Middle Paleolithic

• 1. Introduction

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  The Middle Paleolithic spanned roughly 300,000 to 50,000 years ago, a stretch of time so vast it dwarfs all of recorded history. African archaeologists call this same era the Middle Stone Age. It was an age of Neanderthals and the first anatomically modern humans, an age when bodies were laid in graves and stone was knapped with a new precision. Yet almost everything about it is contested. Did these people believe in an afterlife, or did they bury their dead for plain practical reasons? Did they eat each other from hunger, from ritual, or not at all? The questions that follow have no easy answers, only bones, tools, and the careful arguments of people who study them.

• 2. An Era Between Eras

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  The Middle Paleolithic sits as the second subdivision of the Paleolithic, the Old Stone Age understood across Europe, Africa, and Asia. The Upper Paleolithic followed it, first beginning between 50,000 and 40,000 years ago. Dating varies considerably from one region to another. Pettit and White place the Early Middle Paleolithic in Great Britain at about 325,000 to 180,000 years ago, late Marine Isotope Stage 9 to late Marine Isotope Stage 7. They date the Late Middle Paleolithic to about 60,000 to 35,000 years ago. In geological terms the period falls within the Chibanian, also called the Middle Pleistocene, and the Late Pleistocene ages. This is the stage on which a remarkable migration began.

• 3. Out Of Africa

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  Around 125,000 years ago, according to the theory of the recent African origin of modern humans, anatomically modern humans started to move out of Africa. They began to replace other Homo species, including the Neanderthals and Homo erectus. This was not a single journey but a slow spread across landscapes already occupied by older human kinds. The newcomers carried with them the beginnings of something archaeologists call behavioral modernity. Its earliest evidence first appears during the Middle Paleolithic, though undisputed signs of it only become common in the Upper Paleolithic that followed.

• 4. Graves And The Dead

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  At Krapina in Croatia, dated to about 130,000 years before present, and at the Qafzeh and Es Skhul caves in Israel, dated to about 100,000 years before present, the dead were buried. These graves led some scholars, among them Philip Lieberman, to argue that Middle Paleolithic cultures may have held a developing religious ideology, including the idea of an afterlife. Other scholars are unconvinced, suggesting the bodies were buried for secular reasons. Findings from Homo heidelbergensis sites in the Atapuerca Mountains hint that intentional burial may have begun even earlier, in the late Lower Paleolithic, though this idea is widely questioned. Cut-marks on Neanderthal bones from sites such as Combe Grenal and the Moula rock shelter in France suggest another practice entirely. Neanderthals may have carried out excarnation, the deliberate removal of flesh from the dead, possibly for religious reasons.

• 5. Beads And Bargains

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  Blombos Cave holds the earliest undisputed evidence of artistic expression in the Paleolithic, in the form of bracelets, beads, decorated rock, and ochre used as body paint and perhaps in ritual. Older possible examples exist, including the Venus of Tan-Tan and the patterns found on elephant bones from Bilzingsleben in Thuringia. Those may have been made by Acheulean tool-users such as Homo erectus before the Middle Paleolithic even began. Long-distance trade between groups appears for the first time during this period, as early as 120,000 years ago. People exchanged rare commodities and raw materials, ochre among them, often sought for religious purposes such as ritual. Such trade between bands may have helped ensure survival, letting groups swap resources during famine or drought.

• 6. Bands And Equals

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  Evidence from archaeology and comparative ethnography points to small, egalitarian band societies during the Middle Paleolithic. They resembled Upper Paleolithic societies and some modern hunter-gatherers, such as the ǃKung and Mbuti peoples. Both Neanderthal and modern human groups cared for their elderly members. Christopher Boehm, writing in 1999, proposed that egalitarianism arose from a need to share resources like food and meat equally, warding off famine and steadying the food supply. The familiar idea that women gathered while men hunted has long been assumed for the Paleolithic. Yet Steven L. Kuhn and Mary Stiner of the University of Arizona argue this sex-based division of labor did not exist before the Upper Paleolithic. It may have evolved only after 45,000 years ago, as a way to acquire food and resources more efficiently.

• 7. Food And Fire

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  Hunting and gathering supplied most food, but Middle Paleolithic people began to add seafood and to preserve meat by smoking and drying it. In the region now occupied by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Middle Stone Age inhabitants hunted catfish six feet long using specialized barbed fishing points, as early as 90,000 years ago. Neanderthals in Italy cooked shellfish about 110,000 years ago, and Middle Paleolithic Homo sapiens did the same at Pinnacle Point in Africa. Fire became widespread for the first time in human prehistory during this period, and humans began cooking food around 250,000 years ago. Some scientists suggest hominids cooked to defrost frozen meat, aiding survival in cold regions. Darker readings of the evidence persist. Tim D. White points to the large quantity of butchered human bones at Neanderthal and other sites as a sign that cannibalism was common before the Upper Paleolithic. It may have stemmed from food shortages, or from religious motives, though some argue the marks instead reflect excarnation or the work of saber-toothed cats, lions, and hyenas.

• 8. The Levallois Edge

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  Around 200,000 years before present, a new way of making stone tools emerged, the Levallois technique, also called the prepared-core technique. It was more elaborate than the earlier Acheulean methods. Wallace and Shea divide the resulting cores into two types, formal cores designed to extract the maximum from raw material, and expedient cores shaped by immediate functional need. The technique produced more controlled and consistent flakes. It let Middle Paleolithic humans haft sharp stone flakes onto wooden shafts, creating stone-tipped spears, the earliest composite tools. Neanderthals, working at a Middle Paleolithic level of technology, hunted large game as effectively as later Upper Paleolithic humans. They rarely or never used projectile weapons, preferring to ambush prey and strike with thrusting spears at close range. Harold L. Dibble has raised a lasting question about these tools, asking whether they were distinct preconceived forms or simply a continuum of shapes reflecting how often an edge was resharpened. Sites that anchor this story stretch from La Cotte de St Brelade on Jersey and Le Moustier in France to Bisitun Cave in Iran and the open-air ground at Maastricht-Belvédère in the Netherlands.