Kashafrud Basin () is an archaeological site in Iran, known for the Lower Palaeolithic artifacts collected there; these are the oldest-known evidence for human occupation of Iran. Kashafrud includes a cluster of sites which are located 35 km to 85 km southeast of Mashhad, near the Kashafrud River. The French geologist Claude Thibault, in collaboration with the Iranian geologist Ali Ariai, conducted surveys in the Kashfrud basin east of Mashhad in 1974–75, during which 80 stone artifacts were collected from seven open areas.
Kashafrud Basin () is an archaeological site in Iran, known for the Lower Palaeolithic artifacts collected there; these are the oldest-known evidence for human occupation of Iran. Kashafrud includes a cluster of sites which are located 35 km to 85 km southeast of Mashhad, near the Kashafrud River. The French geologist Claude Thibault, in collaboration with the Iranian geologist Ali Ariai, conducted surveys in the Kashfrud basin east of Mashhad in 1974–75, during which 80 stone artifacts were collected from seven open areas.
==Collections== The largest of these collections were found near the village of Abravan and other large collections in Chahak and Baghbaghu. The survey identified three major alluvial units that are roughly attributed to the Lower, Middle, and upper Pleistocene. Many of the findings are attributed to the Lower Pleistocene gravel layer that lies on a thick layer of sand. In an article, Thibaut published the results of a preliminary study of stone artifacts and their geological context in 1977.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).