The morphometric affinities of the 33,000 year old skeleton from Nazlet Khater, Upper Egypt are examined using multivariate statistical procedures. In the first part, principal components analysis is performed on a dataset of mandible dimensions of 220 fossils, sub-fossils and modern specimens, ranging in time from the Late Pleistocene to recent and restricted in space to the African continent and Southern Levant. In the second part, mean measurements for various prehistoric and modern African and Levantine populations are incorporated in the statistical analysis. Subsequently, differences between male and female means are examined for some of the modern and prehistoric populations. The results indicate a strong association between some of the sub-Saharan Middle Stone Age (MSA) specimens, and the Nazlet Khater mandible. Furthermore, the results suggest that variability between African populations during the Neolithic and Protohistoric periods was more pronounced than the range of variability observed among recent African and Levantine populations. Results also demonstrate a general reduction in the degree of sexual dimorphism during the Holocene. However, this pattern of reduction pattern varies by geographic location and is not uniform across the African continent.
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Close examination of the geographic position of Early Neolithic settlements in SE-Europe shows that the oldest sites are almost exclusively situated in some very specific biogeographic areas. These earliest Neolithic settlements are all concentrated in a region that Pavle Cikovac calls the Sub-Mediterranean-Aegean biogeographic region. It covers the northern and north-western edge of the Aegean, including Thessaly, Greek Macedonia and Greek Thrace, and extends further into the Balkans, but only along the valleys rivers of the Vardar (Axios), Struma (Strymon) and Mesta (Nestos) rivers. Surprisingly, although Thrace is the closest landscape to Anatolia, it does not contain any sites of the earliest phase of the Neolithic at all beyond the narrow zone of the northern Marmara. In the present paper we explain this remarkable situation in terms of the natural environment in this particular region of the southern Balkans. To begin, we propose that the lack of oldest Early Neolithic settlements in Thrace is related to the extreme microclimate of this region. As shown by modern vegetation analogues, Thracian oriental hornbeam-downy oak forests are exposed to stronger continental influence with frosts in the winter and average temperatures during the coldest months that are ca. 2-3 °C lower than those in the Central Balkans that have Sub-Mediterranean vegetation. In general terms, what we may expect is that the earliest Neolithic groups would first appear in regions with similarly mild conditions, on a yearly average, to those in the Mediterranean. Such mild conditions are indeed present in the Sub-Mediterranean biogeographic region. On the other hand, before moving further to the north along the north-south oriented river systems of the Central Balkans, the Neolithic economy based on agriculture and stockbreeding would first have to be adapted to the relatively harsh winters in the Balkans. In consequence, it would have been possible to apply the new Neolithic lifestyle in the neighbouring areas of Thrace, Walachia, Dobrudža and the Carpathian Basin only after a certain period of adaptation. Available 14C-data show that the adaptation period is identical to the time-span of Rapid Climate Change (RCC: 6550-6050 calBC) as defined in previous studies.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2017
