Marina Mosquera

Universitat Rovira i Virgili | URV

Understanding the temporal resolution of archaeological deposits is a critical issue for drawing behav-ioural inferences. In the case of TD10.2 (Gran Dolina, Sierra de Atapuerca), this factor becomes essential in defining the mass communal bison hunting level and the different butchering events that took place at the sub-unit, which is characterise...

Understanding the evolution of technological complexity is a major goal in the study of prehistoric lithic industries. This has led to the development of different methods to examine both archaeological items and their production processes. These methods have attempted to segment the actions that form an operational sequence, usually with the aim o...

Social learning informs us of the cognitive abilities to acquire knowledge transmitted between generations as adaptive strategies (Tomasello et al. 1993). In the archaeological record, the transmission of knowledge and skills are identified through repetitive patterns, however, the majority of these only remain in the best-preserved archaeological...

Stone tools are the most represented archaeological remains in Pleistocene sites. Firstly, for the better preservation of the lithic remains, and secondly, because they are direct ev-idences of human activity. However, the traditional technological studies are currently in non-use, and new research addressed to cognitive evolution, socialization an...

The skill spectrum for stone tool knappers is very wide. Concepts such as connaissance, savoir-faire, know-how, knowledge cognition, and motor ability are more difficult to track in human evolution. However, it is possible to identify if we search for the prehistoric individual , and analyse his/her lithic production. In this paper, we present the...

Determining hand laterality during human evolution is important in order to identify brain hemispheric lateralization for motor tasks and, indirectly, to gain information on the complex cognitive functions of the human brain. In this paper, we present a new method for inferring handedness from lithic evidence. The study is based on an analysis of t...

This paper aims to update the information available on the lithic assemblage from the entire sequence of TD6 now that the most recent excavations have been completed, and to explore possible changes in both occupational patterns and technological strategies evidenced in the unit. This is the first study to analyse the entire TD6 sequence, including...

El yacimiento de Navalmaíllo es un abrigo kárstico localizado en un entorno de montaña cerca del río Lozoya. La ubicación del yacimiento permite un control del entorno, siguiendo las migraciones de animales y para el establecimiento temporal de los grupos humanos. Las dificultades asociadas con la temporalidad relacionada con los procesos ocupacion...

The Navalmaíllo site is a karstic rockshelter located in a mountain environment near the Lozoya river. The location of the site allows for the close monitoring of the surrounding area, for following the migrations of animals and for the temporary residence of human groups. The difficulties associated with temporality as it relates to occupational p...

The relationship between lithic technology, learning and language is a topic of growing interest in human evolution studies, and has therefore been the subject of numerous scientific papers in recent years. To evaluate the role of language in the social transmission of lithic technology, we designed and developed an experimental protocol through wh...

The aim of this paper is to apply a previously published method (Bargalló and Mosquera, 2014) to the archaeological record, allowing us to identify the hand laterality of our ancestors and determine when and how this feature, which is exhibited most strongly in humans, appeared in our evolutionary history. The method focuses on identifying handedne...

Here we present a new site in the Sierra de Atapuerca (Burgos, Spain): Galería de las Estatuas (GE), which provides new information about Mousterian occupations in the Iberian Plateau. The GE was an ancient entrance to the cave system, which is currently closed and sealed by a stalagmitic crust, below which a detritic sedimentary sequence of more t...

Cave sites with Mousterian occupations in the Iberian Peninsula are mainly limited to the Northern, Eastern and Southern mountain ranges. Thus, the information available for the interior part of the Iberian Peninsula is very limited. Since 2008, we are working on a new cave site in the Sierra de Atapuerca (Burgos, Spain): Galería de las Estatuas (G...

In Western Europe, Acheulean cultural evidence is well attested by ca. 0.5 Ma. However, recent work has proven that it was present earlier; at the end of the Early Pleistocene. The timing and mode of the Western European Acheulean needs still to be investigated, and this knowledge appears to be strongly dependent upon data from sites with sufficien...

There is currently a controversy about the nature of chimpanzees’ social learning. One of the main issues is focused on chimpanzees’ learning abilities and whether this species is able to learn directly from a model's behaviour (action copy) or otherwise learns indirectly through the consequences of the model’s actions (results copy). The aim of th...

Abstract This paper expands upon the preliminary refit analysis of the NW area of unit TD10.1 at Gran Dolina (Sierra de Atapuerca, Burgos, Spain) (López-Ortega et al., 2011). The refit study described here has been conducted on the quartz and quartzite assemblage recovered from unit TD10.1, consisting of a total of 4302 artefacts (709 quartz and...

Evidence of late Early Pleistocene elephant butchery activity has been excavated in the Pit 1 locality at Barranc de la Boella (Catalonia, Spain). The fossil assemblage mainly comprises the remains of one prime adult individual of Mammuthus meridionalis, together with 125 lithic artefacts, among which several refitting groups of chert have been ide...

Here we present a preliminary approach to the taphofacies analysis of the El Forn Lower Pleistocene site. Since 2007, tree open air archeo-paleontological sites have been excavated at Barranc de la Boella (Tarragona, Spain): La Mina, Pit 1 locality and El Forn, dated at around 1 my old. Fossil mammals and lithic remains point to these sites as the...

Keywords: European Early Acheulean Late Early Pleistocene Barranc de la Boella Butchering site Europe a b s t r a c t Since 2007, excavations at Barranc de la Boella (Tarragona, Catalonia, Spain) have revealed three localities with rich archaeo-paleontological assemblages: La Mina, El Forn and Pit 1. Palaeontology, palae-omagnetism and cosmogenic a...

Barranc de la Boella is made up of several open-air late Early Pleistocene archaeological sites (Pit 1, La Mina and El Forn) the formation of which is related to a deltaic sedimentary environment. Its age makes it a key site for studying the behavior of the early hominin groups of the Iberian Peninsula and western Europe and the ecological context...

This article focuses on the origins for technological variation during the Middle Pleistocene through the analysis of the lithic assemblages from Galería and Gran Dolina-subunit TD10.1 (Atapuerca, Spain). The technological study was organized into three main levels of analysis. The first stage consisted of the technological characterization of the...

The first arrivals of hominin populations into Eurasia during the Early Pleistocene are currently considered to have occurred as short and poorly dated biological dispersions. Questions as to the tempo and mode of these early prehistoric settlements have given rise to debates concerning the taxonomic significance of the lithic assemblages, as trace...

This work presents a study of the oldest Acheulean lithic assemblages from the Galería site, specifically the GIIa subunit, which has been dated to c. 503 ± 95 ka, and compares them with the subsequent subunit in the sequence, GIIb, dated to around 237–269 ka. The main goals of this study are to offer a detailed technological characterization of th...

The present work describes a preliminary study of a primarily quartz-based Mousterian lithic assemblage deposited about 75,000 years ago by Neanderthals in Navalmaíllo rockshelter (Pinilla del Valle, Madrid, Spain). Although archaeological assemblages dominated by quartz are not common in the central Iberian Peninsula, they are more common in perip...

The Sierra de Atapuerca sites offer a chronological sequence that allows the evolution of technology at a local scale during the Early and Middle Pleistocene to be reconstructed. This paper presents updated information on the main lithic assemblages recovered from the various levels of the Sima del Elefante, Gran Dolina, Galería, and Sima de los Hu...

The Sierra de Atapuerca sites offer a chronological sequence that allows the evolution of technology at a local scale during the Early and Middle Pleistocene to be reconstructed. This paper presents updated information on the main lithic assemblages recovered from the various levels of the Sima del Elefante, Gran Dolina, Galería, and Sima de los Hu...

The Sierra de Atapuerca sites (Spain) have yielded excellent data and they represent the longest chronological sequence discovered in Europe to date, covering the late Early Pleistocene to the late Middle Pleistocene. In view of these exceptional characteristics, this work aims to meet three objectives: to characterise the technological features of...

In this paper we present a new method for inferring handedness from lithic evidence. The study was conducted by means of an experimental programme in stone-knapping, after which the resulting lithic products (tools) were analysed. These lithic tools were produced by 15 inexpert knappers (8 right-handed and 7 left-handed), because we were not able t...

This paper presents a study of the cores (neutral BNIG) from the Atapuerca Middle Pleistocene sites (Burgos, Spain). An analysis and study of the Atapuerca knapping methods is made, as well as one of the relationship between the knapping methods and the by-products (flakes, BP). On the other hand, an approach to the diachronic differences observed...

Simple Summary: Hunting is well documented in wild chimpanzees, but has rarely been documented in captive chimpanzees. At Fundació Mona Primate Rescue we have obtained evidence of five episodes of hunting in rehabilitated chimpanzees who had no previous experience of these types of behaviors. This demonstrated that they were able to perform this sp...

Clear hand laterality patterns in humans are widely accepted. However, humans only elicit a significant hand laterality pattern when performing complementary role differentiation (CRD) tasks. Meanwhile, hand laterality in chimpanzees is weaker and controversial. Here we have reevaluated our results on hand laterality in chimpanzees housed in natura...

We present here a study of some upper Pleistocene archaeological sites from central Spain. They are located at a karstic complex at de high Lozoya valley (Pinilla del Valle, Madrid). Navalmaíllo Shelter preserves lithics, hearths and highly anthropically altered fauna, which are common at camp sites. Buena Pinta Cave was mainly used as hyaena den,...

Recently, many studies have been conducted on manual laterality in chimpanzees. Nevertheless, whether nonhuman primates exhibit population-level handedness remains a topic of considerable debate. One of the behaviors studied has been bimanual coordinated actions. Although recent studies have highlighted that captive chimpanzees show handedness at p...

There is currently much debate about the nature of the social learning in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). The main question is whether they possess the ability to copy the actions of others, by imitation, or by reproducing the environmental effects of these actions, by emulation. This study explores the social learning abilities in 12 chimpanzees ho...

Manual functional asymmetries have been extensively studied in nonhuman primates and other animals over the last two decades. It is particularly interesting to see if brain hemispheric specialization, so characteristic of human beings, is present or not and to what extent in the animal kingdom. With chimpanzees, we find few studies that have assess...

El trabajo de investigación que se presenta tiene por objeto la delimitación de los factores que intervienen en la variabilidad de la industria lítica de los yacimientos mencionados en el título. El planteamiento básico es la reconstrucción de los procesos que han intervenido en la formación del registro lítico, mediante el estudio de las secuencia...

The aim of this paper was to determine what technical gestures must be learned in order to produce stone tools. To identify these gestures, we compared the performance of expert knappers and complete novices. We hypothesised that the differences between novices and experts would indicate which technical gestures experts had learned to successfully...

Homo is the only genus that responds to environmental pressures by adopting such strategies as non-standardized behaviour, a general diet, and technology. Considering that basic idea, this paper introduces the general hypothesis that the Pliocene and Early Pleistocene Homo dispersals within and out of Africa were consequences of that human characte...