West Asia

This chapter presents a brief overview of Middle and Upper Paleolithic sites and lithic assemblages in West Asia as an introduction to relevant records in PaleoAsia DB, which were registered mainly during 2010–2011. The database includes 230 sites in West Asia, containing 553 cultural layers that mainly yielded Middle and Upper Paleolithic assemblages. Among them, 176 Middle Paleolithic layers and 114 Upper Paleolithic layers include data of lithic technological modes defined by the PaleoAsia project (Nishiaki et al. in Quat Int 596:144–154, 2021). The registered sites are mainly distributed in the Levant while the rest includes sites in the Zagros, Anatolia, the southern Caucasus, and the Arabian Peninsula. Although the database does not include many of the sites reported after 2012, we made some updates. The chronological and geographical patterns of the Middle and Upper Paleolithic sites and lithic assemblages in the database (as of 2012) were described in detail by (Kadowaki in Dynamics of learning in Neanderthals and modern humans, Springer, New York, 2013; Kadowaki in Encyclopedia of global archaeology, Springer, New York, 2014). Here we present the summary with some updates since 2012. Thus, we mainly cite references published after 2012 because those before 2012 are listed in (Kadowaki in Dynamics of learning in Neanderthals and modern humans, Springer, New York, 2013; Kadowaki in Encyclopedia of global archaeology, Springer, New York, 2014). We also present a recent summary of human fossils recovered from Middle and Upper Paleolithic sites in West Asia that provide key evidence regarding the relationship between human cultural and biological evolutions.