Anyway, next month, the quartz tools found there will be described in detail in the June issues of the journal Hesperia, but courtesy of archaeologists Chris Hardaker and Julien Riel-Salvatore, here is a sneak preview.
There is the usual debate raging about whether these are actually tools. As Julien Riel-Salvatore says,
You can read the rest of his blog about them hereMore photographs are also available in a nice slideshow provided by Boston University press release, and they give you an idea of the size of the handaxes and of how they might have been handled. The thing with quartz, however, is that it's very hard to see flaking landmarks on photographs. For what it's worth, I still think that at least that handaxe looks very rough in craftsmanship (e.g., uneven thinning, apparently no basal thinning, very sinuous edges). Although that's not too unusual for pieces on quartz, I really hope that this one's not their best looking one!
To summarize the debate a bit, Strasser, Runnels and company have found these quartz implements whose morphology is reminiscent of that of handaxes in deposits dating to ca. 130,000 years BP on Crete. This is significant because Crete appears to have remained an island detached from the European mainland for most of the Pleistocene, which implies any tool maker on the island must have originally arrived there through some form of seafaring.
Chris also sent through another web page with more interesting detail:
And it looks as though one of Runnels own hypothesis is going to be overturned, now that Paabo has found that HS and Neanderthals did, in fact, interbreed.“Objects like this have never been found on islands before, anywhere. For the last 150 years it was thought that early humans couldn’t cross the open sea,” says Runnels. “That now needs to be reexamined.”
Sponsored by the National Geographic Society, Runnels, Thomas Strasser of Providence College, and Eleni Panagopoulou of the Greek Ministry of Culture traveled to Crete in 2008 and 2009. When the project started, they were hoping to find evidence of seafarers from about 12,000 years ago.
Their survey focused mainly on the island’s southwestern coast, near the town of Plakias, where the team members recovered more than 2,000 artifacts from 28 sites. “I’m the one who identified the sites and worked out the protocol for dating them,” says Runnels, “so I played a major role.”
Artifacts were found in caves and rock shelters located in Preveli Gorge, where freshwater rivers and streams have eroded rocky sediment. Among the artifacts were hand axes, cleavers, and scrapers made from local quartz rock. According to Runnels, the tools may have been used to hollow out large tree trunks, to turn them into boats.
The team’s discovery puts centuries-old beliefs about movements of early humans out of Africa into question, according to Runnels, and will have worldwide implications. “Every hypothesis is suddenly on the rack,” he says.
Other large Mediterranean islands, such as Cyprus and Sardinia, will also need to be examined to learn more about early human occupation.
“We have also been contacted by archaeologists interested in early boats and early seafaring who are very excited by these finds,” he says.
This is not the first time Runnels has been involved in research that could shift paradigms. In the 1980s and 1990s, he helped show that the people of prehistoric Greece caused catastrophic environmental change through soil erosion and deforestation. “That work challenged a long-held belief that prehistoric peoples were careful stewards of the natural environment,” he says.
Other research by Runnels in Greece revealed that Neanderthals were not related to Homo sapiens.
“This is the way science works: new evidence leads to new hypotheses, which in turn lead to new syntheses of our understanding of the past,” he says.
From here
