NDLI: The Muddle in the Middle Pleistocene: The Lower–Middle Paleolithic Transition from the Levantine Perspective

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The Muddle in the Middle Pleistocene: The Lower–Middle Paleolithic Transition from the Levantine Perspective

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Malinsky Buller, Ariel
Copyright Year	2016
Abstract	The terms Lower Palaeolithic and Middle Palaeolithic represent research constructs within which cultural evolution and prehistoric hominin behaviours can be studied, with the transition usually understood as marking a watershed in our evolution: an adaptation with a million-year record of success that gives way to something new. The interpretation of the Lower Palaeolithic Acheulian technocomplex is usually understood as a period of cultural stasis that extends over much of Africa and Eurasia, principally associated with Homo erectus. Those innovations that can be observed occur widely separated from one another in space and time. Yet a closer and more detailed examination of the Middle Pleistocene records from East Africa, southern Africa, Europe and the Levant reveals significant variation in cultural repertoires. A kind of paradox emerges, in which an Old World Lower Palaeolithic, apparently lacking an overall dynamic of distinctive and directed change in terms of cumulative variation over time, nevertheless culminates in a transition which sees the universal appearance of the Middle Palaeolithic. The two main hypotheses that have been advanced to explain the global transition, which happens essentially synchronously, appear mutually exclusive and contradictory. One view is that altered climatic-environmental constraints enabled and encouraged an ‘Out-of-Africa’ dispersal (or dispersals) of a new type of genus Homo. This cultural replacement model has been challenged more recently by the alternative hypothesis of accumulating but unrelated and temporally non-linked regional, and in fact potentially autochthonous, processes. The Levant, by virtue of its position bridging Africa and Eurasia (thus being the region into which any out-of-Africa groups would have had first to disperse into), must be seen as a critical region for assessing the relative merits of these competing hypotheses. This paper deals with the Lower–Middle Paleolithic boundary in the Levant within a long temporal perspective. The Middle Pleistocene record in the Levant enables us to examine the amplitude of variation within each techno-complex, as well as to question whether there are diachronic changes in the amplitude of techno-typological variations as well as changes in the manner by which they appear in the record. The results carry significant implications for understandings of demographic and societal processes during the Lower–Middle Paleolithic transition in the Levant.
Starting Page	1
Ending Page	78
Page Count	78
File Format	PDF
ISSN	08927537
Journal	Journal of World Prehistory
Volume Number	29
Issue Number	1
e-ISSN	15737802
Language	English
Publisher	Springer US
Publisher Date	2016-04-04
Publisher Place	New York
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Lower Paleolithic Middle Paleolithic Levant Lithic technology Biface Levallois Innovation processes Archaeology Anthropology
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Archeology Archeology (arts and humanities)

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