The Late and Final Middle Palaeolithic of Central Europe and Its Contributions to the Formation of the Regional Upper Palaeolithic: a Review and a Synthesis

Abstract

For decades, the relationship of pre-modern hominins to anatomically modern humans (AMH) and the transition from mode 3 to mode 4 industries remain topics of ongoing scientific debate. Over the last 20 years, different disciplines have added new data and much detail to these questions, highlighting the demographic and social and cultural complexity underlaying these major changes or turnovers in human evolution. As with most other regions outside Africa, archaeologists faced long-lasting discussions whether or not the central European archaeological record is to be understood as a regional transition from the Middle Palaeolithic (MP) to the Upper Palaeolithic (UP) or if it is characterised by the replacement of Neanderthal MP techno-complexes by industries of overall UP character imported by modern humans. These debates have been re-fuelled by the discoveries of new sites, of new hominin fossil remains and by aDNA studies pinpointing towards the arrival of AMH in Europe several millennia earlier than previously thought (Slimak et al.,  Science Advances, 8, eabj9496, 2022; Hajdinjak et al., Nature, 592, 253-257, 2021; Prüfer et al., Nature Ecology & Evolution, 5, 820–825, 2021). Together with new radiometric age-estimates and detailed archaeological site studies, these developments call to recapture the present knowledge of the Late (LMP) and Final Middle Palaeolithic (FMP) of central Europe, viewed from the perspective of lithic technology and typology, raw material exploitation and land-use strategies. We will review and characterise this record as it represents the demographic and cultural substrate that AMH had met and will discuss to which degree this substrate contributed to the formation of the central European UP.