Mousterian

Middle Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age) culture producing distinctive flint implements, mainly from flakes. The name derives from a Neanderthal rock shelter at Le Moustier in the Dordogne, France. Mousterian industry and material culture associated with the Neanderthals is the earliest found in Europe, western Asia, and North Africa during the end of the last interglacial period and the last Würm glaciation, 120,000 to 35,000 years ago.

At Le Moustier, flint points, scrapers, and other implements were discovered along with bones of mammoth, woolly-haired rhinoceros, bear, and musk ox. It is not known to what extent Neanderthals coexisted with anatomically modern humans. A suggestion that they had an idea of ritual and ‘modern’ social behaviour is given in the discovery of Neanderthal cemeteries in La Ferrassiè, France and at Shanidar, Iraq. The analysis of pollen at one Middle Eastern grave suggests that flowers were included, but archaeologists note the problem of extrapolating from this to the ritual behaviour associated with the laying of flowers.

Preparation of flints demonstrated the technological advance of the cerallois, or tortoise-core, technique. This involves the concept of economy of material, and necessitates thinking through the tool to be made by preforming the shape of the flake on the core flint before removal. Reconstruction has suggested that it required a cutting edge of 100 cm/40 in, compared with 20 cm/8 in for the Acheulian tools of the earlier Paleolithic.