Florent Rivals

Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social | IPHES

Cover, List of Contents, Contributors, Foreword, and Preface -- https://www.elsevier.com/books/updating-neanderthals/romagnoli/978-0-12-821428-2

Dietary traits of individuals and populations of both Neanderthals and animals, are essential for the reconstruction of biotic interactions among species. These kinds of dynamic relationships with other living species in a shared environment can be seen as a major influence in evolution and ecology, and the timing and type of interaction could have...

Dietary traits in ungulates from Lazaret Cave were analysed for possible changes in ecological niches throughout the marine isotopic stage (MIS) 6 sequence of the site and to investigate the duration of the occupations corresponding to the accumulation of ungulate remains by human groups. The analysis revealed changes in dietary diversity throughou...

Dental microwear is a common and well-established technique which allows the short-term reconstruction of the dietary behaviour in extinct and extant vertebrates, allowing inferences about daily, seasonal, or regional variations in diets. However, the use of this method may be limited because taphonomic processes can affect enamel surfaces and mod...

Proofs under correction. Supplementary data to this article can be found soon online at https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2023.108341.

One of the most widely used methods to associate lithic tools and bone assemblage in archaeological sites is the identification of cut-marks. However, the identification of these marks is still problematic in some localities on account of the similarities with the modifications generated by non-human processes, including biostratinomic and post-dep...

The societies living in the present-day Languedoc region during the Iron Age (7th-2nd c. BC) experienced a series of progressive transformations, including a demographic growth and an increase in social differentiation, affecting their economic, social and political structure. This context certainly influenced economic organisation, including farmi...

A través de l’estudi tafonòmic i espacial del registre faunístic del nivell P de l’Abric Romaní, es va definir que el conjunt va ser el resultat d’almenys dos tipus diferents d’ocupacions: 1) Un campament residencial transitori durant breus estades, centrat en l’explotació de cérvols; 2) Un campament de caça per a la captura especialitzada de caval...

Maragheh has yielded one of the richest mammal faunas of the late Miocene in the so-called Gre-co-Iranian Biogeographical Province in western Asia. This study investigates the paleoecology of fossil perissodactyls (equids) from the late Miocene of Maragheh, northwestern Iran. We used dental micro-and mesowear techniques to draw robust inferences ab...

Dietary habits for the cave bear lineage have been previously studied for the Early Pleistocene ursids from Dmanisi (1.8 Ma) and Orce sites (1.6–1.2 Ma), and their diet was found to be omnivorous with a substantial consumption of meat and fish in both cases. The present study represents the chronological continuation of these previous published wor...

The aim of this work is to provide evidence about the mobility of hunter-gatherer groups from the north-east of the Iberian Peninsula during the Epipaleolithic, more specifically, those from the Balma del Gai site (Moià, Barcelona, Spain). To do so, a study of the dental meso- and microwear of ungulates hunted by the groups that occupied the Balma...

En los últimos años, los estudios paleodietéticos y paleoambientales han tenido un gran avance debido a nuevas técnicas, como el análisis del desgaste dental a nivel micro y macro y, el análisis de isotopos estables de diferentes elementos en los tejidos de los animales. Recientemente, la combinación de éstos proxies ha mejorado sustancialmente est...

La Balma del Gai (Moià, NE Ibèria) es troba a 760 m s. n. m. i a 50 quilòmetres de la línia de costa actual. Al nivell I, s’hi diferencien dues fases cronològicoculturals a partir dels materials trobats i també d’acord amb les datacions radiocarbòniques realitzades. La capa inferior, conté artefactes del complex lític Epimagdalenià o Microlaminar,...

Bone retouchers have been used since the Lower Paleolithic, e.g., at Gran Dolina TD10-1, Bolomor Cave, Qesem Cave and Schöningen. These tools became widespread during the Middle Palaeolithic in Eurasia. Thus, they have been mainly associated to Neanderthal occupation horizons in French cave sites, such as La Quina, where these tools were first reco...

Balma del Gai (Moià, NE Iberia) is at 760 m a.s.l. and is located 50 km from the current coastline. Two chronological-cultural phases were identified in Level I based on the materials recovered and radiocarbon dating. The lower layer, containing Epimagdalenian or Microlaminar lithic complex artefacts, is dated to 13,480-13,233 cal yrs BP (OxA-29608...

The genus Macaca belongs to Cercopithecidae (Old World monkeys), Cercopithecinae, Papionini. The presence of Macaca in North Africa is well known from the Late Miocene to the Late Pleistocene. However, the diet of fossil Macaca has been poorly described in the literature. In this study, we investigated the feeding habits of Macaca cf. sylvanus (n =...

In this article we announce the discovery of the first remains of Megaloceros giganteus found in Catalonia (north-eastern Iberia) from the Late Pleistocene: a fragment of maxillary. Dated between 35,000 and 37,000 cal BP, it is also among the youngest occurrence of this taxon in the Iberian Peninsula, while its last known occurrence is dated to the...

The Mazama genus is one of the more diverse genera among deer (Cervidae); its classification is controversial because of its complex phylogenetic relationships. The Central American red brocket deer ( Mazama temama ) is distributed from Central America to the northwest of South America. Studying the diet of mammals gives us information about the en...

Anthracotheres and entelodonts are large mammals with peculiar morphological characteristics that combine plesiomorphic and derived features. The unusual anatomy of anthracotheres shows a morphological resemblance to pigs and hippos and their bunoselenodont low-crowned molars have been interpreted as an adaptation to frugivorous/folivorous diets. E...

In recent years, the study of bone and dental remains from archeological sites has advanced thanks to significant improvements in high-resolution techniques and new analytical methods. These include a better understanding of individual demographic parameters (age and sex), individual dietary patterns, territorial mobility, hunting strategies or ani...

The application of dental wear study to murids has always been ruled out because of their omnivorous diet, which does not leave significant wear on the dentition. Nevertheless, in our work we select Apodemus sylvaticus (wood mouse) as the object of study for several reasons: its seasonal diet, its ability to resist the gastric juices of predators,...

Cervids, and especially the red deer Cervus elaphus, are among the most regularly and abundantly recorded ungulates in Pleistocene/Paleolithic bone assemblages. Numerous Pleistocene or Holocene subspecies have been described, reinforcing their status as essential proxies for environmental and chronological reconstructions. Despite this, at the begi...

In the last decades there has been an exponential increase in analytical methods applied in zooarchaeology. This work presents the results of the zooarchaeological study carried out in the Bronze Age village (ca. 1600-850 BC) of Els Closos de Ca'n Gaià (Felanitx, Mallorca), where the faunal remains from two structures with different functionalities...

Bears have consistently played an important role in human culture and behavioral evolution. Throughout the Paleolithic, ursids were not only an economic resource to exploit for fur, meat, and osseous material, but also became part of the vast array of cultural traditions of different human populations up to recent historical times (Brown, 2009; Hus...

Extinct hyenas of the genus Crocuta were typical representatives of the Late Pleistocene mammoth fauna of Eurasia. The geographical distribution of these animals was vast, stretching from the British Isles to the Pacific coast. In this paper, we studied the tooth microwear of Crocuta spelaea from the Prolom 2 grotto in Crimea and the Bukhtarminskay...

The paleoecology of the giant deer (Megaloceros giganteus), including its dietary preferences, is poorly known, mainly because reconstructions based on morphological characteristics have produced contradictory results. In this study, we propose to reconstruct the diet of the giant deer from five archaeological sites located in Southern Germany and...

Updating Neanderthals: Understanding Behavioural Complexity in the Late Middle Palaeolithic provides the most up-to-date and comprehensive knowledge of Neanderthals who lived throughout the European and Asian continents. Focusing on the last phase of Neanderthal settlements and behaviours in Europe, the Levant and across Asian regions, the book syn...

In the last decades, methodological advancements in the natural and exact sciences have increasingly been used to study the past. In this chapter, we review how such developments can be applied to address questions regarding Neanderthal identification, phylogeny, chronology, mobility, climate, and diet. These examples illustrate how prehistoric stu...

This chapter aims is to briefly review the history of research on Neanderthals and to show how we have reached the current behavioural approach, including the complex scenario we have today. The main scientific debates that have marked Neanderthal studies since the discovery of skeletal remains at Feldhofer Cave in 1856 and the theoretical and meth...

Dental microwear is a common and well-established proxy that shows a high temporal resolution in characterising the ungulate diet on a short time scale linked to the time of death. It is often the case that a high number of specimens from fossil assemblages are excluded from analyses due to structural or superficial damage, which can drastically re...

Dental mesowear is a widely used tool in archaeology and palaeontology for the reconstruction of the overall diet of mammals. This method is based on the characterisation of the height and relief of dental cusps, as they vary according to diet. The use of this method on domestic ungulates presents limitations because (1) currently, very few referen...

The northeastern region of Iberia constitutes a natural pass-area for arriving populations into the peninsula and becomes a key area to understand Neanderthal resilience to changing environmental conditions experienced during Marine Isotope Stage 3 (MIS 3; 60–30 ka). Short-term but repeated occupations by Neanderthal groups occurred in Teixoneres C...

Extinct cave bears inhabited a large part of Eurasia in a wide diversity of habitats during the Pleistocene. This study investigates via tooth wear analysis the feeding habits of 66 individuals belonging to three genetically different species located in the Urals and eastern Europe: Ursus rossicus from Kizel cave, U. kanivetz from Secrets cave, and...

The present study's primary goal is to apply analyses of stable isotopes and tooth micro-and mesowear to the question of dietary change among a mid-Holocene population of small brocket deer (Cervidae: Mazama) in response to anthropogenic alteration of the natural insular vegetation for approximately 450 calendar years (6060-5620 cal yr BP). The bro...

Postdepositional damage to fossil remains are of great interest if considering the possible distortion they could produce in the archaeological and paleontological record. These damages are particularly relevant for the dietary reconstructions based on dental microwear which was formed during the lifetime of an animal. The taphonomic processes have...

Herbivore teeth are a valuable source of information for inferring the hunting season of past hunter-gatherers, the spatial–temporal organization of their activities, their socio-economic organization, and their adaptation to the seasonal fluctuation of the resources. Numberless of studies have been conducted on Neanderthals across Eurasia, but onl...

In the last few decades, bioarchaeological studies have grown exponentially on the Balearic Islands. In general, animal husbandry based on domestic triad and a Mediterranean macchia landscape is well-attested during the prehistory of this archipelago. Despite providing meaningful data about dietary patterns and livestock practices, dental microwear...

The Aïn Beni Mathar – Guefaït (ABM-GFT) region in Eastern Morocco is the object of anarchaeological, palaeontological, geological and geochronological research project, led by an interna-tional team since 2006. The research in this former fluvio-lacustrine basin, roughly 2000 km2, hasrevealed a significant number of Pleistocene and Holocene sites....

The submerged site of Ohalo II was occupied during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), between 23,500–22,500 cal BP, bridging the Upper Paleolithic/Epipaleolithic transition in the southern Levant. The site is known for the excellent preservation of its brush huts and botanical remains. This study examines the behavior of its past inhabitants through a...

The control of animal feeding was fundamental during the first stages of domestication and husbandry. Studies on the diets of domestic mammals from the Neolithic period onwards are essential to understand early livestock practices and animal productive and reproductive strategies. Among the existing methods, microwear has been the one least applied...

Els grups humans del Paleolític mitjà no es poden entendre sense tenir en compte el medi en el qual es desenvolupaven. Des d'aquest punt de vista, les coves del Toll (Toll i Teixoneres) són un bon indret per analitzar les relacions dels humans d'aquest període amb les entitats biològiques del territori circumdant. Aquest treball intenta aportar llu...

The behaviour and mobility of hominins are dependent on the availability of biotic and abiotic resources, which, in temperate ecosystems, are strongly related to seasonality. The objective of this study is to establish evidence of seasonality and duration of occupation(s) of specific archaeological contexts at late Lower Palaeolithic Qesem Cave bas...

Dental microwear analysis is a proxy for analysing the diet in extinct and extant vertebrates, especially mammals. The limits of these approaches are still rather poorly known, especially in terms of taphonomic impacts. Indeed, several physical or chemical phenomena may have altered the microscopic features linked to the diet and compromised their...

Coulet des Roches and Aven des Planes are two Vauclusian pitfalls. The first provided new information covering some 23,000 years, from Pleniglacial (Greenland Stadial 3) to Subboreal, and data on several interstadials (Greenland Interstadial 3 et 9/10). Information are also available for GI 10-11. Fauna consists of complete skeletons of large and s...

Excavated from 2009 to 2019 by the Tübingen-Armenian Paleolithic Project, Aghitu-3 Cave is the only stratified Upper Paleolithic site in Armenia. Sedimentary deposits range from 39,000 to 24,000 calibrated years before present (ka cal BP). The main Paleolithic occupations occurred during the accumulation of Archaeological Horizon (AH) VI between 36...

Video describing the protocol to prepare molds and casts of animal teeth for microwear analysis

Sheep predominate the Early Neolithic faunal assemblages in the Iberian Peninsula. Their exploitation for meat and milk production made them key to the economy of these early farming societies. Management of sheep breeding season and feeding in the context of the local environment were decisive in obtaining these livestock products. This work focus...

Level 4.1 from the Abri du Maras (Ardèche, France) is chronologically attributed to the beginning of MIS 3 and is one example of late Neanderthal occupations in the southeast of France. Previous work on the faunal and lithic remains suggests that this level records short-term hunting episodes of reindeer associated with fragmented lithic reduction...

Teixoneres Cave (Moià, Barcelona, Spain) is a reference site for Middle Palaeolithic studies of the Iberian Peninsula. The cave preserves an extensive stratigraphic sequence made up of eight units, which is presented in depth in this work. The main goal of this study is to undertake an initial spatial examination of Unit III, formed during Marine I...

Teixoneres Cave (Moià, Barcelona, Spain) is a reference site for Middle Palaeolithic studies of the Iberian Peninsula. The cave preserves an extensive stratigraphic sequence made up of eight units, which is presented in depth in this work. The main goal of this study is to undertake an initial spatial examination of Unit III, formed during Marine I...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Here we respond to Dantas et al.‘s reply to de Oliveira et al. (2020) regarding a disagreement over the paleodiet of Xenorhinotherium bahiense and whether it was a grazer (our view) or a browser/mixed feeder (Dantas et al.). We refer again to the points made by de Oliveira et al. (2020) in order to refute the arguments of Dantas et al.

Equifinality constitutes a challenge when interpreting agency in archaeological sites. The fact that a specific type of damage frequently cannot be linked to a single actor, behavior, or ecological context, handicaps correct interpretations of site formation processes. Actualistic studies have been used to address this type of problem by creating m...

Our understanding of the emergence and dispersal of the earliest tool-making hominins has been revolutionised in the last decade, with sites in eastern Africa and China pushing records of both events several hundred thousand years earlier than previously thought. In recent years, climate and environmental factors have been considered by many as pri...

Corrigendum Corrigendum to "Neanderthal faunal exploitation and settlement dynamics at the Abri du Maras, level 5 (South-eastern France)" [Quat. Sci. Rev. 243 (2020) 106472]

The Crimean Peninsula has a rich archaeological record characterised by numerous multi-layered sites from the Middle Palaeolithic and by a number of important sites representing the transition from the Middle to the Upper Palaeolithic. Absolute dates place the region as one of the last Neanderthal refuges in Europe. Combining dental meso-and microw...

The late Pleistocene site of Irgiz 1 (Saratov Region, Russia) has yielded an accumulation of giant rhinoceros (Elasmotherium sibiricum) within the deposits of an oxbow lake. Irgiz 1 is one of the few sites in the world with a significant amount of elasmothere individuals of different age groups. Tooth mesowear and microwear are used to characterize...

Neanderthals are widely known to be a resilient human species that successfully faced constant and strong environmental fluctuations modifying the landscapes they inhabited and the availability of their potential resources. It has been traditionally assumed that environmental features could strongly affect human behaviour due to the stretch relatio...

The Final Natufian level Ib from Eynan/Ain Mallaha provided a large and diversified assemblage of ungulates used here to study the seasonality of game procurement. The objective of this study was to evaluate the advantage of combining two methods, dental eruption and wear, and tooth microwear. Tooth microwear results allowed us to confirm the seaso...