Neanderthals in the Levant

<p>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 44-70000 year old Middle Paleolithic occupation of a Jordanian rockshelter.</p><p><br></p><p>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.</p><p><br></p><p>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 10-20000 years later than the occupation of Tor Faraj.</p>