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Causal explanations involve both narrative and laws. To explain some event as the effect of other events, we must at least demonstrate (1) that the cause and effect both took place, with the cause preceding the effect, and (2) that the effect belongs to a class of events that can be reliably expected to follow from a class of events to which the cause belongs. Demonstration (1) is a narrative; demonstration (2) is a law. Narrative and "contingency" are not satisfactory substitutes for laws in explaining evolutionary events. If any evolutionary events are explicable, there must be evolutionary laws, and the course of evolution must therefore be to some extent predictable. However, many evolutionary events will probably always elude causal explanation. In particular, as Hume pointed out, qualitatively unique events cannot be explained causally. If human beings possess qualitatively unique traits, their causes must remain a subject for speculation. The only evolutionary events we can explain, in our own line...

The Early Upper Paleolithic industry known as the Chatelperronian has been the subject of considerable controversy since its recognition early in the twentieth century. It has variously been considered to be associated with Neandertals or with modern humans, to be an intrusive or an indigenous development, and to be related or unrelated to subsequent industries in France and Spain. The dominant views of the Chatelperronian have changed over time in ways related both to changing theoretical perspectives in paleoanthropology and to the accumulating database at archaeologists' disposal.

The questions of the biological origins of anatomically modern humans and of the cultural transition between the Middle and the Upper Paleolithic are two of the most controversial issues in paleoanthropology and Paleolithic archaeology. This article reviews some of the main topics related to the Middle/Upper Paleolithic transition and suggests the principal role of the concept of complexity in understanding this cultural and historical change. The archaeological record of the Abric Romani Middle Paleolithic site is presented as an example of this approach. Our principal aim is not to add new and revolutionary facts but to suggest some thoughts for discussion, in the hope of opening a new perspective in the current debate.

Paleoanthropologists, while expending great effort to recover archaeological evidence of early hominid activities in the Plio-Pleistocene of Africa, have devoted almost no attention to the question of which early hominid(s) authored the Oldowan Industrial Complex. Weak and indirect evidence has been adduced for the propositions that (1) Homo habilis alone made the first stone tools (even though Homo is not found at this early time) and (2) Paranthropus was not a toolmaker (mainly because it was a vegetarian with a smaller cranial volume than Homo habilis). The most parsimonious interpretation of all present evidence, including geochronological, archaeological, and diagnostic fossil evidence of the hands of Australopithecus spp., Paranthropus robustus, and Homo habilis, indicates that Paranthropus and Homo habilis were both early toolmakers. Paranthropus may have been the first maker of stone tools, and these "robust" australopithecines may have relied heavily on lithic and bone technology to procure (and ...

This article considers the possible contribution of a modified concept of morphological "dating" to paleoanthropology. It is suggested that when a fossil specimen is discovered which does not "fit" morphologically with its supposed contemporaries, morphological dissimilarity should function to focus attention on the accuracy of its suggested antiquity. Examples from the Upper Pleistocene of Europe and North America illustrate that whenever such a situation has occurred in the past, the original dating and/ or the context of the aberrant specimen was subsequently found to be either wrong or at least highly questionable.