Rivers are often seen to have played an important role for Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers as landmarks and resource location. While the former view regards rivers as passive guidelines or obstacles, the latter reduces them to their economic value. Both views, therefore, look at generic properties, equally valid for all streams and their sections and partly overlook the interaction between humans and specific rivers within the landscape. In this article, we contribute to the discussion by looking explicitly at an historically contingent and specific case of interaction between humans and a particular section of an individual river, i.e., the Rhine in the Neuwied Basin. Using an agent-based model, we aim at identifying differences in water-oriented land use decisions between the Late Upper and Late Palaeolithic occupations of the region. We observe a clear shift from a dominant focal role of the Rhine during the former to a less important spatial entity during the latter period and conclude that these differences are as much an expression of a changed perception of the Rhine as they are a result of environmental change and the transition from a pioneering to a stationary settlement phase and that indeed both aspects are inextricably intertwined.