Julien Favreau

McMaster University | McMaster · Department of Anthropology

Eastern Africa's Plio-Pleistocene palaeoanthropological record has shaped our understanding of human biological and cultural evolution. Over the years, raw material sourcing has emerged as an important research topic in lithic analysis as it can allow for the identification of resource extraction points and transport distances as a means to infer o...

The increasing approaches to non-flint lithic raw materials are widening our understanding of the economy around lithic resources by prehistoric societies. The characterization of stone using geoarchaeological disciplines, the identification of technological features on stone artefacts, and the spatio-temporal organization of lithic reduction seque...

The increasing approaches to non-flint lithic raw materials are widening our understanding of the economy around lithic resources by prehistoric societies. The characterisation of stone using geoarchaeological disciplines, the identification of technological features on stone artefacts, and the spatio-temporal organisation of lithic reduction seque...

More than 2 million years ago in East Africa, the earliest hominin stone tools evolved amidst changes in resource base, with pounding technology playing a key role in this adaptive process. Olduvai Gorge (now Oldupai) is a famed locality that remains paramount for the study of human evolution, also yielding some of the oldest battering tools in the...

Rapid environmental change is a catalyst for human evolution, driving dietary innovations, habitat diversification, and dispersal. However, there is a dearth of information to assess hominin adaptions to changing physiography during key evolutionary stages such as the early Pleistocene. Here we report a multiproxy dataset from Ewass Oldupa, in the...

Environmental change is key for human evolution, especially at times of anatomical and behavioral change in life histories, such as the origin of meat consumption, economic diversification, and dispersal. However, for the earliest phase of human evolution featuring the technology-dependent hominins that shaped our lineage since 2.6 Ma, the Oldowan,...

Oldupai Gorge is located within the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in northern Tanzania along the western margin of the East African Rift System. Oldupai's sedimentary record contains inter-stratified stone tool industries associated with the Earlier, Middle, and Later Stone Age. While diachronic technological change is...

Despite the common exploitation of quartzites as raw materials during the African Stone Age, petrographic and geochemical characterization studies have been rarely undertaken. The Naibor Soit outcrop at Oldupai Gorge (Tanzania), considered the main source for quartzite procurement in the area, probably represents the exception to this analytical sc...

The African Early Stone Age record, including that of Oldupai Gorge, reveals widespread evidence for hominin exploitation of quartzose lithic raw materials such as quartzite. However, few studies have sought to characterize these rock types grounded on the assumption that they are not amenable for provenance studies. Through the use of macroscopic,...

Strontium isotope analysis is a useful tool for tracing mobility and migration in past populations. For it to be employed, the ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr values of the landscape must be well-understood. Bioavailable strontium is a combination of geological and atmospheric strontium available for use by plants and animals. In this study we begin mapping bioavailable...

This article studies soil and plant phytoliths from the Eastern Serengeti Plains, specifically the Acacia-Commiphora mosaics from Oldupai Gorge, Tanzania, as present-day analogue for the environment that was contemporaneous with the emergence of the genus Homo . We investigate whether phytolith assemblages from recent soil surfaces reflect plant co...

Despite the common exploitation of quartzites as raw materials during the African Stone Age, petrographic and geochemical characterization studies are scarce in Palaeolithic archaeology. Naibor Soit outcrop in Oldupai Gorge (Tanzania), considered the main source for lithic procurement in the area, probably represents the exception to this analytica...

Oldupai Gorge is located within the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in northern Tanzania along the western margin of the East African Rift System. Oldupai’s sedimentary record exhibits a complex sequence of inter-stratified lithic assemblages associated with the Early, Middle, and Later Stone Age. While diachronic technol...

Ancient dental calculus research currently relies on destructive techniques whereby archeological specimens are broken down to determine their contents. Two strategies that could partly remediate a permanent loss of the original sample and enhance future analysis and reproducibility include (1) structural surface characterization through spectrosco...

Olduvai Gorge is located within the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in northern Tanzania along the western margin of the East African Rift System. Olduvai’s sedimentary record exhibits a complex sequence of inter-stratified lithic technologies including Oldowan, Acheulean, Middle Stone Age, and Later Stone Age assemblages...

This paper studies soil and plant phytoliths from the Eastern Serengeti Plains, specifically the Acacia-Commiphora mosaics from Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. The soil phytolith transect extends 100 ha and comprises 35 samples. Botanic collection was aimed at investigating the range of species present in the study area, learning about their phytolith pro...

The assumption that taxonomy can be ascertained by starch granule shape and size has persisted since the late nineteenth and early twentieth century biochemistry. More recent work has established that granule morphological affinity is scattered throughout phylogenetic branches, morphotype proportions vary within the genus, granules from closely rel...

Dental calculus provides ancient starch research a niche where granules may be adsorbed to minerals, coated, overgrown, entrapped, and/or protected from chemical degradation. While encapsulation offers protection from degradation, it does not shield the sample’s surface from contamination. The most common approach to retrieving microbotanical parti...

The assumption that taxonomy can be ascertained by starch granule shape and size has persisted unchallenged since the late nineteenth and early twentieth century biochemistry. More recent work has established that granule morphological affinity is scattered throughout phylogenetic branches, morphotype proportions vary within the genus, granules fro...

No agreement on what constitutes a safe and reproducible anticontamination protocol exists for ancient starch research. Protocols applied to laboratory work may represent ‘symptomatic treatment’ only, as contamination of archaeological materials in the field may be more extensive than realized. This paper is the first systematic study on the impact...

Evidence for an Early Stone Age occupation of the Zambezian zone prior to the late Acheulean is meager. In this article, we present an Acheulean site from eastern Zimbabwe called Maunganidze between the Limpopo and Zambezi, containing a wealth of large prepared cores, blanks, and large cutting tools that illustrate diversity and complexity in stone...