Multiproxy analysis of Upper Palaeolithic lustrous gravels supports their anthropogenic use.

Upper Palaeolithic sites in southwestern France attributed to the Upper Gravettian and the Solutrean yielded sub spherical gravels with a highly shiny appearance that have intrigued researchers since the 1930s. In this work, we analyze specimens from five sites, including the recently excavated Solutrean site of Landry, to establish whether their presence in archaeological layers and peculiar aspect are due to natural processes or human agency. We study the spatial distribution of gravels at Landry and submit archaeological gravels from the five sites, natural formations, Landry sediment sieving, and polishing experiments with a rotary tumbling machine to morphometric, colorimetric, microscopic, and textural analyses.

New Blombos Cave evidence supports a multistep evolutionary scenario for the culturalization of the human body.

The emergence of technologies to culturally modify the appearance of the human body is a debated issue, with earliest evidence consisting of perforated marine shells dated between 140 and 60 ka at archaeological sites from Africa and western Asia. In this study, we submit unpublished marine and estuarine gastropods from Blombos Cave Middle Stone Age layers to taxonomic, taphonomic, technological, and use-wear analyses. We show that unperforated and naturally perforated eye-catching shells belonging to the species Semicassis zeylanica, Conus tinianus, and another Conus species, possibly Conus algoensis, were brought to the cave between 100 and 73 ka.

Technological and functional analysis of 80-60 ka bone wedges from Sibudu (KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa).

Fully shaped, morphologically standardized bone tools are generally considered reliable indicators of the emergence of modern behavior. We report the discovery of 23 double-beveled bone tools from ~ 80,000-60,000-year-old archaeological layers at Sibudu Cave in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. We analyzed the texture of use-wear on the archaeological bone tools, and on bone tool replicas experimentally used in debarking trees, processing rabbit pelts with and without an ochre compound, digging in sediment in and outside a cave, and on ethnographic artefacts.