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<< Other Photo Pages >> Qesem Cave - Cave or Rock Shelter in Israel

Submitted by davidmorgan on Friday, 11 November 2011  Page Views: 7133

Natural PlacesSite Name: Qesem Cave
Country: Israel
NOTE: This site is 0.538 km away from the location you searched for.
Type: Cave or Rock Shelter
Nearest Town: Tel Aviv
Latitude: 32.109943N  Longitude: 34.980007E
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
 no data Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
 no data Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
 4 Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
2co-ordinates of the nearest village
1co-ordinates of the nearest town
0no data
 4

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Qesem Cave
Qesem Cave submitted by bat400 : Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology digitize bones from Qesem Cave at Tel Aviv University. Photo to illustrate new story. Photo credit: Chantal Argoud (ESRF). (Vote or comment on this photo)
Cave or Rock Shelter in Israel. A limestone cave inhabited from the Lower Palaeolithic, 400,000 years ago. There may be evidence of very early Homo Sapiens found here.

Note: Scientists from Max Planck Institute digitize bones from Qesem Cave, curated at Tel Aviv University. See comment.
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"Qesem Cave" | Login/Create an Account | 5 News and Comments
  
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Early humans deliberately recycled flint to create tiny, sharp tools by Andy B on Friday, 12 July 2019
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A new Tel Aviv University study finds that prehistoric humans "recycled" discarded or broken flint tools 400,000 years ago to create small, sharp utensils with specific functions. These recycled tools were then used with great precision and accuracy to perform specific tasks involved in the processing of animal products and vegetal materials.

The site of Qesem Cave, located just outside Tel Aviv, was discovered during a road construction project in 2000. It has since offered up countless insights into life in the region hundreds of thousands of years ago.

In collaboration with Prof. Cristina Lemorini of Sapienza University of Rome, the research was led jointly by postdoctoral fellow Dr. Flavia Venditti in collaboration with Profs. Ran Barkai and Avi Gopher. All three are members of TAU's Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures. It was published on April 11th in the Journal of Human Evolution.

Read more at
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190529113105.htm
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The Disappearance of the Elephant Caused the Rise of Modern Man by Andy B on Wednesday, 18 January 2012
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Dietary change led to the appearance of modern humans in the Middle East 400,000 years ago, say TAU researchers

Elephants have long been known to be part of the Homo erectus diet. But the significance of this specific food source, in relation to both the survival of Homo erectus and the evolution of modern humans, has never been understood — until now.

When Tel Aviv University researchers Dr. Ran Barkai, Miki Ben-Dor, and Prof. Avi Gopher of TAU's Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies examined the published data describing animal bones associated with Homo erectus at the Acheulian site of Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in Israel, they found that elephant bones made up only two to three percent the total. But these low numbers are misleading, they say. While the six-ton animal may have only been represented by a tiny percentage of bones at the site, it actually provided as much as 60 percent of animal-sourced calories.

The elephant, a huge package of food that is easy to hunt, disappeared from the Middle East 400,000 years ago — an event that must have imposed considerable nutritional stress on Homo erectus. Working with Prof. Israel Hershkovitz of TAU's Sackler Faculty of Medicine, the researchers connected this evidence about diet with other cultural and anatomical clues and concluded that the new hominids recently discovered at Qesem Cave in Israel — who had to be more agile and knowledgeable to satisfy their dietary needs with smaller and faster prey — took over the Middle Eastern landscape and eventually replaced Homo erectus.

The findings, which have been reported in the journal PLoS One, suggest that the disappearance of elephants 400,000 years ago was the reason that modern humans first appeared in the Middle East. In Africa, elephants disappeared from archaeological sites and Homo sapiens emerged much later — only 200,000 years ago.

The perfect food package

Unlike other primates, humans' ability to extract energy from plant fiber and convert protein to energy is limited. So in the absence of fire for cooking, the Homo erectus diet could only consist of a finite amount of plant and protein and would have needed to be supplemented by animal fat. For this reason, elephants were the ultimate prize in hunting — slower than other sources of prey and large enough to feed groups, the giant animals had an ideal fat-to-protein ratio that remained constant regardless of the season. In short, says Ben-Dor, they were the ideal food package for Homo erectus.

When elephants began to die out, Homo erectus "needed to hunt many smaller, more evasive animals. Energy requirements increased, but with plant and protein intake limited, the source had to come from fat. He had to become calculated about hunting," Ben-Dor says, noting that this change is evident in the physical appearance of modern humans, lighter than Homo erectus and with larger brains.

To confirm these findings, the researchers compared archaeological evidence from two sites in Israel: Gesher B'not Yaakov, dating back nearly 800,000 years and associated with Homo erectus; and Qesem Cave, dated 400,000 to 200,000 years ago. Gesher B'not Yaakov contains elephant bones, but at Qesem Cave, which is bereft of elephant bones, the researchers discovered signs of post-erectus hominins, with blades and sophisticated behaviors such as food sharing and the habitual use of fire.

Evolution in the Middle East

Modern humans evolved in Africa 200,000 years ago, says Dr. Barkai, and the ruling paradigm is that this was their first worldwide appearance. Archaeological records tell us that elephants in Africa disappeared alongside the Acheulian culture with the emergence of modern humans there. Though elephants can be found today in Africa, few species survived and no evidence of the animal can be found in archaeological sites after 200,000 years ago. The similarity to the circumstances of the Middle East 400,000 yea

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Scientists digitise our prehistoric past by bat400 on Friday, 11 November 2011
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Researchers in Leipzig are compiling a ground-breaking digital archive of artefacts from around the world. Created to compare Neanderthals with modern man, the archive could revolutionise their field — which is exactly why many oppose it.

Visitors to Tel Aviv University are greeted by three skulls with seashells in their eye sockets and on a table behind them, a student completes a detailed drawing of the teeth in a human jaw. The bone chamber lies behind a simple steel door on the ground floor, located right next to the delivery entrance of the anatomy institute at Tel Aviv University, what looks like a simple storeroom is actually one of the world’s largest repositories of human history.

These are one-of-a-kind fossils that reveal a key episode in the history of the human species. Paleoanthropologists have excavated the bones of some three dozen individuals from the rocks in sites in northern Israel such as the Qesem cave. What is truly unique about their find is that the bones come from two different species of man. They indicate that modern man and Neanderthals once lived hardly a stone’s throw away from each other.

This raises a number of questions: Did the two cousins live here at the same time? Did they interact? Did the two rival species have their first confrontation in an evolutionary battle for world domination here in the Levant?

Last year’s decoding of the Neanderthal’s genetic make-up provided strong evidence in support of this thesis. Researchers working under Svante Paabo, the director of the Department of Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, found that modern Eurasians inherited a small portion of their DNA sequence from Neanderthals. This suggests that the two species must have had sexual intercourse.

What’s more, the genetic researchers were also able to narrow down the time-frame of this momentous genetic intermingling. According to their findings, the intercourse took place between 65,000 and 90,000 years after modern man set foot on the Eurasian landmass, presumably on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean.

Scientists are now trying to determine the exact relationship the inhabitants of caves in Israel had with the forefathers of modern-day Eurasians. In particular, they are examining the fossil remains to see if there are traces of the interaction between the two species.

Jean-Jacques Hublin becomes almost sentimental as he carefully lifts the skull and jaw bones from their drawers. “As far as I’m concerned, they belong — so to speak — to my family,” says the 57-year-old paleoanthropologist from the Max Planck Institute.
Hublin, who has become one of the leaders in his field, has now returned to Israel in the hope of unlocking the secrets of the finds he once helped to salvage and to aid scientists in deciphering the enigmatic creature known as the Neanderthal.

When Hublin arrived in Israel from Leipzig, the custodians of these precious fossils regarded him with both awe and suspicion. Of course, they had grown used to having visitors in the form of scholars travelling here from all over the world to inspect the most famous pieces in the collection. But this time was different.

Hublin and his team of researchers didn’t arrive with sketch pads and sliding calipers instead, their luggage was packed with hi-tech devices weighing tons. Their plan was to use a mobile computer tomography machine to make digital images of as many of the fossils as they could.

Hublin predicts that doing so “will fundamentally alter paleoanthropology.” Instead of having to travel from museum to museum, researchers could soon be able to examine finds from around the world from their home computers. What’s more, the images often even allow them to recognize details that would have escaped notice under the naked eye.

Hublin has already travelled with his equipment to South Africa, Kenya, Morocco, Croatia and Russia to X-ray all the fossils

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Human remains spark spat - ancient teeth could rewrite human evolution by davidmorgan on Wednesday, 05 January 2011
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The Qesem Cave site in Israel had yielded ancient human teeth with controversial implications.

A handful of ancient human remains from Israel garnered a huge burst of media coverage this week, as claims that the finds could "rewrite the history of human evolution" were quickly followed by a backlash from the blogosphere.

Many of the initial reports were based on a Tel Aviv University press release about a paper published in The American Journal of Physical Anthropology by Israeli and Spanish scientists. The paper detailed the discovery, in Qesem Cave near Tel Aviv, of eight human teeth dating to between 200,000 and 400,000 years ago. This makes them among the oldest significant early human remains found anywhere in southwest Asia.

According to the paper, the teeth cannot be conclusively identified as belonging to a particular species of human, whether Homo sapiens — the first modern humans — Neanderthals, or other humans. But the press release and some of the articles that drew on it state that the teeth are evidence that Homo sapiens lived in the Levant as early as 400,000 years ago. This contrasts with the prevailing view of human evolution, which suggests that Homo sapiens arose in Africa roughly 200,000 years ago.

The discrepancy between the media coverage and the paper was seized upon by science bloggers Carl Zimmer and Brian Switek, who objected to the hype around the research.

Nature spoke to Avi Gopher, an archaeologist from Tel Aviv University and a co-author of the paper, about the discovery and its press coverage.

Do the teeth that you found in Qesem Cave really provide evidence that Homo sapiens did not evolve in Africa?

We don't know. What I can say is that they definitely leave all options open. There's been a tendency for people to get so accustomed to the "out of Africa" hypothesis that they use it exclusively and explain any finding that doesn't fit it as evidence of yet another wave of migration out of Africa.

Were you surprised by press reports making claims that didn't appear in your paper?

I told all the reporters I spoke to, to be very cautious what they wrote. But that's what happens. [Gopher also defended the press release as being worded "more sharply" than the paper but that "it was not incorrect"]

But your paper clearly avoids saying the teeth came from modern humans, although it points out traits that overlap with Neanderthal characteristics. Is there enough evidence to link them with a specific species of early human?

Teeth contain a lot of information. At this point we've gone as far as we can on the level of basic analysis [looking at the shape and wear patterns of the teeth]. Because we wanted to preserve the teeth, we haven't yet tried to extract DNA or, for example, to dissect the teeth to get information about diet.

What I've done, with Israel Hershkovitz, Ran Barkai, and my other Israeli colleagues, is compare them to a large database of early human teeth compiled by our Spanish collaborators. The best match for these teeth are those from the Skhul and Qafzeh caves in northern Israel, which date later [to between 80,000 and 120,000 years ago] and which are generally thought to be modern humans of sorts.

If we were to take your teeth out and my teeth out and put them on a table together with early human teeth, we'd find that some of our teeth are very like some of the early human teeth. There is a range of variation and no single unique trait that identifies a tooth unambiguously as modern or archaic or Neanderthal. We offer the most reasonable conclusion based on the statistical evidence: that they represent the same population as the Skhul and Qafzeh finds, thus pushing the date for that type of early man back to a much earlier time.
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101231/full/news.2010.700.html

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No Longer Out of Africa but out of the Middle East by davidmorgan on Tuesday, 28 December 2010
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Did first humans come out of Middle East and not Africa? Israeli discovery forces scientists to re-examine evolution of modern man.

Scientists could be forced to re-write the history of the evolution of modern man after the discovery of 400,000-year-old human remains. Until now, researchers believed that homo sapiens, the direct descendants of modern man, evolved in Africa about 200,000 years ago and gradually migrated north, through the Middle East, to Europe and Asia. Recently, discoveries of early human remains in China and Spain have cast doubt on the 'Out of Africa' theory, but no-one was certain.

The new discovery of pre-historic human remains by Israeli university explorers in a cave near Ben-Gurion airport could force scientists to re-think earlier theories.

Archeologists from Tel Aviv University say eight human-like teeth found in the Qesem cave near Rosh Ha’Ayin - 10 miles from Israel’s international airport - are 400,000 years old, from the Middle Pleistocene Age, making them the earliest remains of homo sapiens yet discovered anywhere in the world.

The size and shape of the teeth are very similar to those of modern man. Until now, the earliest examples found were in Africa, dating back only 200,000 years. Other scientists have argued that human beings originated in Africa before moving to other regions 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. Homo sapiens discovered in Middle Awash, Ethiopia, from 160,000 years ago were believed to be the oldest 'modern' human beings. Other remains previously found in Israeli caves are thought to have been more recent and 80,000 to 100,000 years old.

The findings of Professor Avi Gopher and Dr Ran Barkai of the Institute of Archeology at Tel Aviv University, published last week in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, suggest that modern man did not originate in Africa as previously believed, but in the Middle East. The Qesem cave was discovered in 2000 and has been the focus of intense study ever since. Along with the teeth – the parts of the human skeleton that survive the longest – the researchers found evidence of a sophisticated early human society that used sharpened flakes of stone to cut meat and other impressive prehistoric tools.

The Israeli scientists said the remains found in the cave suggested the systematic production of flint blades, the habitual use of fire, evidence of hunting, cutting and sharing of animal meat, and mining raw materials to produce flint tools from rocks below ground.
'A diversified assemblage of flint blades was manufactured and used,' the Tel Aviv scientists wrote, describing the tools they found in the cave 'Thick-edged blades, shaped through retouch, were used for scraping semi-hard materials such as wood or hide, whereas blades with straight, sharp working edges were used to cut soft tissues.' The explorers said they were continuing to investigate the cave and its contents, expecting to make more discoveries that would shed further light on human evolution in prehistoric times.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1341973/Did-humans-come-Middle-East-Africa-Scientists-forced-write-evolution-modern-man.html#ixzz17dfdu26C

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