Abstract
During the Middle Paleolithic in Eurasia, the production of deliberate, abstract engraving on bone or stone materials is a rare phenomenon. It is now widely accepted that both anatomically modern humans and hominins that predate them have produced deliberate engravings associated with symbolic behavior. Within the Levantine Middle Paleolithic context, only five examples of intentional engravings are known thus far. In this paper, we present an aurochs bone fragment that bears six deep, sub-parallel incisions, recovered at the open-air Middle Paleolithic site of Nesher Ramla in Israel. The item, found in an anthropogenic accumulation of artifacts in Unit III of the site, was dated to early Marine Isotope Stage 5 (ca. 120 ka). Unit III is a stratigraphically well-defined layer that is characterized by intense on-site knapping activities with predominance of the centripetal Levallois reduction method and by intense exploitation of aurochs and tortoises. This paper presents a multidisciplinary study of the bone and the incisions, including zooarchaeological, macro- and microscopic analyses, Scanning Electron Microscope analysis and experimental replications. The macroscopic and microscopic attributes of the incisions, and the comparisons with experimental material exclude a taphonomic or utilitarian origin of the incisions. The study indicates that the engravings were most likely produced by a right-handed individual in a single working session. The morphology and characteristics of the incisions, especially the presence of longitudinal polish and striations in one of the incisions, suggest that they were made by a flint artifact, likely retouched. The engraved bone from Unit III at Nesher Ramla is one of the oldest deliberate abstract manifestations produced by Middle Paleolithic and Middle Stone Age hominins and the oldest known so far in the Levant. As such, it has major implications for our understanding of the emergence and early stages of the development of human symbolic behavior.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 80-93 |
| Journal | Quaternary International |
| Volume | 624 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 30 Jun 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The Nesher Ramla project is funded by a grant from the Israel Science Foundation (Grant number 1936/18) to Y.Z. The zooarchaeological study was funded by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant number 1258/17) to Reuven Yeshurun. We would like to thank Dr. Reuven Yeshurun for reading the first draft of the manuscript and providing useful comments and corrections. We thank Vitaly Gutkin, from the Nano Center (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) for conducting the SEM observations, and Francesco Valletta, from the Computational Archaeology Laboratory, The Institute of Archaeology (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) for scanning the incised bone. Finally, we thank the two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments that helped to improve the manuscript.
Funding Information:
The Nesher Ramla project is funded by a grant from the Israel Science Foundation (Grant number 1936/18) to Y.Z. The zooarchaeological study was funded by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant number 1258/17) to Reuven Yeshurun. We would like to thank Dr. Reuven Yeshurun for reading the first draft of the manuscript and providing useful comments and corrections. We thank Vitaly Gutkin, from the Nano Center (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) for conducting the SEM observations, and Francesco Valletta, from the Computational Archaeology Laboratory, The Institute of Archaeology (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) for scanning the incised bone. Finally, we thank the two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments that helped to improve the manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA
Keywords
- Aurochs bone
- Engraved object
- Middle paleolithic
- Non-utilitarian object
- Symbolic mediated behavior
