The terms Lower Palaeolithic and Middle Palaeolithic represent research constructs within which cultural evolution and prehistoric hominin behaviours can be studied, with the transition usually understood as marking a watershed in our evolution: an adaptation with a million-year record of success that gives way to something new. The interpretation of the Lower Palaeolithic Acheulian technocomplex is usually understood as a period of cultural stasis that extends over much of Africa and Eurasia, principally associated with Homo erectus. Those innovations that can be observed occur widely separated from one another in space and time. Yet a closer and more detailed examination of the Middle Pleistocene records from East Africa, southern Africa, Europe and the Levant reveals significant variation in cultural repertoires. A kind of paradox emerges, in which an Old World Lower Palaeolithic, apparently lacking an overall dynamic of distinctive and directed change in terms of cumulative variation over time, nevertheless culminates in a transition which sees the universal appearance of the Middle Palaeolithic. The two main hypotheses that have been advanced to explain the global transition, which happens essentially synchronously, appear mutually exclusive and contradictory. One view is that altered climatic-environmental constraints enabled and encouraged an ‘Out-of-Africa’ dispersal (or dispersals) of a new type of genus Homo. This cultural replacement model has been challenged more recently by the alternative hypothesis of accumulating but unrelated and temporally non-linked regional, and in fact potentially autochthonous, processes. The Levant, by virtue of its position bridging Africa and Eurasia (thus being the region into which any out-of-Africa groups would have had first to disperse into), must be seen as a critical region for assessing the relative merits of these competing hypotheses. This paper deals with the Lower–Middle Paleolithic boundary in the Levant within a long temporal perspective. The Middle Pleistocene record in the Levant enables us to examine the amplitude of variation within each techno-complex, as well as to question whether there are diachronic changes in the amplitude of techno-typological variations as well as changes in the manner by which they appear in the record. The results carry significant implications for understandings of demographic and societal processes during the Lower–Middle Paleolithic transition in the Levant.

中文翻译：

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中更新世的泥潭：从黎凡特视角看中下古石器时代的过渡

下旧石器时代和中旧石器时代的术语代表研究构造，可在其中研究文化进化和史前人类的行为，而这种转变通常被理解为我们进化的分水岭：一种具有上百万年成功记录的改编作品，为某种东西所取代新。通常将下旧石器时代的阿契尔河技术复合体的解释理解为一段文化停滞期，其遍布非洲和欧亚大陆的大部分地区，主要与直立人有关。可以观察到的那些创新在空间和时间上彼此之间是相互分离的。然而，对东非，南部非洲，欧洲和黎凡特的中更新世记录进行的更仔细，更详细的检查显示，文化库中存在显着差异。一种悖论出现了，其中旧世界下旧石器时代显然缺乏随时间的累积变化而具有明显和有向变化的整体动态，但是最终在过渡时期达到了中古旧石器时代的普遍现象。为解释全球过渡而提出的两个主要假设基本上是同步发生的，它们相互排斥且相互矛盾。人。这种文化替代模型最近受到替代假设的挑战，这些假设是积累但不相关且在时间上不相关的区域过程，实际上是潜在的自发过程。黎凡特，由于其在非洲和欧亚大陆之间的桥梁地位（因此是非洲以外的团体首先必须进入的地区），必须被视为评估这些竞争的相对优势的关键地区。假设。本文从长远的角度探讨了黎凡特的下-中旧石器时代边界。黎凡特的中更新世记录使我们能够检查每个技术复杂区内的变化幅度，以及质疑技术类型变化幅度的历时性变化以及它们出现在记录中的方式是否发生变化。这些结果对于了解黎凡特下中古旧石器时代过渡时期的人口和社会进程具有重要意义。