Initial Upper Paleolithic in the Zagros Mountains
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Iranian Plateau and the Zagros Mountain chain, located at the crossroads of Africa and Eurasia, occupy a critical geographical position in out-of-Africa scenarios, sitting astride a major dispersal corridor into southern and central Asia. Yet, the region’s role in human population expansions remains under-investigated. Here, we present findings from new excavations at Pebdeh Cave, a site located in the southern zone of the Zagros Mountains. Pebdeh contained a well-defined layer dating to ∼42–40,000 years ago (ka), with Levallois elements alongside laminar reduction. This transitional feature in the Zagros was not dated and recorded before, and, given its similarity to Western and Central Asian industries with respect to chronology and technological features, we define it here as the Zagros Initial Upper Paleolithic (IUP). Although Late Middle Paleolithic and Early Upper Paleolithic technologies have been identified in the Zagros in the time period ranging between 50 and 40 ka, suggesting the presence of Neanderthals and modern humans in the mountainous region, the overall abrupt and constrained chronology of the IUP at Pebdeh, together with the penecontemporaneous appearance of other Upper Paleolithic sites in the Zagros Mountains, is compatible with a population expansion of Homo sapiens rather than an autochthonous development.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".