No abstract

Our field data from the Upper Palaeolithic site of Al-Ansab 1 (Jordan) and from a pollen sequence in the Dead Sea elucidate the role that changing Steppe landscapes played in facilitating anatomically modern human populations to enter a major expansion and consolidation phase, known as the "Early Ahmarian", several millennia subsequent to their initial Marine Isotope Stage 4/3 migration from Africa, into the Middle East. The Early Ahmarian techno-cultural unit covers a time range between 45 ka-37 ka BP. With so far more than 50 sites found, the Early Ahmarian is the first fully Upper Palaeolithic techno-cultural unit exclusively and undisputedly related to anatomically modern human populations. In order to better understand the potentially attractive features of the Early Ahmarian environmental context that supported its persistence for over 8,000 years, we carried out a decennial research program in Jordan and in the Dead Sea. This included (1) a geoscientific and archaeological survey program in the Wadi Sabra (Jordan) with a particular focus on excavations at the Early Ahmarian site of Al-Ansab 1 alongside the detailed analysis of Quaternary sediments from the same area and (2) palaeobotanical research based on Quaternary lake deposits from the Dead Sea. Our pollen data from the Dead Sea indicate slow, low frequency vegetational variation with expanding Artemisia steppe, from 60 to 20 ka BP (MIS 3-2). Here, we see a reciprocal assimilation of southern and northern Levantine vegetation zones thereby enhancing a long-lasting south-to-north steppe corridor. The same integration process accelerated about 40 ka ago, when forested areas retreated in the Lebanese Mountains. The process then extended to encompass an area from Southern Lebanon to

Early Epipaleolithic groups in the Levant often are described as highly mobile. Although there are some exceptions (e.g., Kharaneh IV and Ohalo II), most sites are aerially small and said to represent short-term camps. In this paper, we use information from the Early Epipaleolithic occupations at KPS-75, Yutil al-Hasa, Tor Sageer, and Tor at-Tareeq in the Wadi al-Hasa region of Jordan to examine their nature as persistent places in the landscape, which yield cumulative palimpsests that often time-average the activities and events that occurred at these locales. We argue that aerially small sites do not necessarily constitute short-term occupations because sites that might indicate high mobility as part of the spatial palimpsest of the landscape would have been quite ephemeral and often are not recorded by traditional surveys which focus on identifying highly visible sites rather than on systematically recording nonsite locales.

No abstract

24We investigate the effects of the Last Glacial Maximum (~25,000-18,500 cal. BP) on 25 human hunting and settlement strategies through the study of faunal remains from four 26