The earliest evidence of behavioral modernity first appears during the Middle Paleolithic; undisputed evidence of behavioral modernity, however, only becomes common during the following Upper Paleolithic period.

Evidence from archeology and comparative ethnography indicates that Middle Paleolithic people lived in small, egalitarian band societies similar to those of Upper Paleolithic societies and some modern hunter-gatherers such as the ǃKung and Mbuti peoples

Cave sites
Western Europe
• Axlor, Spain
• Grotte de Spy, Spy, Belgium
• La Cotte de St Brelade, Jersey
• Le Moustier, France—see also Mousterian

• Veldwezelt-Hezerwater
• Picture Gallery of the Paleolithic (reconstructional palaeoethnology), Libor Balák at the Czech Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Archaeology in Brno, The

Although gathering and hunting comprised most of the food supply during the Middle Paleolithic, people began to supplement their diet with seafood and began smoking and drying meat to

Around 200,000 BP Middle Paleolithic Stone tool manufacturing spawned a tool-making technique known as the prepared-core technique, that was more elaborate than previous Acheulean techniques. Wallace and Shea split the core artifacts into two different types:

• Early human migrations
• Recent African origin of modern humans
• Timeline of human prehistory