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Neanderthals in the Levant

Behavioural Organization and the Beginnings of Human Modernity

Professor Donald O. Henry (University of Tulsa, USA)

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English
Bloomsbury Academic
23 February 2023
This significant contribution to scholarship on the Middle Paleolithic, now reissued with a new preface, traces the controversy that revolves around the bio-cultural relationships of Archaic (Neanderthal) and Modern humans at global and regional, Levantine scales. The focus of the book is on understanding the degree to which the behavioral organization of Archaic groups differed from Moderns. To this end, a case study is presented for a 44-70,000 year old, Middle Paleolithic occupation of a Jordanian rockshelter.

The research, centering on the spatial analysis of artifacts, hearths and related data, reveals how the Archaic occupants of the shelter structured their activities and placed certain conceptual labels on different parts of the site. The structure of Tor Faraj is compared to site structures defined for modern foragers, in both ethnographic and archaeological contexts, to measure any differences in behavioral organization.

The comparisons show very similar structures for Tor Faraj and its modern cohorts, and the implications of this finding challenge prevailing views that Archaic groups had inferior cognition and less complex behavioral-social organization than modern foragers. The study also calls into question the contention that such behaviors only emerged after the appearance of the Upper Paleolithic, dated some 10-20,000 years later than the occupation of Tor Faraj.

Edited by:  
Imprint:   Bloomsbury Academic
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Edition:   NIPPOD
Dimensions:   Height: 297mm,  Width: 210mm, 
ISBN:   9781350343993
ISBN 10:   1350343994
Series:   New Approaches to Anthropological Archaeology
Pages:   344
Publication Date:  
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Donald O. Henry is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Tulsa, USA. He is the author of several books and numerous articles covering his over 25 years of archaeological research on prehistoric human ecology in the Near East.

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