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September 25, 2014
University of Connecticut
Analysis of stone artifacts from the excavation of a 300,000-year-old
site in Armenia shows that new technologies evolved locally, rather than
being imported from outside, as previously thought.
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Stone Age tools: Innovation was local, not imported, in Eurasia more
than 300,000 years ago
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T
Prehistoric hand axe (stock image).
he analysis of artifacts from a 325,000-year-old site in Armenia shows
that human technological innovation occurred intermittently throughout
the Old World, rather than spreading from a single point of origin, as
previously thought.
The study, published today in the journal Science, examines thousands of stone
artifacts retrieved from Nor Geghi 1, a unique site preserved between two lava flows
dated to 200,000-400,000 years ago. Layers of floodplain sediments and an ancient
soil found between these lava flows contain the archaeological material. The dating of
volcanic ash found within the sediments and detailed study of the sediments
themselves allowed researchers to correlate the stone tools with a period between
325,000 and 335,000 years ago when Earth's climate was similar to today's.
The stone tools provide early evidence for the simultaneous use of two distinct
technologies: biface technology, commonly associated with hand axe production
during the Lower Paleolithic, and Levallois technology, a stone tool production method
typically attributed to the Middle Stone Age in Africa and the Middle Paleolithic in
Eurasia. Traditionally, Archaeologists use the development of Levallois technology and
the disappearance of biface technology to mark the transition from the Lower to the
Middle Paleolithic roughly 300,000 years ago.
Archaeologists have argued that Levallois technology was invented in Africa and
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spread to Eurasia with expanding human populations, replacing local biface
technologies in the process. This theory draws a link between populations and
technologies and thus equates technological change with demographic change. The
co-existence of the two technologies at Nor Geghi 1 provides the first clear evidence
that local populations developed Levallois technology out of existing biface technology.
"The combination of these different technologies in one place suggests to us that,
about 325,000 years ago, people at the site were innovative," says Daniel Adler,
associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut, and the study's
lead author. Moreover, the chemical analysis of several hundred obsidian artifacts
shows that humans at the site utilized obsidian outcrops from as far away as 120
kilometers (approximately 75 miles), suggesting they must also have been capable of
exploiting large, environmentally diverse territories.
The paper argues that biface and Levallois technology, while distinct in many regards,
share a common pedigree. In biface technology, a mass of stone is shaped through
the removal of flakes from two surfaces in order to produce a tool such as a hand axe.
The flakes detached during the manufacture of a biface are treated as waste. In
Levallois technology, a mass of stone is shaped through the removal of flakes in order
to produce a convex surface from which flakes of predetermined size and shape are
detached. The predetermined flakes produced through Levallois technology are the
desired products. Archaeologists suggest that Levallois t echnology is optimal in
terms of raw material use and that the predetermined flakes are relatively small and
easy to carry. These were important issues for the highly mobile hunter-gatherers of
the time.
It is the novel combination of the shaping and flaking systems that distinguishes
Levallois from other technologies, and highlights its evolutionary relationship to biface
technology. Based on comparisons of archaeological data from sites in Africa, the
Middle East, and Europe, the study also demonstrates that this evolution was gradual
and intermittent, and that it occurred independently within different human populations
who shared a common technological ancestry, says Adler. In other words Levallois
technology evolved out of pre-existing biface technology in different places at different
times.
This conclusion challenges the view held by some Archaeologists that technological
change resulted from population change during this period. "If I were to take all the
artifacts from the site and show them to an archaeologist, they would immediately
begin to categorize them into chronologically distinct groups," Adler said. In reality,
the artifacts found at Nor Geghi 1 reflect the technological flexibility and variability of a
single population during a period of profound human behavioral and biological change.
These results highlight the antiquity of the human capacity for innovation.
This study is the first to present data from Nor Geghi 1, and the research conducted at
the site is a collaboration between the University of Connecticut, Yerevan State
University, and the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Yerevan. Intellectual
contributions to this research were made by and international team of collaborators
from Armenia, the United Kingdom, Canada, Spain, Holland, Germany, Ireland, and
the United States. Funding for this research was provided by the University of
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MLA APA Chicago
University of Connecticut. "Stone Age tools: Innovation was local, not imported, in
Eurasia more than 300,000 years ago." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 25 September
2014. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140925141224.htm>.
Share This
Connecticut (the Norian Armenian Programs Committee, the College of Liberal Arts
and Science, the Office of Global Affairs, Study Abroad, and the CLAS Book
Committee), the UK Natural Environment Research Council, the L.S.B. Leakey
Foundation, the Irish Research Council, and the University of Winchester, UK.
Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by University of Connecticut. Note:
Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
1. D. S. Adler, K. N. Wilkinson, S. Blockley, D. F. Mark, R. Pinhasi, B. A. Schmidt-
Magee, S. Nahapetyan, C. Mallol, F. Berna, P. J. Glauberman, Y. Raczynski-
Henk, N. Wales, E. Frahm, O. Jris, A. MacLeod, V. C. Smith, V. L. Cullen, and
B. Gasparian. Early Levallois technology and the Lower to Middle Paleolithic
transition in the Southern Caucasus. Science, 2014; 345 (6204): 1609-1613
DOI: 10.1126/science.1256484
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