Origins and Revolutions: Human Identity in Earliest Prehistory by Clive Gamble

Author:Clive Gamble [Gamble, Clive]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2007-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

For Clark, Foley and Lahr the Australian sequence indicates little beyond a Mode 3 technology even though the continent was first colonised when Mode 4 was widespread in the Old World. Their argument is that Mode 3 is a more reliable archaeological signature of Modern humans than Mode 4 since it can be found with them in Africa at 300,000 or Australia 60,000 years ago. Furthermore, Mode 3 was available to other species such as the Eurasian Neanderthals during this quarter of a million years which implies that the cognitive and evolutionary changes which began around 300,000 years ago in Africa and Eurasia had significant consequences for the social technologies of more than one hominin.

In Foley and Lahr's (1997:26) opinion ‘blades are regionally not globally important’. For them the later development of blades has more to do with the subsequent differentiation of groups through material culture and is not indicative of the first appearance of modern human behaviour (Foley 2001b:192). Consequently both prismatic and Levallois PCTs are widely cited as evidence for planning and anticipation (Table 7.8) that would be expected with modern human behaviour (Bar-Yosef 2002).

Table 7.8. Binford’s definitions of forward thinking associated with modern humans rather than Neanderthals, blade rather than flake PCTs (1989:19–20)

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