American School of Prehistoric Research/Instituto Português de Arqueologia
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Abstract:
Because of their meaning in other realms (common language, biological sciences), the use of words such as "modern" or "behavior" to conceptualize aspects of human evolution has a strong impact in our current understanding of the emergence of the Upper Paleolithic in Europe; it implicitly conveys, and favors, teleological views of the process where the explanation of culture change is fully reduced to changes in the biological hardware of the protagonists of the cultural process. The problems of definitioninvolving the Aurignacian relate to a large extent to the fact that, in this framework, the word has become equated with "behavior of the early modern Europeans". Such a practice should be abandoned, and the Aurignacian defined as a technocomplex, regardless of issues of authorship, so that we can work with a shared operational definition that holds in spite of adherence to paradigmatic views of what happened to Neandertals and early modern humans in the Europe of ca.40-30 kyr BP.
