Mina Weinstein-Evron

Preliminary abstract: The workshop will focus on technological, behavioral and cultural changes and innovations at the late Lower Paleolithic (LP) — early Middle Paleolithic (MP) boundary, 400-150 ky ago. This period witnessed the evolution of the Neanderthals in Europe and Anatomically Modern Humans in Africa, associated with a global burst of innovative behaviors that led to the rise of the MP and the Middle Stone Age. The origins of these new behaviors are under debate and have been argued to result from out-of-Africa dispersal of Anatomically Modern humans, cultural diffusions, local independent inventions, demographic increase, or anatomic changes in human populations. For the last 15 years, we have been researching the late LP (Acheulo-Yabrudian) — early MP layers at Misliya Cave, Israel, which yielded rich lithic and faunal assemblages, and provided new perspectives on various aspects of the LP–MP transition. In recent years, several other sites containing late LP or early MP layers have been studied in the Near East and nearby regions and old collections were re-analyzed. The proposed workshop will provide a fertile ground for discussion on pertaining issues of the LP–MP boundary with a special focus on the Near Eastern record, supplemented with contributions and general overviews from Eurasia and Africa.