Toward complexity in the osseous raw material work at the beginning of the Early Upper Palaeolithic in Eurasia: the Manot Cave (Israel) osseous tools in the Aurignacian emergence and diffusion context

Summary

The Early Upper Palaeolithic in the Levant plays an important role in understanding the emergence, dispersal, and adaptations of the first anatomically modern human populations in Eurasia. The exploitation of osseous raw materials for technical and conceptual behaviours is recognized as one of the several innovations that have occurred both in the Levant and in Europe during this time. Previous works demonstrated that the complex and innovative working of osseous materials in Europe is restricted to antler working, around 40 Ka cal BP, and are thus chronologically coincident with the emergence of the Early Aurignacian. Conversely, bone exploitation shows a continuity through the Mousterian, the Proto-Aurignacian and the Early Aurignacian, invalidating the argument that osseous material exploitation represents a radical difference between the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic in Europe.

We present the results of a technological analysis on the bone/antler industries from the EUP (Aurignacian) layers at Manot Cave, Israel. Comparing the technical concepts of the bone/antler working, through the operational sequence, between the European and the Levantine Aurignacian allow us to discuss the significance of the osseous raw material exploitation in the framework of the different proposed hypotheses on the emergence/diffusion of the Aurignacian techno-typological tradition over Eurasia.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Manot Cave: In Search of Modern Humans

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15075