Amy Clark

Some background about me:

• I went to college at New York University in New York City

• There, I began to study archaeology which I had been interested in since learning about the Maya in elementary school

• Now I am in graduate school at the University of Arizona.

• I study the Middle and Upper Paleolithic, specifically about 30,000-200,000 years ago- during the Ice Age

• This is the time period when we first see modern humans in Europe and the Near East and they cohabitated with Neanderthals

• Neanderthals are the most recent archaic human- the only one who lived at the same time as modern humans and with whom we may have interacted.

BASIC NEEDS:

• Subsistence (food and water)

• Shelter (clothing and housing)

• Reproduction of the of the culture (marriage, kinship, education)

• Need for explanation (religion, philosophy, science)

• Need to communicate (language, art, music)

SUBSISTENCE (food and water):

• Both Neanderthals and early modern humans living during the Paleolithic (ice age) were hunter-gatherers.

• What are hunter-gatherers?

• People who find food and water by walking across the landscape looking for sources of food. They hunt animals and they collect wild fruits, vegetables and grains.

• Archaeologists can understand a lot about the subsistence of Neanderthals and early modern humans because the majority of what we find is the remains of these activities.

Hunter-gatherers are…

Typical Paleolithic archaeological excavations:

The most common artifacts found in Paleolithic sites are:

1.Stone tools

2. Animal bones

What can we learn from Stone Tools?

• What activities they are doing at the site: using tools for scraping hides, for cutting wood and other materials or for killing game?

• Where they are traveling around on the landscape: We can look at the material that the tools are made out of, and trace it to it’s source.

• How complex is their thought pattern: Are they making very simple tools or are they making ones the require a lot of planning and forethought?

What can we learn from animal bones left at the site?

• What they ate: did they prefer reindeer, mammoth, or goat?

• How they butchered the animal: did they use every last bit of the animals or did they only eat the meatiest parts?

• How they transported the animal: based on the animal parts left at the site, did they bring only the limbs back to the site or did they transport the entire animal?

Evidence for shelter in the Paleolithic:

• Caves and rock shelters

• Constructed dwellings

What is this shelter made out of?

Evidence for reproduction of the culture (though kinship, marriage, education) in the Paleolithic:

• This is difficult to know because we have to acquire it through indirect evidence.

• What is indirect evidence?

• It means that we cannot make conclusions about their culture based on primary evidence- we only find stone tools and animal bones at the archaeological sites and these do not give us information about how families were structured, how people may have mated or formed marriages, and how their educational system might have worked.

• Instead, we must turn to looking at modern day hunter-gatherers for information, or what archaeological artifacts might tell us indirectly.

• For example, there are certain distinct ways of making stone tools that are found in certain areas for many years. These techniques are so unique that they would have been needed to have been taught to the next generation. This is evidence for some level of education that is taking place.

Levallois Technique

• Based on modern hunter-gatherer groups, we can also conclude that Paleolithic groups were also most likely egalitarian.

• What does egalitarian mean?

• Unlike our current society where some people are more wealthy or have more political and social status then others, in egalitarian all people are equal.

• This is common in hunter-gatherer societies where people live in small groups and where all food and wealth is distributed evenly among its members.

Need for explanation (religion, philosophy, science):

• This is even more difficult to understand for the Paleolithic

• There are some art forms which some archaeologists argue are religious icons.

“Venus Figurines”

• We can also make some conclusions about religious belief when we find burials.

• What do human burials indicate?

• Belief in the afterlife? Love and affection for the deceased? Or simply a way of disposing the body so that it doesn’t attract animals or cause disease?

• For Neanderthals, it isn’t clear what human burial indicates.

• They did bury their dead, however, which is remarkable but did they do it because of religious belief or simply practicality?

• If possessions were found in the grave, this would indicate a belief in the afterlife, but this hasn’t been proven for Neanderthals.

• For modern humans, some of the burials are very elaborate and have many grave goods which almost certainly means that they had some sort of belief in life after death.

Need to communicate (language, art, music):

• For Neanderthals, all of these things are debated.

• There have been some beads associated with Neanderthal stone tools which are both a form of art and communication but some argue that these beads weren’t actually made by archaeologists.

• We don’t know whether Neanderthals could talk. Some think that it wasn’t physically possible because of the morphology of their throat but it’s impossible to know for sure.

• For early modern humans, we have LOTS of evidence for art, music, and, of course, we assume that they could communicate using language.

• MUSIC:

• ART:

Grotte de Font-de Gaume

Grotte de Lascaux

Grotte de Pech Merle