Fast Fashion? Pelt Procurement in the Late Pleistocene at le Grand Abri aux Puces, France

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The origins of hominins using animal pelts as body covering, i.e. clothing, is an important adaptation to reconstruct. Throughout history, our hominin ancestors have adapted to living in temperate and glacial climates, as well as expanding into novel environments, like the Neanderthals in Europe over the past 300,000 years. However, there is currently no evidence that Neanderthals used needles or other tools to tailor tight-fitting clothing like later Upper Paleolithic modern Homo sapiens, and their sites have significantly fewer remains of the species that are most frequently targeted for their pelts (canids, leporids, and mustelids) than modern human sites. Le Grand Abri aux Puces (GAP), a site in Mediterranean France that dates between 125,000 - 90,000 years ago, could provide insight into this gap in knowledge. Preliminary research at GAP has provided evidence of cutmarks indicating pelt removal from beaver and lynx. This study undertakes a more thorough zooarchaeological analysis of the faunal remains from the rest of the GAP sequence in order to reconstruct if and how the hominins there were acquiring pelts, how this behavior compares to other signatures from the region, and the implications for hominin survival during the Late Pleistocene.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36381.0