Abstract
The origin of modern humans is a hot topic today and, as can be seen from the number of major symposia and volumes devoted to the topic (e.g., Smith and Spencer 1984; Mellars and Stringer 1989; Mellars 1990; Trinkaus 1989), has been such for the last few years when it successfully displaced questions of human origins as the premier paleoanthropological issue. This shift in concern brought with it not only more recent chronological contexts, but also a geographic relocation from Africa to Europe and Asia. What is at issue today is the meaning of the Late Pleistocene record which documents a change both in hominid types and their cultures. In Eurasia this time span — a period between some 100,000 and 30,000 years ago saw anatomically modern humans replace the Neanderthals, and a transition from the Middle to the Upper Paleolithic. The significance and synchrony of these changes have been a subject of many recent debates which have focused on two issues: first, what exactly happened at this transition, and second, which hominid types were responsible for the changes noted in the archaeological record. As a perusal of any of the volumes cited above indicates, no consensus has been reached on these questions — a dilemma stemming not only from the ambiguity of the relevant records but also from excessive focus on the question of what happened. Much less attention has been paid to the potentially more enlightening questions about why the changes occurred.
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Soffer, O. (1994). Ancestral Lifeways in Eurasia — The Middle and Upper Paleolithic Records. In: Nitecki, M.H., Nitecki, D.V. (eds) Origins of Anatomically Modern Humans. Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1507-8_5
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