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Radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence dating and magnetic stratigraphy indicate Upper Paleolithic occupation—probably representing modern humans—at archaeological sites on the Don River in Russia 45,000 to 42,000 years ago.
Early Upper Paleolithic samples (pre-Glacial Maximum) are very tall; (2) Late Upper Paleolithic groups (post-Glacial Maximum) from Western Europe, compared to their ancestors, show a marked decrease in height; (3) a further, although not significant, reduction of stature affects Western Mesolithics; (4) no regional differences have been observed during both phases of the Upper Paleolithic; (5) a high level of homogeneity has also been found in the Mesolithic, both in Western and Eastern Europe....Evaluation of possible causes for the great stature of the Early Upper Paleolithic samples points to high nutritional standards as the most important factor. Results obtained on later groups clearly indicate that the Last Glacial Maximum, rather than the Mesolithic transition, is the critical phase in the negative trend affecting Western European populations. While changes in the quality of the diet, and in particular decreased protein intake, provide a likely explanation for that trend....
The last doc I read about genetic testing, showed that there was no interbreeding with Neanderthals and they did not contribute to our makeup.
The Mesolithic was quite different from the Paleolithic in terms of what foodstuffs were available. The big game such as mammoth was no longer available, so they had to resort to smalller game and perhaps had to become more reliant on plant matter. So I don't know - should we really not really consider the Mesolithic foods and concentrate only on the Paleolithic? (It's harder though, as there isn't as much fossil evidence!).
...rabbit meat is as nutritionally balanced as deer meat, and considering that extra fat was extracted from the long bones of most of the carcasses consumed in the cave, rabbit was not a “starvation food”. Rabbit hunting provided the Late Upper Palaeolithic peoples of central Portugal with substantial calories, a relatively balanced diet of protein and fat, and several important minerals such as calcium.
Milk wasn't on the Stone Age menu, says a new study which suggests the vast majority of adult Europeans were lactose intolerant as recently as 7,000 years ago.
Based on the results of this analysis, nothing other than a constant proportion of meat versus vegetable material can be shown in the diets of humans throughout the time represented by these sites (70,000-35,000 years BP). It is possible that different foods were being collected even though there was no net change in the meat:vegetable proportions. The composition of the fauna, recovered from the three sites, however, suggests that there was no change in the kinds of fauna being exploited other than changing from one genus of large bodied herbivore to another (Garrod and Bate, 1937, Bouchud, 1974).""The distributions of strontium and stronum:calcium ratios from the two late phase pipaleolithic sites (Kebara B and el-Wad which date to around 10,000 years BP), compared with all the earlier sites, however, suggest that a major dietary change occurred between early and late phases of the Epipaleolithic....the major dietary shift occurred some 15,000 years after the major morphological shift had been completed....the change in subsistence activities related to dietary components occurred long after the change in skeletal robustness from archaic to modern Homo sapiens. In fact, the shift toward greater dependence on plant products, occurred some 15,000 years after the first appearance of fully modern Homo sapiens."
...a new report on the evolution of a gene for skin color suggested that Europeans acquired pale skin quite recently, perhaps only 6000 to 12,000 years ago.In 2005, researchers linked the paleness of the modern European skin to a mutation in gene SLC 24A5.The mutation gene must have spread gradually (as often occurs with new mutation) from that time but it surely would have taken another two or three thousand years down the line before it would become the dominant European profile. That makes it just three thousand years ago.
Those studies suggest that a primitive, stone-age human came to Europe, probably from Central Asia and the Middle East, in two waves of migration beginning about 35,000 years ago.Their numbers were small and they lived by hunting animals and gathering plant food. They used crudely sharpened stones and fire.“About 24,000 years ago, the last ice age began, with mountain-sized glaciers moving across most of Europe.The Paleolithic Europeans retreated before the ice, finding refuge for hundreds of generations in three areas: what is now Spain, the Balkans and the Ukraine.“When the glaciers melted, about 16,000 years ago, the Paleolithic tribes resettled the rest of Europe. Y chromosome mutations occurred among people in each of the ice age refuges.About 8,000 years ago a more advanced people, the Neolithic, migrated to Europe from the Middle East, bringing with them a new Y chromosome pattern and a new way of life – agriculture. About 20 percent of Europeans now have the Y chromosome pattern from this migration.
The data suggest that the selective sweep occurred 5300 to 6000 years ago, but given the imprecision of method, the real date could be as far back as 12,000 years ago, Norton said. She added that other, unknown, genes probably also cause paling in Europeans...Either way, the implication is that our European ancestors were brown-skinned for tens of thousands of years—a suggestion made 30 years ago by Stanford University geneticist L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza. He argued that the early immigrants to Europe, who were hunter-gatherers, herders, and fishers, survived on ready-made sources of vitamin D in their diet. But when farming spread in the past 6000 years, he argued, Europeans had fewer sources of vitamin D in their food and needed to absorb more sunlight to produce the vitamin in their skin.
Long before the adoption of agriculture and a settled mode of existence, waves of humans left East Africa and populated higher latitudes. Since, with the exception of oily fish, available foods did not provide significant quantities of vitamin D, these populations lost most or all of their skin pigmentation and thereby improved their production of vitamin D to compensate for the lower solar UV radiation at the higher latitudes.
Calcium, by contrast, would still have been abundant in the food of hunter-gatherer nomads in Europe and Asia. Leafy greens, nuts, roots, tubers and the other foods in a typical hunter-gatherer's diet tend to be quite calcium rich. Indeed, the annual rack of antlers produced by deer species in northern latitudes is testimony to the environmental abundance of calcium. The paleolithic high calcium intake probably prevailed for the human race as long as humans followed a hunter-gatherer economy, that is until about 10000 BC in the Fertile Crescent and until perhaps no more than 2 000 to 3 000 years ago in the Western Hemisphere.
Much (M.) Vorgeschichtliche Nahrund Nutzpflanzen Europas. (Mitt. d. Anthrop. Ges. in Wien, 1908, XXXVIII, 195-227, 2 fgs.) Discusses the prehistoric food and economic plants of Europe, their culture-historic age, origin, etc....
Upper Paleolithic people specialized in organized, group hunting of large mammals; they sometimes pursued and drove into traps entire herds. Their nutritional needs were met largely by meat consumption, as the vegetation was limited to tundra and steppe and the land was covered by ice and snow (Vistula final glaciation) for long periods....In a cave near Nowy Targ (East-Gravettian culture), a 30,000 years old, world's oldest boomerang was found. It is a crescent-shaped 70 cm long object with fine finish, made of mammoth tusk. Mammoths were hunted in Kraków area during 25,000-20,000 BCE.[5
A 12,600 BCE Hamburg culture site with tents, camp-fire and stone meat baking devices was discovered in Olbrachcice, Wschowa County.[3][9][10]
Rydno is a complex of archeological sites along the Kamiennna River valley between Skarżysko-Kamienna and Wąchock. Several hundred Paleolithic campsites have been located there, which makes it the world's largest accumulation of such finds. They extend over a number of periods, beginning with the Mousterian (Neanderthal) culture, followed by the Hamburg culture of reindeer hunters....
This article provides a review of previous archaeological studies of Stone Age Magdalenian culture in pre-war Poland, a territorial expanse that included large tracts of present-day Belarus, Lithuania and Ukraine....The Late Swiderian closes the Upper Paleolithic Period in Poland. Different researchers have concluded that the autochthonous Polish Swiderian culture presents a dividing line between two separate European cultural provinces. These provinces are the Northwest European, embracing Belgium, Holland, northwest Germany, Denmark and Norway and the Middle East European, embracing Silesia, Brandenburgia, Poland, Lithuania, White Russia, Central Russia, Ukraine and the Crimea. The latter is centered on the Nowy Mlyn site in Poland.
