Abstract

Until the beginning of this century the Early Paleolithic of the Caucasus region was represented by numerous Late Acheulian sites with flat and carefully flaked hand axes (second half of the Middle Pleistocene, i.e., after ~500 Kyr) [1] as well as the only much older Dmanisi site in South Georgia (Figure 1) yielding a typical Oldowan industry with primitive core-choppers (Figure 1) and flakes [2,3]. The Oldowan artifacts together with abundant paleontological and anthropological remains were found in the Early Pleistocene deposits dated to the interval of 1.85-1.76Myr that corresponds mainly to the Olduvai paleomagnetic subchron [3-5]. So, in the Caucasus there was a huge chronological gap between the Late Acheulian and the Oldowan stages of the Early Paleolithic occupation. However, over the past two decades the situation has changed dramatically, because several the sites of the Early Pleistocene ages, i.e., older than 0.8Myr, were discovered in different parts of the region (Figure 1).