The Upper Palaeolithic of Europe

Over the last quarter century, discussions of the emergence of the Upper Palaeolithic (UP) have become intimately associated with disappearance of “archaic” humans and rise of “modernity” issues. As a consequence of the gradual blurring of previously perceived contrasts with the Middle Palaeolithic (MP) in technology, subsistence and site structure (Bar-Yosef & Kuhn 1999; Speth 2004), the deinitional signiicance of ornaments and art was emphasised, with one strand of scientiic opinion arguing that their sudden emergence in the European record in tandem with the replacement of Neanderthals by modern humans, about 40,000 years ago, could not be a coincidence (e.g., Klein 2003; Mellars 2004a, 2005). In this view, both processes ought to be explained by (a) the emergence of modern humans in Africa being a speciation event, (b) Neanderthals being a different species with less evolved capabilities, (c) art and personal ornamentation being material proxies for symbolic thinking and language and (d) the lack of such proxies in the MP proving that its makers were fundamentally different from present-day humans in biology, cognition and culture. This view of the emergence of the UP as a “Human Revolution” (Mellars & Stringer 1989) has since been shown to be inconsistent with the empirical evidence in crucial respects, namely, (a) in Africa, art remains unknown for more than 150,000 years after anatomical modernity irst appears in the palaeontological record, which questions mechanistic explanations of the emergence of the phenomenon as a straightforward and immediate consequence of the acquisition of cognitive capabilities provided by neurological changes putatively associated with the changes in skeletal morphology; (b) in the Maghreb, personal ornaments date to about 90,000 years ago, when the region was inhabited by the anatomically archaic Aterian people, which further questions the notion of a direct link of causality between “modern anatomy” and “modern cognition”; (c) in Europe, the earliest igurative art postdates modern human immigration by almost ive millennia, which questions cognitive explanations of the Neanderthals’ demise; (d) in Iberia, by 50,000 years ago, about ten millennia before moderns are irst recorded in Europe, MP Neanderthals used marine shell beads and complex cosmetic recipes; and (e) in France, by 60,000 years ago, Neanderthals were burying their dead with grave-goods (e.g., the engraved bone associated with the La Ferrassie 1 adult individual) and architecture (e.g., the slab decorated with cupules covering the burial pit of the La Ferrassie 6 child) (Zilhão 2001, 2007, 2011; d’Errico 2003; d’Errico et al. 2003a; Wolpoff et al. 2004; Trinkaus 2005a; Bouzouggar et al. 2007; d’Errico et al. 2009; Zilhão et al. 2010a). A string of key palaeontological revelations accompanied this transformation of the archaeological landscape, including (a) the discovery of new fossils, such as the Lagar Velho child from Portugal (Duarte et al. 1999; Zilhão & Trinkaus 2002) or the Oase 1 mandible and Oase 2 cranium from Romania (Trinkaus et al. 2003; Rougier et al. 2007; Zilhão et al. 2007), and (b) the secure dating and reanalysis of long-forgotten material, such as the Cioclovina and Muierii crania from Romania (Soicaru et al. 2006, 2007; Dobos et al. 2010) or the sample from Mladeč, in the Czech Republic (Teschler-Nicola et al. 2006). All of these fossils display diagnostic Neanderthal traits, suggesting signiicant admixture at the time of contact (Trinkaus 2007). This inference has since been corroborated by the outcome of the Neanderthal genome project, which found a Neanderthal contribution in the genome of extant humans – estimated to be of 1% to 4% and signiicantly higher in Eurasians than in Africans (Green et al. 2010). The combined palaeontological and palaeogenetical evidence thus shows that the disappearance of the Neanderthals, although construable as a replacement process in a long-term, evolutionary sense, was not a process of extinction without descent. Moreover, it makes it clear that Neanderthals were also Homo sapiens, not a separate species, and that the processes of population dispersal, extinction and assimilation that occurred at the time of emergence of the European UP must be explained in terms of the operation of environmental, demographic, cultural and contingent factors – they are a part, not the cause, of what happened at this particular point in (pre-)history. Given this recent evidence, does it still make sense to maintain a conceptual distinction between the MP and the UP? In Europe, yes, for a number of reasons. Firstly, in terms of technology (Fig. 3.19.1; Bar-Yosef & Kuhn 1999; Meignen & Bar-Yosef 2004), the traditional deinition of the UP remains operationally valid because (a) across the continent, the stone tool assemblages of 3.19 THE UPPER PALAEOLITHIC OF EUROPE