The Middle And Upper Paleolithic Archeology Of The Levant And Beyond

This volume is a compilation of results from sessions of the Second International Conference on the Replacement of Neanderthals by Modern Humans, which took place between November 30 and December 6, 2014, in Hokkaido, Japan. Similar to the first conference held in 2012 in Tokyo, the 2014 conference (RNMH2014) aimed to compile the results of the latest multidisciplinary approaches investigating the issues surrounding the replacement of Neanderthals by modern humans. The results of the sessions, supplemented by off-site contributions, center on the archeology of the Middle and Upper Paleolithic of the Levant and beyond. The first part of this volume presents recent findings from the Levant, while the second part focuses on the neighboring regions, namely, the Caucasus, the Zagros, and South Asia. The 13 chapters in this volume highlight the distinct nature of the cultural occurrences during the Middle and Upper Paleolithic periods of the Levant, displaying a continuous development as well as a combination of lithic traditions that may have originated in different regions. This syncretism, which is an unusual occurrence in the regions discussed in this volume, reinforces the importance of the Levant as a region for interpreting the RNMH phenomenon in West Asia.

The volume offers a comprehensive introduction to the archaeology of the southern Levant (modern day Israel, Palestine and Jordan) from the Paleolithic period to the Islamic era, presenting the past with chronological changes from hunter-gatherers to empires. Written by an international team of scholars in the fields of archaeology, epigraphy, and bioanthropology, the volume presents central debates around a range of archaeological issues, including gender, ritual, the creation of alphabets and early writing, biblical periods, archaeometallurgy, looting, and maritime trade. Collectively, the essays also engage diverse theoretical approaches to demonstrate the multi-vocal nature of studying the past. Significantly, The Social Archaeology of the Levant updates and contextualizes major shifts in archaeological interpretation.

Through an analysis of archaeological data from the Levant, this text argues that by at least 100,000 years ago people of the Middle Paleolithic period, usually regarded as being somewhat less than human were, on the contrary, fully modern in terms of their behavioural and cultural systems.

This book provides an overview of the archaeological sites and cultural assemblages in the world and presents an archaeological database that has been established through two large-scale research projects conducted between 2010 and 2022. The projects were Replacement of the Neanderthals by Modern Humans (2010–2015) and The Cultural History of PaleoAsia (2016–2022), both of which were carried out with the aid of the Japanese Government. They deal with multi-disciplinary studies of the demise of more archaic hominins and the survival of anatomically modern humans. Although the database is designated PaleoAsiaDB, which may imply a focus on Asia, it incorporates the dataset collected from Africa and Europe by the Replacement of the Neanderthals by Modern Humans project. PaleoAsiaDB provides a list of more than 3,300 sites and 7,600 cultural assemblages of the Middle and Upper Paleolithic (Middle and Late Stone Age) of the Eastern Hemisphere as of 2020. This database is the first attempt of its kind to document the related sites of 200-20ka. The full version of the database is available at the University Museum on the University of Tokyo homepage.

This significant contribution to scholarship on the Middle Paleolithic, now reissued with a new preface, traces the controversy that revolves around the bio-cultural relationships of Archaic (Neanderthal) and Modern humans at global and regional, Levantine scales. The focus of the book is on understanding the degree to which the behavioral organization of Archaic groups differed from Moderns. To this end, a case study is presented for a 44-70,000 year old, Middle Paleolithic occupation of a Jordanian rockshelter. The research, centering on the spatial analysis of artifacts, hearths and related data, reveals how the Archaic occupants of the shelter structured their activities and placed certain conceptual labels on different parts of the site. The structure of Tor Faraj is compared to site structures defined for modern foragers, in both ethnographic and archaeological contexts, to measure any differences in behavioral organization. The comparisons show very similar structures for Tor Faraj and its modern cohorts, and the implications of this finding challenge prevailing views that Archaic groups had inferior cognition and less complex behavioral-social organization than modern foragers. The study also calls into question the contention that such behaviors only emerged after the appearance of the Upper Paleolithic, dated some 10-20,000 years later than the occupation of Tor Faraj.

Publisher Description

This volume brings together diverse contributions from leading archaeologists and paleoanthropologists, covering various spatial and temporal periods to distinguish convergent evolution from cultural transmission in order to see if we can discover ancient human populations. With a focus on lithic technology, the book analyzes ancient materials and cultures to systematically explore the theoretical and physical aspects of culture, convergence, and populations in human evolution and prehistory. The book will be of interest to academics, students and researchers in archaeology, paleoanthropology, genetics, and paleontology. The book begins by addressing early prehistory, discussing the convergent evolution of behaviors and the diverse ecological conditions driving the success of different evolutionary paths. Chapters discuss these topics and technology in the context of the Lower Paleolithic/Earlier Stone age and Middle Paleolithic/Middle Stone Age. The book then moves towards a focus on the prehistory of our species over the last 40,000 years. Topics covered include the human evolutionary and dispersal consequences of the Middle-Upper Paleolithic Transition in Western Eurasia. Readers will also learn about the cultural convergences, and divergences, that occurred during the Terminal Pleistocene and Holocene, such as the budding of human societies in the Americas. The book concludes by integrating these various perspectives and theories, and explores different methods of analysis to link technological developments and cultural convergence.

Drawing upon invasion biology and the latest archaeological, skeletal and environment evidence, From Arabia to the Pacific documents the migration of humans into Asia, and explains why we were so successful as a colonising species. The colonisation of Asia by our species was one of the most momentous events in human evolution. Starting around or before 100,000 years ago, humans began to disperse out of Africa and into the Arabian Peninsula, and then across southern Asia through India, Southeast Asia and south China. They learnt to build boats and sail to the islands of Southeast Asia, from which they reached Australia by 50,000 years ago. Around that time, humans also dispersed from the Levant through Iran, Central Asia, southern Siberia, Mongolia, the Tibetan Plateau, north China and the Japanese islands, and they also colonised Siberia as far north as the Arctic Ocean. By 30,000 years ago, humans had colonised the whole of Asia from Arabia to the Pacific, and from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean as well as the European Peninsula. In doing so, we replaced all other types of humans such as Neandertals and ended five million years of human diversity. Using interdisciplinary source material, From Arabia to the Pacific charts this process and draws conclusions as to the factors which made it possible. It will be invaluable to scholars of prehistory, and archaeologists and anthropologists interested in how the human species moved out of Africa and spread throughout Asia.