The occupation of Europe, Central Asia, East Asia, Australia, and eventually the Americas had not yet occurred or was in its earliest stages.

The full suite of symbolic and material behaviors associated with what archaeologists call behavioral modernity — cave painting, personal ornamentation, complex composite tools, long-distance trade networks — was beginning to appear in the African record but had not yet spread globally.

Neanderthals, at this point, had been occupying Europe and western Asia for approximately 300,000 years.

They had survived multiple cycles of glaciation and warming.

They had maintained a sophisticated stone tool technology — the Mousterian industry, based on the Levallois technique for producing predetermined flake shapes — across an enormous geographic range and an enormous span of time.