Stone Tool Discovery in Armenia Gives Insight into Human Innovation

Sci News
Sept 26 2014

Stone Tool Discovery in Armenia Gives Insight into Human Innovation
325,000 Years Ago
Sep 27, 2014 by Sci-News.com

An analysis of about 3,000 stone tools from a 325,000-year-old
archaeological site near the village of Nor Geghi in the Kotayk
Province of Armenia challenges the theory held by many scientists that
the so-called Levallois stone tool-making technique was invented in
Africa and then spread across the world as the human population
expanded.

This image shows stone tools found at the site of Nor Geghi, Armenia:
top – biface tool; bottom – a Levallois core. Image credit: (c) Dan
Adler.

Named after flint tools discovered in the 19th century in the
Levallois-Perret suburb of Paris in France, Levallois technique is a
distinctive style of flint knapping developed by early humans during
the Paleolithic.

This technique involves the multistage shaping of a mass of stone in
preparation to detach a flake of predetermined size and shape from a
single preferred surface.

Many anthropologists argue that Levallois technique was invented in
Africa more than 300,000 years ago and spread to Eurasia with
expanding human populations, replacing a more basic type of technology
– biface technique – in which a raw block of stone is shaped through
the serial removal of interrelated flakes until the remaining volume
takes on a desired form, such as a hand axe.

But now a team of archaeologists and anthropologists from the United
States and Europe led by Dr Daniel Adler of the University of
Connecticut has discovered at the Armenian archaeological site of Nor
Geghi that Levallois tools already existed there between 325,000 and
335,000 years ago, suggesting that local populations developed them
out of biface technique, which was also found at the site.

The co-existence of the two techniques provides the first clear
evidence that local populations developed Levallois technique out of
existing biface technique.

“The discovery of thousands of stone artifacts preserved at this
unique site provides a major new insight into how Stone Age tools
developed during a period of profound human behavioral and biological
change”, said Dr Simon Blockley of Royal Holloway, University of
London, who is a co-author of the paper describing the discovery in
the journal Science.

“The people who lived there 325,000 years ago were much more
innovative than previously thought, using a combination of two
different technologies to make tools that were extremely important for
the mobile hunter-gatherers of the time.”

Moreover, the chemical analysis of several hundred obsidian tools from
Nor Geghi shows that early humans at the site utilized obsidian
outcrops from as far away as 120 km, suggesting they must have been
capable of exploiting large, environmentally diverse territories.

_____

D. S. Adler et al. 2014. Early Levallois technology and the Lower to
Middle Paleolithic transition in the Southern Caucasus. Science, vol.
345, no. 6204, pp. 1609-1613; doi: 10.1126/science.1256484

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress