Early Levallois technology and the Lower to Middle Paleolithic transition in the Southern Caucasus

Abstract

The Lower to Middle Paleolithic transition (~400,000 to 200,000 years ago) is marked by technical, behavioral, and anatomical changes among hominin populations throughout Africa and Eurasia. The replacement of bifacial stone tools, such as handaxes, by tools made on flakes detached from Levallois cores documents the most important conceptual shift in stone tool production strategies since the advent of bifacial technology more than one million years earlier and has been argued to result from the expansion of archaic Homo sapiens out of Africa. Our data from Nor Geghi 1, Armenia, record the earliest synchronic use of bifacial and Levallois technology outside Africa and are consistent with the hypothesis that this transition occurred independently within geographically dispersed, technologically precocious hominin populations with a shared technological ancestry.

Reassessing obsidian field relationships at Glass Buttes, Oregon

“…Our study also corroborates findings of other recent successes in obsidian sourcing using pXRF (e.g., Jia et al, 2013;Kellett et al, 2013;Rodríguez-Alegría et al, 2013;Adler et al, 2014;Ebert et al, 2014;Frahm, 2014b;Frahm et al, 2014b,c;Galipaud et al, 2014;Lawrence et al, 2014;McCoy et al, 2014;Milić, 2014), namely that portable instruments are capable of sourcing results that, a decade ago, necessitated laboratory-based equipment available only in specialized archaeometric facilities. This has two consequences for this study.…”

Neandertals revised

“…The beginning of the Middle Paleolithic, around MIS 8, is characterized by the Levallois method, a technique to extract blanks of predetermined form from carefully prepared cores. From around 300 ka onward, Neandertals again shared with their MSA contemporaries the use of this Levallois method (76), whereas alongside the Levallois technique, older, more expedient, techniques kept on being used by Middle and Late Pleistocene African and Eurasian populations. The blanks obtained by the Levallois and other techniques could be used as such or after having been retouched for sharpness or strength.…”

What is Still Bay? Human biogeography and bifacial point variability

“…However the scale at which convergence or drift become likely explanations for assemblage similarities or differences is seldom investigated or even discussed. Indeed, the amount of space and time separating technologically similar artefacts/assemblages is correlated with the probability of convergence (Kleindienst, 1968;Wang et al, 2012;Adler et al, 2014;Will et al, 2015). For instance, it is unlikely that the presence of bifacial foliates in the Aterian of north-west Africa or in the Somalian MSA necessarily means there is a connection to the Still Bay.…”