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Solutrean
The Solutrean industry is a relatively advanced flint tool-making style of the Upper Paleolithic of the Final Gravettian, from around 22,000 to 17,000 BP. Solutrean sites have been found in modern-day France, Spain and Portugal. Details The term ''Solutrean'' comes from the type-site of " Cros du Charnier", dating to around 21,000 years ago and located at Solutré, in east-central France near Mâcon. The Rock of Solutré site was discovered in 1866 by the French geologist and paleontologist Henry Testot-Ferry. It is now preserved as the Parc archéologique et botanique de Solutré. The industry was named by Gabriel de Mortillet to describe the second stage of his system of cave chronology, following the Mousterian, and he considered it synchronous with the third division of the Quaternary period. The era's finds include tools, ornamental beads, and bone pins as well as prehistoric art. Solutrean tool-making employed techniques not seen before and not rediscovere ...
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Cro-Magnon
Cro-Magnons or European early modern humans (EEMH) were the first early modern humans (''Homo sapiens'') to settle in Europe, migrating from western Asia, continuously occupying the continent possibly from as early as 56,800 years ago. They interacted and interbred with the indigenous Neanderthals (''H. neanderthalensis'') of Europe and Western Asia, who went extinct 35,000 to 40,000 years ago. The first wave of modern humans in Europe ( Initial Upper Paleolithic) left no genetic legacy to modern Europeans; however, from 37,000 years ago a second wave succeeded in forming a single founder population, from which all subsequent Cro-Magnons descended and which contributes ancestry to present-day Europeans. Cro-Magnons produced Upper Palaeolithic cultures, the first major one being the Aurignacian, which was succeeded by the Gravettian by 30,000 years ago. The Gravettian split into the Epi-Gravettian in the east and Solutrean in the west, due to major climatic degradation during ...
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Gravettian
The Gravettian is an archaeological industry of the European Upper Paleolithic that succeeded the Aurignacian circa 33,000 years BP. It is archaeologically the last European culture many consider unified, and had mostly disappeared by  22,000 BP, close to the Last Glacial Maximum, although some elements lasted until  17,000 BP. In modern-day Portugal, Spain and France, it was succeeded by the Solutrean and by the Epigravettian in Italy, the Balkans, Ukraine and Russia. The Gravettian culture is known for their artistic works including the famous Venus figurines, which were typically carved from either ivory or limestone. The culture was first identified at the site of La Gravette in the southwestern French department of Dordogne.Kipfer, Barbara Ann. "Encyclopedic Dictionary of Archaeology". Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2000. P. 216. While historically assumed to represent a genetically homogenous group, recent analysis of ancient DNA sequences suggests tha ...
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Rock Of Solutré
The Rock of Solutré (French: ''Roche de Solutré'') is a limestone escarpment west of Mâcon, France, overlooking the Communes of France, commune of Solutré-Pouilly. It is an iconic site in the Departments of France, department of Saône-et-Loire, in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté. Protected by the French law on ''sites naturels classés'' and currently at the heart of a ''grand site national'' operation, the outcropping is notable in several aspects: as a rare geological phenomenon of the region, as a prehistory, prehistoric site of the eponymous Solutrean, Solutrean paleolithic culture, and for the natural environment at its summit, the Calcareous grassland, ''pelouse calciole'' grassland of Mâcon, with its distinctive flora and fauna. Occupied by humans for at least 55,000 years, it is also located in the heart of the Pouilly-Fuissé wine appellation. It has attracted media coverage since the 1980s, when French President François Mitterrand began his annual ritual ascent of th ...
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Upper Paleolithic
The Upper Paleolithic (or Upper Palaeolithic) is the third and last subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. Very broadly, it dates to between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago (the beginning of the Holocene), according to some theories coinciding with the appearance of behavioral modernity in early modern humans. It is followed by the Mesolithic. Anatomically modern humans (i.e. ''Homo sapiens'') are believed to have emerged in Africa around 300,000 years ago. It has been argued by some that their ways of life changed relatively little from that of archaic humans of the Middle Paleolithic, until about 50,000 years ago, when there was a marked increase in the diversity of Artefact (archaeology), artefacts found associated with modern human remains. This period coincides with the most common date assigned to early human migrations, expansion of modern humans from Africa throughout Asia and Eurasia, which may have contributed to the Neanderthal extinction, extinction of th ...
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Magdalenian
Magdalenian cultures (also Madelenian; ) are later cultures of the Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic in western Europe. They date from around 17,000 to 12,000 years before present. It is named after the type site of Abri de la Madeleine, a rock shelter () located in the Vézère valley of Tursac in Dordogne, France. Édouard Lartet and Henry Christy originally termed the period ''L'âge du renne'' "the age of the reindeer". They conducted the first archaeological excavation of the type site, publishing in 1875. The Magdalenian is associated with reindeer hunters. Magdalenian sites contain extensive evidence for the hunting of red deer, wild horses, and other megafauna present in Europe toward the end of the Last Glacial Period. The culture was geographically widespread, and later Magdalenian sites stretched from Portugal in the west to Poland in the east, and as far north as France, the Channel Islands, England, and Wales. Besides la Madeleine, the chief stations of the Ma ...
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Henry Testot-Ferry
Henry Bernard Alfred Testot-Ferry also known as Henry de Ferry (5 February 1826, La Chapelle-la-Reine, Seine-et-Marne – 9 November 1869, Bussières, Saône-et-Loire) was a French geologist, archeologist and paleontologist. He was discoverer of the prehistoric site at the Rock of Solutré. Family Testot-Ferry was the youngest son of Baron Claude Testot-Ferry and his wife Joséphine Elizabeth Claudine Fabry. Henry's father was a hero of the Napoleonic Wars who had been ennobled by Emperor Napoleon I and died at Châtillon-sur-Seine. After a somewhite idle youth typical of the "gilded youth" of the 19th century, in which hunting was his chief passion, he married in 1852, at the advice (or perhaps the insistence) of his older brother Gustave. His wife was Louise Madeleine O'Brien, descendant of the O'Brien clan of Munster, which had given rise to several Kings of Ireland, and which had been received to courtly honours under Louis XV of France in 1737. O'Brien brought as dowry ...
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Creswell Crags
Creswell Crags is an enclosed limestone gorge on the border between Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, England, near the villages of Creswell and Whitwell. The cliffs in the ravine contain several caves that were occupied during the last ice age, between around 43,000 and 10,000 years ago. Its caves contain the northernmost cave art in Europe. Creswell Crags forms part of the Welbeck Estate. It is a Scheduled monument and a Site of Special Scientific Interest. The evidence of occupation found in the rich series of sediments that accumulated over many thousands of years is regarded as internationally unique in demonstrating how prehistoric people managed to live at the extreme northernmost limits of their territory during the Late Pleistocene period. The caves contain occupation layers with evidence of flint tools from the Mousterian, proto- Solutrean, Creswellian and Maglemosian cultures. They were seasonally occupied by nomadic groups of people during the Upper Palaeol ...
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Louis Laurent Gabriel De Mortillet
Louis Laurent Gabriel de Mortillet (29 August 1821 – 25 September 1898), French archaeologist and anthropologist, was born at Meylan, Isère. Biography Mortillet was educated at the Jesuit college of Chambéry and at the Paris Conservatoire. Becoming in 1847 proprietor of '' La Revue indépendante'', he was implicated in the Revolution of 1848 and sentenced to two years' imprisonment. He fled the country and during the next fifteen years lived abroad, chiefly in Italy. In 1858 he turned his attention to ethnological research, making a special study of the Swiss lake-dwellings. He also issued three works on the evidence for early man in North Italy, the third making a then unprecedented association with the Ice Age. He returned to Paris in 1863, and soon afterwards was appointed curator of the newly created Musée des Antiquités Nationales at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, with responsibility for the Stone Age collections. He became mayor of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and in 1885 he ...
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Lithic Reduction
In archaeology, in particular of the Stone Age, lithic reduction is the process of fashioning stones or rocks from their natural state into tools or weapons by removing some parts. It has been intensely studied and many archaeological industries are identified almost entirely by the lithic analysis of the precise style of their tools and the chaîne opératoire of the reduction techniques they used. Normally the starting point is the selection of a piece of tool stone that has been detached by natural geological processes, and is an appropriate size and shape. In some cases solid rock or larger boulders may be quarried and broken into suitable smaller pieces, and in others the starting point may be a piece of the debitage, a flake removed from a previous operation to make a larger tool. The selected piece is called the lithic core (also known as the "objective piece"). A basic distinction is that between flaked or knapped stone, the main subject here, and ground stone ...
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Archaeological Industry
In the archaeology of the Stone Age, an industry or technocomplex is a typology (archaeology), typological classification of stone tools. An industry consists of a number of lithic Assemblage (archeology ), assemblages, typically including a range of different types of tools, that are grouped together on the basis of shared technological or Morphology (archaeology), morphological characteristics. For example, the Acheulean industry includes Hand axe, hand-axes, Cleaver (tool), cleavers, Scraper (archaeology), scrapers and other tools with different forms, but which were all manufactured by the symmetrical Lithic reduction, reduction of a Biface, bifacial Lithic core, core producing large flakes. Industries are usually named after a type site where these characteristics were first observed (e.g. the Mousterian industry is named after the site of Le Moustier). By contrast, Neolithic axeheads from the Langdale axe industry were recognised as a type well before the centre at Great L ...
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Ibex
An ibex ( : ibex, ibexes or ibices) is any of several species of wild goat (genus ''Capra''), distinguished by the male's large recurved horns, which are transversely ridged in front. Ibex are found in Eurasia, North Africa and East Africa. Taxonomy The name ''ibex'' comes from Latin, borrowed from Iberian or Aquitanian, akin to Old Spanish ''bezerro'', 'bull', modern Spanish ''becerro'', 'yearling'. Ranging in height from and weighing for males, ibex can live up to 20 years. Three closely related varieties of goats found in the wild are not usually called ibex: the markhor, western tur, and eastern tur. A male ibex is referred to as a buck, a female is a doe, and young juveniles are called kids. An ibex buck is commonly larger and heavier than a doe. The most noticeable difference between the sexes is the larger size of a buck's horns. The doe grows a pair of smaller, thinner horns which develop considerably more slowly than those of a buck. The ibex's horns appear at ...
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Gracile
Gracility is slenderness, the condition of being gracile, which means slender. It derives from the Latin adjective ''gracilis'' (masculine or feminine), or ''gracile'' ( neuter), which in either form means slender, and when transferred for example to discourse takes the sense of "without ornament", "simple" or various similar connotations. In ''Glossary of Botanic Terms'', B. D. Jackson speaks dismissively of an entry in earlier dictionary of A. A. Crozier as follows: "Gracilis (Lat.), slender. Crozier has the needless word 'gracile'". However, his objection would be hard to sustain in current usage; apart from the fact that ''gracile'' is a natural and convenient term, it is hardly a neologism. The ''Shorter Oxford English Dictionary'' gives the source date for that usage as 1623 and indicates the word is misused (through association with ''grace'') for "gracefully slender". This misuse is unfortunate at least, because the terms ''gracile'' and ''grace'' are unrelated: the etymo ...
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