Upper Paleolithic

The Paleolithic

Pliocene (before Homo)

Lower Paleolithic
(c. 3.3 Ma – 300 ka)

Middle Paleolithic
(300–45 ka)

Upper Paleolithic
(50–10 ka)

Mesolithic
Stone Age

The Upper Paleolithic (or Upper Palaeolithic, Late Stone Age) is the third and last subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. Very broadly, it dates to between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, roughly coinciding with the appearance of behavioral modernity and before the advent of agriculture.

Modern humans (i.e. Homo sapiens) are believed to have emerged about 195,000 years ago in Africa.[1] Although these humans were modern in anatomy, their lifestyle changed very little from their contemporaries, such as Homo erectus and the Neanderthals.[2]

About 50,000 years ago, there was a marked increase in the diversity of artifacts. In Africa, bone artifacts and the first art appear in the archeological record. Between 45,000 and 43,000 years ago, this new tool technology spread with human migration to Europe. The new technology generated a population explosion of modern humans which is believed to have contributed to the extinction of the Neanderthals.

The Upper Paleolithic has the earliest known evidence of organized settlements, in the form of campsites, some with storage pits. Artistic work blossomed, with cave painting, petroglyphs, carvings and engravings on bone or ivory. The first evidence of human fishing is also noted, from artifacts in places such as Blombos cave in South Africa. More complex social groupings emerged, supported by more varied and reliable food sources and specialized tool types. This probably contributed to increasing group identification or ethnicity.[3]

By 50,000–40,000 BP, the first humans set foot in Australia. By 45,000 BP, humans lived at 61° north latitude in Europe.[4] By 30,000 BP, Japan was reached, and by 27,000 BP humans were present in Siberia above the Arctic Circle. At the end of the Upper Paleolithic, a group of humans crossed the Bering land bridge and quickly expanded throughout North and South America.[4]

Lifestyle and technology

Both Homo erectus and Neanderthals used the same crude stone tools. Archaeologist Richard G. Klein, who has worked extensively on ancient stone tools, describes the stone tool kit of archaic hominids as impossible to categorize. It was as if the Neanderthals made stone tools, and were not much concerned about their final forms. He argues that almost everywhere, whether Asia, Africa or Europe, before 50,000 years ago all the stone tools are much alike and unsophisticated.

Firstly among the artifacts of Africa, archeologists found they could differentiate and classify those of less than 50,000 years into many different categories, such as projectile points, engraving tools, knife blades, and drilling and piercing tools. These new stone-tool types have been described as being distinctly differentiated from each other; each tool had a specific purpose. The invaders, commonly referred to as the Cro-Magnons, left many sophisticated stone tools, carved and engraved pieces on bone, ivory and antler, cave paintings and Venus figurines.[5][6][7]

The Neanderthals continued to use Mousterian stone tool technology and possibly Chatelperronian technology. These tools disappeared from the archeological record at around the same time the Neanderthals themselves disappeared from the fossil record, about 40,000 years ago.[8] Settlements were often located in narrow valley bottoms, possibly associated with hunting of passing herds of animals. Some of them may have been occupied year round, though more commonly they appear to have been used seasonally; people moved between the sites to exploit different food sources at different times of the year. Hunting was important, and caribou/wild reindeer "may well be the species of single greatest importance in the entire anthropological literature on hunting."[9]

Technological advances included significant developments in flint tool manufacturing, with industries based on fine blades rather than simpler and shorter flakes. Burins and racloirs were used to work bone, antler and hides. Advanced darts and harpoons also appear in this period, along with the fish hook, the oil lamp, rope, and the eyed needle.

The changes in human behavior have been attributed to the changes in climate during the period, which encompasses a number of global temperature drops. This meant a worsening of the already bitter climate of what is popularly (but incorrectly) called the last ice age. Such changes may have reduced the supply of usable timber and forced people to look at other materials. In addition, flint becomes brittle at low temperatures and may not have functioned as a tool.

Some scholars have argued that the appearance of complex or abstract language made these behavior changes possible. The complexity of the new human capabilities hints that humans were less capable of planning or foresight before 40,000 years, while the emergence of cooperative and coherent communication marked a new era of cultural development.[10] This theory is not widely accepted, since human phylogenetic separation dates to the Middle Palaeolithic (see Pre-language). While the latter view is better supported by phylogenetic inference, the material "evidence" is ambiguous.

Changes in climate and geography

European LGM refuges, 18,000 BC.
  Solutrean and Proto Solutrean Cultures
  Epi Gravettian Culture

The climate of the period in Europe saw dramatic changes, and included the Last Glacial Maximum, the coldest phase of the last glacial period, which lasted from about 24,500 to 18,000–17,000 BC, being coldest at the end, before a relatively rapid warming (all dates vary somewhat for different areas, and in different studies). During the Maximum, most of Northern Europe was covered by an ice-sheet, forcing human populations into the areas known as Last Glacial Maximum refugia, including modern Italy and the Balkans, parts of the Iberian Peninsula and areas around the Black Sea.

This period saw cultures such as the Solutrean in France and Spain. Human life may have continued on top of the ice sheet, but we know next to nothing about it, and very little about the human life that preceded the European glaciers. In the early part of the period, up to about 30,000 BC, the Mousterian Pluvial made northern Africa, including the Sahara, well-watered and with lower temperatures than today; after the end of the Pluvial the Sahara became arid.

The Last Glacial Maximum was followed by the Allerød oscillation, a warm and moist global interstadial that occurred around 11,500 BC to 10,800 BC. Then there was a very rapid onset, perhaps within as little as a decade, of the cold and dry Younger Dryas climate period, giving sub-arctic conditions to much of northern Europe. The Pre-Boreal rise in temperatures also began sharply around 9600 BC, and by its end around 8501 BC had brought temperatures nearly to present day levels, although the climate was wetter. This period saw the Upper Paleolithic give way to the start of the following Mesolithic cultural period.

As the glaciers receded sea levels rose; the English Channel, Irish Sea and North Sea were land at this time, and the Black Sea a fresh-water lake. In particular the Atlantic coastline was initially far out to sea in modern terms in most areas, though the Mediterranean coastline has retreated far less, except in the north of the Adriatic and the Aegean. The rise in sea levels continued until at least 5500 BC, so evidence of human activity along Europe's coasts in the Upper Paleolithic is mostly lost, though some traces have been recovered by fishing boats and marine archaeology, especially from Doggerland, the lost area beneath the North Sea.

Timeline

Map of findings of Upper Paleolithic art in Europe.

50,000 BC

50,000 BC

45,000—43,000 BC

43,000—41,000 BC

40,000 BC

40,000—35,000 BC

39,000 BC

Venus of Laussel, an Upper Paleolithic (Aurignacian) carving.

38,000 BC

38,000 BC—29,000 BC

35,000 BC

32,000 BC

30,000 BC

30,000 BC

29,000—25,000 BC

24,000 BC

23,000 BC

22,000 BC

21,000 BC

20,000 BC

20,000 BC

18,000 BC

18,000 BC—11,000 BC

18,000 BC—12,000 BC

17,000 BC

17,000 BC—15,000 BC

16,500 BC

15,000 BC

15,000 BC

15,000 BC–12,000 BC

14,000 BC

The Swimming Reindeer, created 13,000 years ago.

13,000 BC

12,000 BC

11,500 BC—10,000 BC

11,000 BC

10,500 BC

Cultures

Reindeer Age articles

The Upper Paleolithic in the Franco-Cantabrian region:

From the Synoptic table of the principal old world prehistoric cultures:

See also

References

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  2. Rightmire, GP (2009). "Out of Africa: modern human origins special feature: middle and later Pleistocene hominins in Africa and Southwest Asia" (PDF). Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 106 (38): 16046–50. doi:10.1073/pnas.0903930106. PMC 2752549Freely accessible. PMID 19581595.
  3. Gilman, Antonio. 1996. Explaining the Upper Palaeolithic Revolution. Pp. 220-239 (Chap. 8) in Contemporary Archaeology in Theory: A Reader. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell
  4. 1 2 John Weinstock. "Sami Prehistory Revisited: transactions, admixture and assimilation in the phylogeographic picture of Scandinavia".
  5. Biological origins of modern human behavior part3
  6. Biological origins of modern human behavior part 1
  7. "'Modern' Behavior Began 40,000 Years Ago In Africa", Science Daily, July 1998
  8. 1 2 http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v512/n7514/full/nature13621.html
  9. "In North America and Eurasia the species has long been an important resource—in many areas the most important resource—for peoples' inhabiting the northern boreal forest and tundra regions. Known human dependence on caribou/wild reindeer has a long history, beginning in the Middle Pleistocene (Banfield 1961:170; Kurtén 1968:170) and continuing to the present....The caribou/wild reindeer is thus an animal that has been a major resource for humans throughout a tremendous geographic area and across a time span of tens of thousands of years." Ernest S. Burch, Jr. "The Caribou/Wild Reindeer as a Human Resource", American Antiquity, Vol. 37, No. 3 (July 1972), pp. 339–368.
  10. "No Last Word on Language Origins" Archived April 4, 2005, at the Wayback Machine., Bellarmine University
  11. Attenbrow, Val (2010). Sydney's Aboriginal Past: Investigating the Archaeological and Historical Records. Sydney: UNSW Press. pp. 152–153. ISBN 978-1-74223-116-7. Retrieved 11 Nov 2013.
  12. Stockton, Eugene D.; Nanson, Gerald C. (April 2004). "Cranebrook Terrace Revisited". Archaeology in Oceania. 39 (1): 59–60. Retrieved 11 Nov 2013.
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  14. Sandra Bowdler. "The Pleistocene Pacific". Published in 'Human settlement', in D. Denoon (ed) The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders. pp. 41–50. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. University of Western Australia. Archived from the original on 16 February 2008. Retrieved 26 February 2008.
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  16. Gary Presland, The First Residents of Melbourne's Western Region, (revised edition), Harriland Press, 1997. ISBN 0-646-33150-7. Presland says on page 1: "There is some evidence to show that people were living in the Maribyrnong River valley, near present day Keilor, about 40,000 years ago."
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  18. "The Trial Excavation at the Archaeological Site of Wong Tei Tung, Sham Chung, Hong Kong SAR". Hong Kong Archaeological Society. January 2006. Archived from the original on 3 March 2009. Retrieved 21 August 2010.
  19. Prehistoric Archaeological Periods in Japan, Charles T. Keally
  20. "Prehistoric Japan, New perspectives on insular East Asia", Keiji Imamura, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, ISBN 0-8248-1853-9
  21. McClellan, pg 11
  22. Macey, Richard (2007). "Settlers' history rewritten: go back 30,000 years". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 5 July 2014.
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  27. Flood, J. M.; David, B.; Magee, J.; English, B. (1987), "Birrigai: a Pleistocene site in the south eastern highlands", Archaeology in Oceania, 22: 9–22
  28. Gillespie, Lyall (1984). Aborigines of the Canberra Region. Canberra: Wizard (Lyall Gillespie). pp. 1–25. ISBN 0-9590255-0-2.
  29. Sea level data from main article: Cosquer cave
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  33. Mulvaney, D J and White, Peter, 1987, Australians to 1788, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon, Sydney
  34. Gary Presland, Aboriginal Melbourne: The Lost Land of the Kulin People, Harriland Press (1985), Second edition 1994, ISBN 0-9577004-2-3. This book describes in some detail the archaeological evidence regarding aboriginal life, culture, food gathering and land management, particularly the period from the flooding of Bass Strait and Port Phillip from about 7–10,000 years ago, up to the European colonisation in the nineteenth century.
  35. Dousset, Laurent (2005). "Daruk". AusAnthrop Australian Aboriginal tribal database. Archived from the original on April 9, 2011. Retrieved 27 August 2012.
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