The first lithic industry of mainland Southeast Asia: Evidence of the earliest hominin in a tropical context

Recent discoveries of ancient sites in mainland Southeast Asia confirm the presence of old lithic industries as early as 0.8 Ma, i.e., at the transition between the Early to Middle Pleistocene. Although these open-air sites still require geochronological and biostratigraphic precisions, they allow us to understand the oldest vestiges of human presence in the tropics and the technical orientations chosen by these hominins. This article aims to present an objective and critical synthesis of the material discovered at the main sites. Some sites in Cambodia and Thailand have been the subject of archaeological field missions by the Ministère de l’Europe et des Affaires Étrangères (MEAE). The diversity of lithic tool types and manufacture methods encountered from the Middle Pleistocene in peninsular Asia shows a technical variability that stands out as a counterexample to diffusionist hypotheses of a cultural fabrication inherited from the West. The diversity of production methods, tools, and raw material matrices remains incomparable to those encountered in the West, Africa, or South Asia. To date, only evidence from China has allowed us to put forward the hypothesis of a common technical basis that would have spread from its southern territories; however, this hypothesis is currently under debate. Researchers have proposed the idea of continuous technical progress and the shift from heavy industry to a lighter and polished stone in Southeast Asia. However, the omnipresence of the pebble prevents a clear conclusion because these technical objects from Southeast Asia are quite simply incommensurable; a chopper in these regions may not be comparable with another chopper from the terraces of the Garonne or the Roussillon in France, for example. In other words, these tools are above all ‘tropical’ tools, and they belong to a distant cognitive world(s) with specific use(s), gesture(s), and meaning(s), making it impossible for them to be compared or evaluated by our faculty of Western judgment.     

Aux origines de la Spiritualité : la notion de transcendance au Paléolithique

In a previous note we presented the expression of the late paleolithic spirituality (Welté and Lambert, 2004). A special analytic grid was used as a possible tool for a demonstration. We separeted rationality from metaphysic; notions which are linked with dialectic relations between necessity (daily constraints), thought, action and evolution in the paleolithic period. Starting from the no direct material activities like burials, funeral materials and art, we purpose now that such notions existed before the upper Paleolithic. We infer that a privilegious set of interactions between the animal and the human appeared early in the thought of the people, before the upper Paleolithic. A metaphysic univers forced itself upon them as an evident “anti-world” which is the symmetric shape of the real and tangible world. In such a context, the social system(s) could not discard these duality.     

Évolution de la préhension chez les primates humains et non humains : la précision et l'utilisation d'outils revisitées

The term “precision”, involving the contact between the tips of thumb and the index is generally attributed to humans, tool use and associated with morphological criteria. Identified in fossils, those criteria are used to assert that they manipulated tools. Observations of 69 individuals belonging to Catarrhines and Platyrrhines allowed us to quantify surfaces of fingers used during simple tasks of grasping both small and large objects, as well as during complex tasks of proto-tool and tool use. We concluded that precision grasping is not peculiar to humans and that it is not systematically linked to tool use. These results allowed us to discuss morphological traits used till now to deduce precision and tool use from the fossils. Besides, our analyses let appear a recurrent proximity between the capuchins and the humans, species distant in a phylogenetic point of view, suggesting the possible existence of functions and close behaviours in spite of great genetic distinctions.     

Plaidoyer pour un outillage lithique de l’Âge du fer : le cas des maillets à gorge de l’Ouest de la France

The attention is turned here to one kind of tools, characterized by a special morphology: the grooved hammer-stones. They are known in Europe and all over the world in various cultures, as Neolithic or Bronze Age remains and generally linked to extraction or mining activity; but, the discovery of several of these tools in western France, within pre-roman archaeological contexts, especially in sites devoted to marine salt production, leads us to a discussion on dating and the function of such tools, and feeds a more general reflexion about the existence of a specialised lithic set of tools during the Iron Age.