The late middle palaeolithic blade technologies and the transition to the Upper Palaeolithic in southern Poland: TL dating contribution.

International audienc

Luminescence dates for the palaeolithic site of Piekary IIa (Poland): comparison between TL of burnt flints and OSL of a loess-like deposit

International audienceWe report the thermoluminescence age-estimates for burnt flints excavated at the palaeolithic site of Piekary IIa and discuss attempts to date quartz grains extracted from the embedding deposit using the OSL technique with the SAR protocol. The results indicate that this loess-like deposit contains a mixture of grains, well bleached at different periods in the past, and that the study of small aliquots seems to be the only way to discriminate between the different fractions

The Emergence of Ornaments and Art: An Archaeological Perspective on the Origins of “Behavioral Modernity”

The earliest known personal ornaments come from the Middle Stone Age of southern Africa, c. 75,000 years ago, and are associated with anatomically modern humans. In Europe, such items are not recorded until after 45,000 radiocarbon years ago, in Neandertal-associated contexts that significantly predate the earliest evidence, archaeological or paleontological, for the immigration of modern humans; thus, they represent either independent invention or acquisition of the concept by long-distance diffusion, implying in both cases comparable levels of cognitive capability and performance. The emergence of figurative art postdates c. 32,000 radiocarbon years ago, several millennia after the time of Neandertal/modern human contact. These temporal patterns suggest that the emergence of “behavioral modernity” was triggered by demographic and social processes and is not a species-specific phenomenon; a corollary of these conclusions is that the corresponding genetic and cognitive basis must have been present in the genus Homo before the evolutionary split between the Neandertal and modern human lineages