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Regional Perspectives on the Soviet Central Asian Paleolithic

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Part of the book series: Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology ((IDCA))

Abstract

In his concluding remarks to the recently published Paleolithic of the U.S.S.R., Boriskovsky (1984b) turned to the famous site of Teshik Tash in Uzbekistan. He recounted Teshik-Tash’s excavator’s, Okladnikov’s observation made in 1949 that the Neanderthalers showed a degree of collective solidarity and reciprocal exchange somewhat unusual for peoples of the Ancient Paleolithic. (In the Soviet Union, the term Ancient Paleolithic, “Drevniy Paleolit, ” traditionally includes the European term Middle Paleolithic as well as Lower Paleolithic). The basis for this observation was that the faunal material in the cave did not consist of complete skeletons of the Siberian mountain goat, the principal source of meat, but consisted instead of portions of the carcass. Both Boriskovsky and Okladnikov inferred that the hunters’ behavior which created this faunal pattern must have been butchering at a kill site some distance from the cave and subsequent transport of selected portions to the site. There, the meat was shared with the nonhunting members of the group.

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© 1987 Plenum Press, New York

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Davis, R.S. (1987). Regional Perspectives on the Soviet Central Asian Paleolithic. In: Soffer, O. (eds) The Pleistocene Old World. Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-1817-0_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-1817-0_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4612-9016-2

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