There's probably nothing "new", but some folks who, for one reason or another, do not have access to the Current Anthropology article (Hovers,et al. 2003), might be interested in a short piece Bruce Bower has written in this week's
Science News (Nov. 1, 2003; Vol. 164, No. 18), also appearing on the Science News website:
CLICK HERE FOR THE URL,
A color photo of one of the ocher pieces accompanies the web article.
Dar
It reads as a decent summary. Science News appears, to me, to be one of the few decent magazines which fairaly accurately summarises archaeological findings and in a readable format. Certain newspapers can learn from them.
My physical copy of CA is in the post and should be arriving in the next 4 weeks. I have not read the pdf but, glancing through it, I liked the following at the end of the authors' reply to the comments on their article:
Archaeologically, the Late Out of Africa model may with
some difficulty explain the European Upper Pleistocene
record but not that of the Levant prior to 50,000 years
ago. The Qafzeh Cave ochre record clearly satisfies the
criterion established by Chase and Dibble (1987) and by
Klein, namely, that credible claims for modern human
behavioral markers before 50,000 years ago “must involve
relatively large numbers of highly patterned objects
from deeply stratified, sealed contexts” (Klein 2000:
28). A number of African sites possibly attest to similar
patterning from roughly the same and even earlier time
(Barham 2002; Brooks et al. 1995; Deino and McBrearty
2002; Henshilwood et al. 2001, 2002; Yellen 1996, 1998;
see discussion in Klein 2000). These occurrences can
(with difficulty, we believe) be explained as the products
of humans who were “cognitively advanced in the direction
of modern humans,” as Klein suggests. But what
is to be made of the Levantine Upper Paleolithic record
post–50,000 years ago, in which little of the traditional
package of “behavioral modernity” is to be found beyond
the proliferation of blade technologies (Belfer-Cohen
1988; Hovers 1992, 1997)? The overall picture would
seem to suggest that both H. neanderthalensis and H.
sapiens had the capacity for symbolic behavior and that
the difference in the expressions of this capacity may be
due to demographic and social circumstances more than
to biological differences. The sporadic and erratic expressions
of modern behavior in the Eurasian Middle Paleolithic
(and, indeed, the Upper Paleolithic as well) may
reflect the instability of mechanisms of long-term communal
memory and failure to retain and inherit social
knowledge, possibly due to the instability of demographic
systems. This would also account for the different
trajectories of establishment and development of
modern human behavior in various geographical regions
(Belfer-Cohen and Hovers 2002, Hovers and Belfer-Cohen
n.d.).
