Heat treatment and associated early modern human behaviors in the Late Paleolithic at the Shuidonggou site

The objective of this study was to determine if visible reflectance spectroscopy and quantitative colorimetry represent viable approaches to classifying the heat treatment state of silcrete. Silcrete is a soil duricrust that has been used as toolstone since at least the Middle Stone Age. The ancient practice of heat treating silcrete prior to knapping is of considerable interest to paleolithic archaeologists because of its implications for early modern human complex cognition generally and the ability to manipulate the material properties of stone specifically. Here, we demonstrate that our quantitative, non-invasive, and portable approach to measuring color, used in conjunction with k-Nearest Neighbors “lazy” machine learning, is a highly promising method for heat treatment detection. Traditional, expert human analyst approaches typically rely upon subjective assessments of color and lustre and comparison to experimental reference collections. This strongly visual method can prove quite accurate, if difficult to reproduce between different analysts. It is thus surprising that until now, no published study has sought to exploit an instrumental approach to measuring color for classifying heat treatment state in silcrete. In this work, we measured percent reflectance for the visible spectrum (1018 variables) and tristimulus color values (CIEL*a*b*) in unheated and experimentally heat treated silcrete specimens from three sources in South Africa. k-NN classification proved highly effective with both the spectroscopy and colorimetry data sets. An important innovation was using the heat treatment state predicted by the k-NN model for the majority of replicate observations of a single specimen to predict the heat treatment state for the specimen overall. When this majority voting approach was applied to the 746 individual observations in this study, associated with 94 discrete silcrete flakes, both spectroscopy and colorimetry k-NN models yielded 0% test set misclassification rates at the specimen level.

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The Emergence of Bone Technologies at the End of the Pleistocene in Southeast Asia: Regional and Evolutionary Implications

Cambridge Archaeological Journal ◽

10.1017/s0959774312000030 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 22 (1) ◽

pp. 37-56 ◽

Cited By ~ 35

Author(s):

Ryan J. Rabett ◽

Philip J. Piper

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Large Scale ◽

Minor Component ◽

Modern Human ◽

Small Element ◽

Adaptive Process ◽

Long Time ◽

One Step ◽

A Minor

For many decades Palaeolithic research viewed the development of early modern human behaviour as largely one of progress down a path towards the ‘modernity’ of the present. The European Palaeolithic sequence — the most extensively studied — was for a long time the yard-stick against which records from other regions were judged. Recent work undertaken in Africa and increasingly Asia, however, now suggests that the European evidence may tell a story that is more parochial and less universal than previously thought. While tracking developments at the large scale (the grand narrative) remains important, there is growing appreciation that to achieve a comprehensive understanding of human behavioural evolution requires an archaeologically regional perspective to balance this.One of the apparent markers of human modernity that has been sought in the global Palaeolithic record, prompted by finds in the European sequence, is innovation in bonebased technologies. As one step in the process of re-evaluating and contextualizing such innovations, in this article we explore the role of prehistoric bone technologies within the Southeast Asian sequence, where they have at least comparable antiquity to Europe and other parts of Asia. We observe a shift in the technological usage of bone — from a minor component to a medium of choice — during the second half of the Last Termination and into the Holocene. We suggest that this is consistent with it becoming a focus of the kinds of inventive behaviour demanded of foraging communities as they adapted to the far-reaching environmental and demographic changes that were reshaping this region at that time. This record represents one small element of a much wider, much longerterm adaptive process, which we would argue is not confined to the earliest instances of a particular technology or behaviour, but which forms part of an on-going story of our behavioural evolution.

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Upper Pleistocene Human Dispersals out of Africa: A Review of the Current State of the Debate

International Journal of Evolutionary Biology ◽

10.4061/2011/615094 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 2011 ◽

pp. 1-17 ◽

Cited By ~ 33

Author(s):

Amanuel Beyin

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Homo Sapiens ◽

Modern Human ◽

Middle Stone Age ◽

Eastern Africa ◽

Last Interglacial ◽

Upper Pleistocene ◽

Current State ◽

Human Colonization ◽

Source Populations

Although there is a general consensus on African origin of early modern humans, there is disagreement about how and when they dispersed to Eurasia. This paper reviews genetic and Middle Stone Age/Middle Paleolithic archaeological literature from northeast Africa, Arabia, and the Levant to assess the timing and geographic backgrounds of Upper Pleistocene human colonization of Eurasia. At the center of the discussion lies the question of whether eastern Africa alone was the source of Upper Pleistocene human dispersals into Eurasia or were there other loci of human expansions outside of Africa? The reviewed literature hints at two modes of early modern human colonization of Eurasia in the Upper Pleistocene: (i) from multiple Homo sapiens source populations that had entered Arabia, South Asia, and the Levant prior to and soon after the onset of the Last Interglacial (MIS-5), (ii) from a rapid dispersal out of East Africa via the Southern Route (across the Red Sea basin), dating to ~74–60 kya.

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