Burial, Paleolithic

The limited nature of the evidence from the Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age, a period beginning over 2.5 million years ago, poses a challenge to archaeologists. Funerary deposits seem to have been limited to cave sites; however, this may indicate more about how artifacts and ancient deposits survive than it does about the limits of cultural practice. During this period there were a number of destructive geoclimatic events, including ice ages, which may account for the absence of evidence since individual hominid species and early human populations may have numbered in the tens of thousands, not tens of millions. Cave sites may have survived continental ice sheets as they were sheltered, just as deeply buried deposits may have survived but are difficult to identify and more difficult still to excavate. Despite the limited and fragmentary nature of the archaeological record, it is evident that it is the Paleolithic that demonstrates first the emergence of human culture and a growing awareness, or at least representation, of human mortality.

Archaeologists have divided the Paleolithic into three phases: the Lower, Middle, and Upper Paleolithic. The Lower Paleolithic is the period from around 2.5 million to about 100,000 years ago and is characterized by the emergence of the Homo genus and the development of stone tools. The Middle Paleolithic is roughly the period 300,000 to 30,000 years ago, although there are regional variations in this dating. This middle period is characterized by the emergence of modern man, Homo sapiens, between 130,000 and 200,000 years ago. Homo neanderthalensis occupied most of Europe during the Middle Paleolithic, and there is debate about the nature of the interaction between these two species. The Upper Paleolithic is often considered to start around 40,000 to 30,000 and have lasted to about 10,000 years ago. It is a period characterized by the survival of more significant numbers of cultural artifacts and art, such as cave painting, campsites, and Venus figurines, as well as advances in the technology of flint tools seen in the utilization of blades rather than choppers or flakes, which may have had a specific function. Bone and antler artifacts such as harpoons also survive.

Lower Paleolithic

There is no evidence for a burial tradition in the Lower Paleolithic, but it is important to understand the development of humans as part of the development of a cultural or social awareness. The early hominids of this period had a more sophisticated social structure than chimpanzees, had larger brains, and made more elaborate stone tools. They seem to have developed a society [Page 121]based on hunting and gathering and used stone tool technology based on flint choppers made from large pebbles. Little evidence from this period survives and that which does often consists of small collections of bones, collection of flint, or, very rarely, kill sites where stone tools and animal bones coexist in the same space.

Two possibly anthropomorphic figures may be associated with the Lower Paleolithic. The Venus of Tan-Tan, found in Morocco, is a small quartz object that might have represented a genderless figure and may have been painted in red ochre. The Venus of Berekhat Ram, Golan Heights, is a red stone object that, like the Venus of Tan Tan, seems to have been manipulated to resemble a human form. Much controversy surrounds both objects and the intentionality of their crude anthropomorphic shapes; however, they do seem to be altered by hominid hands and both date to over 250,000 years ago.

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