The cave art traditions of Lascaux and Altamira, which testify to extraordinary cognitive and creative capacity, were produced by people who also made bone needles, bone flutes, ivory figurines, and antler-tipped hunting weapons.

The organic tool tradition of the European Upper Paleolithic was not a second-choice technology; it was a sophisticated and valued tradition that complemented the stone tool tradition.

The ancestors of the first Americans — the Siberian populations that eventually crossed into the Americas during the late Pleistocene — were part of this broader Old World tradition.

They were people who worked organic materials, who made tools from bone and antler and plant fiber, who understood the specific properties of different materials and how to exploit those properties for specific purposes.

When these people — or their descendants — arrived in the Americas, they brought this knowledge with them.