The Initial Upper Paleolithic and Its Place Within the Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic Transition of Southwest Asia: What Hides Behind the Curtain of Taxonomies?

Classification of the Paleolithic into Lower, Middle, and Upper has both chronological and cultural meanings serving as a framework for reconstructing cultural evolution and interpreting behavioral processes. Traditionally, the Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic transition in Eurasia is regarded as a bio-cultural turning point, in which local Neanderthals were replaced by incoming Homo sapiens populations, carrying with them a novel technological repertoire. As such, the basic classification of archeological data into broad spatially and temporally coherent blocks is not neutral and disconnected from the paradigmatic view of a “transition” as a developmental event. Initially, the Initial Upper Paleolithic (IUP) was introduced to describe the first cultural stage within the Upper Paleolithic and was later modified to define the cultural transition from the Middle to the Upper Paleolithic. In the last 20 years, the IUP has increasingly been used as a chronological-biological taxonomic unit to describe modern human dispersals into Eurasia, overriding its use within a cultural taxonomic system. In this paper, we evaluate the applicability of the term as a taxonomic unit. The construction of a chronicle and histories, based on well-documented and published data from the late Middle Paleolithic through to the earliest Upper Paleolithic sites across southwest Asia, are used to evaluate the applicability of the term Initial Upper Paleolithic as a taxonomic unit. Within this perspective, the Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic transition is viewed as a social and demographic process that is manifested differently in each of the sub-regions of southwest Asia: the Levant, Southern Caucasus, Armenian Highlands, and the Zagros.