Middle Pleistocene Homo behavior and culture at 140,000 to 120,000 years ago and interactions with Homo sapiens
The thesis of this blog is that pre-Homo sapiens hominins existed within a collective mentality as a single creature and were fundamentally not war-like because the advantages of their divisions of labor were so predominant; similarly, for 100 million years after the initial formation of organisms in the Cambrian a half-billion years ago, early species, such as trilobites, were filter-feeders with no need for Malthusian competition. Now comes the discovery of a previously unknown archaic Homo population in the Levant, the “Nesher Ramla Homo” (130,000 years ago), who had completely learned the contemporaneous stone tool culture (“Levallois”) from Homo sapiens who were migrating up from Africa. This sounds like the different populations peacefully mingled, interbred, and picked up the stone tool culture in the process.
Science 25 Jun 2021: Vol. 372, Issue 6549, pp. 1429-1433, Yossi ZaidnerLaura Centi, Marion Prévost, Norbert Mercier, Christophe Falguères, Gilles Guérin
Abstract
Fossils of a Middle Pleistocene (MP) Homo within a well-defined archaeological context at the open-air site of Nesher Ramla, Israel, shed light on MP Homo culture and behavior. Radiometric ages, along with cultural and stratigraphic considerations, suggest that the fossils are 140,000 to 120,000 years old, chronologically overlapping with H. sapiens in western Asia. Lithic analysis reveals that MP Homo mastered stone-tool production technologies, previously known only among H. sapiens and Neanderthals. The Levallois knapping methods they used are indistinguishable from that of concurrent H. sapiens in western Asia. The most parsimonious explanation for such a close similarity is the cultural interactions between these two populations. These findings constitute evidence of contacts and interactions between H. sapiens and MP Homo.
