Behaviour and symbol amongst Levantine Middle Palaeolithic populations : a focus on the Neanderthals vis-a-vis their early modern human contemporaries

Abstract

On the fringe of habitability between the desert and the sea lies a tiny stretch of land in which an outcrop of undulating limestone meets a wooded coastal plain. This is the Mount Carmel, of Solomon's Song of Songs, a place which has seen the constant annihilation and rebirth of cultures, tribes, armies and peoples. And yet it remembers a time before all wars and conflicts, a time when a massive radiation of large mammals moved from Africa to the Levant, seeking more temperate zones. Among these mammals were some ancestral humans. As time passed they grew and evolved and looked nothing like their distant cousins whom they left in Africa. And long before battle came to ravage and scar the Levant, they left their bones upon Mt Carmel and the surrounding area.