Save for some places too cold to inhabit, today, our species has successfully spread across the planet. As researchers continue to recount the narratives of our ancestors’ journeys across the continents, many aspects remain contentious: the way(s) they took, when, how, and under what conditions.
Recent archaeological, paleoanthropological, and genetic data from across the Old World’s continents suggest a complex succession of hominin species over the last 1-2 million years, with population expansions and migrations, as well as contractions and retreats, against the backdrop of the climatic fluctuations that shaped our planet’s environments during the Pleistocene. Throughout this immense time span, hominins frequently utilized the Levant, the main -or potentially only- land bridge that has connected Africa, Asia, and Europe. Even though our understanding of hominin movements across this land-bridge has been, and continues to be, highly enriched by an ongoing exploration of its southern part, our understanding remains hindered by the virtual absence of research on its other areas, particularly its highly pertinent heart: Lebanon.
The potential of the Lebanese Paleolithic record in contributing to the refining of our ancestors’ dispersal stories is clearly illustrated by the results of the several surveys and few excavations conducted in the country, mostly during the first half of the 20th century. These projects have disclosed a plethora of sites with material culture spanning the entire Paleolithic Period (Fig. 1). The better explored sites also presented faunal assemblages, as well as hominin remains. Unfortunately, in spite of the great potential this material holds for providing information on hominin behaviour and adaptations, and for attributing behavioural capabilities to respective hominin species, this material remains mostly unstudied as the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in the mid-1970s hampered all further planned research activities.
The ERC Consolidator REVIVE project (2021-2026) will pick-up where work had stopped several decades ago and will move it forward by employing the state-of-the art methodologies available to us today. REVIVE sets out to harness the potential of the Lebanese sites and material in yielding clues about human occupations and migrations through this area and thus fill the geographical gap in the exploration of the Levantine Paleolithic.
