In southern Europe during the Upper Paleolithic there is evidence of cave paintings of great beauty, as well as sculpture and jewelry, but there is no such evidence from the Upper Paleolithic in Egypt. Blades, which are flakes that are at least twice as long as they are wide, are the characteristic stone tool of this period. The Egyptian examples are long and narrow, with a greater standardization in the finished tools, which were retouched along the edges, than is evident in earlier stone tools.
The Western Desert remained uninhabitable until after ca. 10,000 years ago, creating a gap in the archaeological evidence of human cultures until after the Upper and Late Paleolithic. Upper Paleolithic sites in the Nile Valley are also rare. The oldest known underground mine in the world (ca. 35,000-30,000 years ago), a source of stone for tools, is located at the site of Nazlet Khater-4 in Middle Egypt. Also excavated at this site was the grave of a robust Homo sapiens sapiens - with a stone ax placed next to his head.
Nomy (AMS). In this technique the carbon 14 atoms are counted directly with a special mass spectrometer. Directly counting the carbon 14 atoms in a sample is much more efficient than waiting for a very small portion of these atoms to decay and this method uses 10 to 100 times smaller sample sizes than the decay counting method. As a result, AMS dating is particularly effective for small samples or samples which produce only small amounts of datable material, such as collagen in bone samples. As AMS is not affected by cosmic radiation background, samples of some materials as old as 75,000 years can be dated.
When radiocarbon dates are obtained from samples they are in radiocarbon years BP, not in calendar years bc or ad. The radiocarbon in the atmosphere is produced by cosmic radiation interactions with the nitrogen molecules in the upper atmosphere. This cosmic radiation intensity has not been entirely constant in time, as Libby assumed. Thus, radiocarbon dates must be calibrated using radiocarbon dated tree rings of known age obtained by dendrochronologists. When calibrated, the calibrated age bc or ad (cal bc
Or cal ad) is given with a standard deviation in years. This calibration curve is not a straight line and sometimes two or more possible solutions exist, which, from a radiocarbon point of view, are equally probable. It is up to the archaeologist to decide which of these solutions is acceptable in an archaeological context. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, carbon 14 free carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning has diluted the carbon 14 in the atmosphere. As a result, the periods from around ad 1600 to ad 1950 will produce many possible solutions, often spanning the whole range. This often makes it difficult to interpret radiocarbon dates from this period.
An example of a radiocarbon date from the Predynastic site of Halfiah Gibli (HG) in Upper Egypt, excavated by Kathryn Bard in 1989 is:
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