Scerri Eleanor M L, Groucutt Huw S, Jennings Richard P, Petraglia Michael D
PACEA, Université de Bordeaux, Bâtiment B19, Avenue des Facultés, 33405 Talence Cedex, France.
School of Archaeology, Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, University of Oxford, New Barnett House, 28 Little Clarendon Street, OX1 2HU Oxford, United Kingdom.
J Hum Evol. 2014 Oct;75:125-42. doi: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2014.07.002. Epub 2014 Aug 8.
The role and significance of the Arabian Peninsula in modern human dispersals out of Africa is currently contentious. While qualitative observations of similarities between Arabian Middle Palaeolithic and African Middle Stone Age (MSA) assemblages have been made, these inferences remain untested and often situated within overly broad dichotomies (e.g., 'Africa' versus the 'Levant'), which distort concepts of geographic scale and subsume local variability. Here, we quantitatively test the hypothesis that assemblages from Jubbah, in the Nefud Desert of northern Saudi Arabia are similar to MSA industries from northeast Africa. Based on the quantitative analysis of a suite of metric and morphological data describing lithic reduction sequences, our results show that early and late core reduction at Jubbah is distinct from equivalent northeast African strategies, perhaps as a result of raw material factors. However, specific techniques of core shaping, preparation and preferential flake production at Jubbah draw from a number of methods also present in the northeast African MSA. While two Jubbah lithic assemblages (JKF-1 and JKF-12) display both similarities and differences with the northeast African assemblages, a third locality (JSM-1) was significantly different to both the other Arabian and African assemblages, indicating an unexpected diversity of assemblages in the Jubbah basin during Marine Isotope Stage 5 (MIS 5, ∼125-70,000 years ago, or ka). Along with evidence from southern Arabia and the Levant, our results add quantitative support to arguments that MIS 5 hominin demography at the interface between Africa and Asia was complex.
阿拉伯半岛在现代人类从非洲扩散过程中的作用和意义目前存在争议。虽然已经对阿拉伯半岛旧石器时代中期与非洲中石器时代（MSA）组合之间的相似性进行了定性观察，但这些推断仍未得到验证，并且常常处于过于宽泛的二分法之中（例如，“非洲”与“黎凡特”），这扭曲了地理尺度的概念并掩盖了局部变异性。在此，我们定量检验了一个假设，即沙特阿拉伯北部内夫得沙漠朱巴的组合与东北非洲的MSA工业相似。基于对一系列描述石器加工序列的度量和形态数据的定量分析，我们的结果表明，朱巴的早期和晚期岩心加工与东北非洲的等效策略不同，这可能是原材料因素导致的。然而，朱巴岩心成型、制备和优先薄片生产的特定技术借鉴了东北非洲MSA中也存在的多种方法。虽然朱巴的两个石器组合（JKF - 1和JKF - 12）与东北非洲的组合既有相似之处也有不同之处，但第三个地点（JSM - 1）与其他阿拉伯和非洲组合都有显著差异，这表明在海洋同位素阶段5（MIS 5，约12.5 - 7万年前，或ka）期间，朱巴盆地的组合存在意想不到的多样性。连同来自阿拉伯半岛南部和黎凡特的证据，我们的结果为关于非洲和亚洲交界处MIS 5人类人口统计学复杂的观点提供了定量支持。
