Homes for hunters?: Exploring the concept of home at hunter-gatherer sites in upper paleolithic Europe and epipaleolithic Southwest Asia

In both Southwest Asia and Europe, only a handful of known Upper Paleolithic and Epipaleolithic sites attest to aggregation or gatherings of hunter-gatherer groups, sometimes including evidence of hut structures and highly structured use of space. Interpretation of these structures ranges greatly, from mere ephemeral shelters to places “built” into a landscape with meanings beyond refuge from the elements. One might argue that this ambiguity stems from a largely functional interpretation of shelters that is embodied in the very terminology we use to describe them in comparison to the homes of later farming communities: mobile hunter-gatherers build and occupy huts that can form campsites, whereas sedentary farmers occupy houses or homes that form communities. Here we examine some of the evidence for Upper Paleolithic and Epipaleolithic structures in Europe and Southwest Asia, offering insights into their complex “functions” and examining perceptions of space among hunter-gatherer communities. We do this through examination of two contemporary, yet geographically and culturally distinct, examples: Upper Paleolithic (especially Magdalenian) evidence in Western Europe and the Epipaleolithic record (especially Early and Middle phases) in Southwest Asia. A comparison of recent evidence for hut structures from these regions suggests several similarities in the nature of these structures, their association with activities related to hunter-gatherer aggregation, and their being “homes” imbued with quotidian and symbolic meaning

Technological Change and Economy in the Epipalaeolithic: Assessing the Shift from Early to Middle Epipalaeolithic at Kharaneh IV

Epipalaeolithic hunter-gatherer communities in the Southern Levant exhibit numerous complex trends that suggest that the transition to the Neolithic was patchy and protracted. This paper explores the changing nature of occupation at the Epipalaeolithic site Kharaneh IV, Jordan, through an in-depth analysis of the lithic and faunal assemblages. Focusing on the analysis of a single deep sounding (unit AS42), we address how Kharaneh IV occupations link to the local landscape and environmental changes. As an aggregation site, Kharaneh IV represents an interesting locale to explore the changing nature of aggregation and social cohesion prior to the origins of agriculture, as well as changes in technology and subsistence between the Early and Middle Epipalaeolithic. We explore the tempo and nature of transition from one archaeological culture to the next through changes in technology and how this reflects the people making and using tools, to understand how foragers adapted to a changing landscape

Decolonising the film curriculum through South–North collaborative online international learning (COIL) initiatives

Collaborative online international learning (COIL), also known as ‘telecollaboration’ or ‘virtual exchange’ among other terms, has been employed as a strategy for internationalisation of the curriculum in various disciplines for several years, but the COVID-19 pandemic has provided renewed impetus. This article argues that it can offer an effective means to decolonise approaches to teaching film studies through South–North collaborations. In brief, COIL is a pedagogical approach that holds that ‘learning takes place through a distributed network of connections to other people and their resources, and formal and informal educational assets in the public domain’ (Reo and Russell, 2015: 64). In this article, we argue that a COIL approach with a South–North focus, partnering with a higher education institution in Latin America, would provide unique opportunities to decolonise the film curriculum, given the features of COIL. In 2020, two universities in Mexico, one in Brazil and one in Colombia founded the Latin American Network for COIL. To date, it comprises 135 institutional members, some of which have students from Indigenous backgrounds and are already actively engaged in decolonising the curriculum. Our article proposes ways to take this forward

Meat outside the freezer: Drying, smoking, salting and sealing meat in fat at an Epipalaeolithic megasite in eastern Jordan

Even though pivotal for understanding many aspects of human behaviour, preservation and storage of animal resources has not received great attention from archaeologists. One could argue that the main problem lies in the difficulties of demonstrating meat storage archaeologically due to the lack of direct evidence. This paper represents an attempt to refine zooarchaeological methods for the recognition of meat preservation and storage at prehistoric sites. Drawing on the faunal assemblage from Kharaneh IV, an Early/Middle Epipalaeolithic aggregation site in eastern Jordan, this study demonstrates that a combination of taphonomic and contextual analyses alongside ethnographic information may indeed lead archaeologists to insights not directly available from the archaeological record. The empirical evidence presented here contributes to the archaeological visibility of meat preservation and storage, providing a clearer concept of the nature of these practices in pre-agricultural societies

On the Uniform Exponential Stability of Time-Varying Systems Subject to Discrete Time-Varying Delays and Nonlinear Delayed Perturbations

This paper addresses the problem of stability analysis of systems with delayed time-varying perturbations. Some sufficient conditions for a class of linear time-varying systems with nonlinear delayed perturbations are derived by using an improved Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional. The uniform global asymptotic stability of the solutions is obtained in terms of convergence toward a neighborhood of the origin

Impact of lung function and baseline clinical characteristics on patient-reported outcome measures in systemic sclerosis-associated interstitial lung disease.

OBJECTIVE: The SENSCIS® trial demonstrated a significant reduction of lung function decline in patients with systemic sclerosis (SSc)-associated interstitial lung disease (SSc-ILD) treated with nintedanib, but no significant effect on health-related quality of life (HRQoL). To assess whether SSc/SSc-ILD severity and large changes in lung function correlate with HRQoL, a post-hoc analysis of SENSCIS®, aggregating treatment arms, was undertaken. METHODS: Patient-reported outcome (PRO) measures (St. George's Respiratory Questionnaire [SGRQ], Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy [FACIT]-Dyspnoea, and Health Assessment Questionnaire-Disability Index [HAQ-DI], incorporating the Scleroderma Health Assessment Questionnaire visual analogue scale [SHAQ VAS]) at baseline and week 52 were assessed for associations to SSc-ILD severity. RESULTS: At baseline and at week 52, forced vital capacity (FVC) 30% fibrosis on high-resolution computed tomography at baseline demonstrated worse PRO measure scores at week 52. After 1 year, patients with a major (>10%) improvement/worsening in FVC demonstrated corresponding improvement/worsening in SGRQ and other PRO measures, significant for the SGRQ symptom domain (p< 0.001). CONCLUSION: Severe SSc-ILD and major deteriorations in lung function have important impacts on HRQoL. Treatments that slow lung function decline and prevent severe SSc-ILD are important to preserve HRQoL. TRIAL REGISTRATION: clinicaltrials.gov, www.clinicaltrials.gov, NCT02597933

Using the posterior distribution of deviance to measure evidence of association for rare susceptibility variants

Aitkin recently proposed an integrated Bayesian/likelihood approach that he claims is general and simple. We have applied this method, which does not rely on informative prior probabilities or large-sample results, to investigate the evidence of association between disease and the 16 variants in the KDR gene provided by Genetic Analysis Workshop 17. Based on the likelihood of logistic regression models and considering noninformative uniform prior probabilities on the coefficients of the explanatory variables, we used a random walk Metropolis algorithm to simulate the distributions of deviance and deviance difference. The distribution of probability values and the distribution of the proportions of positive deviance differences showed different locations, but the direction of the shift depended on the genetic factor. For the variant with the highest minor allele frequency and for any rare variant, standard logistic regression showed a higher power than the novel approach. For the two variants with the strongest effects on Q1 under a type I error rate of 1%, the integrated approach showed a higher power than standard logistic regression. The advantages and limitations of the integrated Bayesian/likelihood approach should be investigated using additional regions and considering alternative regression models and collapsing methods

Twenty Thousand-Year-Old Huts at a Hunter-Gatherer Settlement in Eastern Jordan

Ten thousand years before Neolithic farmers settled in permanent villages, hunter-gatherer groups of the Epipalaeolithic period (c. 22–11,600 cal BP) inhabited much of southwest Asia. The latest Epipalaeolithic phase (Natufian) is well-known for the appearance of stone-built houses, complex site organization, a sedentary lifestyle and social complexity—precursors for a Neolithic way of life. In contrast, pre-Natufian sites are much less well known and generally considered as campsites for small groups of seasonally-mobile hunter-gatherers. Work at the Early and Middle Epipalaeolithic aggregation site of Kharaneh IV in eastern Jordan highlights that some of these earlier sites were large aggregation base camps not unlike those of the Natufian and contributes to ongoing debates on their duration of occupation. Here we discuss the excavation of two 20,000-year-old hut structures at Kharaneh IV that pre-date the renowned stone houses of the Natufian. Exceptionally dense and extensive occupational deposits exhibit repeated habitation over prolonged periods, and contain structural remains associated with exotic and potentially symbolic caches of objects (shell, red ochre, and burnt horn cores) that indicate substantial settlement of the site pre-dating the Natufian and outside of the Natufian homeland as currently understood