Cultural Transmission, Institutional Continuity and the Persistence of the Mousterian

Abstract

Mousterian or Eurasian Middle Paleolithic material culture represents an extremely successful set of hominin adaptations. Mousterian technologies were used for more than 200,000 years by groups living in diverse habitats through several glacial/interglacial cycles. Yet they also disappeared surprisingly rapidly following the expansion of anatomically modern Homo sapiens into Eurasia. In fact, the same factors that underpinned the apparent success of the Mousterian technologies and culture may have hastened their eventual disappearance. Middle Paleolithic populations, though widespread, were small and fragmented into numerous local demes. Middle Paleolithic foragers fed at a high trophic level, which would have facilitated expansion into empty habitats but also would have kept absolute densities low. These demographic conditions help explain the apparent continuity in Mousterian culture across great expanses of space and time. Small, fragmented populations limit the rates at which innovations appear and spread. Unstable populations also inhibit the development of robust social networks and other cultural institutions that can store latent cultural information. But it is difficult for dispersed, fragmented populations to resist invasion. Any cognitive or cultural characteristics which led to greater continuity in early Homo sapiens populations and cultural institutions would have helped them to disrupt the already fragile social fabrics of Middle Paleolithic populations, and to establish a permanent presence in Eurasia.