Europe: Middle to Upper Paleolithic Transition

Introduction

This “transition” condenses in fact an extreme variety of cultural factors dispersed across all continents but especially in the “Old World”: Africa, Europe, and Asia. Within each of these continents, these factors and processes interacted constantly. We focus here only on the apparently fundamental elements in each region. In terms of technology, China and the Far East shift in particular from the use of bamboo and cobbles to light blade blanks. During this phase, the general gracilization of the human skeleton and anatomic uprightness, observed simultaneously everywhere, are the result of bipedalism. In Africa an avalanche of autonomous technical inventions took place: from cobbles to bifaces, Levallois to blade production, up to agropastoral Neolithic civilizations and metallurgy. The immensity of this continent made it a sort of laboratory in which innovations and convergences emerged. But, leaving to one side these fabulous and exotic territories, we now focus on an...