Sink the Mousterian? Named stone tool industries (NASTIES) as obstacles to investigating hominin evolutionary relationships in the Later Middle Paleolithic Levant

The Later Middle Paleolithic lithic archaeological record for the East Mediterranean Levant has been invoked to support competing and contradictory models for the evolutionary relationships between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis. The lithic evidence has not helped paleoanthropology achieve a conclusive resolution about this issue because archaeologists continue to structure inter-assemblage lithic variability in terms of stone tool industries such as the “Mousterian”. This paper explores the problems that named stone tool industries (or “NASTIES”) cause for Paleolithic archaeology, and it explores alternatives to them.