Shaped stone balls were used for bone marrow extraction at Lower Paleolithic Qesem Cave, Israel

Author, as appears in the article.: Assaf, Ella; Caricola, Isabella; Gopher, Avi; Rosell, Jordi; Blasco, Ruth; Bar, Oded; Zilberman, Ezra; Lemorini, Cristina; Baena, Javier; Barkai, Ran; Cristiani, Emanuela

Department: Història i Història de l'Art

URV's Author/s: Rosell Ardévol, Jordi

Keywords: Use-wear; Tools; Olduvai gorge; Middle pleistocene; Micro-residues; Israel; Humans; History, ancient; Fossils; Esr/u-series; Dietary fats; Diet, paleolithic; Central hearth; Caves; Bone marrow; Bone and bones; Blind tests; Bed-ii; Archaeology; Animals; Amudian layers

Abstract: © 2020 Assaf et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The presence of shaped stone balls at early Paleolithic sites has attracted scholarly attention since the pioneering work of the Leakeys in Olduvai, Tanzania. Despite the persistent presence of these items in the archaeological record over a period of two million years, their function is still debated. We present new results from Middle Pleistocene Qesem Cave on the use of these implements as percussion tools. Use-wear and abundant bone and fat residues found on ten shaped stone balls indicate crushing of fresh bones by thrusting percussion and provide direct evidence for the use of these items to access bone marrow of animal prey at this site. Two experiments conducted to investigate and verify functional aspects proved Qesem Cave shaped stone balls are efficient for bone processing and provide a comfortable grip and useful active areas for repeated use. Notably, the patina observed on the analyzed items precedes their use at the cave, indicating that they were collected by Qesem inhabitants, most probably from older Lower Paleolithic Acheulian sites. Thus, our results refer only to the final phases of the life of the items, and we cannot attest to their original function. As bone marrow played a central role in human nutrition in the Lower Paleolithic, and our experimental results show that the morphology and characteristics of shaped stone ball replicas are well-suited for the extraction of bone marrow, we suggest that these features might have been the reason for their collection and use at Qesem Cave. These results shed light on the function of shaped stone balls and are consistent with the significance of animal fat in the caloric intake of Middle Pleistocene humans as shown by the archeozoological evidence at Qesem Cave and possibly beyond.

Thematic Areas: Zootecnia / recursos pesqueiros; Sociology; Sociología; Serviço social; Saúde coletiva; Química; Psychology; Psicología; Planejamento urbano e regional / demografia; Odontología; Nutrição; Multidisciplinary sciences; Multidisciplinary; Medicine (miscellaneous); Medicina veterinaria; Medicina iii; Medicina ii; Medicina i; Materiais; Matemática / probabilidade e estatística; Linguística e literatura; Letras / linguística; Interdisciplinary research in the social sciences; Interdisciplinar; Human geography and urban studies; History & philosophy of science; Historia; Geografía; Geociências; General medicine; General biochemistry,genetics and molecular biology; General agricultural and biological sciences; Farmacia; Environmental studies; Ensino; Engenharias iv; Engenharias iii; Engenharias ii; Engenharias i; Enfermagem; Educação física; Educação; Economia; Direito; Demography; Comunicação e informação; Ciências sociais aplicadas i; Ciências biológicas iii; Ciências biológicas ii; Ciências biológicas i; Ciências ambientais; Ciências agrárias i; Ciência política e relações internacionais; Ciência de alimentos; Ciência da computação; Biotecnología; Biology; Biodiversidade; Biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology (miscellaneous); Astronomia / física; Arquitetura, urbanismo e design; Archaeology; Antropologia / arqueologia; Anthropology; Agricultural and biological sciences (miscellaneous); Administração, ciências contábeis e turismo; Administração pública e de empresas, ciências contábeis e turismo

licence for use: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/

Author's mail: jordi.rosell@urv.cat

Record's date: 2025-01-28

Paper version: info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Link to the original source: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0230972

Licence document URL: https://repositori.urv.cat/ca/proteccio-de-dades/

Paper original source: Plos One. 15 (4): e0230972-

APA: Assaf, Ella; Caricola, Isabella; Gopher, Avi; Rosell, Jordi; Blasco, Ruth; Bar, Oded; Zilberman, Ezra; Lemorini, Cristina; Baena, Javier; Barkai, Ran; (2020). Shaped stone balls were used for bone marrow extraction at Lower Paleolithic Qesem Cave, Israel. Plos One, 15(4), e0230972-. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0230972

Article's DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0230972

Entity: Universitat Rovira i Virgili

Journal publication year: 2020

Publication Type: Journal Publications