In Eurasia, cultural changes viewed as part of the Upper Paleolithic period spread rapidly, with early sites in southwest Asia (Israel/Lebanon) dated at 47,000 ya. Soon after, Upper Paleolithic culture expanded throughout Europe, and several sites dated to approximately 41,000 ya located from southeastern Russia all the way to southern France and northern Spain have been excavated ( Anikovich et al., 2007).
The European climate was quite different than it is today. At the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic, glacial ice covered land and sea in northern Europe. Where the glaciers stopped, ice desert and tundra began. The tundra gradually merged into vast grasslands that stretched as far south as the northern Mediterranean region. The overall climatic trend was one of gradually cooler average annual temperature, which reached its coldest with the last major glacial advance of the Ice Age between 20,000 and 12,000 ya. The tundra and grasslands created an enormous pasture for herbivorous animals, large and small, and a rich hunting ground for the predators that ate them. This hunter’s paradise stretched from Spain through Europe and across the Russian steppes. Reindeer herds roamed its vast expanse, along with mammoths, bison, horses, and other animals, many of which were staple foods of Upper Paleolithic hunters. It is also during this period that archaeologists find the earliest evidence of the extensive exploitation of birds and fish as game animals.
Bear in mind, however, that our understanding of the human use of marine resources is distorted by how little is known archaeologically of the thousands of square miles of coastal plains, hills, and valleys that were buried by rising sea levels at the end of the Ice Age (Erlandson, 2010).
Upper Paleolithic hunters focused most of their efforts on the immense herds of reindeer, horses, and a few other big game species that seasonally migrated across the European grasslands. Such specialized hunting is viewed by many researchers as a key aspect of the cultural transition from the Middle to the Upper Paleolithic (Mellars, 1989). While the technology of Middle and Upper Paleolithic hunters did indeed differ greatly, recent research shows that the focus of their hunting may have been more similar than once believed possible. Analysis of well-documented faunal remains from the Dordogne region of southern France reveals that the frequency of ungulates (in other words, reindeer, roe deer, and the like) shows little change between late Middle and early Upper Paleolithic strata (Grayson and Delpech, 2003).
Farther south, archaeologists also found evidence of similar Middle and Upper Paleolithic land use patterns in three valleys of eastern Spain (Miller and Barton,2008). Had the way of life of Upper Paleolithic hunters differed greatly from that of their Middle Paleolithic predecessors, more obvious differences should be seen both in the type and amount of game that was hunted and in overall land use patterns.
Many archaeologists now conclude that “Middle and Upper Palaeolithic hunting and gathering was largely determined by what was available seasonally in the local environment” (Bar-Yosef, 2004, p. 333). While acknowledging the similarities, other researchers remind us that the material culture differences between these two periods are such that cultural continuity cannot simply be assumed (Adler et al., 2006). Our understanding of Upper Paleolithic subsistence also suffers from how little we know about the economic importance of plant foods and other gathered resources. A potentially important contrast between the Middle and Upper Paleolithic is seen by archaeologists when they examine the remains of Upper Paleolithic sites. They find that these settlements were often larger and used longer than Middle Paleolithic sites in the same regions. These encampments were home to around 25 to 50 people and perhaps even more during the fall and spring, when game herds made their seasonal migrations in search of fresh pasture. Remnants of Upper Paleolithic huts, some of which measure 15 to 20 feet in diameter, have been uncovered at several sites in the grasslands of Ukraine. Similar structures undoubtedly dotted camps across Europe.
Upper Paleolithic human burials provide additional insight into the nature of these communities (Pettitt, 2011). The graves sometimes include ornaments, tools, and other artifacts that were deliberately placed with corpses. Such grave goods may indicate possible status differences among community members, the existence of burial rituals, and possibly even fundamental notions of an afterlife. For example, burials uncovered at the 24,000-year-old Sungir site near Moscow include adults and adolescents dressed in beaded clothing, with grave inclusions of red ocher, thousands of ivory beads, long spears made of straightened mammoth tusks, ivory engravings, and jewelry (Formicola and Buzhilova, 2004). Although child burials are rarely discovered, far to the west at the 27,000-year-old Krems-Wachtberg site in Austria, two newborn infants have been found that were covered in red ocher and buried with scores of ivory beads (Einwögerer et al., 2006). While Upper Paleolithic groups shared many similarities with their Middle Paleolithic predecessors, there were also many important differences. The Upper Paleolithic was an age of technological innovation that can be compared in its impact on society to the past few hundred years of our own history of amazing technological advances. Modern humans of the Upper Paleolithic not only invented new and specialized tools, but, as we’ve seen, also turned to new materials, such as bone, ivory, and antler.
Consider, for example, the changes in hunting technology. Neandertals relied on close-encounter weapons, and while these weapons and the tactics that went with them were clearly effective, they placed hunters at great risk of serious injury. Even such seemingly formidable weapons as the Middle Paleolithic wooden spears from Schöningen (see p. 260) may have had an effective range of only 25 feet or less (Shea, 2006). Hunting practices must have changed considerably with the advent of more accurate projectile weaponry such as spear-thrower darts as these weapons spread out of Africa after 50,000 ya (Shea, 2009; Shea and Sisk, 2010). The spear-thrower, or atlatl, was a wooden or bone hooked rod that acted to extend the hunter’s arm, thus enhancing the force and distance of a stone projectile-tipped dart or short spear. Spear-thrower technology and, much later in the period, the bow and arrow undoubtedly had a big impact on hunting, on hunters, and on the game animals they pursued.
Archaeologists have long recognized five major Upper Paleolithic industries in western Europe: Chatelperronian, Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian. These industries differ by age, distribution, and the style and type of artifacts. Important among their shared features is the use of blade technology for making most stone tools. A chipped stone blade is a flake that is more than twice as long as it is wide.
The technology for making ribbonlike blades of predictable length, width, and thickness was invented in Africa more than 100,000 ya, but it wasn’t widely adopted until the Upper Paleolithic. Blades were struck from stone cores using an indirect percussion method, the most common of which was the punch technique, in which a toolmaker positioned a bone or antler “punch” on a prepared core and then either hit the punch with a billet or applied pressure with a crutch to drive a blade off the core. Given a properly prepared core, blades with razor-like edges could be quickly struck until the core was used up.
While blades could be (and were) used without further modification, they were often just the first step in making dart points, knives, scrapers, and other tools. For example, a burin could be made by snapping off bits of a blade to create a chisel-like working end , which was then mounted in a handle and used to cut bone, antler, ivory, and wood. As anyone who has tried to cut through a big deer bone with a stone flake could tell you, a burin can make the difference between success and failure.
Another technique, called pressure flaking, was often used to finish a chipped stone tool. By pressing the tip of a deer antler or similarly shaped piece of bone or wood against the edge of a core, toolmakers found that they could precisely remove small, thin flakes . Applied by skilled hands, pressure flaking was used to fashion stone tools, such as Solutrean laurel leaf points . That reflect an expert command of the technology and are aesthetically pleasing even by modern standards.
Along with the everyday tools of Upper Paleolithic life, archaeologists also find evidence of personal ornaments and clothing , both of which are rarely found in European Middle Paleolithic sites and are unknown from Lower Paleolithic contexts. Personal ornaments included such things as bone necklaces, shell beads, drilled bear canines, and bone and ivory bracelets. Clothing was mostly made from tanned hides and fur, but twined and simply woven fabrics are also known from as early as 27,000 ya (Soffer et al., 2000). Complex fitted clothing probably originated with the basic need for warmth in cooler regions, but it acquired new meanings that went well beyond mere function during the Upper Paleolithic (Gilligan, 2010). Like personal ornaments, clothing also served Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers as a medium to express the status of individuals, their roles within society, their gender, and even group identity.
The period between 35,000 and 10,000 ya was an era of “unparalleled creativity and symbolic expression” (Nowell, 2006, p. 240). Best known from sites in Europe, Upper Paleolithic art is now also well documented from Siberia, Africa, and Australia. It found expression in a variety of ways, from painted cave walls to everyday tools that show engraved and carved decorations. New methods of mixing pigments and applying them were important in rendering painted or drawn images. Bone and ivory carving and engraving were made easier with the use of burins and other stone tools. Once believed to have originated toward the end of the Upper Paleolithic, recent cave art discoveries demonstrate that it was already well developed by 35,000–32,000 ya (see p. 303).
Upper Paleolithic art divides readily into two broad categories—portable art, or that which can be removed from the archaeological record in its entirety, and cave art, or that which cannot be so removed. Portable art includes everything from decorated everyday objects to artifacts interpreted as instances of symbolic or artistic expression. For example, many small bone, stone, and ivory sculptures collectively called “Venus figurines” have been excavated at sites from westernmost Europe to western Russia. Some figures were realistically carved, and the faces appear to be modeled after actual women. Other female figures are more stylized representations, often with exaggerated sexual characteristics, and they sometimes depict body decoration, clothing, and headgear . Although Venus figurines have often been narrowly viewed as objects created for fertility or other ritual purposes, these objects actually represent women in diverse statuses and roles in Upper Paleolithic society (Soffer et al., 2000).
At two sites in the Czech Republic, Dolní Veˇstonice and Pr˘edmostí (both dated at approximately 27,000–26,000 ya), archaeologists have also found small animal figures of fired clay. This is the first documented use of ceramic technology anywhere; in fact, it precedes the earliest documented examples of fired clay pottery by more than 15,000 years.
Upper Paleolithic cave art— material symbolic expressions that can’t be removed from the archaeological record without destroying them— comprises what are probably the most widely recognized images of human prehistory in the world. It began during the Aurignacian and continued to the end of the Ice Age. It is beautiful, exotic, rare, old, and only partly understood (Desdemaines-Hugon, 2010).
Most cave art depicts common food animals, such as reindeer, bison, mammoths, and horses, and occasionally even fish, but there are also many pictures of dangerous animals, such as cave bears, rhinos, and lions . Many of these animals went extinct at the end of the Ice Age. Other representations include hand stencils (an outline created by blowing pigment over a hand held against a cave wall) and patterns of dots and lines. Images of people are uncommon by comparison with those of other animals.
The importance of cave art ultimately rests in its being far more than just a bunch of pretty pictures executed in strange places. When the first site was discovered in the late 1800s, it caused an immediate sensation because either it was an elaborate hoax, which at first seemed likely, or it truly was old. If the latter, then there was a problem: Its execution defied the then dominant view of cultural “progress” as something that gradually proceeded from a “ savage” ancient past to the “civilization” of the present. Since cave art did prove to be quite old, we can reasonably claim that these Upper Paleolithic sites played a role in encouraging a reevaluation of basic notions about the nature of culture change and the course of biocultural evolution.
Cave art is now known from more than 200 sites, many of which are in southwestern France and northern Spain. The most famous of these sites are Altamira, in Spain, and Lascaux and Grotte Chauvet, in France .
Altamira was discovered by a hunter in 1869. The walls and ceiling of this immense cave are filled with superb portrayals of bison in red and black pigments (Ramos, 1999). The artist even took advantage of bulges in the walls to create the visual illusion of depth in the paintings. Nearly 70 years after the discovery of Altamira, Lascaux Cave came to light and soon attracted worldwide attention for its huge paintings of bulls that dominate the long passage now called the Great Hall of Bulls. Here and elsewhere in the cave, painting after painting of horses, deer, wild bulls, ibex, and other animals were drawn with remarkable skill in black, red, and yellow pigments (Aujoulat, 2005). Chauvet is one of the most recently
discovered art caves, having been found by cave explorers in 1994. It contains more than 200 paintings and engravings of animals, including cave bears, horses, rhinos, lions, and mammoths, as well as stone tools, torches, and fireplaces left by Upper Paleolithic visitors to the cave (Clottes, 2003). Radiocarbon dating of pigments sampled from the paintings shows that they were executed during the Aurignacian, around 35,000–32,000 ya (Balter, 2006; Cuzange et al., 2007), making Chauvet considerably earlier than the Magdalenian sites of Lascaux and Altamira. Pettitt (2008; Pettitt and Pike, 2007) questions current interpretations of Chauvet’s age, noting that cave art is hard to date; few examples of Upper Paleolithic cave art have been dated; and Chauvet’s art and its execution are most similar to late Upper Paleolithic art, not that of the Aurignacian. Examples of art older than 30,000 ya are also quite rare and, were it not for Chauvet, early Upper Paleolithic art would look much more like the Middle Paleolithic than the late Upper Paleolithic (Pettitt, 2008). Nevertheless, regardless of the age that its paintings ultimately prove to be, Chauvet is extraordinary.
A recent comparative analysis of art cave hand stencils from four French caves has concluded that both men and women participated in cave art (Snow, 2006). And their art was not limited to caves. Evidence discovered during the past 15 years shows that they also painted and engraved images on cliff faces and rocks outside of caves (Bicho et al., 2007), but very little of this art has survived thousands of years of weathering in the open air. The big question, of course, is why did they paint? There is probably no single reason that explains all Upper Paleolithic art. Certainly, many ideas have been suggested over the decades— for example, that the art represents early religious beliefs, hunting magic (perhaps I can capture the animal if I capture its essence in an image), a visual representation of cosmology or worldview, and group identity or boundaries. It is a question for which archaeologists still have much to learn before they can answer it convincingly.
Dwellings – IGNOU
Now it is very clear that Upper Palaeolithic population inhabited a great variety of dwellings, rock shelters, (rocks overhangs as distinguished from deep caves) were widely used. Trees were felled and propped against the rock face, perhaps trellised by branches and skins. Large caves were inhabited; huts or tents built inside caves were heated with wood or bone fires where rock shelters were rare as in central and eastern Europe, remains of permanent dwellings were found.
Long shaped huts which are sometimes sunk into the ground have been found at Pushkari in USSR. One hut measures 39 × 13 feet. At another site i.e. the Kostenki I site there are traces of 2 dwellings each 120 × 49 feet plus 9 hearths situated on the long axis and numerous silos of varying shapes and heights were discovered. It is unlikely that this complex was accommodated under one roof.
Tool inventory
Upper Palaeolithic people produced such a culture which in variety and elegance, far exceeded anything of their predecessors. Upper Palaeolithic groups made fine tools and delicately worked bones. The Eurasian Upper Palaeolithic was essentially a blade-tool assemblage characterised by an abundance and variety of long parallel-sided implements called “blades”. The blade tool industry was partially devised for working bone and wood. Out of the functional tool types burins (chisel shaped blades) were probably utilised for engraving and working wood, bone or antler, which might have been employed as handles or shafts by scarping or shaving wood or hollow out wood or bone. Laural-leaf blades were carefully made into thin sharp-edged knives or arrowheads, which the Upper Palaeolithic people might have used as daggers.
New tools and weapons
New items such as polished pins or bone or antler awls are found in Upper Palaeolithic tool kits. New types of points were probably hafted to sticks. The late Magdalenian inventory (a cultural complex from western Europe dating from 12,000 to 17,000 B.P.) included hooked rods employed as spear throwers, barbed points, and harpoons for fishing, fishhooks, needles with eyes, bone and ivory bodkins ( large eyed blunt needles), belt fasteners, and tools of undetermined use. Many of these tools were highly decorative depicting hunt animals and may have served as ceremonial items. The use of bow and arrow is first verified for the latter part of Late Palaeolithic people. Some 100 wooden arrows have been recovered at the Mesolithic Stellmoor site, a former lake near Hamburg, Germany (10,500 B.P.) 25% of arrows were designed to use with anterior tip, one such arrow was found in situ in a wolf vertebra. The arrows were fire hardened. The flint-tipped arrows may have been used for large game only, the untipped for smaller game