Palaeolithic Pioneers: Behaviour, abilities, and activity of early Homo in European landscapes around the western Mediterranean basin ~1.3-0.05 Ma. PDF Download

Author: Michael J. Walker
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1784916218
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Archaic humans were present for over a million years in western Mediterranean Europe where they left very many traces of their early stone-age activities and behaviour, and sometimes even human skeletal remains. This book evaluates archaeological findings about their life-ways at many important sites in Italy, southern France, and Spain.

Author: Ian Gilligan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108611389
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
Clothing was crucial in human evolution, and having to cope with climate change was as true in prehistory as it is today. In Climate, Clothing, and Agriculture in Prehistory, Ian Gilligan offers the first complete account of the development of clothing as a response to cold exposure during the ice ages. He explores how and when clothes were invented, noting that the thermal motive alone is tenable in view of the naked condition of humans. His account shows that there is considerably more archaeological evidence for palaeolithic clothes than is generally appreciated. Moreover, Gilligan posits, clothing played a leading role in major technological innovations. He demonstrates that fibre production and the advent of woven fabrics, developed in response to global warming, were pivotal to the origins of agriculture. Drawing together evidence from many disciplines, Climate Clothing, and Agriculture in Prehistory is written in a clear and engaging style, and is illustrated with nearly 100 images.

Author: Vicki Cummings
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191025275
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1361

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Book Description
For more than a century, the study of hunting and gathering societies has been central to the development of both archaeology and anthropology as academic disciplines, and has also generated widespread public interest and debate. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers provides a comprehensive review of hunter-gatherer studies to date, including critical engagements with older debates, new theoretical perspectives, and renewed obligations for greater engagement between researchers and indigenous communities. Chapters provide in-depth archaeological, historical, and anthropological case-studies, and examine far-reaching questions about human social relations, attitudes to technology, ecology, and management of resources and the environment, as well as issues of diet, health, and gender relations - all central topics in hunter-gatherer research, but also themes that have great relevance for modern global society and its future challenges. The Handbook also provides a strategic vision for how the integration of new methods, approaches, and study regions can ensure that future research into the archaeology and anthropology of hunter-gatherers will continue to deliver penetrating insights into the factors that underlie all human diversity.

Author: Kathy Diane Schick
Publisher: Stone Age Institute Press
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
The earliest traces of proto-human technology emerged over 2.5 million years ago on the African continent. Called the Oldowan after the famous site of Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, these technologies herald a major evolutionary shift in the human lineage. The Oldowan: Case Studies into the Earliest Stone Age provides a critical look at early archaeological sites and their evidence. This volume also shows how a range of probing, multidisciplinary, experimental investigations - including experimental tool-making, comparative studies of ape technologies, biomechanical analysis, and PET studies of brain activity - help us evaluate this tantalizing prehistoric evidence and appreciate its relevance to human evolution.

Author: Antonio Sagona
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107016592
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 563

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Book Description
This conspectus brings together in an accessible and systematic manner a dizzy array of archaeological cultures situated between several worlds.

Author: UNESCO
Publisher: UNESCO Publishing
ISBN: 9231028138
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1847

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Book Description
Volume IV deals with the 'Middle Ages'. It starts with the expansion of Islam and closes with the discovery of the New World. Various events during this period led to a significant expansion in communications: the rapid spread of Islam and of Gengis Khan's Mongol Empire, as well as the Crusades and the development of trans-Saharan and maritime routes around Africa to the Indian Ocean, leading to multiplied exchanges between the peoples and cultures of Africa, Asia and Europe.

Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309148383
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
The hominin fossil record documents a history of critical evolutionary events that have ultimately shaped and defined what it means to be human, including the origins of bipedalism; the emergence of our genus Homo; the first use of stone tools; increases in brain size; and the emergence of Homo sapiens, tools, and culture. The Earth's geological record suggests that some evolutionary events were coincident with substantial changes in African and Eurasian climate, raising the possibility that critical junctures in human evolution and behavioral development may have been affected by the environmental characteristics of the areas where hominins evolved. Understanding Climate's Change on Human Evolution explores the opportunities of using scientific research to improve our understanding of how climate may have helped shape our species. Improved climate records for specific regions will be required before it is possible to evaluate how critical resources for hominins, especially water and vegetation, would have been distributed on the landscape during key intervals of hominin history. Existing records contain substantial temporal gaps. The book's initiatives are presented in two major research themes: first, determining the impacts of climate change and climate variability on human evolution and dispersal; and second, integrating climate modeling, environmental records, and biotic responses. Understanding Climate's Change on Human Evolution suggests a new scientific program for international climate and human evolution studies that involve an exploration initiative to locate new fossil sites and to broaden the geographic and temporal sampling of the fossil and archeological record; a comprehensive and integrative scientific drilling program in lakes, lake bed outcrops, and ocean basins surrounding the regions where hominins evolved and a major investment in climate modeling experiments for key time intervals and regions that are critical to understanding human evolution.

Author: I. Peter Martini
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 904819413X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 475

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Book Description
This book contains case histories intended to show how societies and landscapes interact. The range of interest stretches from the small groups of the earliest Neolithic, through Bronze and Iron Age civilizations, to modern nation states. The coexistence is, of its very nature reciprocal, resulting in changes in both society and landscape. In some instances the adaptations may be judged successful in terms of human needs, but failure is common and even the successful cases are ephemeral when judged in the light of history. Comparisons and contrasts between the various cases can be made at various scales from global through inter-regional, to regional and smaller scales. At the global scale, all societies deal with major problems of climate change, sea-level rise, and with ubiquitous problems such as soil erosion and landscape degradation. Inter-regional differences bring out significant detail with one region suffering from drought when another suffers from widespread flooding. For example, desertification in North Africa and the Near East contrasts with the temperate countries of southern Europe where the landscape-effects of deforestation are more obvious. And China and Japan offer an interesting comparison from the standpoint of geological hazards to society - large, unpredictable and massively erosive rivers in the former case, volcanoes and accompanying earthquakes in the latter. Within the North African region localized climatic changes led to abandonment of some desertified areas with successful adjustments in others, with the ultimate evolution into the formative civilization of Egypt, the "Gift of the Nile". At a smaller scale it is instructive to compare the city-states of the Medieval and early Renaissance times that developed in the watershed of a single river, the Arno in Tuscany, and how Pisa, Siena and Florence developed and reached their golden periods at different times depending on their location with regard to proximity to the sea, to the main trunk of the river, or in the adjacent hills. Also noteworthy is the role of technology in opening up opportunities for a society. Consider the Netherlands and how its history has been formed by the technical problem of a populous society dealing with too much water, as an inexorably rising sea threatens their landscape; or the case of communities in Colorado trying to deal with too little water for farmers and domestic users, by bringing their supply over a mountain chain. These and others cases included in the book, provide evidence of the successes, near misses and outright failures that mark our ongoing relationship with landscape throughout the history of Homo sapiens. The hope is that compilations such as this will lead to a better understanding of the issue and provide us with knowledge valuable in planning a sustainable modus vivendi between humanity and landscape for as long as possible. Audience: The book will interest geomorphologists, geologists, geographers, archaeologists, anthropologists, ecologists, environmentalists, historians and others in the academic world. Practically, planners and managers interested in landscape/environmental conditions will find interest in these pages, and more generally the increasingly large body of opinion in the general public, with concerns about Planet Earth, will find much to inform their opinions. Extra material: The color plate section is available at http://extras.springer.com

Author: Vincent L. Gaffney
Publisher: Council for British Archaeology
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
This excellent book, which deserves a wide readership, reports on the work of the North Sea Palaeolandscapes Project, which has been researching the fascinating lost landscape of Doggerland which until the end of the last Ice Age connected Britain to the continent in the North Sea area. It aims to make the findings available to a general readership, and show just how impressive they have been, with nearly 23,000km2 mapped. The techniques used to reconstruct the landscape are explained, and conclusions and speculation about the climate and vegetation of the area in the Mesolithic offered. It also tells the story of the rediscovery of Doggerland, and the Mesolithic landscape more generally, from the pioneering work of Clement Reid in the nineteenth century, to the research of Grahame Clark and Bryony Coles in the twentieth. It's also worth pointing out just how well produced and illustrated the book is, and one can only hope that it can spark public interest in a comparatively little known phase of our prehistory.

Author: Assaf Yasur-Landau
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108668240
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 941

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Book Description
The volume offers a comprehensive introduction to the archaeology of the southern Levant (modern day Israel, Palestine and Jordan) from the Paleolithic period to the Islamic era, presenting the past with chronological changes from hunter-gatherers to empires. Written by an international team of scholars in the fields of archaeology, epigraphy, and bioanthropology, the volume presents central debates around a range of archaeological issues, including gender, ritual, the creation of alphabets and early writing, biblical periods, archaeometallurgy, looting, and maritime trade. Collectively, the essays also engage diverse theoretical approaches to demonstrate the multi-vocal nature of studying the past. Significantly, The Social Archaeology of the Levant updates and contextualizes major shifts in archaeological interpretation.