The Middle and Upper Paleolithic Archeology of the Levant and Beyond: (Replacement of Neanderthals by Modern Humans Series)

This volume is a compilation of results from sessions of the Second International Conference on the Replacement of Neanderthals by Modern Humans, which took place between November 30 and December 6, 2014, in Hokkaido, Japan. Similar to the first conference held in 2012 in Tokyo, the 2014 conference (RNMH2014) aimed to compile the results of the latest multidisciplinary approaches investigating the issues surrounding the replacement of Neanderthals by modern humans. The results of the sessions, supplemented by off-site contributions, center on the archeology of the Middle and Upper Paleolithic of the Levant and beyond. The first part of this volume presents recent findings from the Levant, while the second part focuses on the neighboring regions, namely, the Caucasus, the Zagros, and South Asia. The 13 chapters in this volume highlight the distinct nature of the cultural occurrences during the Middle and Upper Paleolithic periods of the Levant, displaying a continuous development as well as a combination of lithic traditions that may have originated in different regions. This syncretism, which is an unusual occurrence in the regions discussed in this volume, reinforces the importance of the Levant as a region for interpreting the RNMH phenomenon in West Asia.

Table of Contents:
Introduction.- An Open-Air Site at Nesher Ramla, Israel, and New Insights into Levantine Middle Paleolithic Technology and Site Use.- A Week in the Life of the Mousterian Hunter.- Chrono-cultural Considerations of Middle Paleolithic Occurrences at Manot Cave (Western Galilee), Israel.- Middle Palaeolithic Flint Mines in Mount Carmel: An Alternative Interpretation.- Initial Upper Palaeolithic Elements of the Keoue Cave, Lebanon.- The Ahmarian in the Context of the Earlier Upper Palaeolithic in the Near East.- Ahmarian or Levantine Aurignacian? Wadi Kharar 16R and New Insights into the Upper Palaeolithic Lithic Technology in the northeastern Levant.- Living on the Edge: The Earliest Modern Human Settlement of the Armenian Highlands in Aghitu-3 Cave.- The Middle to Upper Paleolithic Transition in the Zagros: The Appearance and Evolution of the Baradostian.- Upper Palaeolithic Raw Material Economy in the Southern Zagros Mountains of Iran.- Neanderthals and Modern Humans in the Indus Valley? The Middle and Late (Upper) Palaeolithic settlement of Sindh, a Forgotten Region of the Indian Subcontinent.- Ecological Niche and Least-cost Path Analyses to Estimate Optimal Migration Routes of Initial Upper Palaeolithic Populations to Eurasia.

About the Author :
Yoshihiro Nishiaki, who received his Ph.D. from University College London, is a professor of prehistory at the University Museum, The University of Tokyo. His research involves the archaeology of West and Central Asia mainly through technological analyses of flaked stone artifacts. He has directed numerous field investigations in West and Central Asia since 1984, including Paleolithic and Neolithic excavations in Syria, Azerbaijan, Iran, and Uzbekistan. He is currently the director of a large-scale research project, PaleoAsia, to investigate the formation processes of modern human cultures in Asia, a project supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan. He has served on the editorial board or scientific committee of a number of international associations, such as the International Union for Quaternary Research, the International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences, and Association Paléorient. Takeru Akazawa taught prehistoric anthropology as a professor at The University of Tokyo, the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, and Kochi University of Technology and is currently a professor emeritus at the latter two. His major research contributions cover a wide range of subjects in prehistoric anthropology, such as the hunter-gatherers’ adaptation in the Japanese archipelago and the Paleolithic human ecology in West Asia. Of the latter, the most notable were the multidisciplinary studies of the behavioral and cognitive characteristics of the Neanderthals. The outcomes of the research, which was based on a series of Neanderthal fossils discovered from his own excavations of the Dederiyeh Cave, Syria, have been published in numerous books and journals in the field of human evolution and prehistory, including the Replacement of Neanderthals and Modern Humans volumes, Springer, of which Prof. Akazawa is a series editor.