A mosaic of change: the Middle–Upper Paleolithic transition as viewed from New Mexico and Iberia

Abstract

From the cultural (archeological) perspective, there is growing evidence that there was not only considerable variability, but also significant change within the block of time that prehistorians call the Middle Paleolithic (MP). This was not a period of stasis, and thus the actors— Homo sapiens neanderthalensis in Europe—were quite capable of adapting to new environmental circumstances in sensu lato. Likewise, the so-called Upper Paleolithic (UP) was a cultural monolith neither in time nor in space. In particular, humans had to react in significant ways to the environmental crisis of the Last Glacial Maximum that began some 20 14C kyr after “the transition” to “modernity”. Adaptation is a continuously ongoing process, sometimes slow, but at other times fast. The complementary opposition that has been set up by archeologists between the MP and the UP obscures the considerable amount of variation and change that existed both before and after the mythic date of 40 14C kyr. This paper reviews and compares relevant aspects of the records from Europe and Africa, and then focuses on the Iberian Peninsula, to highlight the arbitrary nature of our concept of an MP–UP transition. Changes took many forms, not all of them novel or abrupt, with many examples of UP-type precursor behaviors and products in the MP, many clear cases of continuity across “the transition”, and abundant evidence that the entire phenomenon was a cultural (and biological) mosaic, rather than starkly “black-and-white” replacement of one adaptive system by another. The Iberian evidence is a microcosm of the complexity of the situation, which cannot be glossed over for the sake of mere simplification or to continue to prop up 19th century culture–historical notions and analytical units.