Obi-Rahmat (Ouzbékistan), origine du Gravettien en Europe, et du métissage néandertalien

Obi-Rahmat, in north-east Uzbekistan, consists of an extensive rock-shelter resulting from successive layers from 80 to 40 thousand years ago. All the stone technologies are part of a distinctive very old and homogeneous trend based on specialized Levallois standards. The techniques used as well as the tools retrieved, suggest that this might be an original site for European Gravettian (Russia and Moravia). Remains of human skeletons display a combination of modern and Neanderthalian features, as is also the case in Moravian sites. These new techniques may have come from the north of Central Asia as indeed those cross-bred people, and similar testimonies can be found in nearby south Altai. The roots of both European Upper Palaeolithic and of human modernity are to be found there.