ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the obstacles to tracking behavioural vectors in the Palaeolithic record, especially given the timescales involved and complex processes which contributed to its formation. It argues that even if caves were routinely used at earlier stages than a potential visibility threshold, changes in the archaeological record of landscape use and technological innovation are compellingly coincident with the appearance of sustained cave occupation. Home bases, constructed in terms of utility and centrality to wider, complex patterns of landscape use represent a human niche which persists in rural and urban settlement systems. Establishing in the regional archaeological record the first persistent and apparently targeted use of caves as home bases, as opposed to opportunistic sleeping sites, is important. While the evolutionary preconditions which might separate those hominins that used cave locations as home bases from those who did not might be small, this threshold would have had big advantages for those groups which expanded into this niche.
