradition to depict wilderness and carved what he used to live in – a hunter-gatherer camp.
The unique discovery looked quite simple, even primitive – this is a rock with a few mounds casually engraved on it. The schist slab is 18 cm wide, 8.5 cm high, and 3.6 cm thick in its maximum dimensions, according to the publication.

When it was unearthed at an excavation site in Moli del Salt, 30 kilometers away from Barcelona, Spain, the archaeologists were hardly able to guess what these seven crude semi-circular figures could mean.

https://www.rt.com/news/324878-paleolithic-spain-settlement-rock/
 
Is that a drawing? I think it's schist.
 
Broken pebbles offer clues to Paleolithic funeral rituals
February 9, 2017 in Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils

Humans may have ritualistically "killed" objects to remove their symbolic power, some 5,000 years earlier than previously thought, a new international study of marine pebble tools from an Upper Paleolithic burial site in Italy suggests.

Researchers at Université de Montréal, Arizona State University and University of Genoa examined 29 pebble fragments recovered in the Caverna delle Arene Candide on the Mediterranean Sea in Liguria. In their study, published online Jan. 18 in the Cambridge Archeological Journal, they concluded that some 12,000 years ago the flat, oblong pebbles were brought up from the beach, used as spatulas to apply ochre paste to decorate the dead, then broken and discarded.

The intent could have been to "kill" the tools, thereby "discharging them of their symbolic power" as objects that had come into contact with the deceased, said the study's co-author Julien Riel-Salvatore, an associate professor of anthropology at UdeM who directed the excavations at the site that yielded the pebbles.

The Arene Candide is a hockey-rink-sized cave containing a necropolis of some 20 adults and children. It is located about 90 metres above the sea in a steep cliff overlooking a limestone quarry. First excavated extensively in the 1940s, the cave is considered a reference site for the Neolithic and Paleolithic periods in the western Mediterranean. Until now, however, no one had looked at the broken pebbles. ...

https://phys.org/news/2017-02-broken-pebbles-clues-paleolithic-funeral.html
 
'Palaeolithic Venus' Discovered In Russia
4/17/2017 07:00:00 PM
A stunning 23,000-year-old 'Venus' has been discovered in the Bryansk region of Russia, say scientists. The Palaeolithic beauty was carved from woolly mammoth tusk and shows a 'fantastically delicate' prehistoric woman.
The rare find was made in the Bryansk region of Russia. Dr Konstantin Gavrilov, who led the expedition that discovered it.

http://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/palaeolithic-venus-discovered-in-russia.html#yBx44hXvwGOer6HQ.97

Wayback machine link to archived report

http://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2017/04/palaeolithic-venus-discovered-in-russia.html
 
Last edited by a moderator:
An early exchange network.

Hunter-gatherers strung a social safety net across much of southern Africa starting at least 33,000 years ago, a new study suggests. And it was held together with ostrich eggshell beads.

Some of these carefully crafted beads — excavated at two high-altitude rock-shelters in the African nation of Lesotho — were found to have originated more than 100 kilometers away, while others came from more than 300 kilometers away, say anthropological archaeologist Brian Stewart of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and his colleagues. Ages of the beads span nearly the last 33,000 years, the scientists report March 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Hunter-gatherers inhabiting inland desert or grassland regions probably started a regional exchange network toward the end of the Stone Age, somewhat akin to how many modern hunter-gatherer groups give gifts back and forth to foster cooperation, Stewart says. Ostriches lived in those dry, flat grasslands, but not at the rock-shelter sites. Inland residents could have made the beads from collected ostrich eggshells. The beads were probably then passed from one group of people to another over long distances, Stewart says. The findings indicate that this activity went on for tens of thousands of years longer than anyone previously has demonstrated for a system of cooperation-currying gift exchanges.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/hunter-gatherers-stone-age-social-networks-ostrich-eggshell-beads
 
Knapped stone "balls" (more or less spherical stone implements) are commonly found in Lower Paleolithic sites. Their intended purpose has long been the subject of conjecture.

New research suggests these balls were optimum tools for smashing bones to access the marrow within - a result that correlates with other research indicating bone marrow was a key part of Stone Age diets.
We May Finally Know Why Early Humans Kept These Mysterious Stone Balls Around

Ancient archaeological sites across the Northern Hemisphere have been littered with a mystery. Where there were hominins, there too could often be found roughly rounded spheres of stone. Some have been dated back to over 2 million years ago, with marks suggesting that the balls had been deliberately shaped.

New research has discovered a plausible purpose for these strange tools: Our ancestors could have been using them to smash open bones - to get to the nutritious marrow inside.

An international team of researchers led by archaeologist Ella Assaf of Tel-Aviv University in Israel made a close examination of ten such stones found at Qesem Cave, a Lower Paleolithic site occupied by early humans between 400,000 and 200,000 years ago.

This is curious, because it's the latest known appearance of these tools, a timeframe when other communities had long ago stopped using them. So Assaf and her team investigated to find out more about these stones, and how they got there. ...

First, they thoroughly examined 29 ancient balls found in the cave. These are not perfectly rounded stones, but have rough ridges where flakes have been knapped away. ...

Of these 29 stone balls, 10 retained traces of use-wear and residue, so the team conducted digital stereomicroscopy and metallographic microscopy to examine them more closely. They analysed residues found in the marks associated with the use-wear, and made an interesting discovery.

"Archaeological residues have morphological features, appearance, colour, and distribution compatible with compact and spongy bone, organic bone glossy film, collagen fibers, and animal fatty matters observed on experimental stone balls used in bone marrow extraction activities," they wrote in their paper. ...

Based on the use-wear scars and residue patterns, the team first knapped their own balls out of different kinds of rock, then tested them on cow and sheep bones. They also tested naturally shaped smooth stones.

And they found that the replicas of the Qesem Cave stones were the most efficient at cracking open bone to get to the marrow therein, and that the ridges help crack the bone in a clean break. ...
FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/archae...purpose-of-mysterious-prehistoric-stone-balls
 
Here are the bibliographic particulars and abstract for the published report. The full report is accessible at the link.

Shaped stone balls were used for bone marrow extraction at Lower Paleolithic Qesem Cave, Israel

Ella Assaf , Isabella Caricola, Avi Gopher, Jordi Rosell, Ruth Blasco, Oded Bar, Ezra Zilberman, Cristina Lemorini, Javier Baena, Ran Barkai, Emanuela Cristiani
Published: April 9, 2020
doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0230972

Abstract

The presence of shaped stone balls at early Paleolithic sites has attracted scholarly attention since the pioneering work of the Leakeys in Olduvai, Tanzania. Despite the persistent presence of these items in the archaeological record over a period of two million years, their function is still debated. We present new results from Middle Pleistocene Qesem Cave on the use of these implements as percussion tools. Use-wear and abundant bone and fat residues found on ten shaped stone balls indicate crushing of fresh bones by thrusting percussion and provide direct evidence for the use of these items to access bone marrow of animal prey at this site. Two experiments conducted to investigate and verify functional aspects proved Qesem Cave shaped stone balls are efficient for bone processing and provide a comfortable grip and useful active areas for repeated use. Notably, the patina observed on the analyzed items precedes their use at the cave, indicating that they were collected by Qesem inhabitants, most probably from older Lower Paleolithic Acheulian sites. Thus, our results refer only to the final phases of the life of the items, and we cannot attest to their original function. As bone marrow played a central role in human nutrition in the Lower Paleolithic, and our experimental results show that the morphology and characteristics of shaped stone ball replicas are well-suited for the extraction of bone marrow, we suggest that these features might have been the reason for their collection and use at Qesem Cave. These results shed light on the function of shaped stone balls and are consistent with the significance of animal fat in the caloric intake of Middle Pleistocene humans as shown by the archeozoological evidence at Qesem Cave and possibly beyond.

SOURCE: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0230972
 
It just shows that early people had bigger balls in the past ;)
 
Why on earth would someone waste energy by laboriously knapping a stone into a shape that could be found naturally?

Why would a spherical stone be better at breaking heavy bone to get at the marrow?

maximus otter
 
Why on earth would someone waste energy by laboriously knapping a stone into a shape that could be found naturally?
Why would a spherical stone be better at breaking heavy bone to get at the marrow?r

The stones used were almost certainly "chunks" of roughly equal size in all 3 dimensions that wouldn't require much knapping to shave into a roughly spherical form.

A rough or approximate spherical shape is the sort of form that maximizes mass / weight in a manipulable volume and doesn't require a specific orientation to "work" (have the desired effect).

One of the most interesting findings was that knapped stone balls that preserved the edges of the knapping "craters" (so to speak) rather than shaving them down / away were the most effective forms for breaking bones cleanly. These raised edges or ridges provided a sort of focal line along which the force of a blow was concentrated. This increased the tendency for the tool to crack the bone open rather than shattering it at the point of impact.
 
...knapped stone balls that preserved the edges of the knapping "craters" (so to speak) rather than shaving them down / away were the most effective forms for breaking bones cleanly.

So a "golf ball" -type device is the most suitable, eh? I'll have to remember that when the last episode of the last soap opera has been transmitted, and society finally collapses for want of brain chewing gum.

I was just wondering why - when most of the ancient world was busy chipping spheroids into handaxes - proto-Israelis were laboriously "smashing the edges off axes" to turn them into spheroids. It seemed a bit like forging 10p coins by filing the corners off 50 pences.

maximus otter
 
I was just wondering why - when most of the ancient world was busy chipping spheroids into handaxes - proto-Israelis were laboriously "smashing the edges off axes" to turn them into spheroids. It seemed a bit like forging 10p coins by filing the corners off 50 pences.

The only connection to the Levant lies in the particular site and area on which the reported research focused.

The reason the shaped stone "balls" were objects of interest lies in the fact they're found in the stone tool inventories of prehistoric hominins throughout the geographical range of all known hominins of the era - i.e., throughout Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. These objects are common in the archaeological record since long before any hominins are known to have been in the Middle East.

Nobody was turning axes into shaped balls, because ...

Hand axes and these shaped balls are two entirely different tools for different purposes. They're made from entirely different materials. Hand axes are typically knapped from harder stone like flint or dense igneous / metamorphic rocks. The shaped balls are overwhelmingly made from carbonate sedimentary rocks (e.g., limestone) that aren't suitable for making cutting tools like hand axes.
 
Last edited:
Apologies if this has already been posted but I haven’t been able to find this on the forum.
It seems that the enduring mystery of those ancient man-made stone balls has been solved.
I must have missed this in all the covid/lockdown news but it’s been one of those mysteries that’s always puzzled me.

1598856719606.jpeg


Paleolithic tribes of humans didn't have the most exciting diets or fancy kitchen accessories to whip up culinary masterpieces. But what they did have in abundance was rocks, and lots of them!

Some of the more mysterious archaeological finds discovered in ancient caves over the decades are shaped stone balls which started to be crafted nearly two million years ago. These carved curiosities have been excavated at numerous historical sites in Africa and Asia but their intended usage has only been speculated on until now.
In a revealing new research paper published April 9 in the online scientific journal PLOS ONE, Dr. Ella Assaf of Tel Aviv University and her team of scholars has explained that the regional groups of hunter-gatherers around the Qesem Cave in the Samaria Hills used these specialized stone utensils to crack open large animal bones to extract the nutrient-rich marrow. All total, her group found 30 spherical stone artifacts made of carbonate rocks like limestone or dolomite.

https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/scientists-discover-what-ancient-stones-balls-were-used-for
 
Persistence of Middle Stone Age Tool Sets.

Fieldwork led by Dr. Eleanor Scerri, head of the Pan-African Evolution Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany and Dr. Khady Niang of the University of Cheikh Anta Diop in Senegal, has documented the youngest known occurrence of the Middle Stone Age.

This repertoire of stone flaking methods and the resulting tools includes distinctive ways of producing sharp flakes by carefully preparing nodules of rock, some of which were sometimes further shaped into tool forms known as 'scrapers' and 'points." Middle Stone Age finds most commonly occur in the African record between around 300 thousand and 30 thousand years ago, after which point they largely vanish.

It was long thought that these tool types were replaced after 30 thousand years ago by a radically different, miniaturized toolkit better suited to diversified subsistence strategies and patterns of mobility across Africa. In a paper published in Scientific Reports this week, Scerri and colleagues show that groups of hunter-gatherers in what is today Senegal continued to use Middle Stone Age technologies associated with our species' earliest prehistory as late as 11 thousand years ago. This contrasts with the long-held view that humanity's major prehistoric cultural phases occurred in a neat and universal sequence. ...

https://phys.org/news/2021-01-human-culture-years-longer-thought.html
 
Newly re-examined and newly discovered evidence in a Polish cave demonstrates cave habitation and tool manufacturing by Homo heidelbergensis - the last common ancestor of both H. Neanderthalensis and H. sapiens - circa a half-million years ago.
Half-a-Million Year Old Signs of Extinct Human Species Found in Poland Cave

Prehistoric stone tools found in a cave in Poland 50 years ago have just been identified as some of the oldest ever discovered in the region.

The tools from the Tunel Wielki cave in Małopolska are between 450,000 and 550,000 years old. This dating may allow scientists to learn more about the humans who made them, and their migration and habitation in Central Europe across prehistory.

For example, the timeframe likely means that the tools were made by extinct human species Homo heidelbergensis, usually considered the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans (us). And it means the region was inhabited by humans at a time that Central Europe's harsh climate would have required significant physical and cultural adjustment.

"This is an extremely interesting aspect of analyses for us," archaeologist Małgorzata Kot of the University of Warsaw in Poland explained ...

"We can examine the limits of the possibilities of survival of Homo heidelbergensis, and thus observe how he adapted to these adverse conditions." ...
FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/half-a...of-extinct-human-species-found-in-poland-cave
 
Here are the bibliographic details and abstract from the published research report. The full report is accessible at the link below.


Kot, M., Berto, C., Krajcarz, M.T. et al.
Frontiers of the Lower Palaeolithic expansion in Europe: Tunel Wielki Cave (Poland).
Sci Rep 12, 16355 (2022).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-20582-0

Abstract
Peopling of Central Europe by Middle Pleistocene hominids is highly debatable, mainly due to the relatively harsh climatic and environmental conditions that require cultural and anatomical adjustments. At least several archaeological sites certify human occupation in the region dated back to MIS 13-11, but they represent open-air settlements. Based on the new fieldwork conducted in Tunel Wielki Cave, we can date the human occupation traces in the cave to MIS 14-12. Bipolar-on-anvil knapping technique prevails in the lithic assemblage, made exclusively in flint. The obtained results have given ground for studying the frontiers of human oikumene and the required cultural adaptive abilities

SOURCE / FULL REPORT: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-20582-0
 
The Paleo was quite varied.

n a study published in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers from the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment (SHEP) at the University of Tübingen show that early humans of the Middle Paleolithic had a more varied diet than previously assumed.

The analysis of a site in the Zagros Mountains in Iran reveals that about 81,000 to 45,000 years ago, the local hominins hunted ungulates as well as tortoises and carnivores. Birds may also have been on the menu.

As early as the Upper Paleolithic, the earliest period of the Paleolithic, the ancestors of modern humans effectively hunted small and large mammals. "According to various studies, the hominins of the subsequent Middle Paleolithic—the period between 300,000 and 45,000 years ago—fed primarily on ungulates. However, there is increasing evidence that, at least occasionally, tortoises, birds, hares, fish, and carnivorous mammals were also on the menu of Neanderthals and their relatives," explains Mario Mata-González, first author of the new study and a doctoral student at the University of Tübingen.

"Reconstructing the dietary habits of early hominins is one of the main objectives of archeozoological studies, which shed light on the way our ancestors adapted to and interacted with different environments," he states.

Together with other SHEP researchers, Mata-González has carried out the first comprehensive and systematic dietary analysis at a Late Pleistocene site in the southern Zagros Mountains with an age around 81,000 to 45,000 years. "Not only are the Zagros Mountains the largest mountain range in Iran, but they are also considered a key geographical region for the study of human evolution in Southwest Asia during the Middle Paleolithic, in particular due to their heterogeneous topography and great environmental diversity," he adds.

Early humans in the paleolithic age: More than just game on the menu


The roughly 81,000 to 45,000 year-old excavation site in the southern Zagros Mountains. Credit: TISARP

To date, archeozoological finds from the mountains have been almost exclusively limited to ungulates. However, the results from the Ghar-e Boof site show that the diet of the local hominins also included carnivorous mammals and turtles. ...

https://phys.org/news/2023-11-early-humans-paleolithic-age-game.html
 
The Paleo was quite varied.

n a study published in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers from the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment (SHEP) at the University of Tübingen show that early humans of the Middle Paleolithic had a more varied diet than previously assumed.

The analysis of a site in the Zagros Mountains in Iran reveals that about 81,000 to 45,000 years ago, the local hominins hunted ungulates as well as tortoises and carnivores. Birds may also have been on the menu.

As early as the Upper Paleolithic, the earliest period of the Paleolithic, the ancestors of modern humans effectively hunted small and large mammals. "According to various studies, the hominins of the subsequent Middle Paleolithic—the period between 300,000 and 45,000 years ago—fed primarily on ungulates. However, there is increasing evidence that, at least occasionally, tortoises, birds, hares, fish, and carnivorous mammals were also on the menu of Neanderthals and their relatives," explains Mario Mata-González, first author of the new study and a doctoral student at the University of Tübingen.

"Reconstructing the dietary habits of early hominins is one of the main objectives of archeozoological studies, which shed light on the way our ancestors adapted to and interacted with different environments," he states.

Together with other SHEP researchers, Mata-González has carried out the first comprehensive and systematic dietary analysis at a Late Pleistocene site in the southern Zagros Mountains with an age around 81,000 to 45,000 years. "Not only are the Zagros Mountains the largest mountain range in Iran, but they are also considered a key geographical region for the study of human evolution in Southwest Asia during the Middle Paleolithic, in particular due to their heterogeneous topography and great environmental diversity," he adds.

Early humans in the paleolithic age: More than just game on the menu


The roughly 81,000 to 45,000 year-old excavation site in the southern Zagros Mountains. Credit: TISARP

To date, archeozoological finds from the mountains have been almost exclusively limited to ungulates. However, the results from the Ghar-e Boof site show that the diet of the local hominins also included carnivorous mammals and turtles. ...

https://phys.org/news/2023-11-early-humans-paleolithic-age-game.html
Is it possible to hunt a tortoise?
 
Back
Top