Re-dated Lebanese collections yield a 300,000-year record for the central Levant

The three collections together cover roughly 400,000 to 100,000 years ago ^[13]. Subtract the ends and the record spans 300,000 years ^[18], sampled at three places, with the new precise dates on two of them ^[23]. Ras el-Kelb holds the old end, in the late Lower Paleolithic; Nahr Ibrahim sits about 150,000 years later, at the transition from the Lower to the Middle Paleolithic ^[12][19]. The Naame material is not among the newly dated ^[23].

The methods are archaeozoology, tooth wear analysis, stable isotopes and modelling of past landscapes ^[14]. Prey was mostly big game, with adult aurochs, fallow deer, red deer and wild goats named as the most important, and rhinoceros also in the assemblages ^[16].

Earlier work at the Ras el-Kelb promontory had already found a comparatively large share of rhinoceros remains, and the archaeozoology on the cave finds agrees; the authors read that as rhinoceroses being regularly present in an estuary-dominated landscape during the Paleolithic ^[17].

"As a result, environmental conditions and archaeological developments from the southern Levant have sometimes been regarded as representative of the entire region," said Sireen El Zaatari of the Paleoanthropology group at Tübingen, the last author on the study ^[8][9]. She dates the gap to research access, noting that the south has been studied intensively for over a century while instability in Lebanon has limited work there since the 1970s ^[8]. The new dating and reconstruction question the assumption ^[10]. Without the dating techniques and the specimen counts behind the isotope and tooth wear results, the size of the north-south difference stays a qualitative claim ^[21].

"Even though some of the original excavations took place more than 100 years ago, modern methods allow us to extract new information from them to answer new scientific questions," Russo said ^[6]. He also said instability in Lebanon "continues to limit access to important fossil sites for extended periods of time," which is what makes the historical collections valuable ^[5]. The team also says the finds document partly densely forested landscapes ^[4], on a corridor that carried Homo sapiens migrations and possibly encounters with Neanderthals during the Pleistocene, a period the release dates from 2.58 million to about 11,700 years ago ^[7].