Conventional wisdom holds that when humans began acquiring meat on a regular basis, whether by hu... more Conventional wisdom holds that when humans began acquiring meat on a regular basis, whether by hunting or by scavenging, they became part of the large carnivore guild and, as a consequence, faced greatly increased levels of potentially life-threatening competition with other predators. This paper offers an alternative view based on fundamental nutritional and metabolic differences between humans, who are descended from primates of largely vegetarian heritage, and hypercarnivores, who are specialized flesh-eaters with a much greater tolerance for protein. Because of these differences, the prey choices and body-part selections made by humans and carnivores, while overlapping, are not isomorphic, with the former prioritizing fatty tissues, the latter prioritizing lean muscle. Competition and confrontation are further minimized by the fact that humans forage during the day, while most predators hunt at night. These and other lines of evidence, including numerous examples from early ethnohistoric accounts, suggest that mutual tolerance rather than deadly confrontation may often have been the most prudent and profitable course of action for all concerned.
The Roswell area witnessed a rapid pithouse-to-pueblo transition (PPT) during the late 1200s and ... more The Roswell area witnessed a rapid pithouse-to-pueblo transition (PPT) during the late 1200s and 1300s. This paper considers a number of the drivers commonly offered to explain such transitions in other parts of the Southwest (e.g., population growth, agricultural intensification, reduction in mobility) and finds that none of the traditional explanations fare very well in the Roswell case. Instead, the Roswell area PPT seems in large part to be a response to the cooperative demands of the local villagers' increasing involvement in long-distance communal bison hunting on the Southern Plains and trading expeditions to the heartland of the Southwest. The process was probably accentuated and accelerated by an ever expanding and deepening "landscape of risk" as competitors vied for access to the bison herds and to trading partners.
E l 19 de marzo de 2021, la arqueología perdió a un querido amigo al expirar Jeffrey Robinson Par... more E l 19 de marzo de 2021, la arqueología perdió a un querido amigo al expirar Jeffrey Robinson Parsons, luego de una breve estancia hospitalaria en Ann Arbor, Michigan, Estados Unidos. Jeff fue una alma callada y gentil que hizo enormes contribuciones a la arqueología. Su fallecimiento estimuló a muchos que conocieron y trabajaron con Jeff, a reflexionar en las múltiples formas en que éste influyó a la arqueología. También los incentivó a pensar ¿cómo fue que él progresó tanto profesionalmente a la vez que mantuvo cualidades personales tan admirables?, sus modales amigables y su generosidad con los datos y el conocimiento, ayudando a otros a continuar sus carreras, a la vez que avanzó en nuestro entendimiento del pasado. Jeffrey Parsons nació el 9 de octubre de 1939 en Washington D.C., siendo sus padres Merton Stanley Parsons (1907-1982), y Elizabeth Oldenvurg Parsons (1911-2005). Jeff fue el mayor de tres hijos, vivió gran parte de su primera juventud en Fairfax, Virginia-el que después se convirtió en un extenso suburbio de Washington-. Ambos padres de Jeff crecieron en granjas y obtuvieron grados universitarios avanzados.
A rthur J. Jelinek, a remarkable scholar and world-renowned Paleolithic archaeologist, passed awa... more A rthur J. Jelinek, a remarkable scholar and world-renowned Paleolithic archaeologist, passed away on January 10, 2022, at the age of 93. As teacher, field archaeologist, and researcher, he touched the lives of a great many people, student and professional alike, over the many decades of his distinguished career. And he is widely known for his important multi-year excavations at two of the most famous Middle Paleolithic or Neanderthal sites in the Old World-Tabun in Israel and La Quina in France. Jelinek grew up in La Grange Park, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago, Illinois. He attended Lyons Township (LT) High School, which, curiously, produced a remarkable number of graduates who went on to become professional anthropologists and archaeologists. In addition to Jelinek, others included Patricia Anderson-Gerfaud, a pioneer in the study of stone tool function by means of microwear analysis; Wilfred C. Bailey, a participant in one of Emil Haury's first field schools in the Mogollon region of Arizona and an anthropologist for many years at the University of Georgia; Elaine (Bluhm) Herold, one of Illinois's
Conventional wisdom holds that when humans began acquiring meat on a regular basis, whether by hu... more Conventional wisdom holds that when humans began acquiring meat on a regular basis, whether by hunting or by scavenging, they became part of the large carnivore guild and, as a consequence, faced greatly increased levels of potentially life-threatening competition with other predators. This paper offers an alternative view based on fundamental nutritional and metabolic differences between humans, who are descended from primates of largely vegetarian heritage, and hypercarnivores, who are specialized flesh-eaters with a much greater tolerance for protein. Because of these differences, the prey choices and body-part selections made by humans and carnivores, while overlapping, are not isomorphic, with the former prioritizing fatty tissues, the latter prioritizing lean muscle. Competition and confrontation are further minimized by the fact that humans forage during the day, while most predators hunt at night. These and other lines of evidence, including numerous examples from early ethnohistoric accounts, suggest that mutual tolerance rather than deadly confrontation may often have been the most prudent and profitable course of action for all concerned.
The Roswell area witnessed a rapid pithouse-to-pueblo transition (PPT) during the late 1200s and ... more The Roswell area witnessed a rapid pithouse-to-pueblo transition (PPT) during the late 1200s and 1300s. This paper considers a number of the drivers commonly offered to explain such transitions in other parts of the Southwest (e.g., population growth, agricultural intensification, reduction in mobility) and finds that none of the traditional explanations fare very well in the Roswell case. Instead, the Roswell area PPT seems in large part to be a response to the cooperative demands of the local villagers' increasing involvement in long-distance communal bison hunting on the Southern Plains and trading expeditions to the heartland of the Southwest. The process was probably accentuated and accelerated by an ever expanding and deepening "landscape of risk" as competitors vied for access to the bison herds and to trading partners.
E l 19 de marzo de 2021, la arqueología perdió a un querido amigo al expirar Jeffrey Robinson Par... more E l 19 de marzo de 2021, la arqueología perdió a un querido amigo al expirar Jeffrey Robinson Parsons, luego de una breve estancia hospitalaria en Ann Arbor, Michigan, Estados Unidos. Jeff fue una alma callada y gentil que hizo enormes contribuciones a la arqueología. Su fallecimiento estimuló a muchos que conocieron y trabajaron con Jeff, a reflexionar en las múltiples formas en que éste influyó a la arqueología. También los incentivó a pensar ¿cómo fue que él progresó tanto profesionalmente a la vez que mantuvo cualidades personales tan admirables?, sus modales amigables y su generosidad con los datos y el conocimiento, ayudando a otros a continuar sus carreras, a la vez que avanzó en nuestro entendimiento del pasado. Jeffrey Parsons nació el 9 de octubre de 1939 en Washington D.C., siendo sus padres Merton Stanley Parsons (1907-1982), y Elizabeth Oldenvurg Parsons (1911-2005). Jeff fue el mayor de tres hijos, vivió gran parte de su primera juventud en Fairfax, Virginia-el que después se convirtió en un extenso suburbio de Washington-. Ambos padres de Jeff crecieron en granjas y obtuvieron grados universitarios avanzados.
A rthur J. Jelinek, a remarkable scholar and world-renowned Paleolithic archaeologist, passed awa... more A rthur J. Jelinek, a remarkable scholar and world-renowned Paleolithic archaeologist, passed away on January 10, 2022, at the age of 93. As teacher, field archaeologist, and researcher, he touched the lives of a great many people, student and professional alike, over the many decades of his distinguished career. And he is widely known for his important multi-year excavations at two of the most famous Middle Paleolithic or Neanderthal sites in the Old World-Tabun in Israel and La Quina in France. Jelinek grew up in La Grange Park, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago, Illinois. He attended Lyons Township (LT) High School, which, curiously, produced a remarkable number of graduates who went on to become professional anthropologists and archaeologists. In addition to Jelinek, others included Patricia Anderson-Gerfaud, a pioneer in the study of stone tool function by means of microwear analysis; Wilfred C. Bailey, a participant in one of Emil Haury's first field schools in the Mogollon region of Arizona and an anthropologist for many years at the University of Georgia; Elaine (Bluhm) Herold, one of Illinois's
It is widely known that traditional northern hunter–gatherers such as the Inuit included putrid m... more It is widely known that traditional northern hunter–gatherers such as the Inuit included putrid meat, fish, and fat in their diet, although the ubiquity and dietary importance of decomposing animal foods seem often to have been underappreciated. There is no evidence that these arctic and subarctic foragers suffered from major outbreaks of botulism (Clostridium botulinum), or from the toxic metabolites of other pathogens such as Listeria monocytogenes or Salmonella spp., until the 1970s and 1980s when Euroamericans introduced more "sanitary" methods for putrefying native foods. While many ethnologists, nutritionists, and public health officials working in these high-latitude regions are generally aware of the importance of putrefied foods among such peoples, most scholars, regardless of discipline, would not expect similar practices to have been commonplace in the tropics, especially in hot, humid environments like the lowland rainforests of the Congo Basin. And yet a "deep dive" into the ethnohistoric literature of sub-Saharan Africa, and elsewhere in the tropics and sub-tropics of the Old and New World, shows that both hunter–gatherers and traditional small-scale rural farmers commonly ate thoroughly putrefied meat, fish, and fat with relative impunity, consuming some of it raw, frequently cooking it, but often barely so. Not only did tropical peoples regularly eat putrefied animal foods, these ethnohistoric accounts make it clear that, at least in many regions, the Indigenous populations generally preferred it that way. Equally surprising, perhaps, is the fact that this preference for putrid meat remained widespread in equatorial Africa and in many other tropical and sub-tropical regions well into the first quarter of the 20th century, only fading from view around the time of WWI or thereabouts. Combining the insights gained by looking at the consumption of putrid meat in both northern and tropical environments, several interesting implications become evident. First, it is clear that the disgust response with regard to the taste, smell, and sight of rotten meat and maggots is not a hardwired human universal, but more likely a learned cultural response, one that is closely linked to European colonization, Westernization, urbanization, and industrialization. Second, the capacity for both northern and tropical peoples to consume putrid meat with impunity suggests that their ability to resist the toxic effects of the metabolites of C. botulinum and other pathogens most likely stems in large part from the environmental priming of their gut floras and immune systems through early childhood exposure to pathogens rather than from genetic factors. This conclusion fits well with findings from recent microbiome studies, including studies of the gut floras of monozygotic twins living in different households. Third, putrefaction provides many of the same benefits that one gets by cooking, because it effectively "pre-digests" meat and fat prior to ingesting them. Moreover, in tropical environments putrefaction occurs very rapidly and automatically, and requires little investment of time and energy on the part of the consumer. Finally, we suggest that, by eating putrid meat and fat, early hominins could have acquired many of the benefits of cooking, but at much lower cost, and quite likely long before they gained control of fire.
One of Binford's most important and influential contributions was his development of utility indi... more One of Binford's most important and influential contributions was his development of utility indices-rankings of ungulate body parts according to their meat, marrow, and grease value. Binford's immediate objective was to model the butchering and processing decisions made by Alaskan caribou-hunting Inuit. Ultimately, however, his goal was much broader-to use these models as a means for better understanding the way Eurasian Middle and Upper Paleolithic hunters dealt with reindeer, caribou's Old World cousin. The original models were excessively complex and subsequent studies have greatly simplified several of them. Important as these modified versions may be, the improvements-with a few noteworthy exceptions-mostly address technical and methodological issues, and miss a fundamental interpretive problem. Both Binford's Modified General Utility Index (MGUI) and the more streamlined Food Utility Index (FUI) place the upper fore-and hind-limbs among the highest-ranking anatomical units, in large part because of the mass of muscle tissue associated with these areas of the carcass. Not so among traditional northern foragers, including Binford's (1978:41) own Nunamiut informants; they viewed muscle meat (i.e., "steaks") as dog food or white man's food. In other words, Binford's interpretation of his utility indices was not a close reflection of Nunamiut food valuations but more than likely a projection of Western, and his own, food preferences. What traditional northern foragers most valued in the limbs was their fatty marrow content, not the lean muscle. A more realistic ranking of body parts, though far more difficult to operationalize in an archaeological context, would look more like the following: most highly ranked would be the back fat (fleece or dépouille), fat on the neck and rump, fatty tissue surrounding the internal organs (kidneys, liver, viscera, etc.), and marrow. Also highly ranked would be the fattiest meat cuts, especially the tongue, ribs, and brisket. The brain, though rich in polyunsaturated fatty acids, is not easily assigned a rank because in a great many ethnohistoric accounts it was used to soften hides, not as a source of food. Hides for clothing, shelter, and equipment were often highly ranked as well, though their value fluctuated according to the hunting group's changing needs. Like hides, bone grease at times was also important, but because its extraction required considerable time and effort, it is difficult to assign an across-the-board valuation. And finally, the parts that most often occupied last place among Indigenous hunters were the lean muscle masses, their use limited by physiological constraints to the amount of protein an individual could safely consume on a daily basis. Interpretation of cutmarks is also less straightforward than commonly assumed. An abundance of such marks on meaty limb elements does not
Despite numerous tweaks, revisions, and extensions, Paleolithic archaeologists continue to rely h... more Despite numerous tweaks, revisions, and extensions, Paleolithic archaeologists continue to rely heavily on many ethnographically-derived concepts put forward decades ago by Lewis Binford. Prominent among these are ideas about logistical vs. residential mobility, expedient vs. curated technologies, embedded vs. direct toolstone procurement, zooarchaeological utility indices, and many others. Binford often presented these ideas in the form of "law-like" generalizations that the archaeological profession has subsequently come to accept and apply with far too little concern for their validity, even in the ethnographic contexts that originally gave rise to them. Some of these classic "Binfordisms" (e.g., logistical and residential mobility) not only don't stand up well when explored more deeply in the ethnohistoric record, but they focus on the movement of food, people, and materials across landscapes yet totally ignore the fundamental issue of transport. Others (e.g., embedded toolstone procurement) are inherently illogical when assumed to be the universal norm, they are largely unsupported by the ethnohistoric and ethnographic record, and they are surprisingly unanthropological in conception, despite Binford's clarion calls for an explicitly "anthropological archaeology." Still others (e.g., zooarchaeological utility indices) suffer from Binford's (inadvertent) imposition of the decidedly Western culinary preference for muscle tissue (i.e., "steaks") in developing his utility rankings of different ungulate body parts. To many traditional northern peoples, these meaty cuts were looked upon as "dog food" or "white man's food" because they contained little or no fat. These and other "Binfordisms" need to be carefully and thoroughly reexamined in the ethnographic and ethnohistoric realm and their theoretical shortcomings identified; they then need to be rebuilt from the ground up. Unfortunately, most contemporary Paleolithic archaeologists seem to have swallowed them hook, line, and sinker, and devote the lion's share of their effort, not to questioning and reexamining the original concepts, but instead to looking for new and ever more sophisticated methods for "seeing" them in the archaeological record. Without much more attention to the validity of these "Binfordisms," and to the real-world variability they subsume and largely ignore, many of the currently fashionable attempts to force the archaeological record into the typological "pigeonholes" fostered by Binford's "law-like" generalizations are likely to produce a library's worth of dubious fairytales.
Post-Clovis Paleoindians living on the North American Great Plains are often thought to have been... more Post-Clovis Paleoindians living on the North American Great Plains are often thought to have been dedicated bison hunters, fulfilling most of their food needs from this one large herbivore. The archaeological record seems compatible with this view, as it is dominated by kill sites, many containing the remains of dozens to hundreds of animals. Campsites often produce remains of a broader range of animals, but these sites too are overwhelmingly dominated by bison, both in numbers of bones and in terms of meat weight. Bison are also the most obvious food source that would have been available to Plains-dwelling Paleoindians, providing an abundance of protein, fat, and hides. However, largely on the basis of nutritional grounds, this paper challenges the viability of a subsistence system based heavily on bison, or even one that relies to a similar extent on other animals. Building from the assumption that humans cannot subsist for extended periods on a diet in which protein intake exceeds ~35% of total calories, I present data to show that bison, even in peak condition, are unlikely to yield sufficient fat. The shortage of fat in bison, and in most other wild ungulates, would have been exacerbated by the fact that Plains Paleoindians made little effort to maximize the yield of skeletal fat from their kills. They often ignored major marrow bones, and apparently made little or no effort to boil grease from the bones. As a consequence, in order to maintain a viable diet, post-Clovis Paleoindians in the Plains may have had to hunt bison and/or other animals in excess of their lean meat needs, primarily for the purpose of obtaining additional fat. The number of kills they would have had to make beyond their lean meat needs depended on the size of the group that had to be fed and the condition of the animals. Unused lean meat could have been fed to dogs, or simply abandoned and left to rot. Plains Pa-leoindians also may have made greater use than archaeologists currently assume of oily and starchy plant foods, although to do this they may have had to leave the Plains proper, at least seasonally, to forage in adjacent areas such as the foothills of the Rockies. Finally, drawing on Binford's conception of embedded toolstone procurement, archaeologists use the location of "high-quality" flint sources to determine Paleoindian hunting ranges. I suggest here that the lithics will probably tell us little about the food-related mobility of Plains Paleoindians. In addition to bison, the seasonal availability of foods rich in fats, oils, and starches almost certainly played a far more important role than flint in determining when, where to, and how often groups moved. More likely, what the flint-based distribution maps offer us are insights into the spatial arrangement of peoples who had ties to the same ancestral landscapes and shared broadly similar belief systems. Although the focus of this paper is on Paleoindian bison hunters, many of the same nutritional arguments likely apply to Eurasian Paleolithic hunting peoples who at times also relied heavily on the naturally lean meat of wild ungulates.
OBITUARY Ofer Bar-Yosef at the University of Michigan Reception during the 2008 SAA meeting in Va... more OBITUARY Ofer Bar-Yosef at the University of Michigan Reception during the 2008 SAA meeting in Vancouver (photo: Carla Sinopoli; original photo cropped for this publication) O n Saturday, 14 March 2020, Ofer Bar-Yosef passed away peacefully at his home in Kfar Saba near the Mediterranean coast in Israel, and archaeology lost one of its true giants. And with his passing many archaeologists the world over lost a dear friend. Ofer had a long and uniquely distinguished career, contributing to the discipline in countless ways, and influencing the lives of an untold number of students and professionals along the way. I am deeply honored by having been invited to write this tribute for Ofer, but at the same time truly humbled. Ofer was a dear friend, but he knew, and was close to, so many people over his long career that my personal lens is simply not capable of capturing the breadth and depth of that amazing life. No matter what I write it will inevitably seem flat, two-dimensional, hardly an adequate tribute to someone whose life, career, and personality were so vibrant , so constantly in motion, so three-dimensional. I certainly don't want what follows to be just a recap of his prodigious record of publication and the many accolades he received. Others have already done that and more are sure to come. I would be remiss, of course, if I didn't begin with a sketch of his remarkable career, given how truly amazing it was. But I want to go a step further and include some of my own personal reminiscences and memories, as well as a few aspects of his life, that otherwise are unlikely to be known by most others and, in that way, give people not PaleoAnthropology 2020: 69−73.
For the past 13,000 years, Native Americans in the North American Great Plains hunted bison (Biso... more For the past 13,000 years, Native Americans in the North American Great Plains hunted bison (Bison bison and B. antiquus) in communally-organized drives. While many of these operations took only a handful of animals at a time, some of the most spectacular kills reached almost industrial proportions, taking literally hundreds of animals in a single massive event. I briefly describe the taxonomy of fossil and living bison, the behavior of modern bison, and what is known from ethnohistoric and archaeological sources about the ways that Native Americans conducted these drives, including the use of foot surrounds, arroyo traps, pounds (corrals), and cliff jumps. I conclude by considering whether such drives were conducted annually in the late fall and/or early winter as a means of winter provisioning; or instead took place periodically, but not necessarily annually, at many different times of year, and served not only as a way of providing meat and hides, but also as a critical sociopolitical mechanism for integrating otherwise widely dispersed and highly mobile hunting bands.
This paper begins by exploring the role of fermented and deliberately rotted (putrefied) meat, fi... more This paper begins by exploring the role of fermented and deliberately rotted (putrefied) meat, fish, and fat in the diet of modern hunters and gatherers throughout the arctic and subarctic. These practices partially 'pre-digest' the high protein and fat content typical of northern forager diets without the need for cooking, and hence without the need for fire or scarce fuel. Because of the peculiar properties of many bacteria, including various lactic acid bacteria (LAB) which rapidly colonize decomposing meat and fish, these foods can be preserved free of pathogens for weeks or even months and remain safe to eat. In addition, aerobic bacteria in the early stages of putrefaction deplete the supply of oxygen in the tissues, creating an anaerobic environment that retards the production of potentially toxic byproducts of lipid autoxidation (rancidity). Moreover, LAB produce B-vitamins, and the anaerobic environment favors the preservation of vitamin C, a critical but scarce micronutrient in heavily meat-based northern diets. If such foods are cooked, vitamin C may be depleted or lost entirely, increasing the threat of scurvy. Psychological studies indicate that the widespread revulsion shown by many Euroamericans to the sight and smell of putrefied meat is not a universal hard-wired response, but a culturally learned reaction that does not emerge in young children until the age of about five or later, too late to protect the infant from pathogens during the highly vulnerable immediate-post-weaning period. Ethnohistoric and ethnographic evidence clearly show that putrefied meat and fish were not used solely as starvation foods, but served instead as ubiquitous, desirable, and nutritionally important components of forager diets throughout these northern environments. In the second part of the paper, I extend these arguments to suggest that putrefied meat, fish, and fat are likely to have been equally important to the lifeways and adaptations of Eurasian Paleolithic hominins inhabiting analogous environments. If such food practices were in fact widespread during the mid-to late Pleistocene, they may help account for aspects of the archaeological record that are presently difficult to comprehend, such as the 'on again, off again' evidence for fire use (and hence cooking) during the Eurasian Middle Paleolithic. Putrefaction also may alter the isotopic composition of the diet. As meat and fish decompose, a variety of volatile compounds are produced, including ammonia. Loss of NH 3 , along with lesser amounts of two other nitrogenous gases—cadaverine and putrescine—would very likely leave rotted meat and fish enriched in 15 N by comparison to the isotopic composition of these foods in their fresh state. Such enrichment may have contributed to the elevated values seen in many Neanderthals, values that are widely taken as prima facie evidence of Neanderthal's status as a 'top predator.' Finally, if Paleolithic foragers relied upon putrefaction to prepare and store meat, archaeologists may have to rethink the way they interpret a number of widely used taphonomic signatures, including the number and distribution of cutmarks, the extent of carnivore damage, the incidence of burning on both animal bones and stone tools, and the frequency and scale of hearths, ash lenses, and other features of combustion. " When we fix salmon head we put it in bucket in ground and we take it out and eat it. We leave it in ten days
La longue séquence moustérienne de la grotte de Kébara (Mt Carmel, Israël) permet de s'interroger... more La longue séquence moustérienne de la grotte de Kébara (Mt Carmel, Israël) permet de s'interroger sur la place que ce site a pu jouer dans l'organisation des territoires sur une période de 12 000 ans environ à la fin du Paléolithique moyen. Les études interdisciplinaires réalisées dans ce site à la suite des fouilles dirigées par O. Bar-Yosef et B. Vandermeersch entre 1982 et 1990 mettent en évidence des changements dans les comportements de subsistance, dans l'organisation techno-économique de la production lithique et dans le statut de ce site au sein des territoires des chasseurs-cueilleurs moustériens. Située dans la zone méditerranéenne où les ressources ont été, semble-t-il, disponibles sur une large partie de l'année, la grotte a été le siège de retours fréquents de groupes de mêmes traditions techniques (Levallois unipolaire), sur l'ensemble de la période considérée, même si les activités menées diffèrent selon les niveaux : occupations très sporadiques au début de la séquence (unités XIII-XII), camp de base sur une large partie de la période considérée (unités XI à VIII), puis finalement lieu d'occupations de plus courte durée pour des activités plus spécialisées – boucherie primaire avant transport vers d'autres sites – (unités VII-V). Les causes possibles de ces changements sont discutées, en relation probable avec une augmentation de la population, au moins localement, au cours du Paléolithique moyen récent. Abstract: With its long archaeological sequence, Kebara cave (Mt Carmel) gives a good opportunity to test shifts in human land-use patterns during the 12,000 years covering the Late Middle Palaeolithic in this site. The interdisciplinary research program organized by O. Bar-Yosef and B. Vandermeersch during their excavations (1982-1990) allowed to recognize changes in subsistence behaviours, lithic technological organization and site function in the territory of the Mousterian hunter-gatherers. Located in the Mediterranean woodland ecozone where food and water resources seem to have been available almost all year round, the cave was repeatedly occupied over the course of thousands of years by human groups sharing the same lithic tradition (unidirectional Levallois system). But the fauna and lithic data show that Kebara cave's functional position within the settlement system changed during this period, from ephemeral occupations in the lower units (XIII-XII) followed by an extensive period during which Kebara was used for repetitive intensive occupations (very likely a residential base camp: units XI-VIII). At the end of the period (units VII-V), activities in the cave were more sporadic, and oriented towards more specific tasks (butchering and processing the carcasses before meat, fat and marrow were transported elsewhere). The reasons for such changes are discussed, an increase in regional population being considered as a plausible working hypothesis. Mots-clés : Paléolithique moyen ; Proche-Orient ; Stratégies de subsistance ; Organisation de production lithique ; Fonction de site.
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