Paleolithic

• 1. Introduction

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  The Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age, stretches from about 3.3 million years ago to roughly 11,650 years before the present. That is nearly the entire span of human prehistoric technology, compressed into a name coined by archaeologist John Lubbock in 1865 from the Greek words for "old" and "stone". What does it mean that our species spent all but the last sliver of its existence without farming, without cities, without writing? And what happened in that enormous stretch of time that made us who we are today? The answers are carved in stone tools, traced in cave paint, and buried with the dead at sites scattered across every continent humans ever reached.

• 2. A World in Motion

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  During the earlier Pliocene epoch, South America was still an island continent, home to distinctive marsupial fauna found nowhere else. Its collision with North America through the Isthmus of Panama cut off warm equatorial ocean currents, chilling the now-isolated Atlantic Ocean and reshaping the climate of the entire planet. Africa's collision with Asia created the Mediterranean Sea, erasing the last remnants of the ancient Tethys Ocean.

  The Pleistocene that followed was an age of ice. Continental glaciers advanced to the 40th parallel in some places, and scientists have identified four major glacial events separated by warmer interglacials. During each advance, sea levels dropped by 100 meters or more as water locked itself into ice sheets thousands of meters deep. During interglacial periods, coastlines drowned under rising seas.

  The effects reached every corner of the globe. The Cordilleran Ice Sheet blanketed northwestern North America, while the Laurentide sheet covered the east. The Fenno-Scandian ice sheet pressed across northern Europe as far as Great Britain. Even equatorial mountain ranges in Africa, including the glaciers of Mount Kenya, Mount Kilimanjaro, and the Ruwenzori Range, held more ice than they do today.

  Those extreme swings in climate may have played a role in the eventual extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna. New research suggests the woolly mammoth fell to a combination of climate change shrinking its habitat and Paleolithic hunters finishing off the reduced populations. Small groups of woolly mammoths survived on remote Arctic islands; the population on Wrangel Island held on until about 1700 years before the present, when that island was settled by prehistoric humans.

• 3. Spreading Across the Planet

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  About 2 million years ago, groups of hominins began leaving Africa for the first time, settling southern Europe and Asia. The South Caucasus was occupied by about 1,700,000 years before the present, and northern China was reached by about 1,660,000 years before the present.

  Homo erectus is the species most closely associated with this first great migration. Very little fossil evidence survives from European Lower Paleolithic sites, but hominins living there are generally thought to have been Homo erectus as well. Their northward expansion appears to have been limited by one crucial lack: there is no evidence of regular fire use in European cave settlements before about 400,000 years ago.

  A second major expansion followed. Around 500,000 years ago, a group of early humans often called Homo heidelbergensis left Africa for Europe and gradually evolved into the Neanderthals. Anatomically modern Homo sapiens sapiens emerged in eastern Africa about 300,000 years ago, left Africa around 50,000 years ago, and from there spread across the planet. For a period, multiple hominin groups coexisted. Neanderthals were still living in parts of Eurasia about 40,000 years ago, and DNA studies point to an unknown degree of interbreeding with Homo sapiens sapiens.

  By about 50,000 years before the present, the first humans set foot in Australia. By about 45,000 years before the present, humans lived at 61 degrees north latitude in Europe. Japan was reached by about 30,000 years before the present, and Siberia, above the Arctic Circle, by about 27,000 years before the present. Kilu Cave at Buku island in the Solomon Islands demonstrates that humans navigated some 60 kilometers of open ocean by 30,000 years BCE. By the close of the Upper Paleolithic, humans had crossed Beringia and expanded throughout the Americas.

• 4. From Chopper to Composite Spear

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  Excavations at Gona, Ethiopia, have produced thousands of stone artifacts firmly dated by radioisotopic dating and magnetostratigraphy to 2.6 million years ago. The earliest hominins who made them, members of the genus Australopithecus, intentionally selected raw stone with good flaking qualities and chose stones of appropriate size for different cutting tasks.

  That earliest tool tradition, called the Oldowan, produced choppers, burins, and stitching awls. It was completely replaced around 250,000 years ago by the more complex Acheulean industry, first conceived by Homo ergaster around 1.8-1.65 million years ago. Hand axes were central to the Acheulean toolkit, but what they were actually used for remains genuinely disputed. Interpretations range from cutting and butchering tools to digging implements, flaking cores, trap components, and even objects of purely ritual significance, perhaps in courtship. William H. Calvin has suggested that some hand axes may have served as thrown weapons aimed at herds of animals at waterholes, stunning an individual without necessarily inflicting deep wounds.

  By around 200,000 years before the present, Middle Paleolithic toolmakers developed the prepared-core technique. Rather than knapping a stone opportunistically, they shaped a core to produce consistent, controlled flakes. This allowed them to haft sharp stone points onto wooden shafts, creating the earliest composite tools: stone-tipped spears. Microliths, or small stone tools, appeared around 70,000-65,000 years before the present, and they proved essential to the later invention of bows and spear-throwers.

  Harpoons appear around 90,000 years before the present. With fish reliably on the menu, Paleolithic groups gained a hedge against starvation that purely land-based hunters lacked. During the Upper Paleolithic, inventions came in rapid succession: nets around 22,000-29,000 years before the present, bolas, the spear thrower around 30,000 years before the present, and the bow and arrow around 25,000-30,000 years before the present.

• 5. Eating Through the Ice Age

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  Paleolithic people ate varying proportions of vegetables, fruit, seeds, insects, meat, fish, and shellfish, and those proportions shifted dramatically depending on geography and era. People living near the coast or along rivers had access to fish and shellfish far earlier than most accounts suggest. Middle Paleolithic Homo sapiens in the region now occupied by the Democratic Republic of the Congo were hunting large catfish, reaching about 6 feet in length, with specialized barbed fishing points as early as 90,000 years ago.

  Shellfish cooking at Neanderthal sites in Italy goes back about 110,000 years, and at Pinnacle Point in South Africa, evidence of shellfish in the diet reaches about 164,000 years before the present. Winemaking may have origins in the Paleolithic as well, when early humans may have drunk the juice of naturally fermented wild grapes from animal-skin pouches. Near the Sea of Galilee, cereal cultivation of emmer, barley, and oats has been observed from the Paleolithic Levant around 23,000 years ago.

  Diet also carried health consequences that cut both ways. Paleolithic hunter-gatherers suffered less famine and malnutrition than the Neolithic farming societies that followed them, partly because they accessed a far wider variety of foods and were not dependent on any single crop. Many famines that struck Neolithic and later farmers were caused or worsened by precisely that dependence. At the same time, Paleolithic people were unlikely to suffer from modern diseases of affluence such as type 2 diabetes or coronary heart disease, because they ate mostly lean meats and plants, engaged in intense physical activity, and generally did not survive long enough to reach the typical age of onset for those conditions.

  Fire transformed what humans could eat. Early hominins may have begun cooking food as early as 1.9 million years ago, and the Upper Paleolithic saw the emergence of boiling. Stone-boiling, in which heated stones were transferred into a perishable container to heat water, is well documented; the Abri Pataud hearths are a Middle Paleolithic example. Cooking made plant foods more digestible, reduced their toxicity, and maximized nutritional value. Archaeologists point to changes in jaw structure, molar size, tooth enamel thickness, and gut volume as physical evidence that cooking reshaped the human body over this long period.

• 6. Society Without States

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  Middle Paleolithic bands typically ranged from 20 to 30 members, or sometimes 25-100, and were usually nomadic. Several families formed each band. Bands could join into larger groupings, sometimes called macrobands, for acquiring mates, celebrations, or exploiting areas of concentrated resources.

  The entire population of Europe between 16,000 and 11,000 years before the present likely averaged around 30,000 individuals. Between 40,000 and 16,000 years before the present, that number was even lower, at an estimated 4,000-6,000 people across the entire continent. Population density overall hovered around just one person per square mile, probably due to a combination of low body fat, high levels of physical activity among women, nomadic lifestyle, late infant weaning, and the simple fact that without farming, a large territory could not support many mouths.

  Debate continues over whether these societies were primarily egalitarian or stratified. Some Upper Paleolithic societies in resource-rich environments, such as those at Sungir in what is now Russia, appear to have had more complex hierarchical organization and may have engaged in persistent conflict. Christopher Boehm hypothesized in 1999 that egalitarianism may have evolved in Paleolithic societies as a practical mechanism for distributing food and meat equally to avoid famine. Raymond C. Kelly proposed that the relative peacefulness of many Middle and Upper Paleolithic groups resulted from low population density, cooperative exchange between bands, and the deterrence effect of projectile weapons, which increased the cost of raiding.

  Long-distance trade is documented as far back as 120,000 years ago in the Middle Paleolithic, with ochre, valued for religious and ritual use, being exchanged between bands. Evidence from art and funerary sites indicates that some women held seemingly high status in their communities. The earliest known Paleolithic shaman, dated to about 30,000 years before the present, was female.

• 7. Art, Music, and the Sacred

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  The earliest undisputed burial of a shaman dates to about 30,000 years before the present, in what is now the Czech Republic. That single grave crystallizes a question the entire Paleolithic raises: when did humans first reach inward toward something they could not see or touch?

  Middle Paleolithic burials at Krapina, Croatia, about 130,000 years before the present, and at Qafzeh, Israel, about 100,000 years before the present, have led some anthropologists, including Philip Lieberman, to conclude that these people may have held beliefs about an afterlife. Cut marks on Neanderthal bones from sites such as Combe-Grenal and Abri Moula in France suggest the Neanderthals may have practiced ritual defleshing for religious reasons, mirroring practices found in some contemporary human cultures.

  Upper Paleolithic cave paintings have generated competing explanations since they were first studied. The prehistorian Abbe Breuil interpreted them as hunting magic, but that reading struggles to account for images of saber-toothed cats and lions, which were not hunted for food, or the half-human, half-animal figures found in the same caves. The anthropologist David Lewis-Williams linked the paintings to shamanistic practices, pointing to the remoteness of the painted chambers and the recurrence of figures that mirror imagery found in modern hunter-gatherer shamanic traditions. Symbol-like images are actually more common in cave paintings than depictions of animals or humans, and researcher R. Dale Guthrie has identified a wide range of skill levels among the artists, suggesting that painting was not confined to specialists.

  Venus figurines have attracted equally varied theories. Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas and feminist scholar Merlin Stone, whose 1976 book When God Was a Woman advanced the argument, saw them as evidence of goddess-centered religion. Catherine McCoid and LeRoy McDermott proposed they were self-portraits made by women artists. Animal worship may also have been widespread: Emil Bächler argued from Middle Paleolithic cave evidence that a bear cult existed among Neanderthals, and archaeological evidence from art and bear remains from the Upper Paleolithic describes a bear ceremonial in which a bear was shot with arrows, killed by a lung shot, and ritually honored near a clay bear statue covered with bear fur, with the skull and body buried separately.

• 8. The End of an Age

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  About 50,000 years before the present, a marked increase in the diversity of artifacts appears in the archaeological record. In Africa, bone artifacts and the first unambiguous art emerge. The first clear evidence of human fishing is also dated to this period, with finds from sites including Blombos Cave in South Africa.

  By around 10,000 years before the present, people in many parts of the world began settling into permanent locations and relying on agriculture. The shift carried a hidden cost. Jared Diamond suggests that the status of women declined with the adoption of agriculture, because women in farming societies typically face more pregnancies and more physically demanding work than women in hunter-gatherer societies. The transition also narrowed the human diet dramatically, making farming populations more vulnerable to the famines that Paleolithic foragers had largely avoided.

  The Wrangel Island mammoth population persisted until about 1700 years before the present, a lifespan that overlaps with the construction of the Egyptian pyramids. On Saint Paul Island, no evidence of prehistoric human presence has been found, though early settlements dating as far back as 6,500 years before the present appear on the nearby Aleutian Islands. What happened on Wrangel Island, where mammoth and human arrival coincide so closely in the record, may be the last chapter in a story that began when the first Paleolithic hunters learned to read the migration patterns of large game animals.