The Middle Palaeolithic Leaf Points of Europe: Ecology, Knowledge and Scale

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This work is an investigation of the relations between heterogeneity in the material world and variations in human behaviour, particularly landscape settlement and stone tool fabrication, in the European Lower and Middle Palaeolithic. Through the development of a theoretical framework, broad analyses and more specific case studies, with a lithic study of the production and spatiotemporal distribution of leaf points, placed in an environmental and climatic context, it is concluded that, in the course of this period, ‘socially transmitted knowledge’ and ‘knowledgeable action’ converged upon each other in scalar terms. Through this process, received bodies of knowledge as to how to act became more vulnerable to transformation in transmission and context-specific technical innovations became more readily institutionalised. Pre-modern humans in Europe were therefore not trapped in permanent behavioural stasis. Possible factors in this process of convergence are discussed and the implications for our understanding of human ‘modernity’ considered.