1Supposing that any human group was ever nourished by animal products alone, or supposing that this same group periodically split up solely for this purpose (which remains to be shown), or even supposing, in this fiction, that significant traces of such an action were preserved, the archaeologist would still need to understand them. On the contrary, fervent imaginations on a perpetual quest for such arguments have constantly run up against inverse scenarios, in which no nutritional reason can justify the power of human concepts over the natural environment. Despite persistent obstinacy, the categorization of a space by a human society is never defined by the search for prey alone, as if this form of nourishment was never just a consequence, rather than the cause, for the nets drawn by a human group over its environment.

2The cyclical movements of nomadic peoples depend more on the relationship they maintain with the Universe than on an anxious quest for the food that the Universe can offer. These food resources, which provide calories that allow the human species to be maintained, are found everywhere in fact, because they result from an intimate and profound interaction between living beings.

3In other words, human displacements arise from spiritual values that are much more complex than the search for food alone: they result from the choices made among the thousands of possibilities offered by an environment at any given moment. The motivations for these choices are rooted in a collective mindset that is maintained by tradition and practice, and is itself a reference to a mythical law. Better to die than to deny this law, as the plethora of existing religious taboos remind us every day. This “spiritual coherence” imbues Anthropology with a heart, without which it would consist of no more than chaotic and absurd litanies. We have trouble understanding, for example, why the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego and the Inuits chose to live such an uncomfortable lifestyle, which certainly cannot be explained from a scholarly “nutritionist” point of view. Such simplistic ideas can result only from a lack of instruction concerning the relationship between nutrition and choice of habitat. Seeing these inhabitable regions as natural refuges for starving hunters is the consequence of a poor education that reduces extremely complex human phenomena, such as the French Revolution of 1789, the discovery of America, or the rise of Nazism, to simplistic schemees.

6The preliminary study of the fauna realized by Marjan Mashkour (Mashkour et al., 2009) shows the extreme dominance of goats, nothing but goats, all smashed and charred – no ritual treatment for these insignificant Caprids. But we can wonder if such a high density of a “prey animal” would not attract others, somewhate like the model of paddocking in Arabia, where animals were grouped together, tamed, sheared and finally ritually killed, as is illustrated by the constant age at death of animals at Yafteh.

7The success of these humans armed with ballistic weapons both ensured their supremacy over the animal world and encouraged their geographic expansion. This power borders on divinity, and thus the transformation of myth into religious faith, because Man now appears in the form of a God.

9The lifespans of these lifeways in Central Asia seem extraordinary: around twenty thousand years at the site of Yafteh alone, as at numerous other occupations across Iran. This is where the foundations of the Aurignacian are the most clear, the longest and the most constant: no other entity came to separate them from the local Mousterian, such that continuity is perceptible in both demography and technology. Inevitably, these lifeways in perfect symbiosis with the steppe environment show few spectacular modifications, at least for those related to technology, whose variations appear to be contemporary and functional.

10The story was probably completely different in the realm of myths, ritual practices and spiritual adventures. On this basis alone, the territorial conquests can be explained since in all other domains, from prey to demography, there was a reigning equilibrium. The progressive displacements of habitats that appeared late in western Eurasia are only one example among many, which the history of sciences alone raised to the rank of a major event, while the phenomenon is maintained at the heart of this original space until the border of written history.