The Early Acheulian of north-western Europe

Moncel, Marie‐Hélène; Ashton, Nick; Lamotte, Agnès; Tuffreau, Alain; Cliquet, Dominique; Despriée, Jackie

doi:10.1016/j.jaa.2015.09.005

Cited by 116 publications

(91 citation statements)

References 178 publications

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“…This gives special importance to the study of the geological context of inferred early sites: rocks can fracture naturally and edges can be modified by natural processes in sediments such as cryoturbation, transport, and volcanic activities, and a wide variety of such processes has been documented to mimic hominin modification and to produce Bartefact-like^geofacts (Gillespie et al 2004;Lubinski et al 2014;Nash 1993;Peacock 1991;Raynal et al 1995;Warren 1914Warren , 1920Wiśniewski et al 2014) (see also below, BDiscussion^). Interestingly, the emergence of the Acheulean signal in southern (Villa 2001) as well as northwestern Europe from 600 to 700 ka (Moncel et al 2013(Moncel et al , 2015Pereira et al 2015) onward is in the same time range as the current estimate for the beginning of the Neandertal lineage (Meyer et al 2016).…”

Section: Introduction the Earliest Occupation Of Europesupporting

confidence: 71%

“…In general terms, in the whole of Europe, there still seems to be a threshold for longer-term hominin settlement at around 500-600 ka, with a marked increase in the number of sites (now not only during temperate climatic intervals but also during colder and drier phases) and the sizes of the assemblages. It is also from around 600-700 ka onward that we observe the first presence of Acheulean tools in Europe (Moncel et al 2015), about a million years later than their first appearance in eastern Africa (Lepre et al 2011). The first occupants of Europe seem to have done without handaxes, the earliest European assemblages only comprising stone flakes, rarely retouched, cores, and core-like tools, with a lack of standardised design and usually with limited modification only (Moyano et al 2011;Ollé et al 2015;Parfitt et al 2010).…”

Section: Introduction the Earliest Occupation Of Europementioning

confidence: 59%

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Uneven Data Quality and the Earliest Occupation of Europe—the Case of Untermassfeld (Germany)

Roebroeks

Gaudzinski‐Windheuser

Baales

et al. 2017

J Paleo Arch

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The database regarding the earliest occupation of Europe has increased significantly in quantity and quality of data points over the last two decades, mainly through the addition of new sites as a result of long-term systematic excavations and large-scale prospections of Early and early Middle Pleistocene exposures. The site distribution pattern suggests an ephemeral presence of hominins in the south of Europe from around 1 million years ago onward, with occasional short northward expansions along the western coastal areas when temperate conditions permitted. From around 600,000-700,000 years ago, Acheulean artefacts appear in Europe and somewhat later hominin presence seems to pick up, with more sites and now some also present in colder climatic settings. It is again only later, around 350,000 years ago, that the first sites show up in more continental, central parts of Europe, east of the Rhine. A series of recent papers on the Early Pleistocene palaeontological site of Untermassfeld (Thuringia, Germany) makes claims that are of great interest for studies of earliest Europe and are at odds with the described pattern: the papers suggest that Untermassfeld has yielded stone tools and humanly modified faunal remains, evidence for a 1 million years old hominin presence in European continental mid-latitudes, and additional evidence that hominins were well-established in Europe already around that time period. Here, we evaluate these claims and demonstrate that these studies are severely flawed in terms of data on provenance of the materials studied and in the interpretation of faunal remains and lithics as testifying to a hominin presence at the site. In actual fact, any reference to the Untermassfeld site as an archaeological one is unwarranted. Furthermore, it is not the only European Early Pleistocene site where inferred evidence for hominin presence is problematic. The strength of the spatiotemporal patterns of hominin presence and absence depends on the quality of the data points we work with, and database maintenance, including critical evaluation of new sites, is crucial to advance our knowledge of the expansions and contractions of hominin ranges during the Pleistocene.J Paleo Arch (2018) 1:5-31 https://doi.org/10.1007/s41982-017-0003-

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Section: Introduction the Earliest Occupation Of Europesupporting

confidence: 71%

Section: Introduction the Earliest Occupation Of Europementioning

confidence: 59%

Uneven Data Quality and the Earliest Occupation of Europe—the Case of Untermassfeld (Germany)

Roebroeks

Gaudzinski‐Windheuser

Baales

et al. 2017

J Paleo Arch

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“…As temperatures improve with the return of interglacial conditions, hominins reoccupied Britain bringing new practices with them (Ashton and Lewis, 2002;Ashton et al, 2011;Bridgland and White, 2015;White, 2000;White and Schreve, 2000). Within the last two decades the British Middle Pleistocene interglacial record has been refined considerably to the point where we can now isolate stadials and inter-stadials within specific glacial/interglacial climatic histories (Ashton et al, 2008;Bates et al, 2014;Moncel et al, 2015). This creates the potential for identifying changes in material culture behaviour across the full span of an interglacial.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

From side to side: Symmetry in handaxes in the British Lower and Middle Palaeolithic

McNabb

Cole

Hoggard

2018

Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports

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The Acheulean is defined by its iconic tool type, the handaxe, and a suite of other large cutting tools (LCTs). These tools retain information on technical and procedural practices concerned with the manufacture of these butchery tools and carcass processing knives. The Acheulean straddles the period in which more ancient hominin species (H. erectus and H. heidelbergensis) give way to archaic H. sapiens (sensu lato) amongst whom the ancestor of modern humans may be found. The roots of modern behaviour may be present in these handaxe making hominin species, and the handaxes themselves, through proxy data such as bilateral symmetry, may chart hominin cognitive evolution as researchers such as T. Wynn and F. Coolidge (2016), amongst others, have argued. But the search for the earliest consistent application of symmetry, and its persistence thereafter has been hampered by the lack of large datasets, spanning the temporal extent of the Acheulean, and analysed through a single consistent methodology.Our paper has two aims. The first, and in the absence of a large comparative data set of earlier Acheulean handaxes, is to assess the degree to which symmetry is consistently applied to the making of handaxes in the later Acheulean (=<0.5 mya), a time when bilateral planform symmetry should already be an integral component in handaxe making. The dataset we select is the British Acheulean from MIS 13 -MIS 3/4. To the best of our knowledge this is the first time handaxe symmetry has been assessed on a large body of British Acheulean handaxes. Our second aim is to present a relatively simple and low tech methodology for the analysis of handaxes

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“…Chronologically, la Noira joins recent discoveries in Spain, France, and England, which enrich our vision of the first Acheulian colonization in the southern and northern parts of Europe and attest to the onset of biface technology before 500 ka: Notarchirico (600 ka) in Italy and Arago (older than 550 ka, levels P and Q) in the South of France [25,26,28,37–39]. Moreover, the recent discovery of la Boella [40] and Estrecho del Quípar [41] in Spain suggests pushing the starting point of European bifacial technology close to the 1 Ma mark (but see [42] for a critique of the chronology).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

High handaxe symmetry at the beginning of the European Acheulian: The data from la Noira (France) in context

et al. 2017

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In the last few decades, new discoveries have pushed the beginning of the biface-rich European Acheulian from 500 thousand years (ka) ago back to at least 700 ka, and possibly to 1 million years (Ma) ago. It remains, however, unclear to date if handaxes arrived in Europe as a fully developed technology or if they evolved locally from core-and-flake industries. This issue is also linked with another long-standing debate on the existence and behavioral, cognitive, and social meaning of a possibly chronological trend for increased handaxe symmetry throughout the Lower Paleolithic. The newly discovered sites can provide a link between the much older Acheulian in Africa and the Levant and the well-known assemblages from the later European Acheulian, enabling a rigorous testing of these hypotheses using modern morphometric methods. Here we use the Continuous Symmetry Measure (CSM) method to quantify handaxe symmetry at la Noira, a newly excavated site in central France, which features two archaeological levels, respectively ca. 700 ka and 500 ka old. In order to provide a context for the new data, we use a large aggregate from the well-known 500 ka old site of Boxgrove, England. We show that handaxes from the oldest layer at la Noira, although on average less symmetric than both those from the younger layers at the same site and than those from Boxgrove, are nevertheless much more symmetric than other early Acheulian specimens evaluated using the CSM method. We also correlate trends in symmetry to degree of reduction, demonstrating that raw material availability and discard patterns may affect observed symmetry values. We conclude that it is likely that, by the time the Acheulian arrived in Europe, its makers were, from a cognitive and motor-control point of view, already capable of producing the symmetric variant of this technology.

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The Early Acheulian of north-western Europe

Cited by 116 publications

References 178 publications

Uneven Data Quality and the Earliest Occupation of Europe—the Case of Untermassfeld (Germany)

Uneven Data Quality and the Earliest Occupation of Europe—the Case of Untermassfeld (Germany)

From side to side: Symmetry in handaxes in the British Lower and Middle Palaeolithic

High handaxe symmetry at the beginning of the European Acheulian: The data from la Noira (France) in context

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