Analyses of raw materials and the distinction between local/regional and long-distance sources have proven invaluable for understanding the extensive movements, interactions, and social networks during the Upper Palaeolithic in the Iberian Peninsula. However, unlike other parts of Iberia, research on the management and acquisition of raw materials in the south and west of Iberia remains relatively underdeveloped. Despite significant knowledge about the technological practices of Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers from southern Portugal, particularly from studies conducted at the site of Vale Boi, there is a noticeable lack of focus on raw materials management. This paper presents the first comprehensive characterisation of chert raw materials from the Gravettian, Proto-Solutrean, and Solutrean occupations at Vale Boi, using both macroscopic and petrographic techniques. Our study reveals that the majority of chert found at Vale Boi originates locally, within a 20 km radius. However, a non-negligible portion of the chert comes from non-local sources, indicating 200 km raw material circulation from central Portugal and southern Spain.
Levallois technology, a hallmark of Middle Palaeolithic stone tool manufacture, involves sophisticated core reduction strategies that have major implications for understanding human cognitive and technological evolution. However, traditional methods of analysing Levallois cores often fail to capture the nuanced variability in their morphology. This study introduces a novel application of three-dimensional geometric morphometrics (GM) to quantify the shape variability of Nubian Levallois cores from the Nile Valley and Dhofar regions. By employing this technique, we analysed core surfaces and preferential scar shapes, identifying distinct regional and technological patterns. Our results reveal significant inter-regional differences in core elongation and surface convexity, highlighting the importance of shape-oriented, rather than metric-based, analysis of prepared cores. This new GM approach offers a robust and replicable tool for investigating lithic variability and holds potential for broader applications in Palaeolithic research, enhancing our understanding of human technological adaptations.
Open-air accumulations of chipped stone debris are a common feature in arid landscapes, yet despite their prevalence, such archives are often dismissed as uninformative or unreliable. In the canyonlands of Dhofar, southern Oman, lithic surface scatters are nearly ubiquitous, including extensive, multi-component workshops associated with chert outcrops. These sites typically display chronologically diagnostic features that correspond to distinct taphonomic states, which in turn appear linked to spatial distribution, with more heavily weathered artifacts often found farther from the chert outcrops. We propose that post-depositional modifications and spatial distributions of chipped stone artifacts reflect site formation processes and, under certain conditions, may provide relative chronological information when absolute dating methods are unavailable. Our study tests this hypothesis by mapping artifact distribution and lithic taphonomy across a series of surface sites in southern Oman, spanning the Lower, Middle, and Upper/Late Palaeolithic periods. The results largely support our model, offering valuable insights into surface site formation and technological change over time. While these findings serve as broad predictive markers for age, their applicability for analyzing finer-scale assemblage variability remains to be determined. Future taphonomic recording systems should aim to quantify surface modifications to enhance replicability for such studies.
Exploring the varied subsistence strategies and cave occupation patterns of Neanderthals is key to understanding their complex behaviors and ecological adaptations. Small game consumption, in particular, is considered a relevant indicator of their behavioral complexity. Rabbit assemblages from Pleistocene cave sites provide valuable insights into Neanderthal interactions with small prey and potential competition with carnivores. Here, we present the first detailed taphonomic analysis of faunal remains from Escoural Cave (Portugal), where a European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) assemblage was found alongside Middle Paleolithic stone tools and some macromammal remains. This study combines traditional zooarchaeological and taphonomic analysis of the rabbit remains with multivariate statistics and machine learning methods to establish the origin of the accumulation, and the implications for Neanderthal subsistence and cave use. Results from the taphonomic analysis show no evidence of human consumption but abundant evidence of small terrestrial carnivore activity, primarily from lynxes. This could indicate a sequential occurrence of Neanderthal and carnivore activities in the cave, with Neanderthal activities likely related to something other than rabbit consumption. Our study contributes to characterizing Iberian carnivore fossil accumulations and differentiating between faunal assemblages accumulated by carnivores and those by hominins. Additionally, we show that the use of machine learning analysis provides a robust and objective method for identifying and classifying taphonomic signatures, enhancing the accuracy and reliability of our interpretations. Future work will focus on analyzing additional faunal collections from both past and new excavations at Escoural, to test whether carnivores and Neanderthals focused on different prey types and how they shared the cave space.
Southwestern Iberia has played a key role in characterizing Late Pleistocene human ecodynamics. Among other aspects of human behavior, chert procurement and management studies in this region have received increasing attention in the past two decades, especially focusing on the sites showing repeated human occupation, such as the case of Vale Boi (Southern Portugal). However, these studies have been very limited in their geographical scope, and mostly focused on brief macroscopic descriptions of the raw materials. To further our knowledge of the relationship between regional availability of raw materials and its impact on human adaptations and mobility, a more detailed approach to characterizing geological sources is needed. This paper characterizes chert raw materials location, diversity, and availability in a geologically well-defined region of southern Portugal ‐ the Algarve. Through macroscopic and petrographic approaches, we provide a detailed characterization of geological chert sources to build a frame of reference for chert exploitation in the region. Our results show that there are four main chert formations in Algarve, and that despite the within-source variability, sufficient differences at macroscopic and petrographic levels are present to allow clear source attribution. These results provide a baseline for raw material studies in archaeological assemblages across southwestern Iberia, that will be essential to further characterize the dynamics of human behavior in some of the most important eco-cultural niches.
Until recently, evidence of Neanderthal cave use in the Algarve (Southern Portugal) came only from the site of Ibn Ammar. Over the last couple of years, archaeological excavations inside another cave, Gruta da Companheira, yielded Mousterian stone tools associated with possible human fossils. The discovery of this assemblage is groundbreaking because it may contribute to enlighten the Neanderthal/cave relationship and explain the dearth of similar sites in the Algarve. Gruta da Companheira, however, is a complex karst system, which was partly destroyed during its accidental discovery. As result, the original entrance of the cave remains unknown, and it is unclear how sediments, archaeological materials and Neanderthals accessed the site. To tackle these issues, we combined geomorphological observations with speleological, Electrical Resistivity Tomography (ERT) and Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR) prospections. Our data indicate that Gruta da Companheira was probably accessed from the hilltop through a sub-vertical entrance. Additionally, our results suggest the existence of yet unexplored shallower cavities connected with the already known passages of Gruta da Companheira. These results will guide the opening of new excavation areas at the site. The limestone bedrock hosting Gruta da Companheira has been extensively dissolved by karst processes. Therefore, it is necessary to focus future research on the cave infillings to clarify whether Neanderthals exploited the cave's inner chambers or alternatively limited their occupations to the hilltop and geogenic processes reworked their materials into the endokarst system shortly after their stays. The deep karstification and partial collapse of the hill hosting Gruta da Companheira are common in limestone outcrops that occur throughout the Western Algarve. Poor visibility and poor accessibility of this karst area, densely covered with shrubby vegetation, are factors that need to be considered when addressing the scarcity of Middle Palaeolithic cave sites in this region.
Species determination based on genetic evidence is an indispensable tool in archaeology, forensics, ecology, and food authentication. Most available analytical approaches involve compromises with regard to the number of detectable species, high cost due to low throughput, or a labor-intensive manual process. Here, we introduce “Species by Proteome INvestigation” (SPIN), a shotgun proteomics workflow for analyzing archaeological bone capable of querying over 150 mammalian species by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). Rapid peptide chromatography and data-independent acquisition (DIA) with throughput of 200 samples per day reduce expensive MS time, whereas streamlined sample preparation and automated data interpretation save labor costs. We confirm the successful classification of known reference bones, including domestic species and great apes, beyond the taxonomic resolution of the conventional peptide mass fingerprinting (PMF)-based Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) method. In a blinded study of degraded Iron-Age material from Scandinavia, SPIN produces reproducible results between replicates, which are consistent with morphological analysis. Finally, we demonstrate the high throughput capabilities of the method in a high-degradation context by analyzing more than two hundred Middle and Upper Palaeolithic bones from Southern European sites with late Neanderthal occupation. While this initial study is focused on modern and archaeological mammalian bone, SPIN will be open and expandable to other biological tissues and taxa.
Blinkhorn et al.1 present a reanalysis of fossil and lithic material from Garrod’s 1928 excavation at Shukbah Cave, identifying the presence of Nubian Levallois cores and points in direct association with a Neanderthal molar. The authors argue that this demonstrates the Nubian reduction strategy forms a part of the wider Middle Palaeolithic lithic repertoire, therefore its role as a cultural marker for Homo sapiens population movements is invalid. We raise the following four major concerns: (1) we question the assumptions made by the authors about the integrity and homogeneity of the Layer D assemblage and (2) the implications of this for the association of the Neanderthal tooth with any specific component of the assemblage, (3) we challenge the authors’ attribution of lithic material to Nubian Levallois technology according to its strict definition, and (4) we argue that the comparative data presented derive from a biased sample of sites. These points critically undermine the article’s conclusion that Shukbah’s Neanderthals made Nubian cores and thus the argument that Neanderthals might have made Nubian technology elsewhere is unsubstantiated.
Currently available data on the Pleistocene human occupation of the westernmost territories of Iberia attest to the presence of Middle Palaeolithic industries from c. 240 ka cal bp until c. 37 ka cal bp. Previous studies focusing on this time frame have suggested that Middle Palaeolithic populations were highly mobile and predominately utilised locally available raw materials, with many cave and open-air sites being located near fluvial settings. Other than these observations, no specific studies have focused on exploring the factors influencing human site location choice during that time range. Employing statistical and GIS approaches, this paper provides an initial assessment of spatial patterning in human settlement during the Middle Palaeolithic of westernmost Iberia. Results show that site locations are biased towards lower elevations and riverine settings and suggest that distance to rivers might have impacted the diversity and specific types of lithic raw materials used at each site. These results help to shed light on the particularities of Neanderthal adaptations in a region regarded as a refugium during periods of unfavourable climate during the Middle Palaeolithic.
Successive generations of hunter–gatherers of the Late Glacial and Early Holocene in Iberia had to contend with rapidly changing environments and climatic conditions. This constrained their economic resources and capacity for demographic growth. The Atlantic façade of Iberia was occupied throughout these times and witnessed very significant environmental transformations. Archaeology offers a perspective on how past human population ecologies changed in response to this scenario. Archaeological radiocarbon data are used here to reconstruct demographics of the region over the long term. We introduce various quantitative methods that allow us to develop palaeodemographic and spatio-temporal models of population growth and density, and compare our results to independent records of palaeoenvironmental and palaeodietary change, and growth rates derived from skeletal data. Our results demonstrate that late glacial population growth was stifled by the Younger Dryas stadial, but populations grew in size and density during the Early to Middle Holocene transition. This growth was fuelled in part by an increased dependence on marine and estuarine food sources, demonstrating how the environment was linked to demographic change via the resource base, and ultimately the carrying capacity of the environment.