Middle Paleolithic
The Middle Stone Age is a period of prehistory , which is a continuation of the Lower Paleolithic. In Europe, he began around 300,000 years before present (stage 8 of the isotopic chronology ) with the spread of Levallois and ends around 30 000 years with the disappearance of the Neanderthals and the arrival of anatomically modern humans ( Homo sapiens ) from the Near East.
This period is marked by the appearance of a new set of cultural traits: she sees such generalized and diversify the use of retouched tools ( scrapers , denticulate, etc..). These tools are made out of shrapnel cut the costs of raw materials prepared blocks, called cores. One method of cutting splinters, identified in the nineteenth century and relatively well known, is the Levallois method : it is characterized by the ability to charge repeatedly bursts whose form was determined before their detachment at the preparation of the nucleus.
In Europe, the main cultural event is the Middle Paleolithic Mousterian. The main architect of the Mousterian is Homo neanderthalensis, or Neanderthal. He had a large skull receding forehead, supraorbital torus in marked and chin almost absent. These characteristics are known to us thanks to the discoveries of fossil bones of Saccopastore of the Guattari cave on Mount Circeo (Italy), from Gibraltar to the south of the Iberian Peninsula, from La Chapelle-aux-Saints , The Ferrassie , La Quina (France), Spy (Belgium) and of course Neanderthal (Germany).
If the first descriptions have wanted to make this man a brute devoid of any intellectual faculty, the proliferation of discoveries can now draw a different picture of the Neanderthal.
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