A revised AMS and tephra chronology for the Late Middle to Early Upper Paleolithic occupations of Ortvale Klde, Republic of Georgia

Abstract

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New insights into the Upper Palaeolithic of the Caucasus through the study of personal ornaments. Teeth and bones pendants from Satsurblia and Dzudzuana caves (Imereti, Georgia)

“…Currently, the earliest Caucasian EUP dates derive mainly from sites on the northern slopes of the Greater Caucasus (Mezmaiskaya and Korotkaya) [ 10 , 11 ] and those located on its southern slopes (Dzduzuana, Ortvale Klde, Bondi Cave, Aghitu-3 Cave) [ 3 , 13 , 32 ]. Most of those dates cluster around 39 Ka CalBP, yet more recent dating endeavours place the beginning of the UP at 46.7/43.6 Ka calBP [ 5 ]. It appears that the regional EUP assemblages from both the northern and southern Caucasus have similar techno-typological features.…”

“…The southern Caucasus played overall a key role in human evolution, with the region of western Georgia (Imereti) being a major geographic corridor for human migrations during the Middle and Upper Paleolithic. It is also a prime location to study Neanderthal and modern human interactions during the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition [1][2][3][4][5]. The study of the local Early Upper Paleolithic (EUP) and Upper Paleolithic (UP) sequences is critical to the understanding of how human populations responded to the climatic shifts during the Last Glacial [6,7].…”

“…Moreover, recent excavations with fine chronological and stratigraphic resolution indicate a discontinuous transition model between the Middle Paleolithic and the Early UP ca. 39,000-34,000 years ago with evidence of a chronological rupture between these two cultural traditions [5,7,[13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. This suggests that the Greater Caucasus mountain range, which seems to have constituted a geographic-cum-cultural barrier for the migration of Neanderthals to the north, was crossed by AMH [14,20].…”

Middle Pleistocene environments, landscapes and tephrostratigraphy of the Armenian Highlands: evidence from Bird Farm 1, Hrazdan Valley

“…Furthermore, sites in the region document Neanderthal and Homo sapiens occupations in a range of topographic and environmental settings before, during and after the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition (e.g. Adler et al, 2006Adler et al, , 2008Bar-Yosef et al, 2006;Golovanova et al, 2010;Pinhasi et al, 2011aPinhasi et al, , 2012Tushabramishvili et al, 2012;Gasparyan et al, 2014;Moncel et al, 2015;Frahm et al, 2016;Pleurdeau et al, 2016;Kandel et al, 2017;Glauberman et al, 2020a;Cullen et al, 2021;. The archaeological record of the region is particularly significant given the southern Caucasus' contrasting topography, bedrock geology, climate and, hence, vegetationfactors that must have provided both constraints and opportunities for the exploitation of the area by past hominin populations.…”

Integrating onshore and offshore paleoseismic evidence to reveal past large earthquakes on the weakly coupled central Hikurangi margin, New Zealand

“…Through the 21 st century, significant technological advances have allowed tephrochronologists to gain increased analytical precision in the development of eruption chronologies (e.g., Cullen et al, 2021;Friedrich et al, 2020;Ito et al, 2017). However, in many places, little attention has been given to the range of geologic uncertainties contained within the eruption ages that continue to be widely applied within other disciplines.…”