PART III

THE LOWER PALEOLITHIC

The next two chapters discuss the evidence from the sister Acheulean sites of Torralba and Ambrona on the Spanish Meseta. The first and most extensive simply details the excavators’ finds and the interpretations. Our conclusions were challenged, and one critic claimed that what we had recovered were simply the remains of scavenged animals and often unrelated stone tools. Some of these criticisms were dealt with in the first of these chapters. In it, I applied some “innovative” statistical techniques that I had adopted for the study of Lower and Middle Paleolithic materials (these techniques were already well-known to the practitioners of other disciplines and had been proven in those fields). The Torralba site is one of the richest and most important Acheulean sites in Europe, and it is lamentable that no monographic study of its excavation has yet appeared. Chapter 6 was an attempt to remedy this lack by providing a brief summary of our finds and their interpretation.

The difficulty of surviving as a scavenger during a cold climatic episode in the mid-Pleistocene of mid-latitude Europe is addressed in the second of these chapters. Strangely, there is still widespread reluctance to accept the idea that our earlier ancestors could have killed their food; the idea that through the mid-Pleistocene people were restricted to scavenging for their meat is still commonly held. That idea persists despite contrary opinions, such as those of the late authority S. W. Washburn, George Schaller, I. Eibl-Eibesfeld, and many others who know about scavenging (and hunting) in Africa firsthand. After all, if other primates are known to be facultative hunters, why should that ability be denied to early people? A major argument in defense of this position is the relative scarcity of scavengeable meat in mid-Pleistocene mid-latitude Europe as compared to the East African situation at the same time.