Early dispersal of modern humans in Europe and implications for Neanderthal behaviour

The IntCal04 and Marine04 radiocarbon calibration curves have been updated from 12 cal kBP (cal kBP is here defined as thousands of calibrated years before AD 1950), and extended to 50 cal kBP, utilizing newly available data sets that meet the IntCal Working Group criteria for pristine corals and other carbonates and for quantification of uncertainty in both the14C and calendar timescales as established in 2002. No change was made to the curves from 0–12 cal kBP. The curves were constructed using a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) implementation of the random walk model used for IntCal04 and Marine04. The new curves were ratified at the 20th International Radiocarbon Conference in June 2009 and are available in the Supplemental Material atwww.radiocarbon.org.

Tooth wear records valuable information on diet and methods of food preparation in prehistoric populations or extinct species. In this study, samples of modern and prehistoric hunger-gatherers and agriculturalists are used to test the hypothesis that there are systematic differences in patterns of tooth wear related to major differences in subsistence and food preparation. Flatness of molar wear is compared for five groups in hunger-gatherers (N = 298) and five groups of early agriculturalists (N = 365). Hunger-gatherers are predicted to develop flatter molar wear due to the mastication of tough and fibrous foods, whereas agriculturalists should develop oblique molar wear due to an increase in the proportion of ground and prepared food in the diet. A method is presented for the quantitative measurement and analysis of flatness of molar wear. Comparisons of wear plane angle are made between teeth matched for the same stage of occlusal surface wear, thus standardizing all groups to the same rate of wear. Agriculturalists develop highly angled occlusal wear planes on the entire molar dentition. Their wear plane angles tend to exceed hunger-gatherers by about 10 degrees in advanced wear. Wear plane angles are similar within subsistence divisions despite regional differences in particular foods. This approach can be used to provide supporting evidence of change in human subsistence and to test dietary hypotheses in hominoid evolution.