Before Vogelherd, all horses were horses. It is hard to overestimate the significance of this transformation. By all appearances, the people of the Upper Paleolithic came into an innocent, unexamined world and galvanized it with symbol, art, metaphor, and story. They did not simply invent better means of surviving. They invented meaning itself.
Fundamental changes call for big, bold, fundamental explanations.
The old one, still viable even a decade ago, filled the bill perfectly. New behaviors explained new anatomy, and vice versa. This cozy synchrony has collapsed under the weight of the bones of Klasies River Mouth, Border Cave, Qafzeh, and Skhul. The old answer is dead. With a 60,000-year time lag between the appearance of modern human skeletons in one part of the world and the florescence of modern behavior in another, the most astonishing advance in the history of human culture has been orphaned of a cause.