'Them' or 'Us§? A Question of Cognition: The Case for Neanderthal Modernity.

Abstract

The appearance of modern human behaviour in Europe has been the focus of many discussions throughout the past few decades. The sudden explosion" (Mellars 1996) of symbolic artefacts after ~40 000 BP (before present) in European sites has given rise to several models describing the entrance of a behaviourally and anatomically modern population to the continent. Though recent discoveries and re-analysis of older data from both Europe and Africa have shown that the Upper Palaeolithic (UP) transition may not have been the revolution it once was thought to be (McBrearty and Brooks 2000, d'Errico 2003), certain prejudices seem to linger.