ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 shows how a critical boundary in time, culture, and presumably cognitive skills, demarcated the middle and the upper Paleolithic periods, respectively. Somewhere around 40,000 years ago several important events occurred. One was the migration out of Africa of Homo sapiens sapiens to most of the rest of the Eurasian continents. Although this subspecies had apparently been present in Africa for many tens of thousands of years prior to this great migration, it was not until this time that massive cultural changes occurred that clearly distinguished what we have referred to as the middle Paleolithic from the subsequent upper Paleolithic. This was a critical time in human prehistory, not just because of the great migration but also in terms of our concern with the evolution of human thought concerning death.
