The absolute chronology of Boker Tachtit (Israel) and implications for the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition in the Levant

The Initial Upper Paleolithic (IUP) is a crucial lithic assemblage type in the archaeology of southwest Asia because it marks a dramatic shift in hominin populations accompanied by technological changes in material culture. This phase is conventionally divided into two chronocultural phases based on the Boker Tachtit site, central Negev, Israel. While lithic technologies at Boker Tachtit are well defined, showing continuity from one phase to another, the absolute chronology is poorly resolved because the radiocarbon method used had a large uncertainty. Nevertheless, Boker Tachtit is considered to be the origin of the succeeding Early Upper Paleolithic Ahmarian tradition that dates in the Negev to ∼42,000 y ago (42 ka). Here, we provide 14C and optically stimulated luminescence dates obtained from a recent excavation of Boker Tachtit. The new dates show that the early phase at Boker Tachtit, the Emirian, dates to 50 through 49 ka, while the late phase dates to 47.3 ka and ends by 44.3 ka. These results show that the IUP started in the Levant during the final stages of the Late Middle Paleolithic some 50,000 y ago. The later IUP phase in the Negev chronologically overlaps with the Early Upper Paleolithic Ahmarian of the Mediterranean woodland region between 47 and 44 ka. We conclude that Boker Tachtit is the earliest manifestation of the IUP in Eurasia. The study shows that distinguishing the chronology of the IUP from the Late Middle Paleolithic, as well as from the Early Upper Paleolithic, is much more complex than previously thought

Levantine cranium from Manot Cave (Israel) foreshadows the first European modern humans

A key event in human evolution is the expansion of modern humans of African origin across Eurasia between 60 and 40 thousand years (kyr) before present (BP), replacing all other forms of hominins1. Owing to the scarcity of human fossils from this period, these ancestors of all present-day non-African modern populations remain largely enigmatic. Here we describe a partial calvaria, recently discovered at Manot Cave (Western Galilee, Israel) and dated to 54.7 ± 5.5 kyr BP(arithmetic mean ± 2 standard deviations) by uranium–thorium dating, that sheds light on this crucial event. The overall shape and discrete morphological features of the Manot 1 calvaria demonstrate that this partial skull is unequivocally modern. It is similar in shape to recent African skulls as well as to European skulls from the Upper Palaeolithic period, but different from most other early anatomically modern humans in the Levant. This suggests that the Manot people could be closely related to the first modern humans who later successfully colonized Europe. Thus, the anatomical features used to support the ‘assimilation model’ in Europe might not have been inherited from European Neanderthals, but rather from earlier Levantine populations. Moreover, at present, Manot 1 is the only modern human specimen to provide evidence that during the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic interface, both modern humans and Neanderthals contemporaneously inhabited the southern Levant, close in time to the likely interbreeding event with Neanderthals2,3

A matter of space and time: How frequent is convergence in lithic technology in the African archaeological record over the last 300 kyr?

Stone artefacts are frequently used to identify and trace human populations in the Paleolithic. Convergence in lithic technology has the potential to confound such interpretations, implying connections between unrelated groups. To further the general theoretical debate on this issue, we first delineate the concepts of independent innovation, diffusion and migration and provide archaeological expectations for each of these processes that can create similarities in material culture. As an empirical test case, we then assess how these different mechanisms play out in both space and time for lithic technology across several scales of the African Stone Age record within the last 300 thousand years (kyr). Our findings show that convergence is neither the exception nor the norm, but a scale-dependent phenomenon that occurs more often for complex artefacts than is generally acknowledged and in many different spatio-temporal contexts of the African record that can crosscut the MSA/LSA boundary. Studies using similarly-looking stone tools to recognize past populations and track human dispersals in the Stone Age thus always need to test for the potential of independent innovation and not assume migration or diffusion a priori