Discovery of new open-air Paleolithic localities in Central Alborz, Northern Iran

The cooperative French-Iranian Paleoanthropological Project (FIPP) discovered three Paleolithic localities in Central Alborz, Northern Iran during its 2005 field mission. In the northern foothills near Baliran in Mazandaran province, Garm Roud yielded an open-air site with an archaeological layer attributable to the last glacial period that dates from the end of OIS 3 (28,486+/-190 cal BP). These geochronological data and the typo-technical observations converge to place the Garm Roud 2 assemblage in the Upper Paleolithic. Garm Roud 2 is thus the first site of this kind discovered in the area. In the southern foothills near Damavand in Tehran province, Moghanak and Otchounak represent two open-air surface localities with lithic assemblages of Mousterian to Ante-Mousterian affinity. Garm Roud, Moghanak, and Otchounak provide some of the first direct field evidence of early human settlements in this central area of the Middle East.