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carved and incised antler and bone art works as well as painted pebbles.
Reconstruction of a pierced staff with a carved heath cock found at Le Mas d’Azil
(Gianni Dagli Orti/Corbis)
See also
References
Gamble, C. 1986. The Paleolithic Settlement of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Le Moustier is the type site of the Mousterian industry (from the Middle Paleolithic period, 180,000–30,000 years ago) found in Europe and northeastern Africa and into central Asia. The rockshelter site was first excavated by édouard lartet and henry christy as part of their work in southwestern france, which began in 1863. Although there is still debate about the nature of Mousterian assemblages, it is often assumed that there is an association between Neanderthal remains and the Mousterian. Difficult problems related to the explanation of variability within Mousterian assemblages remain and were at the center of celebrated exchanges between prehistorians françois bordes and lewis binford.
See also
References
Gamble, C. 1986. The Paleolithic Settlement of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(1903–1972)
Leakey was born in Kenya, East Africa, to missionary parents and grew up among the tribal Kikuyu. He went to secondary school in England and then to St John’s College Cambridge in 1922 where he studied languages, archaeology, and anthropology. In 1926 he returned to East Africa and began to investigate the prehistory of the Rift Valley, which he published in Stone Age Cultures of Kenya Colony (1931). He married the artist and archaeological draftsperson Mary Douglas Nichol in 1936.
Between 1936 and 1962 many examples of Australopithecus (small-brained, bipedal hominid fossils, extant between five million and one million years ago) were found in South Africa (at the sites of Sterkfontein, kromdraai, Makapansgat, and swartkrans), firmly establishing the study of the earliest archaeological records in the world. Unlike many of his European contemporaries Louis Leakey believed that Africa, and not Central Asia, was where humanity had originated. During the 1940s Louis and mary leakey pioneered Paleolithic “living-floor” archaeology at olorgesailie, investigating fossil pollens and paleo-environmental data in an attempt to more fully interpret the stone tools from the same levels. They also began looking for the makers of the Oldawan stone tools they had found in the ancient deposits of the olduvai gorge, an ancient lake basin in northern Tanzania in the East African Rift Valley. In 1959 the hominid cranium, called Zinjanthropus (East African man) boisei or OH 5 was found. “Zinj” was the first hominid to be dated by the potassium-argon (K/Ar) method, a new technique, and was found to be 1.7 million years old. Zinjanthropus was also the first hominid to be excavated on television, and event that not only captured public imagination but also grabbed the attention of the American National Geographic Society, who were to provide ongoing financial support for the Leakeys’ work. “Zinj” also caused some scientific controversy.
Louis Leakey first concluded that OH 5 was the ancestor of modern humans and not another ancestral form of the South African Australopithecines—which in fact it subsequently became. Then the remains of another, more advanced hominid (i.e., with a larger brain capacity) were found close by, and in 1964 Leakey claimed that this find, Homo habilis, superceded OH 5 as the early human ancestor, directly connected to Homo sapiens. While Leakey’s simplistic views on human evolution have now been generally rejected, his finds were a significant contribution to the knowledge of fossil human evolution. International funding for research in this area increased and archaeologists and Paleo-anthropologists from America and Europe began to work in Africa searching for the origins of the whole of humanity. Leakey’s work had shifted interest from Europe and Asia
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