The Soii Havzak rockshelter inside the Zeravshan Valley in Tajikistan accommodates quite a lot of phases of Paleolithic occupation rich in stone devices, faunal and charcoal stays.
The Soii Havzak rockshelter is no doubt one of many only some multilayered stratified Paleolithic web sites in Central Asia. Image credit score rating: Yossi Zaidner & Sharof Kurbanov.
Soii Havzak is a small tributary of the Zeravshan River, about 10 km north of Panjakent in northern Tajikistan.
The Soii Havzak web site is a rockshelter/overhang carved proper right into a cliff face about 40 m above the stream.
Hebrew Faculty Professor Yossi Zaidner, Dr. Sharof Kurbanov from the Nationwide Academy of Sciences of Tajikistan and their colleagues excavated three areas on the web site, unearthing layers of human train.
The archaeologists discovered a rich array of Paleolithic stone devices, animal bones, and vegetation.
The finds date once more to quite a few intervals between 150,000 and 20,000 years previously.
They provide important proof that Central Asia carried out a big operate in early human migration and enchancment.
“Plainly the Zeravshan Valley, acknowledged primarily as a Silk Avenue route inside the Middle Ages, was a key route for human enlargement prolonged sooner than that — between 20,000 and 150,000 years previously,” Professor Zaidner said.
“This space might have served as a migration route for quite a lot of human species, harking back to fashionable Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, or Denisovans, which might have coexisted on this house, and our evaluation objectives to uncover who had been the people who inhabited these components of the Central Asia and the character of their interactions.”
Paleolithic stone devices found inside the Soii Havzak rockshelter, Tajikistan. Image credit score rating: Yossi Zaidner & Sharof Kurbanov.
The well-preserved finds from Soii Havzak provide useful clues to the standard native climate and ambiance, along with the potential for finding human stays that might decide which human species inhabited the realm.
“The preservation of pure provides, harking back to burnt picket stays, along with bones, is excellent,” Professor Zaidner said.
“This permits us to reconstruct the realm’s historic native climate and provides hope that extra excavations might reveal clues about human biology inside the space.”
“That’s important for understanding the occasion of human populations and conduct in Central Asia.”
The evaluation has broader implications for the look at of human evolution and migration, considerably in understanding how historic human groups might have interacted with each other.
The Soii Havzak web site inside the mountainous corridor of Central Asia might have served as a serious transition stage for human populations, enabling the unfold of early folks all through enormous areas.
“We hope that ongoing evaluation at this web site will reveal new insights into how fully completely different human groups — like fashionable folks, Neanderthals and Denisovans — might have interacted on this space,” Professor Zaidner said.
“This discovery is a serious step in the direction of understanding historic human historic previous in Central Asia and marks an very important collaboration between worldwide scientific teams.”
A paper describing the findings was revealed inside the journal Antiquity.
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Yossi Zaidner & Sharof Kurbanov. Soii Havzak: a model new Palaeolithic sequence inside the Zeravshan Valley, central Tajikistan. Antiquityrevealed on-line November 4, 2024; doi: 10.15184/aqy.2024.149