Through a prism of paradigms : a century of research into the origins of the Upper Palaeolithic in the Levant

In the Levant, the origins of the Upper Palaeolithic is closely linked to the question of modern human emergence. This paper reviews a century of research on the subject. The history of discoveries in Mount Carmel (1900-1945) is argued to have particular importance in shaping the debate, yielding both archaeological and physical anthropological remain that were initially considered to be “transitional” between modern humans and their Neanderthal predecessors. This perspective changed dramatically in the 1980s, with the introduction of the Replacement hypothesis, necessitating a new view of the IUP as a foreign, intrusive industry into the Levant. In recent years, distinctions between species in the Levant have been called into question, while ancient DNA evidence suggests there was genetic admixture between early humans and Neanderthal populations somewhere in the greater Near East. There is no archaeological evidence for a movement of peoples out of Africa, nor is there evidence for complete cultural continuity. New data from the Arabian Peninsula show that the most likely precursor of Levantine IUP technology was the Arabian Nubian technocomplex. Therefore, we argue that the Levantine IUP developed at the interface of the southern Levant and northern Arabian Peninsula.