Explore the vast range of titles available.

Competition for resources is a key question in the study of our early human evolution. From the first hominin groups, carnivores have played a fundamental role in the ecosystem. From this perspective, understanding the trophic pressure between hominins and carnivores can provide valuable insights into the context in which humans survived, interacted with their surroundings, and consequently evolved. While numerous techniques already exist for the detection of carnivore activity in archaeological and palaeontological sites, many of these techniques present important limitations. The present study builds on a number of advanced data science techniques to confront these issues, defining methods for the identification of the precise agents involved in carcass consumption and manipulation. For the purpose of this study, a large sample of 620 carnivore tooth pits is presented, including samples from bears, hyenas, jaguars, leopards, lions, wolves, foxes and African wild dogs. Using 3D modelling, geometric morphometrics, robust data modelling, and artificial intelligence algorithms, the present study obtains between 88 and 98% accuracy, with balanced overall evaluation metrics across all datasets. From this perspective, and when combined with other sources of taphonomic evidence, these results show that advanced data science techniques can be considered a valuable addition to the taphonomist’s toolkit for the identification of precise carnivore agents via tooth pit morphology.

Traditional views of Neanderthal hunting strategies envisage them preying on herd species such as bison and deer, rather than the sophisticated tracking of solitary animals. Analysis of faunal remains from El Esquilleu Cave in northern Spain, however, demonstrates that during certain periods of the Middle Palaeolithic occupation, Neanderthals focused on the hunting of ibex and chamois, small solitary species that inhabited the mountainous terrain around the site. These results indicate that Neanderthal hunting practices may have had more similarity to those of their Upper Palaeolithic relatives than is usually assumed.

Barranco León (Orce, Andalusia, Spain) provides the oldest case of knapping and percussive activities on an ancient raw material reservoir deposit. This site has already proven to be one of the oldest and most significant Oldowan open-air sites in Europe (1.4 Ma), with an exceptionally rich flint and limestone lithic assemblage, in association with large and small faunal remains, including a tooth fragment attributed to Homo sp. All of these finds have been discovered after years of excavations from a clear stratigraphic succession, complimented by multidisciplinary analyses of environmental proxies. The analysis of the entire lithic collection presented here describes a tool kit composed of cores flakes and debris, hammerstones, and other macro-tools like heavy-duty scrapers and sub-spheroidal morphologies. This paper combines geological and sedimentological data with archeology, providing a new interpretation of site formation processes and how they shaped hominin activities at Barranco León. We examine the dynamics forming the depositional sequence and document taphonomic alterations of the archeological finds, while also analyzing their distribution over the excavation area. This information is key to understanding the nature of post-depositional phenomena and to evaluate primary versus secondary deposition. The positioning of the refitting items in the site highlights in situ action, reaffirming the importance of the Barranco León site as a raw material repository. The observation of a refitted lithic set provides information about knapping strategies and hominin behavior in this European Oldowan site.

Recently the incorporation of artificial intelligence has allowed the development of valuable methodological advances in taphonomy. Some studies have achieved great precision in identifying the carnivore that produced tooth marks. Additionally, other works focused on human activity have managed to specify what type of tool or raw material was used in the filleting processes identified at the sites. Through the use of geometric morphometrics and machine learning techniques, the present study intends to analyze the cut marks of the Ulaca oppidum (Solosancho, ?vila, Spain) in order to identify the type of tools used during carcass modification. Although the Ulaca oppidum is an Iron Age site, the results suggest that most of the cut marks were produced with flint tools.

Modern day investigation in fields of archaeology and palaeontology can be greatly characterised by an exponential growth of integrated new technologies, nevertheless, while these advances are of great significance to multiple lines of research, their evaluation and update over time is equally as important. Here we present an application of inter and intra-observer analysis in taphonomy based geometric morphometrics, employing robust non-parametric statistical analyses for the study of experimental carnivore tooth pit morphologies. To fully understand the influence of measurement errors in the collection of this data, our statistical assessment was performed on fully superimposed, partially superimposed and raw landmark coordinates collected from 3D surface scanning. Experimental samples used to assess these errors includes wolf and dog tooth pits used in modern day ecological livestock predation analysis. Results obtained from this study highlight the importance of landmark type in the assessment of error, emphasising the value of semi-landmark models over the use of ambiguous Type III landmarks. In addition to this, data also reveals the importance of observer experience for the collection of data alongside an interesting increase in error when working with fully superimposed landmarks due to the ?Pinocchio Effect?. Through this study we are able to redefine the geometric morphometric models used for tooth pit morphological analyses. This final hybrid Type II fixed landmark and semi-landmark model presents a significant reduction in human induced error, generating a more metrically reliable and replicable method that can be used for data pooling in future inter-institutional research. These results can be considered a fundamental step forward for carnivore inspired studies, having an impact on archaeological, palaeontological, modern-day ecological research as well as applications in other forensic sciences.

Este trabajo reconoce el papel desarrollado por la Dra. Teresa Chapa Brunet entre los años 2014 y 2018, como directora del Centro de Apoyo a la Investigación de Arqueometría y Análisis Arqueológico (CAIAAA), entonces llamado CAI. Revisaremos sus inicios en 2007, sus problemas, su evolución y cómo el paso de Teresa Chapa Brunet, significó un antes y un después en el CAI. Una serie de circunstancias ocurridas entre 2011 y 2013 prácticamente desmantelaron el centro en 2013. Cuando Teresa asumió la dirección del CAI en 2014 afrontó la tarea de su reconstrucción. Para ello, consiguió dotar al CAI de los recursos, personal y equipos de trabajo que permitieron reiniciar sus actividades. Su labor ayudó a crear una infraestructura y sentó las bases que todavía continúan en la actualidad, manteniendo la filosofía original del CAIAAA, centrada en la documentación y protección del patrimonio arqueológico mediante la aplicación, investigación y desarrollo de tecnologías innovadoras no destructivas.

During the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century the discussion on early human behavioral patterns revolved around the hunting versus scavenging debate. The correct identification of bone modifications, including percussion, cut and tooth marks, is a key issue within this debate. While many authors have shown that carnivore and human modifications can be easily distinguished, it is true that sometimes percussion marks without associated microstriations and tooth pits overlap morphologically, causing confusion, especially when unmodified hammerstones are used. In order to solve this equifinality problem, many investigations have focused their efforts on other pieces of evidence such as the identification of notches, fragmentation patterns and frequencies, among others. These studies, however, cannot be considered as fully conclusive. Within this paper we address the problem of equifinality when identifying percussion marks produced with unmodified hammerstones and tooth pits created by carnivores using new methodologies based on the 3D reconstruction of marks and their statistical multivariate analysis. For the purpose of this study a total of 128 marks? 39 percussion marks produced with an unmodified quartzite hammerstone, and 89 pits generated by different carnivores?were virtually modelled with the aid of a DAVID structured-light scanner SLS-2 and later analyzed by means of geometric morphometrics. Our results show that percussion marks not associated with striae fields and the pits generated by the carnivores studied here can be successfully distinguished.

The settlement of cold and arid environments by Pleistocene hunter-gatherers has been a heated topic in Paleolithic Archaeology and the Quaternary Sciences for years. In the Iberian Peninsula, a key area for studying human adaptations to such environments is composed by the large interior and upland regions of the northern and southern plateaus ( Mesetas ) and bordering areas. As, traditionally, these regions have been relatively under-investigated compared to the ecologically more favored coastal areas of the peninsula, our knowledge of the human settlement of the whole Iberian hinterland remains scarce for the Last Glacial. In this paper we present the discovery and first geoarcheological, paleoenvironmental and chronometric evidence obtained at Charco Verde II, a new site close to the southwestern foothills of the Iberian system range (Guadalajara province, Spain), bearing a sequence of Magdalenian human occupations starting at least at 20.8–21.4 ka cal BP during the Last Glacial Maximum, and covering Greenland Stadial 2 until ∼15.1–16.6 ka cal BP, including Heinrich stadial 1. As this site is located in an upland region which today faces one of the harshest climates in Iberia, such occupation sequence, occurred during some of the coldest and most arid phases of the Last Glacial, has relevant implications for our understanding of human-environment-climate interactions and population dynamics in Iberia and Western Europe. These findings support the hypothesis that the Iberian hinterland was not avoided by Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers due to ecological constraints, but it hosted a complex and relatively dense settlement at least in some areas, even during cold periods. This suggest, one more time, that the historical scarcity of Upper Paleolithic sites in inland Iberia is, to a significant extent, an artifact of research bias.

The archaeological site of La Magdalena, located in Alcalá de Henares (Madrid), has a large necropolis area related to different chronological phases. This study was based on the bone remains found in three Roman tombs that date back to the second and third century AD and a votive offering. The three tombs were located in different places far from one another and have special features on their structure pits and their grave goods. We conducted anthropological and archeozoological analyses on the individuals and bird-associated remains. The anthropological results indicated that there was one adult male, one adult female, and a child, each one associated with a Common Pheasant which presents the same relative age and sex as the corpse they were accompanying. Moreover, all these pheasants were placed inside the grave next to the right tibia of the indicated human remains. We found another bird interred as an offering for the Early Roman cremations, but it was not associated with any particular grave. We consider that the presence of these bird remains is a votive offering related to a religious funeral ritual, but we could not determine if it belongs to a pagan religion or Christianity.

Analytic models have been developed to reconstruct early hominin behaviour, especially their subsistence patterns, revealed mainly through taphonomic analyses of archaeofaunal assemblages. Taphonomic research is used to discern which agents (carnivores, humans or both) generate the bone assemblages recovered at archaeological sites. Taphonomic frameworks developed during the last decades show that the only large-sized carnivores in African biomes able to create bone assemblages are leopards and hyenas. A carnivore-made bone assemblage located in the short-grassland ecological unit of the Serengeti (within Olduvai Gorge) was studied. Taphonomic analyses of this assemblage including skeletal part representation, bone density, breakage patterns and anatomical distribution of tooth marks, along with an ecological approach to the prey selection made by large carnivores of the Serengeti, were carried out. The results show that this bone assemblage may be the first lion-accumulated assemblage documented, although other carnivores (namely spotted hyenas) may have also intervened through postdepositional ravaging. This first faunal assemblage potentially created by lions constitutes a new framework for neotaphonomic studies. Since lions may accumulate carcasses under exceptional circumstances, such as those documented at the site reported here, this finding may have important consequences for interpretations of early archaeological and paleontological sites, which provide key information about human evolution.