Upper Paleolithic

• 1. Introduction

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  Around 50,000 years ago, something shifted in the stone tools that humans left behind. The archaeologist Richard G. Klein, who has studied ancient stone tools at length, says that before this moment the kits found in Asia, Africa and Europe all look much alike and unsophisticated. After it, the tools split into categories a researcher could name: projectile points, engraving tools, knife blades, drills and piercers. This is the threshold of the Upper Paleolithic, the third and final subdivision of the Old Stone Age. It runs very broadly from about 50,000 years ago down to roughly 12,000 years ago, where it gives way to the Mesolithic. Some theories tie its start to the appearance of behavioral modernity in humans. So why did the tools suddenly differentiate after hundreds of thousands of years of sameness? What does it mean that humans began carving ivory, painting cave walls and marking bones with dots and lines? And what happened to the Neanderthals, who kept making the older tools right up until they vanished?

• 2. The Toolmaker's Leap

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  Among the artefacts of Africa less than 50,000 years old, archaeologists found they could sort the stone tools into many distinct types, each made for a specific purpose. This was the change Richard G. Klein highlights: a tool kit that suddenly resists being lumped together. The early modern humans who spread into Europe, called the Cro-Magnons, left behind sophisticated stone tools alongside carved and engraved pieces of bone, ivory and antler, plus cave paintings and Venus figurines.

  Flint manufacturing shifted toward industries built on fine blades rather than the simpler, shorter flakes of earlier times. Burins and racloirs let people work bone, antler and hides with precision. Advanced darts and harpoons appear in this period, and so does a cluster of inventions that reshaped daily survival: the fish hook, the oil lamp, rope, and the eyed needle.

  Climate may have forced some of this ingenuity. The behavioral changes have been linked to a series of global temperature drops that deepened the cold of the last glacial period, popularly but incorrectly called the last ice age. Falling temperatures may have shrunk the supply of usable timber, pushing people toward other materials. Flint itself becomes brittle in the cold and may have stopped working as a reliable tool, a small physical fact with large consequences for what humans had to invent next.

• 3. Hands Across The Continents

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  Anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens, are believed to have emerged in Africa around 300,000 years ago. For a long stretch their way of life is argued to have changed little from the archaic humans of the Middle Paleolithic, until the marked increase in artefact diversity about 50,000 years ago. That period coincides with the most common date for the expansion of modern humans out of Africa across Asia and Eurasia.

  Australia was most likely reached before about 60,000 years ago, while Europe was peopled after about 45,000 years ago. Modern humans pushed north into Siberia as far as the 58th parallel by roughly 45,000 years ago, a presence recorded by the remains known as Ust'-Ishim man. Kilu Cave at Buka in the Solomons stands as evidence for the first human settlement of an oceanic island and for navigating the open ocean.

  The peopling of the Americas came later and depended on the cold itself. East and Central Asian populations reached the Bering land bridge after about 35,000 years ago. They expanded into the Americas by about 15,000 years ago, with Paleo-Indians moving across North America and then southward through Central America. Far to the south, wooden buildings appear in Chile by about 12,000 years ago, and the first evidence of human settlement in Argentina dates to about 11,000 years ago.

• 4. The Cold That Shaped Everything

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  The Last Glacial Maximum was the coldest phase of the last glacial period, lasting from about 26,500 to 19,000 years ago and coldest at its very end. During it, most of Northern Europe lay under an ice-sheet. Human populations were pushed into refugia: modern Italy and the Balkans, parts of the Iberian Peninsula, and areas around the Black Sea.

  After the Maximum came the Allerød oscillation, a warm and moist global interstadial around 13,500 to 13,800 years ago. Then, perhaps within as little as a decade, the cold and dry Younger Dryas set in, bringing sub-arctic conditions to much of northern Europe. The Preboreal rise in temperatures began sharply around 10,300 years ago and, by its end around 9,000 years ago, had brought temperatures nearly to present-day levels, though the climate stayed wetter.

  As the glaciers receded, the sea rose and swallowed land that humans had walked. The English Channel, the Irish Sea and the North Sea were dry ground at this time, and the Black Sea was a fresh-water lake. The rise continued until at least 7,500 years ago, so most evidence of Upper Paleolithic life along Europe's coasts is now lost beneath the water, including Doggerland, the drowned region beneath the North Sea.

• 5. Walls Of Paint And Ivory

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  At Chauvet Cave in the Ardèche gorge at Vallon-Pont-d'Arc, France, a wall painting of horses, rhinoceroses and aurochs survives; it was discovered in December 1994. Artistic work blossomed in this era through cave painting, petroglyphs, and carvings and engravings on bone or ivory. Cave art in Spain, around the Caves of Nerja, is dated to about 40,000 years ago, the oldest yet found in Europe, and scientists have theorised that Neanderthals rather than modern humans may have made it.

  The Swabian Alps held an early cultural centre that produced the oldest depiction of a human being, the Venus of Hohle Fels, near the beginning of the Aurignacian. The Löwenmensch figure carved at Hohlenstein-Stadel is one of the earliest examples of figurative art and now sits in the Ulmer Museum in Ulm, Germany. The first flutes also appear in Germany during this window. The directly dated figurative cave art at Leang Bulu' Sipong in Sulawesi, Indonesia, stands among the earliest known.

  Later walls grew busier. The Hall of Bulls at Lascaux in France was painted around 17,000 years ago, discovered in 1940 and closed to the public in 1963. Spotted human hands were painted at Pech Merle in the Dordogne, and the bison on the ceiling at Altamira in Spain, discovered in 1879, were not accepted as authentic until 1902. At Cosquer Cave near Cap Margiou in France, the paintings are real but the cave mouth now lies underwater.

• 6. Marks That Mean Something

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  Lines and dots, set next to images of animals in European caves around 35,000 BCE, may be the earliest proto-writing. Several symbols were used in combination to convey seasonal information about hunted animals. A line and a dot were apparently interchangeable as a way to count lunar months, while the Y sign apparently meant "To give birth." Combined, these characters seem to record the breeding period of the animals drawn beside them.

  The impulse to mark and tally reaches deep into Africa. The notched Lebombo bone, a possible tally stick or lunar calendar, is dated to about 44,000 to 43,000 years ago in Eswatini, then called Swaziland, in southern Africa. The earliest known mining in the archaeological record is the Ngwenya Mine in Swaziland, where humans dug hematite about 43,000 years ago to make the red pigment ochre. The oldest-known ceramic in the world, the Venus of Dolní Věstonice in the Czech Republic, dates to the window between about 29,000 and 25,000 years ago.

• 7. Hunters And Their Herds

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  Caribou, or wild reindeer, "may well be the species of single greatest importance in the entire anthropological literature on hunting," a measure of how central one animal was to survival. Settlements often sat in narrow valley bottoms, possibly tied to the hunting of passing herds. Some camps may have been lived in year round, but more often they were seasonal, with people moving between sites to take different foods at different times of the year.

  The Upper Paleolithic holds the earliest known evidence of organized settlements, in the form of campsites, some with storage pits. More complex social groupings emerged, supported by more varied and reliable food sources and specialized tools, which probably fed a rising sense of group identification or ethnicity. The mammoth-bone village at Mezhyrich in Ukraine, dating to about 18,000 years ago, shows how thoroughly people built their lives around the animals they hunted.

  Fishing has even deeper roots. The first evidence of human fishing comes from artefacts about 125,000 years old in Buya, Eritrea, and from other places such as Blombos cave in South Africa. In this later period, the fishing of pelagic species and the navigation of open ocean is shown by sites from Timor and from Buka in the Solomon Islands, including the Jerimalai shelter on Timor. At the close of the era, around 10,000 years ago, evidence of a massacre near Lake Turkana in Kenya points to Upper Paleolithic warfare.

• 8. The Last Of The Neanderthals

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  The Neanderthals kept using Mousterian stone tool technology, and possibly Châtelperronian technology, even as modern humans were inventing new tool types around them. The first direct evidence for Neanderthals hunting cave lions comes from a cave lion skeleton found at Seigsdorf, Germany, bearing hunting lesions, dated to about 48,000 years ago. So these were capable hunters, not crude relics.

  The Châtelperronian culture sat around central and south western France and northern Spain, appearing to derive from the Mousterian and marking the period of overlap between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, lasting from roughly 45,000 to 40,000 years ago. The Mousterian tools, and the Neanderthals who made them, disappeared from the record at about the same moment, around 40,000 calibrated years before present. Yet the line did not snap cleanly everywhere; evidence for continued Neanderthal presence in the Iberian Peninsula at 37,000 years ago was published in 2017.

  The expansion of modern humans out of Africa, the same movement that filled Eurasia, may have contributed to the Neanderthals' extinction. After them, the cultural sequence rolls on through named traditions: the Aurignacian flourishing between 43,000 and 26,000 years ago, the Gravettian, the Solutrean of France, Spain and England, and the Magdalenian leaving traces from Portugal to Poland between 17,000 and 12,000 years ago. The Holocene glacial retreat begins around 11,700 years ago, and with it the earliest farming stirs in the Fertile Crescent.