The figurines of the Gravettian culture, distributed across Europe in the same period and sharing stylistic features with the figurines of Mal’ta far to the east, demonstrate the simultaneous existence of symbolic traditions across vast distances.

The maritime technologies that allowed people to cross open water to Australia, which happened at least 65,000 years ago, required engineering and planning capabilities that we would not hesitate to call sophisticated.

Upper Paleolithic people were, by every cognitive measure, as capable as we are.

Their brains were the same size and the same structure as ours.

Their language, whatever its specific form, was language in the full sense — symbolic, grammatically structured, capable of expressing abstract concepts and transmitting complex information across time.

Their social structures were not the simple dominance hierarchies of non-human primates but the complex, negotiated, culturally mediated social arrangements of fully human communities.