The Upper Paleolithic And What It Actually Was

A recurring problem with the way prehistory is discussed in popular culture is the tendency to imagine it as a single undifferentiated era of primitive, barely-sentient beings barely managing to survive.

The Upper Paleolithic — the period roughly 50,000 to 10,000 years ago — is particularly subject to this distortion.

The reality is more interesting and more humbling.

The Upper Paleolithic was the period in which modern human behavior, as we would recognize it, became fully expressed across a wide range of geographic environments.

The cave paintings of Lascaux and Chauvet in France, dating to roughly 30,000 to 17,000 years ago, represent some of the most technically accomplished two-dimensional art ever produced by human hands.