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Learning from snapshots of lost fossils


In museum troves, researchers found photos of Paleolithic children who belonged to an early group of Homo sapiens spreading beyond Africa

The artifacts found with them attest to cultural and technological changes, known as the Upper Paleolithic, that swept through the Mediterranean region and other parts of Eurasia around 40,000 years ago, just about the time Neanderthals disappeared. They painted with red and yellow ochre, crafted beads from animal teeth and seashells, and at Ksâr ‘Akil accessed exotic stones from up to 700 kilometers away in what is today central Turkey. Tens of thousands of stone tools from Ksâr ‘Akil had been sitting for decades, mostly unstudied, in wooden boxes in Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography.

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Photo of lost fossils

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