Autor según el artículo: Assaf E; Caricola I; Gopher A; Rosell J; Blasco R; Bar O; Zilberman E; Lemorini C; Baena J; Barkai R; Cristiani E
Departamento: Història i Història de l'Art
Autor/es de la URV: Rosell Ardévol, Jordi
Palabras clave: Amudian layers Bed-ii Blind tests Central hearth Esr/u-series Micro-residues Middle pleistocene Olduvai gorge Tools Use-wear
Resumen: © 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.
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Acceso a la licencia de uso: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/
Direcció de correo del autor: jordi.rosell@urv.cat
Identificador del autor: 0000-0002-6758-6291
Fecha de alta del registro: 2024-02-03
Versión del articulo depositado: info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Referencia al articulo segun fuente origial: Plos One. 15 (4): e0230972-
Referencia de l'ítem segons les normes APA: Assaf E; Caricola I; Gopher A; Rosell J; Blasco R; Bar O; Zilberman E; Lemorini C; Baena J; Barkai R; Cristiani E (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
URL Documento de licencia: https://repositori.urv.cat/ca/proteccio-de-dades/
Entidad: Universitat Rovira i Virgili
Año de publicación de la revista: 2020
Tipo de publicación: Journal Publications
Repositori URV