for some 3 million years, the archaeological record is characterized by stone tools undergoing incremental changes. then around 40,000 years ago, the monotony of lithics is terminated by a profusion of visual representations, generally considered to be the world’s first objets d’art. this collection include a series of portable objects, especially figurines and, later on, the famous cave painti...

In the south west of France the majority of research concerning the Middle-to-Upper Palaeolithic transition tends to focus upon the Chatelperronian and Aurignacian at the expense of the end of the Middle Palaeolithic. This contribution attempts to rectify this shortcoming by demonstrating that the classic model of a direct MTA-Chatelperronian filiation is no longer valid as these two techno-com...

The Middle to Upper Paleolithic boundary marks an important threshold in human cultural and biological evolutionwith the establishment of Anatomically Modern Humans and the termination of Neandertal settlement in Eurasia between 40–30 ka C BP. The demographic and cultural processes underlying this ‘‘transition’’ throughout Eurasia are among the most intensively debated issues in Paleolithic Arc...

Obi-Rakhmat Grotto is situated 100 km northeast of Tashkent, Republic of Uzbekistan. The site was first studied in the 1960s and excavations through the 1970s yielded more than 40,000 stone artifacts. Excavations were renewed in 1998 with the goal of clarifying the archaeological, geological and environmental sequence. Based on studies of the 1998-1999 collections and a sample of artifacts with...

The dynamics of change underlying the demographic processes that led to the replacement of Neandertals by Anatomically Modern Humans (AMH) and the emergence of what are recognized as Upper Paleolithic technologies and behavior can only be understood with reference to the underlying chronological framework. This paper examines the European chronometric (mainly radiocarbon-based) record for the p...

■ Abstract The transition from the Middle Paleolithic to the Upper Paleolithic is considered one of the major revolutions in the prehistory of humankind. Explanations of the observable archaeological phenomena in Eurasia, or the lack of such evidence in other regions, include biological arguments (the role of Cro-Magnons and the demise of the Neanderthals), as well as cultural-technological, an...

Significant new information shows that the Campanian Ignimbrite (CI) eruption from the Phlegrean Fields, southern Italy, was much larger than hitherto supposed and in fact one of the largest late Quaternary explosive events. The eruption can be dated to 40,000 calendar years ago, within the interval of the so-called Middle to Upper Paleolithic 'transition'. Its position can be precisely correla...

The territory of present day Armenia is a geographic contact zone between the Near East and the northern Caucasus. Armenian Middle and Upper Paleolithic records are both few and patchy as a result of the historical paucity of systematic archaeological research in the country. Consequently, it is currently difficult to correlate the Armenian Middle and Upper Paleolithic records with those from o...