The Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition in the Levant is a cultural phase of short duration. Indeed, its actual occurrence as reflected in the region’s archaeological record is debated. The blade industries that mark the onset of the Levantine Upper Paleolithic were viewed for a long time as a local development, stemming either directly out of the later stages (“Tabun B-type”) of the Levantine Middle Paleolithic (Garrod 1951, 1955, 1957; Copeland 1986:11), or from an early lithic tradition (“Tabun D-type”) that had been retained over the millennia (Marks 1993, and references therein). More recently it was suggested that transitional assemblages are virtually absent from the Levant, as even the lowest level of Boker Tachtit, the type locality for the alleged transitional assemblages, is argued to contain a full-fledged Upper Paleolithic occupation (Bar-Yosef et al. 1996). The latter scenario suggests that the fundamental change in lithic technology occurred during an extremely brief time span, between about 48 ky ago, the latest known date for a Mousterian assemblage in the Levant (Kebara VI), and about 45 ky, the date of Boker Tachtit. According to this view, the abrupt change in lithic technology between the Late Mousterian and the Early Upper Paleolithic may have been the result of “a rapid acculturation” rather than an autochtonous process (Bar-Yosef 1994:41; and cf. Klein 1995, this volume). Because “[I]nnovations involve . . . little more than new ways of doing old things” (Renfrew 1978), ‘pre-adaptations’ for accepting such new ways are thought to have occurred among Late Mousterian populations, permitting the swift shift in lithic technology between the Middle and Upper Paleolithic periods. These pre-adaptations would have enabled the assimilation of less familiar technological traits through either cultural contact with extraneous groups or autochthonous groups. In the former case, such pre-adaptations would allow easy incorporation of external innovations into the normative technological
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