A CRITICAL VIEW OF THE EVIDENCE FOR A SOUTHERN AFRICAN ORIGIN OF BEHAVIOURAL MODERNITY

Nicholas J. Conard

70 citations0/0 files stored

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology Archaeology and Rock Art Studies Language and cultural evolution

Abstract

The Middle Stone Age of southern Africa has produced a wealth of new data that points to this region as a centre for cultural development during the Middle and Late Pleistocene. In South Africa it has become scientifically fashionable and politically expedient in recent years to emphasize these important findings and to suggest that southern Africa represents the source of behavioural modernity. While a case can be made for this point of view, this paper examines the strengths and weaknesses of this hypothesis and ultimately rejects the idea of a monocentric southern African origin in favour of a model for a histori-cally contextualized, polycentric rise of cultural modernity. This model for Mosaic Polycentric Modernity (MPM), while not denying the unique role of Africa in the later phases of human evolution, better matches the global archaeological record than the models emphasizing strictly African origins.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 70 citations exist upstream.

References

2000The revolution that wasn't: a new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior 2003Pleistocene Homo sapiens from Middle Awash, Ethiopia 2005Stratigraphic placement and age of modern humans from Kibish, Ethiopia 2002Emergence of Modern Human Behavior: Middle Stone Age Engravings from South Africa 1988Genetic and Fossil Evidence for the Origin of Modern Humans 2007Early human use of marine resources and pigment in South Africa during the Middle Pleistocene 2004Middle Stone Age Shell Beads from South Africa 2002Modern human origins: progress and prospects

Cited by

2012Towards a prehistory of primates 2015An evolutionary perspective on coastal adaptations by modern humans during the Middle Stone Age of Africa 2012What roots for the Uluzzian? Modern behaviour in Central-Southern Italy and hypotheses on AMH dispersal routes 2011Trees and ladders: A critique of the theory of human cognitive and behavioural evolution in Palaeolithic archaeology 2011The Demise of the Neanderthal Cultural Niche and the Beginning of the Upper Paleolithic in Southwestern Germany

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.