Middle to Upper Paleolithic Transition = Stoopid

O. Bar-Yosef (2004). Eat What is There: Hunting and Gathering in the World of Neanderthals and their Neighbours. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. 14: 33-342.

 

In his article, Eat What is There: Hunting and Gathering in the World of Neanderthals and their Neighbours, O. Bar-Yosef briefly summarizes and offers a generalized critique of three current hypotheses regarding the Middle to Upper Paleolithic, arguing that humans hunted, gathered, and scavenged what was available in local contexts.

Bar-Yosef begins by outlining some of the limitations imposed by the archaeological data set, focusing specifically on the problem of reconstructing diets, economies, and mobility patterns in the absence of critical data regarding plant food. He also stresses the fact that many trends we see in ethnographic accounts of hunter-gatherers were not necessarily present before the Holocene. Fish did not appear to be a major dietary component until this time, and the ethnographic record is devoid of hunter-gatherer occupation in temperate regions now dominated by sedentary groups.

The author follows his mention of broad problems of constructing Paleolithic environment with a brief outline of three current hypotheses explaining the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition. The first explaining the change as resultant of gradual behavioural and cultural changes, the second citing technological advancements as a response to specific environmental changes in a core area enabling a dispersal of homo sapiens sapiens and their impact on neighbouring populations, the third attributing the transition to a fundamental neurological change which allowed for greater behavioural flexibility.

The author then shifts to a focus on Middle and Upper Paleolithic hunting, pointing out that older visions of Neanderthals as strictly big game hunters or scavengers have been generally discarded. He contends that there was essentially no difference between the Middle and Upper Paleolithic, and that this comparison should be discarded in favour of analysis based on smaller and standardized time units and more localized regional conditions. Bar-Yosef concludes by stating that current research indicates that faunal assemblages are representative of what was locally available to hunters, and that any deviation from this pattern warrants further investigation of the discrepancy. He also suggests that future research needs to break from a Eurocentric study of the transition, incorporating a wider context by testing theories against data from other regions of the Old World.

Figure 1. Diagrams always make arguments look more scientific (Bar-Yosef 2004)

Bar-Yosef’s overview of the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition was extremely broad and shallow. No specific arguments were aimed at any of the three theories he introduced at the beginning of the paper, nor were they elaborated upon because such would be “beyond the scope of this paper.” Leaving me to wonder why they were mentioned at all. The problems outlined were diverse and involved little depth, reading like a to-do list rather than offering any insights or clear issues for consideration. Anyone with enough background in Paleolithic archaeology to know what Bar-Yosef was talking about would not find anything new or interesting in the paper while anyone without such experience was not given enough context to figure out why or how such issues were problems. Without any clear direction or objective in the paper other than to list off problems with constructing Paleolithic conditions or comparing Middle and Upper Paleolithic economies, the paper struggled to maintain cohesion. What I learned from this paper is that you can’t really compare ethnographic accounts with Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, you can’t really tell what Paleolithic hunter-gatherers ate or how they moved around because of the lacking faunal data, you can’t really construct broad theories because local conditions are what’s most important, and the three hypotheses that exist to explain a Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition aren’t very useful because their frames of reference are flawed. The only real question that I was left with after reading the paper was if there is any point in looking at the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition at all.