SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, Oct. 4 (EUROPE PRESS) –
The multidisciplinary and high-resolution study at the Abric del Pastor site (Alicante, Alcoy), in which the University of La Laguna participates, has made it possible to isolate a singular occupation of a Neanderthal group and has made it possible to recognize its main characteristics, which is key to understanding the way of life of these hunter-gatherer populations.
One of the main difficulties that research has faced in this regard is to identify evidence of a unique human occupation in archaeological sites. This has not been possible until now, and the usual analytical frameworks in Paleolithic archeology are often not adequate to answer questions related to human behavior, because they mix multiple, diverse and time-separated camps. This is what is known as the palimpsest effect, which merges remains from different eras into a single set, giving an apparent synchrony to what, in reality, has accumulated over centuries or even millennia.
It is the result of the sum of multiple and diverse activities carried out by heterogeneous human groups that never had any relationship. Consequently, resolving the temporal and spatial scale of human activity in the Palaeolithic is one of the most difficult challenges currently facing prehistoric archaeology.
In El Salt and Abric del Pastor, two Neanderthal sites located in the town of Alcoy, a team led by professors from the University of La Laguna (Bertila Galván, Carolina Mallol and Cristo Hernández) has been assuming since 2011 the search for solutions to this problem, developing a line of research that combines palimpsest dissection with high-resolution microscopic and molecular archaeology.
Until now, this team had made significant progress in studying the record from narrower time frames that began to offer a clearer picture of what the unique occupations of these hunter-gatherer camps that lived more than 50,000 years ago could be like. However, with the article that has now been published in Scientific Reports, led by Santiago Sossa and in which the universities of Valencia, Alicante, Rovira i Virgili and the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution also participate, of nut, without precedents, when presenting a multidisciplinary work that has allowed to isolate one of these singular occupations.
This important result probably represents the closest picture we have of a Neanderthal group and their daily life. The study has made it possible to know what activities the same group carried out, shedding light on their spatial behavior (activity around the fire) and on the activities carried out (lithic carving and butchery of appendicular parts of a single deer).
“If we manage to continue with this approach, we will have a closer reconstruction of human realities in the past,” say the researchers. Until now, most studies on Neanderthals approached their materials from the stratigraphic unit, formed over hundreds or thousands of years, which generates a mixed and homogeneous view of their behavior. “It is time to change the paradigm and do it from high resolution”, they conclude.
