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Journal of Human Evolution 60 (2011) 319

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Journal of Human Evolution

journal homepage: www.elsevier .com/locate/ jhevol

Editorial

Preface to the special issuedEarly-Middle Pleistocene Palaeoenvironment in theLevant

In May 2009, The Institute for Advanced Studies, HebrewUniversity of Jerusalem, with financial support from the IsraelScience Foundation, hosted a three-day workshop entitled “Theeffect of climate change on the environment and hominins of theUpper Jordan Valley between ca. 800 ka and 700 ka ago as a basisfor prediction of future scenarios.” The participants included earthscientists, archaeologists, and paleontologists from Israel, Europe,and the United States, and their presentations focused mainly onthe Acheulean site of Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov (GBY). GBY is locatedjust south of the Hula Valley in the northern Dead Sea Rift. Untilthe 1950’s, the valley housed a freshwater lake and marsh areasfed by the Jordan River, and the sediments at GBY reflect a moreexpansive lake, aptly called paleo-Lake Hula. The excavationsexposed a depositional sequence that reached a cumulative thick-ness of 34 m and that records a shift from reversed to normalgeomagnetic polarity. The paleomagnetic readings place the sedi-ments firmly between 800 ka and 700 ka. Archaeological investiga-tions at GBY began in the 1930’s, but the site achieved its presentprominence only after 1989, whenHebrewUniversity archaeologistNaama Goren-Inbar initiated a multidisciplinary research programdesigned to take full advantage of the site’s unique context andcontents. Goren-Inbar and her colleagues not only established thegeologic antiquity of the site, but their large, thoughtfully analyzedartifact samples revealed that GBY bore a striking resemblance tocontemporaneous African sites. Like their African contemporaries,the GBY Acheuleans preferentially chose volcanic rock for bifacemanufacture, and the bifaces and associated tools they producedhave a distinctly African flavor. Perhaps most telling are large basaltflakes that have a bulb of percussion on both surfaces. Similarpieces are otherwise common only in eastern and northern Africa,where they are often called Kombewa flakes.

At both GBY and the African sites, Kombewa flakes were oftenused to produce the guillotine-like bifaces known as cleavers, andthey place GBY firmly within the African Acheulean tradition. Onepossible explanation is that like some earlier and later Israeli sites,GBY marks a time when Africa expanded ecologically to incorpo-rate its southwest Asian periphery. A more intriguing alternativeis that it records an Out-of-Africa movement that paralleled theMediterranean coast and that could have produced, first, the stillsparsely known Acheulean of Anatolia and, later, the much betterknown Acheulean of Europe. The GBY animal remains support anOut-of-Africa event, for they include the oldest well-established

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Eurasian record of the straight-tusked woodland elephant, Elephas(Palaeoloxodon) antiquus, which evolved from E. (Palaeoloxodon)recki in Africa before 1 Ma. By 600 ka, E. antiquus or its descendantswere distributed from Spain to China, and its bones consistentlycharacterize the earliest well-documented European Acheuleansites, dated to between 600 ka and 300 ka.

Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov would be important if we knew only itsfirmly dated stone artifacts and associated animal fossils, but inaddition, prolonged water-logging means that the deposits alsopreserve bark, fruits, and seeds, some from edible plants, andfragments of wood, including a piece that the Acheulean inhabi-tants appear to have polished. The plant remains allow an unusu-ally detailed reconstruction of the lakeside environment and ofthe way in which Acheulean people may have exploited it. Infurther testimony to GBY’s unique information potential, themeticulous excavations have also revealed discrete clusters ofburned flint chips surrounded by spreads of mainly unburnedartifacts, bones, and vegetal remains. The clusters have been plau-sibly interpreted as the remnants of Acheulean fireplaces, andthey comprise the oldest widely accepted evidence for humanuse of fire.

This Special Issue of the Journal of Human Evolution derivesfrom the multidisciplinary presentations at the Workshop, manyof which emphasized the unique contribution of GBY to our under-standing of Acheulean behavior and ecology. Thus, the followingarticles are intended to bring the benefits of the Workshop toa wider audience, some by addressing aspects of GBY directly,others by placing it in a broader archaeological or paleoenviron-mental context. The Workshop organizers, Naama Goren-Inbarand Baruch Spiro, who also served as guest editors for this specialissue, have asked me to express their gratitude to JHE editor, StevenLeigh, and to his editorial assistants, Natalie Uhl and Jodi Blumen-feld, for their help and support. I thank the organizers for theopportunity to attend the Workshop and to learn more there andin this special issue about the unusually productive multidisci-plinary exploration of a key Acheulean site in both regional andtemporal contexts.

Richard KleinProgram in Human Biology, Stanford University,

Stanford, CA 94305, United StatesE-mail address: rklein@stanford.edu