This essay considers focal concerns and disagreements in the current debate on the emergence of behavioral modernity in the Middle and Upper Paleolithic. After a critical evaluation of the theoretical considerations implicit in some debaters’ assumptions about religion as an all-inclusive mindset, a kind of regulatory world-view by default (cf. Lewis-Williams 2002), I move on to discuss burials and personal ornaments as particularly tenacious cases of suspended disbelief. In their capacity as archaeological signatures indicating new means of familiarization and defamiliarization, personal ornaments and buried (“artificial”) bodies express enhanced (“hyperbolic”) identities by simultaneously subsuming an in-group awareness of the artificiality inherent in such expressions. The latter propensity can be considered crucial to the emergence of behavioral modernity, viz. that of withholding viable assumptions about the natural world (e.g. what constitutes a human body) as a means of creating, and participating in, a virtual world of shared hyperboles.