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Middle Pleistocene Qesem Cave, Israel, contains one of the richest known deposits of microvertebrate remains in the Near East, nearly a quarter of a million specimens. The remains have been excavated from two main concentrations, and over 16,000 have been identified to genus level. The faunal content of the two concentrations is broadly similar, and only a few taxa are restricted to the one or the other; most notably, the Myomimus judaicus/setzeri group and Rattus cf. haasi are only known from the chronologically older Concentration 2. The identification of Stellagama stellio is presented as an example of tree-thinking in the Quaternary; a phylogenetic tree is an epistemic structure that provides a non-arbitrary means to determine the minimum number and phylogenetic position of extant comparative specimens required to identify an extinct population. The new mammal data show that the total proportion of lower …