Middle Paleolithic
| The Paleolithic |
|---|
|
↑ Pliocene (before Homo) |
|
Lower Paleolithic (c. 3.3 Ma – 300 ka)
(300–45 ka)
(50–10 ka)
|
| ↓ Mesolithic ↓ Stone Age |
↑ Pliocene (before Homo)
The Middle Paleolithic (or Middle Palaeolithic) is the second subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age as it is understood in Europe, Africa and Asia. The term Middle Stone Age is used as an equivalent or a synonym for the Middle Paleolithic in African archeology. The Middle Paleolithic broadly spanned from 300,000 to 30,000 years ago. There are considerable dating differences between regions. The Middle Paleolithic was succeeded by the Upper Paleolithic subdivision which first began between 50,000 and 40,000 years ago.
According to the theory of the recent African origin of modern humans, anatomically modern humans began migrating out of Africa during the Middle Stone Age/Middle Paleolithic around 100,000 or 70,000 years ago and began to replace earlier pre-existent Homo species such as the Neandertals and Homo erectus.
The earliest evidence of behavioral modernity first appears during the Middle Paleolithic; undisputed evidence of behavioral modernity, however, only becomes common during the following Upper Paleolithic period.
Middle Paleolithic burials at sites such as Krapina, Croatia (c. 130,000 BP) and the Skhul and Qafzeh hominids (c. 100,000 BP) have led some anthropologists and archeologists such as Philip Lieberman, to believe that Middle Paleolithic cultures may have possessed a developing religious ideology which included belief in concepts such as an afterlife; other scholars suggest the bodies were buried for secular reasons.
According to recent archeological findings from Homo heidelbergensis sites in the Atapuerca Mountains, the practice of intentional burial may have begun much earlier during the late Lower Paleolithic, but this theory is widely questioned in the scientific community. Cut marks on Neandertal bones from various sites such as Combe Grenal and the Moula rock shelter in France may imply that the Neanderthals, like some contemporary human cultures, may have practiced excarnation for presumably religious reasons (see Neanderthal behavior § Cannibalism or ritual defleshing?).
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