Homo erectus at Trinil on Java used shells for tool production and engraving

Joordens, Josephine C.A.; d’Errico, Francesco; Wesselingh, Frank P.; Munro, Stephen; Vos, John de; Wallinga, Jakob; Ankjærgaard, Christina; Reimann, Tony; Wijbrans, J. R.; Kuiper, Klaudia F.; Mücher, H. J.; Coqueugniot, Hélène; Prié, Vincent; Joosten, Ineke; Os, Bertil van; Schulp, Anne S.; Panuel, M.; Haas, Victoria van der; Lustenhouwer, W. J.; Reijmer, John J.G.; Roebroeks, Wil

doi:10.1038/nature13962

Cited by 329 publications

(180 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…The marking, dated to around 450 ka (75), is a unique case thus far, but it shows that such engravings were within the range of the capacities of the hominin metapopulation already in the middle part of the Middle Pleistocene.…”

Section: Neandertal Ways Of Lifementioning

confidence: 83%

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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: 83%

“…The known record thus cannot show when people, Neandertals or archaic humans, first collected shellfish. Given the high nutritional value and the ease with which shellfish can be collected, this very probably started long before 150,000 y ago (75).…”

Section: Neandertal Ways Of Lifementioning

confidence: 99%

Neandertals revised

Roebroeks

Soressi

2016

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

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“…As I was finishing this text, news services were covering the discovery of human tools plus human markings much older than any previously known, made by Homo erectus 500 000 years ago (Joordens et al, 2015). Even more à propos our field, the discovery was made on shells collected 120 years ago and resting unknown in a natural history museum.…”

Section: Romantic Serendipity or Planned Resiliencementioning

confidence: 99%

Tools for assessing needs and impacts

Michalski¹

2015

Studies in Conservation

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The results of the ICCROM Forum 2013 on Conservation Science working group on Tools for assessing needs and impacts is presented. It is used as a starting point for a fundamental study of tools in general, tangible and intangible. The phenomenon of scientists and their organizations becoming defined by their tools, and unable to change when the needs of those they serve change, was noted by Kaplan in 1964. Part of the mechanism is the human tendency to solve any disagreement between new facts (like client needs) and old beliefs (such as the importance of one's toolset) by twisting the facts rather than the beliefs. Collins' proposal of three kinds of tacit knowledge, with collective tacit knowledge as the most difficult to make explicit, can explain common problems of interpretation and communication of assessments, and guide strategies for reliable tools. Kaufmann's ideas on the structuring of needs assessment by levels, and the distinction between macro outputs and mega outcomes, is combined with Maslow's five basic human needs, as well as the three pillars of sustainability, to produce an overall map of where needs assessment tools operate, and where conservation science organizations fit into this structure.

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“…They also produced a variety of personal ornaments consisting of animal teeth, fossils, and marine shells, some of which were colored with ochre (22,23). Additionally, isolated occurrences of innovative cultural traits are recorded at much older sites in Europe and Asia (24), and well-established innovations (e.g., Middle Stone Age shell beads) disappear abruptly from the archaeological record and similar behaviors later reappear in different forms and sometimes on different media (14,25).…”

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confidence: 99%

Identifying early modern human ecological niche expansions and associated cultural dynamics in the South African Middle Stone Age

d’Errico

Banks

Warren

et al. 2017

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

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The archaeological record shows that typically human cultural traits emerged at different times, in different parts of the world, and among different hominin taxa. This pattern suggests that their emergence is the outcome of complex and nonlinear evolutionary trajectories, influenced by environmental, demographic, and social factors, that need to be understood and traced at regional scales. The application of predictive algorithms using archaeological and paleoenvironmental data allows one to estimate the ecological niches occupied by past human populations and identify niche changes through time, thus providing the possibility of investigating relationships between cultural innovations and possible niche shifts. By using such methods to examine two key southern Africa archaeological cultures, the Still Bay [76-71 thousand years before present (ka)] and the Howiesons Poort (HP; 66-59 ka), we identify a niche shift characterized by a significant expansion in the breadth of the HP ecological niche. This expansion is coincident with aridification occurring across Marine Isotope Stage 4 (ca. 72-60 ka) and especially pronounced at 60 ka. We argue that this niche shift was made possible by the development of a flexible technological system, reliant on composite tools and cultural transmission strategies based more on "product copying" rather than "process copying." These results counter the one niche/one human taxon equation. They indicate that what makes our cultures, and probably the cultures of other members of our lineage, unique is their flexibility and ability to produce innovations that allow a population to shift its ecological niche.Middle Stone Age | Still Bay | Howiesons Poort | ecological niche modeling | paleoclimate R esearch on animal behavior has made it clear that culture represents a second inheritance system that may have changed the dynamics of evolution on a broad scale (1-3). Understanding how this process has affected the evolution of our genus is a major challenge in paleoanthropology. In what ways, and through what phases of evolutionary history, has human culture extended beyond culture seen in other species? Are the cultural adaptations and associated cultural innovations that we observe in the archaeological record the direct consequence of our biological evolution, or are they the outcome of mechanisms largely independent of it? In our lineage, if cultural innovations were directly linked to classic Darwinian evolutionary processes, such as isolation, random mutation, selection, and speciation, one would expect a clear correspondence between the emergence of a new species and a related set of novel cultural behaviors. By shaping a new hominin species, natural selection would provide this species with a new cognitive setting resulting in the capacity for particular cultural innovations or behaviors. Such a mechanism would provide the possibility for cultural variability but would narrow its range of expression to the species' biologically dictated potential. Although some would still argue ...

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Homo erectus at Trinil on Java used shells for tool production and engraving

Cited by 329 publications

References 42 publications

Neandertals revised

Neandertals revised

Tools for assessing needs and impacts

Identifying early modern human ecological niche expansions and associated cultural dynamics in the South African Middle Stone Age

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