Introduction

Abstract It has long been recognized that human populations and their behaviors underwent a variety of dramatic changes during the middle of the last glacial period, the period also known as the Interpleniglacial or Oxygen Isotope Stage (OIS) 3. This has long been framed in the context of the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition and as part of the phylogenetic emergence of early modern humans. However, it has become apparent that it involved not only these more generally recognized transitions but also significant human biological, technological, social, and cultural changes within the earlier Upper Paleolithic. For this reason, the Upper Paleolithic complexes of OIS 3 are increasingly divided into an Initial Upper Paleolithic (the Châtelperronian, Bohunician, Szeletian, etc.), the Early Upper Paleolithic (principally the Aurignacian), and the Middle Upper Paleolithic (the Gravettian and its variants in time and space) (Svoboda et al., 1996; Roebroeks et al., 2000; Svoboda & Bar-Yosef, 2003; Svoboda & Sedlácková, 2004). From this comes a recognition, long overdue, of the major amounts of human cultural fluorescence that emerged after 30,000 years B.P. and continued through the middle of the following ten millennia.