![]() ![]() The researchers, led by archaeologists Nira Alperson-Afil and Naama Goren-Inbar of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, mapped the precise locations and densities of thousands of plant and animal remains as well as stone tools found in one of GBY's 14 archaeological levels. ![]() It is also the site of the earliest widely accepted mastery of fire by prehistoric humans. sapiens in Africa and the Neandertals in Europe. heidelbergensis, a species that may have given rise to H. GBY is thought to have been occupied by H. Now, a team working at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov (GBY), a 790,000-year-old site in northern Israel's Hula Valley, claims that a much older species also showed tendencies toward tidiness. New research at rock shelters like Abric RomanĂ in Spain and Tor Faraj in Jordan, where Neandertals lived between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago-before modern humans migrated into Europe and Asia-has demonstrated spatial organization at times indistinguishable from that typical of H. More recently, however, work at Neandertal sites has demonstrated that our evolutionary cousins also divided up their living spaces into activity areas. Whereas sites occupied by modern humans often show signs of separate "activity areas" such as hearths, stone-tool knapping areas, food preparation areas, sleeping areas, and so forth, not so long ago there was little evidence that other hominins engaged in such organized behavior. Prehistoric humans did not start building permanent dwellings until about 15,000 years ago, but earlier hominins-the term now commonly used by scientists for humans and their ancestors but not other apes-frequented caves and open-air sites as they hunted and gathered food. ![]() But new work at a nearly 800,000-year-old hominin site in Israel suggests that the roots of tidiness may lie deep in our evolutionary past. One of the hallmarks of modern behavior is the sophisticated way Homo sapiens organizes the spaces it lives in, with everything in its place. "A tidy house, a tidy mind." Some of the more slovenly among us might bristle at this scolding old proverb, but to human evolution researchers it makes perfect sense. ![]()
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