Sultan Muhesen

Middle Palaeolithic bitumen use at Umm el Tlel around 70,000 BP

The authors identify natural bitumen on stone implements dating to 70,000 BP. It is proposed that this represents residue from hafting, taking the practice back a further 30,000 years from the date previously noted and published in Nature. The bitumen was tracked to a source 40km away, using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and carbon isotopes

Bitumen as Hafting Material on Middle Paleolithic Artifacts from the El Kowm Basin, Syria

The El Kowm basin in Central Syria is located between the Palmyra basin and the valley of the Euphrates River (Figure 1). It is a depression 25 km wide and 80 km long, dominated to the east by Jabal Bicheri (rising to 850 m above sea level) and to the south by Jabal Minshar (879 m) and Jabal Mqaibara (1110 m). Running down the center of this natural basin is an elongated plateau, the Qdeir plateau, carved out by Quaternary erosion (Figure 2). During surveys in 1978 directed by T. Fujimoto (1979) and J. Cauvin (Cauvin et al. 1979), numerous lithic assemblages were discovered in the backdirt of many ancient wells situated on the periphery of the plateau or on the surface of tells. Since that time, two Middle Paleolithic sites have been excavated. One is the site of Hummal, situated on the plateau 3 km from the tell of El Kowm (Hours 1982; Le Tensorer and Hours 1989); the other is the site of Umm El Tlel, located on the northern slope of the Qdeir plateau (Molist et al. 1988; Boeda and Muhesen 1993). Among the material collected at these two sites, we identified 16 artifacts, 15 flint and one limestone, which showed traces of a black substance on one or more surfaces. On

Anatomy of the Neandertal Infant Skeleton from Dederiyeh Cave, Syria

A human infant skeleton was discovered in the Mousterian formation at Dederiyeh Cave, northern Syria, in 1993 by the team of the Japan-Syrian joint expedition (Akazawa et al. 1995a,b). The skeleton was lying in the expected anatomical position embedded in a stratigraphic entity that contained a “Tabun B-type” Mousterian industry. The preservation of the bones was remarkably good, and all the vertebrae and the left ribs were identifiable (Figure 1). This paper will focus only on the anatomical aspects of the skeleton. The good preservation will allow us to assign the specimen to a taxon fairly easily despite its immature state.