Modes, movement and moderns

Abstract

The current trend to unite rather than divide the early Palaeolithic world is long overdue. For too long we have been interested in partition, dividing the Early Stone Age from the Lower Palaeolithic and the Middle Stone Age from the Middle Palaeolithic. As a result sub-Saharan Africa and Europe, the Near East and North Africa have become the archaeological equivalent of the old joke about England and the USA — two countries separated by the same language. The INQUA session in Durban on “Out of Africa: once, twice or continuously in the Pleistocene”, organised by Bar-Yosef and Straus, provided a much-needed forum to air the concerns and showcase the results of archaeologists on either side of the geographical divide. There is clearly much discussion ahead concerning the details of dating and the significance of artefact assemblages, and more on these aspects below. But what is so encouraging, as the papers in this volume amply demonstrate, is that explanations of the early Palaeolithic will now be placed in a very wide geographical framework. To understand human evolution in Africa we need to understand what is going on in Europe and vice versa. The globalisation of Palaeolithic enquiry is confirmed as not just the prerogative of those who write endwords for conference volumes but of everyone researching the subject. However, the move to globalisation is currently hindered by the baggage inherited from past approaches. I will direct my comments at three areas which most concern the papers in this volume and which also led to some lively discussions at the workshop which followed the formal session. The three issues are technological modes, hominid movement, and being modern. I will also use the latitude normally accorded authors of endwords to present three hitherto un-named archaeo-continents which, if adopted, would greatly assist the study of hominid dispersal.