Book review: Emergence and Diversity of Modern Human Behavior in Paleolithic Asia

Abstract

This text represents a monumental undertaking in scope and breadth of topical coverage and geographic extent and the editorship and authors have done a tremendous service in its production. The title is an appropriate thumbnail sketch of what this volume presents to the reader. The crux of this book addresses and brings to question the variables that researchers have used and continue to use to identify “modern human behavior” in the prehistoric record. Discussions of what constituted modern human behavior at the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition across Africa and Western Europe have relied largely on trait lists and how these are combined in the archaeological record. The combined papers in the present volume all suggest that, although such trait lists are an appropriate approach to identifying modern human behavior, trying to apply them in toto to parts of Asia beyond Europe and Africa is not feasible.