The Lower and Middle Paleolithic in the Middle East and neighboring regions

✍ Scribed by John J. Shea

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2008
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 94 KB
• Volume: 17
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1060-1538
• DOI: 10.1002/evan.20183

✦ Synopsis

The Lower and Middle Paleolithic in the Middle East and Neighboring Regions B y virtue of its location at the conjunction of Africa and Eurasia, the ''Near East,'' or Southwest Asia, has long been a focus for debate about the geographic dimensions of human evolution. When did ancestral hominins disperse from Africa? How many dispersals were there? How were the spread of human populations and the spread of behavioral innovations related to one another in the earliest phases of prehistory? These and other questions were raised and debated at a conference organized by Jean-Mare Le Tensorer, Dorota Wojtczak, Thomas Hauck, and Daniel Schuhmann (Basel) at the Hotel Rochat in Basel, Switzerland, between May 8À10, 2008. This conference brought together scientists of many nationalities who currently are working in Anatolia, the Caucasus, the Levant, Mesopotamia, Iran, and the Arabian Peninsula.

Much of what is known about the early prehistory of the Near East is informed by excavations of caves along the East Mediterranean coast. That information is supplemented by the results of cave excavations in the Zagros Mountains along the Iraq-Iran border. Many of these caves, such as Tabun, Yabrud, Ksar Akil, and Shanidar, were initially excavated in the mid-twentieth century.

Understandably, the quality of archeological and hominin fossil evidence from these sites is markedly inferior to that recovered by recent excavations. Levantine open-air sites and sites from the Arabian Peninsula have been known for a long time, but until recently the evidence recovered from them has not been well integrated into the mainstream of Southwest Asian prehistory. The convening of this conference reflects recent progress made by excavations at three spring-margin sites in the El Kowm Basin in central Syria, as well by ongoing survey projects elsewhere in Syria, Iran, and on the Arabian Peninsula.