Excavations at Schöningen and paradigm shifts in human evolution

Conard, Nicholas J.; Serangeli, Jordi; Böhner, Utz; Starkovich, Britt M.; Miller, Christopher E.; Urban, Brigitte; Kolfschoten, Thijs van

doi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2015.10.003

Cited by 121 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 61 publications

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“…Hunting clearly was the main method of meat procurement by Neandertals (52,53), from the very beginning of the lineage onward, as illustrated by the ∼300,000-y-old carefully crafted (54) wooden spears and the associated remains of large ungulate prey animals at Sch} oningen (Germany) (55)(56)(57). Stone-tipped spears seem to have been part of their hunting equipment too (58-61).…”

Section: Neandertal Ways Of Lifementioning

confidence: 99%

Neandertals revised

Roebroeks

Soressi

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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The last decade has seen a significant growth of our knowledge of the Neandertals, a population of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers who lived in (western) Eurasia between ∼400,000 and 40,000 y ago. Starting from a source population deep in the Middle Pleistocene, the hundreds of thousands of years of relative separation between African and Eurasian groups led to the emergence of different phenotypes in Late Pleistocene Europe and Africa. Both recently obtained genetic evidence and archeological data show that the biological and cultural gaps between these populations were probably smaller than previously thought. These data, reviewed here, falsify inferences to the effect that, compared with their near-modern contemporaries in Africa, Neandertals were outliers in terms of behavioral complexity. It is only around 40,000 y ago, tens of thousands of years after anatomically modern humans first left Africa and thousands of years after documented interbreeding between modern humans, Neandertals and Denisovans, that we see major changes in the archeological record, from western Eurasia to Southeast Asia, e.g., the emergence of representational imagery and the colonization of arctic areas and of greater Australia (Sahul).

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Section: Neandertal Ways Of Lifementioning

confidence: 99%

Neandertals revised

Roebroeks

Soressi

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…Good evidence also exists that Lower Palaeolithic hominins hunted horses cooperatively (Stiner et al, 2009) as exemplified by the scapula of a horse punctured by a wooden spear found at Boxgrove GTP17 (Roberts & Parfitt 1999) and the horses found in association with the famous Schöningen spears (Conard et al 2015). Floodplains were an easy place to kill horses while they were drinking.…”

Section: Eel Beaver and Horse Ecologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Eels, Beavers, and Horses: Human Niche Construction in the European Late Upper Palaeolithic

Brown¹,

Basell²,

Farbstein

2017

Proc. Prehist. Soc.

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“…In the database, we included artifacts most often considered to be symbolic, such as engraved objects, ornamentation, artistic representations, “exotic” artifacts, and the use of ochre. We also included the modification of objects not traditionally considered “symbolic”, such as the creation of bone tools and hafting, since multiple scholars have argued that these items signified complex cognition. We acknowledge that not all scholars accept these as indicators of such cognitive capacities, but present this database as a source of the different types of data related to this debate, any of which can be easily removed from an analysis.…”

Section: The Databasementioning

confidence: 99%