Direct AMS Radiocarbon dates for the Sungir mid Upper Palaeolithic burials

Pettitt, Paul; Bader, Nabil

doi:10.1017/s0003598x00059196

Cited by 48 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 3 publications

(1 reference statement)

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“…Given the difficulty of demarcating and defending wild resources, bourgeois types in this setting simply act as aggrandizers, benefiting from others who share the goods in their possession while refusing to share, and occasionally engaging in contests with civics and other bourgeois types as a result. [This is consistent with the ethnographic literature and suggested by archaeological evidence (35,40).] The all-civic state is stationary because the many civics rarely lose their contests with the few bourgeois types, instead inflicting costs on them.…”

Section: Persistence and Demise Of Forager Technology And Institutionssupporting

confidence: 90%

Coevolution of farming and private property during the early Holocene

Bowles

Choi

2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

164

125

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The advent of farming around 12 millennia ago was a cultural as well as technological revolution, requiring a new system of property rights. Among mobile hunter-gatherers during the late Pleistocene, food was almost certainly widely shared as it was acquired. If a harvested crop or the meat of a domesticated animal were to have been distributed to other group members, a late Pleistocene would-be farmer would have had little incentive to engage in the required investments in clearing, cultivation, animal tending, and storage. However, the new property rights that farming required-secure individual claims to the products of one's labor-were infeasible because most of the mobile and dispersed resources of a forager economy could not cost-effectively be delimited and defended. The resulting chicken-and-egg puzzle might be resolved if farming had been much more productive than foraging, but initially it was not. Our model and simulations explain how, despite being an unlikely event, farming and a new system of farming-friendly property rights nonetheless jointly emerged when they did. This Holocene revolution was not sparked by a superior technology. It occurred because possession of the wealth of farmers-crops, dwellings, and animals-could be unambiguously demarcated and defended. This facilitated the spread of new property rights that were advantageous to the groups adopting them. Our results thus challenge unicausal models of historical dynamics driven by advances in technology, population pressure, or other exogenous changes. Our approach may be applied to other technological and institutional revolutions such as the 18th-and 19th-century industrial revolution and the information revolution today.agent-based simulation | evolutionary game theory | technical change | institutional change | big history A mong the outstanding puzzles in human social dynamics is the simultaneous emergence and diffusion of novel economic institutions and new technologies. An important example is the appearance of private storage (1-4) and other indicators of individual property (5, 6) along with the advent of farming (7,8), one of the greatest technological-institutional revolutions ever experienced by our species.Economists, archaeologists, and historians often consider advances in technology to be an exogenous driver of innovations in property rights, wealth inheritance practices, or other institutions. Well-studied examples include the social and cultural impacts of the introduction of the horse on the US Great Plains in the 17th century or the sweet potato in the New Guinea Highlands a century later (9, 10). However, the technological and institutional innovations of the early Holocene are difficult to reconcile with this view because, as a number of archaeologists have pointed out (11-13), farming was probably not economically advantageous in many places where it was first introduced. Indeed, recent estimates suggest that the productivity of the first farmers (calories per hour of labor including processing and storage) was proba...

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Section: Persistence and Demise Of Forager Technology And Institutionssupporting

confidence: 90%

Coevolution of farming and private property during the early Holocene

Bowles

Choi

2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

164

125

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“…141), the direct 14 C date of a human skeleton, Sungir 1, is c. 19,200 rcbp . Although this age determination does not fit with the previous one of c. 22,900 rcbp (Pettitt and Bader 2000), Sungir still may provide important evidence of the LGM occupation of the Russian Plain. Even further east and north, the Medvezhya site (62°N) was occupied at c. 20,000 rcbp ( 14 C date of 20,070 ± 180 rcbp, without indication of material dated, Lab code, or No.…”

Section: Evaluation Of 14 C Date Frequencies and The Lgm Occupation Ocontrasting

confidence: 81%

Siberia at the Last Glacial Maximum: Environment and Archaeology

Kuzmin

2008

J Archaeol Res

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This article focuses on the presence of humans in Siberia and the Russian Far East at the coldest time of the Late Pleistocene, called the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and dated to c. 20,000-18,000 rcbp. Reconstruction of the LGM environment of Siberia, based on the latest models and compilations, provides a background for human existence in this region. Most of Siberia and the Russian Far East at c. 20,000-18,000 rcbp was covered by tundra and cool steppe, with some forest formations in the river valleys. Climate was much colder and drier than it is today. Eighteen Upper Paleolithic sites in Siberia are radiocarbon dated strictly to the LGM, and at least six of them, located in southern parts of western and eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East, have solid evidence of occupation during that time span. It seems clear that southern Siberia was populated by humans even at the height of the LGM, and that there was no dramatic decline or complete disappearance of humans in Siberia at that time. The degree of human adaptation to periglacial landscapes in the mid-Upper Paleolithic of northern Eurasia was quite high; humans coped with the cold and dry environmental conditions using microblade technology, artificial shelters, tailored clothes, and megafaunal bones as fuel.

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“…The remains of eight individuals were found, buried and ornamented with ivory spears, bracelets, brooches, numerous ivory beads, and perforated fox teeth, attesting to the technical sophistication of its inhabitants. The cultural assemblage and the red ochre covering the skeletons imply strongly that the burials are related to the wider Mid-Upper Paleolithic cultures of European modern humans (26). Sungir is the northernmost of these Upper Paleolithic sites and has a Streletskian artifact assemblage, which comprises triangular bifacial points with concave bases and therefore suggests the site is a transitional cultural phase related to the previous Early Upper Paleolithic (EUP).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Single amino acid radiocarbon dating of Upper Paleolithic modern humans

Marom

McCullagh

Higham

et al. 2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

125

130

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Archaeological bones are usually dated by radiocarbon measurement of extracted collagen. However, low collagen content, contamination from the burial environment, or museum conservation work, such as addition of glues, preservatives, and fumigants to "protect" archaeological materials, have previously led to inaccurate dates. These inaccuracies in turn frustrate the development of archaeological chronologies and, in the Paleolithic, blur the dating of such key events as the dispersal of anatomically modern humans. Here we describe a method to date hydroxyproline found in collagen (∼10% of collagen carbon) as a bone-specific biomarker that removes impurities, thereby improving dating accuracy and confidence. This method is applied to two important sites in Russia and allows us to report the earliest direct ages for the presence of anatomically modern humans on the Russian Plain. These dates contribute considerably to our understanding of the emergence of the Mid-Upper Paleolithic and the complex suite of burial behaviors that begin to appear during this period.HPLC | accelerator mass spectrometry | Kostenki | Sungir

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Direct AMS Radiocarbon dates for the Sungir mid Upper Palaeolithic burials

Cited by 48 publications

References 3 publications

Coevolution of farming and private property during the early Holocene

Coevolution of farming and private property during the early Holocene

Siberia at the Last Glacial Maximum: Environment and Archaeology

Single amino acid radiocarbon dating of Upper Paleolithic modern humans

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