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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Neanderthals in the Levant: Behavioural Organization and the Beginnings of Human Modernity

Neanderthals in the Levant: Behavioural Organization and the Beginnings of Human Modernity

Henry, Donald O.

Paperback

Series: New Approaches to Anthropological Archaeology

ArchaeologyGeneral World HistoryGeology

ISBN10: 1350343994
ISBN13: 9781350343993
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published: Feb 23 2023
Pages: 344
Weight: 1.32
Height: 0.72 Width: 7.00 Depth: 10.00
Language: English

This significant contribution to scholarship on the Middle Paleolithic, now reissued with a new preface, traces the controversy that revolves around the bio-cultural relationships of Archaic (Neanderthal) and Modern humans at global and regional, Levantine scales. The focus of the book is on understanding the degree to which the behavioral organization of Archaic groups differed from Moderns. To this end, a case study is presented for a 44-70,000 year old, Middle Paleolithic occupation of a Jordanian rockshelter.

The research, centering on the spatial analysis of artifacts, hearths and related data, reveals how the Archaic occupants of the shelter structured their activities and placed certain conceptual labels on different parts of the site. The structure of Tor Faraj is compared to site structures defined for modern foragers, in both ethnographic and archaeological contexts, to measure any differences in behavioral organization.

The comparisons show very similar structures for Tor Faraj and its modern cohorts, and the implications of this finding challenge prevailing views that Archaic groups had inferior cognition and less complex behavioral-social organization than modern foragers. The study also calls into question the contention that such behaviors only emerged after the appearance of the Upper Paleolithic, dated some 10-20,000 years later than the occupation of Tor Faraj.

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