The emergence of modern-like forager capacities & behaviors in Africa and Europe: Abrupt or gradual, biological or demographic?

Abstract

It is increasingly difficult to defend the existence of an absolute, abrupt break between “simple” MSA/Middle Paleolithic (Mode 3) technologies or human adaptions on the one hand and those of a more “complex” or “modern” LSA/Upper Paleolithic on the other hand. What went on during both blocks of cultural time was far from uniformity or stasis–quite to the contrary. Cultural evolution, as a long, drawn-out, mosaic process, must be disentangled from the question of the purely European replacement of the Neandertals by African-originated Homo sapiens idaltu/sapiens. A brief review of the African and European records points to the arbitrariness of the so-called Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition and to the notion of unilineal cultural evolution. The utility of the “transition” idea is as questionable as is the reality and homogeneity of the MSA/MP and LSA/UP culture-stratigraphic constructs. Variability is more relevant than essentialism in the study of any Paleolithic cultural adaptations; the notion of change with considerable continuity is more appropriate to describe what was going on throughout the late Upper Pleistocene than saltation. Demographic factors are probably more important in understanding many of the important changes that characterized the last 50-70,000 years of the Pleistocene than putative advances in human capacities-- mental and linguistic. The growth of human populations during MIS 3 seems to have led to increasingly complex technologies, subsistence intensification, burgeoning social relations mediated through symbolic behavior with material manifestations in “art” and personal ornamentation. The time has come to really acknowledge and grapple with complexity (e.g., multilineality, non-directionality, regional and functional variation) in the development of “modern-type” hunting-gathering adaptations among humans throughout the Old World during the last phases of the Paleolithic, regardless of the 19th-early 20th century labels archeologists may still use to describe classic culture-stratigraphic subdivisions.