Evolutionary Anthropology 15:42 43 (2006)

NEWS

The Human Revolution Rethought

conference entitled Rethinking the Human Revolution: New Behavioral and Biological Perspectives on the Origins and Dispersal of Modern Humans was held at Cambridge University between September 711, 2005. This conference, organized by Paul Mellars, Chris Stringer, Ofer Bar-Yosef, and Katie Boyle, was sponsored by the MacDonald Institute for Archaeological Research (Cambridge) and the American School of Prehistoric Research (Harvard). Its purpose was to assess progress in our understanding of modern human origins since the rst Human Revolution conference, held at Cambridge nearly twenty years ago.1,2 The major issues at the rst Human Revolution conference involved the implications of mitochondrial Eve, the redating of Levantine Middle Paleolithic hominin fossil contexts, models of the Middle to Upper Paleolithic industrial transition in western Eurasia, and the role of the Neandertals in modern human origins. In contrast, the major issues at this second conference were the use of contemporary human genetic variation to reconstruct ancient population dispersals, the implications of DNA recovered from Neandertal fossils, variation in the African Middle Stone Age (MSA) archeological record, the origins of the Aurignacian and related Initial Upper Paleolithic complexes, and the behavioral signicance of personal adornments. Forster (Cambridge), Kinsveld (Estonian Biocentre), Underhill (Stanford), and others described patterned variation among mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome haplogroups that shed light on the history of human population dispersals. These data point to a dispersal of ancestral Homo sapiens populations within Africa before 100 Kyr, followed by a dispersal

out of Africa, most likely rst to southern Asia after 40 Kyr. The recovery of DNA from Neandertal fossils in Europe is one of the truly revolutionary changes in paleoanthropological data since the rst Human Revolution conference. Pa a bo (Max Planck, Leipzig) reported that those Neandertal DNA sequences thus far recovered do not support hypotheses of large-scale interbreeding between Neandertals and early modern humans. He also described the numerous difculties, chiey contamination, that stand in the way of recovering DNA from human fossils. Much of the session devoted to the African evidence focused on Sally McBreartys (Connecticut) and Alison Brooks (George Washington University) contention that the essential characteristics of the Eurasian Upper Paleolithic Revolution emerged gradually and earlier on the African continent. The main challenges to this anti-Revolutionary position were questions about how widespread and persistent these particular behaviors were throughout Africa. For example, as Shea and Fleagle (Stony Brook) reported, archeological assemblages from Omo Kibish, Ethiopia, show few complex behaviors and little evidence of signicant behavioral change across an appreciable span of time, 195100 Kyr. That many of the indicators of behavioral modernity (personal adornment, complex stone-tool designs, pigment use, and use of marine resources) reported by Henshilwood (Bergen) for Blombos Cave are present neither at penecontemporaneous sites nor in the later phases of the South African MSA raised questions in many minds about the source of these seeming recursions of complex behavior in the African record. As the focus of the conference shifted to Europe and the Near East, the key issue was clearly the nature of

various Transitional and Initial Upper Paleolithic industrial entities, particularly the Bohunician and the Chatelperronian. Tostevins (Minnesota) detailed analysis of technological and typological variation among numerous southeast European and southwest Asian Initial Upper Paleolithic assemblages points clearly to a strong link between the Initial Upper Paleolithic of the Levant and the Bohunician industry of Moravia. This link is so strong, Tostevin argued, that it may be evidence of a migration from the Levant to Southeastern Europe. The conference also witnessed a further installation in the long-running debate between Mellars (Cambridge) and Zilhao (Bristol) concerning the antiquity of the West European Chatelperronian industry. Gravina (Cambridge) read a paper describing the interstratication of an early Aurignacian assemblage between two Chatelperronian ones at Grotte des Fe ` es. Because European prehistorians equate the Chatelperronian with Neandertals and the Aurignacian with modern humans, that discovery seems to provide clear evidence of contemporaneity between these hominins. Zilhao challenged this interpretation of the evidence, suggesting that the geoarcheological tests necessary to exclude stratigraphic disturbance had not been performed. BarYosef (Harvard) injected further energy into this debate by challenging the equation of the Chatelperronian with Neandertals, suggesting instead that it reected an early movement of modern humans into Western Europe. The use of exosomatic symbols, especially personal adornment, is clearly important in the modernization of Homo sapiens behavior. As Kuhn (Arizona) argued, however, the common practice of treating personal adornment as a subspecies of Paleolithic art isolates this behavior from its social and

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economic contexts. The patchwork appearance of evidence of personal adornment in Africa and Eurasia raises many questions. Are we looking at variation in the selective pressures that elicit this behavior, insufcient sampling of the African, Asian, and Australasian records, an artifact of taphonomy or preservation or, as White (New York University) suggested, systematic bias against the recovery of small artifacts by conventional archeological eld methods? This is an important issue because, as DErrico and Vanhaeren (Bordeaux) showed, variation in the production strategies of Aurignacian-age pendants approximates the short-term and regionalized pattern of modern cultural variability to a far greater degree than do other contemporary lithic or faunal dimensions of the archeological record.

apparently rooted in archeological estimates for biogeographic separation of human populations. These estimates are often controversial, to say the least. Debate about morphological variation among hominin fossils was, compared to the rst Human Revolution conference, conspicuous by its absence. New discoveries from Pestera cu Oase and Omo Kibish were reported, but the meaning of variation among Middle-Late Pleistocene hominins was not a focus for discussion.

PROSPECTS
By the conclusion of the conference, participants had identied several important directions for future research. These included the following: The South and East Asian paleoanthropological records are under-represented in our current database on human origins. As is made clear by the discoveries in Niah Cave by Barker (Cambridge) and excavations in India by Petraglia (Cambridge), our ignorance about the course of recent human evolution in these regions is vast. The Australasian archeological evidence, reviewed by OConnell (Utah), remains incompletely integrated into models of behavioral modernity based on the European evidence. Paleolithic industrial systematics needs a complete overhaul. If archeologists are going to continue to use named Paleolithic industries as a means by which to track (simultaneously) both adaptive change and population movements, then lithic analytical entities have to be constructed systematically and with theories well-grounded in models of ethnographic material-culture variability. Tostevins paper for this conference showed that this can be done, and that if it is done well, will produce valuable insights into the sources of industrial variability. Connecting cognitive studies to archeological variability, as Gibson (Texas), Wynn and Coolidge (Colorado), and Bickerton attempted, focusing on stone tools, involves many potential pitfalls. Most Paleolithic stone tools are instant technology, simple cores

PROBLEMS
Over the course of discussions, it became clear that there were some obstacles to constructive dialog among the participants. There were stark contrasts between largely European and Near Eastern archeologists working in a culturehistorical research tradition and, again largely, Anglo-American archeologists working in an evolutionary ecological one. These differing paradigms made it difcult to establish a dialog. Some culture-historical archeologists found the Americans discussions about middle-range research, cost-benet modeling, and costly signaling theory to be a distraction from central issues of chronology and geographic variation. Debates about Paleolithic industrial variability and the revolutionary or nonrevolutionary nature of Late Pleistocene archeological variability struck several of the more evolutionarily and ecologically oriented researchers as inductive generalizations without the support the middle-range theory (Binfords posthoc accommodative arguments). It also became clear that there was a growing need for dialog between geneticists and archeologists. The chronological basis for (pre)historical interpretations of living human genetic variation (that is, mutation rates) are

and akes that require no more than a few minutes, more often mere seconds, for a modern intknapper to replicate. The exceptions to this generalization may tell us something about cognitive abilities, but simple stone tools do not reliably implicate simple minds. As the Aranda (Central Australian Desert Aboriginal) proverb goes, The more you know, the less you need. A more profitable direction probably lies with exploring the implications of brain size and archeological evidence of increased social complexity. There clearly needs to be more careful higher-order theorization about the concept of behavioral modernity. It currently means very different things to different researchers. Europeanists use the term as a shorthand term for the derived features of the Upper Paleolithic. Africanists use it to refer to emergent features of the Middle Stone Age. Still others argue that trait-list approaches to the issue are fundamentally awed, suggesting instead that we should focus on strategic variation in particular behaviors (toolmaking, subsistence, and land use) rather than bundling them together into higher-level theoretical constructs. From what this reviewer saw at the conference, the latter approach is clearly the wave of the future in modern human origins research. If pulling together many diverse threads of recent paleoanthropological research and fostering debate were their goals, Mellars, Stringer, Bar-Yosef and Boyle clearly scored a success. The papers from this conference are being prepared for publication in 2005 as a monograph of the MacDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

REFERENCES
1 Mellars P, Stringer C, editors. 1989. The human revolution: behavioural and biological perspectives on the origins of modern humans. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2 Mellars PA, editor. 1990. The emergence of modern humans: an archaeological perspective. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

John J. Shea
Anthropology Department Stony Brook University NY 11794-4364 USA Email: John.Shea@sunysb.edu
DOI 10.1002/evan.20085