Archaeological collections from Long Hole (Gower, Swansea, UK) and their place in the British Palaeolithic

At the time of its excavation in 1861, the cave site of Long Hole (Gower peninsula, Swansea, UK) was recognized as important for establishing the antiquity of man in Wales. However, in comparison to its more illustrious neighbour Paviland Cave, it has received very little attention since. Long Hole has been host to three documented excavations: by Colonel Wood in the 1860s, by John Campbell in 1969 and most recently the small-scale work in 2012 described in this paper. Here we outline Long Hole’s excavations and the archaeological material from the cave. Although the site’s earliest collections suffer from the familiar problems of being significantly selected and lacking contextual information, several conclusions are possible. Previous suggestions of two late Neanderthal occupations are unconvincing. Lithic artefacts from Long Hole are instead reminiscent of Aurignacian material from Paviland Cave, suggesting that they were left by some of Britain’s very early modern human occupants, 37–35,000 cal BP. Because Campbell excavated an apparently well-stratified Late Pleistocene sequence his collections have the greatest potential for future work

Neandertal-Modern Human Contact in Western Eurasia: Issues of Dating, Taxonomy, and Cultural Associations

Supporting Assimilation views of Neandertal/modern human interaction, chronostratigraphic reasoning indicates that the “transitional” industries of Europe predate modern human immigration, in agreement with their association with Neandertals in the Châtelperronian at the Grotte du Renne and St.-Césaire. Supporting the Neandertals' species separateness and less developed cognition, those industries are alternatively claimed to relate to pioneer groups of modern humans; the latter would have been the true makers of the precocious instances of symbolic material culture that, under Assimilation, are assigned to the Neandertals. However, the taxonomy of the Kent's Cavern and Grotta del Cavallo dental remains is uncertain, and their poor stratigraphic context precludes dating by association. The opposite happens at the Grotte du Renne, whose stratigraphic integrity is corroborated by both taphonomy and dating. Not questioning that the Early Ahmarian is a cultural proxy for modern humans and a source for the Protoaurignacian of Europe, its claimed emergence ~46–49 ka ago at Kebara refl ects the dating of Middle Paleolithic charcoal—to be expected, because the Early Ahmarian units at the back of the cave are made up of reworked Middle Paleolithic sediments derived from the entrance. The dating of inherited material also explains the old results for the Aurignacian of Willendorf II and Geissenklösterle. At the latter, the dates on anthropically modified samples of the hunted taxa (reindeer and horse) place its Aurignacian occupations in the same time range as elsewhere in Europe, after ~40 ka ago. The hypothesis that Neandertal/modern human contact in Europe resulted in a process of assimilation in connection with the spread of the Protoaurignacian ~41.5 ka ago remains unfalsified.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Reassessment of the Lower Paleolithic (Acheulean) presence in the western Tien Shan

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Reassessment of the Lower Palaeolithic (Acheulean) presence in the western Tien Shan

Kulbulak (Uzbekistan) is among the most important Paleolithic sites in Central Asia. Based on excavations from the 1960s to the 1980s, a stratigraphic sequence yielding 46 archeological horizons of the Lower, Middle and Upper Paleolithic has been described. The lowermost 22 layers were at that time defined as Acheulean, both in cultural and chronological aspects. Based on these previous works, Kulbulak has thus often been cited as one of the rarest occurrences of Lower Paleolithic and Acheulean in the region. However, this attribution was debatable. New excavations at Kulbulak in 2007-2010 provided new material and the first reliable dates that permitted us to tackle this issue. Moreover, a reappraisal of the lithic collections and documents from previous excavations was also conducted. These new data clearly indicate the absence of Acheulean or even Lower Paleolithic at Kulbulak. On the contrary, the lithic assemblages from this site only correspond to Middle and Upper Paleolithic periods. The lowermost layers are particularly interesting due to the presence of an early industry with blade and bladelet technology

Not Older and Not Different: Hohle Fels IV and the Western European Late Aurignacian.

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Not Older and Not Different: Hohle Fels IV and the Western European Late Aurignacian.

International audienceà veni