Upper Paleolithic

This ability gave them a distinct survival advantage over their Neanderthal counterparts, who relied more on individual strength and instinct.

Furthermore, language allowed for the refinement of toolmaking techniques, The Acheulean hand axes used by Homo erectus gave way to the more sophisticated blade tools of the Upper Paleolithic, which required precise instruction and replication.

Teaching these skills verbally meant that each generation could improve upon the last, accelerating technological advancements.

Language gave us speech, but symbols gave us memory.

so

Let's scroll back a little bit further in history than we've gone back so far, back to the Upper Paleolithic.

So we are basically Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers.

Strip the Armani suit off a Wall Street broker and you have a caribou hunter beneath.

And depending on how you do the calculation, about 90% of our time as behaviourally modern humans has been spent as hunter-gatherers.

We can acknowledge that communitarianism is the best type of policy.

We can acknowledge that being locked up in our own carapace is a miserable and politically and sociologically deadly way to try to exist.

So yeah, we've got to become Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, even if we live in Dollars Hill.

So in those northern regions, there is identical artifacts and identical skull types.

And what's really strange about that is that many of them, not only were they large, but had protruding brow ridge, sloped skulls, very upper Paleolithic, very archaic type skulls.

Now, some of them would eventually become, you know, northern Europeans, but then there was a sect that came out of that.

And then they ended up over here.

And many of the Cro-Magnon skeletons were 6'7", 6'8", 7 foot.

And that also is that Cro-Magnon had protruding brow ridge, more of an archaic-type skull, large jaws, protruding brow ridge.

I mean, not as pronounced as a Neanderthal, but Upper Paleolithic.

And that's exactly what we find in England, and it's exactly what we find in Ohio Valley.

If you check back in the old literature, you can actually find reference to it.

F.S. Mariel, the director of the Maltese Museums back in the 60s, didn't like that bison bull figure because it raised the horrible possibility that the hypogeum might date to the Upper Paleolithic rather than to the Daleks.

So he solved for Copland by scrubbing it off for water.

Nikki Glaser, the stunning tour.

And Gough's Cave may not have been some isolated community doing something bizarre.

A 2023 study by William Marsh and Sylvia Bello surveyed the late Upper Paleolithic European sites and found a broader pattern among populations associated with the Magdalenian culture tradition.

Of the sites where researchers could determine mortuary behavior, 13 contained evidence interpreted as cannibalism, 10 contained primary burial, and 2 combined both.

Skull cups and other post-mortem modifications appeared repeatedly, and when those practices were compared with ancient genetic ancestry, the authors proposed that funerary cannibalism may have belonged to a wider Magdalenian mortuary tradition that eventually declined as populations carrying different ancestry and different burial customs expanded across Europe.

Yet even Fontbréguat cannot tell us whether the dead were relatives, enemies, captives, or victims of some emergency.

Archaeology can sometimes recover the meal without recovering the reason for it, including carefully modified skull cups that are known from Upper Paleolithic, Neolithic, and Bronze Age contexts, including Gough's Cave, Herxheim, and several Iberian sites.

What emerges is not evidence for one enormous European cannibal culture, but something much stranger.

Different populations, separated by thousands of years, repeatedly discovering that the human corpse could become food, ritual material, an object of transformation, or several of those things simultaneously.

If you flip through a textbook, you'll often see a neat division.

Neanderthals used Mousterian tools, Homo sapiens used Upper Paleolithic tools, and the latter were simply better.

End of story.

Reality, unsurprisingly, refuses to be that tidy.

So we have to be careful here.

Technology doesn't map cleanly onto species.

Mousterian doesn't mean Neanderthal in every case, and Upper Paleolithic doesn't mean sapiens by default.

These are cultural traditions that could be invented, shared, borrowed, or dropped.

It is engineering.

For hundreds of thousands of years, humans shaped stone, but it was only in the Upper Paleolithic, roughly forty thousand years ago, that stone technology leapt from crude improvisation into precision manufacturing.

In this age, flint knappers invented techniques so advanced that modern experimental archeologists struggle to replicate them.

The breakthrough was blade technology.

Efficiency was no longer measured in tools per rock, but in tools per strike.

The diversity that followed is staggering.

More than sixty distinct tool types are recorded from Upper Paleolithic sites.

Each one had a purpose, and each one reflects minds that saw the world in categories, in functions, in systems.

The archeological record goes from scattered hints of symbolic behavior to an absolute explosion of creativity.

This is what researchers call the Upper Paleolithic Revolution, though revolution might be too mild a word.

It was more like a cognitive supernova.

In Europe, modern humans who had recently arrived from Africa started doing something unprecedented.

And they did all of this while the world was locked in an ice age that made much of the planet nearly uninhabitable.

This wasn't gradual evolution anymore.

This was revolution, the Upper Paleolithic Revolution.

And it's the moment when everything that makes us human, everything we think of as distinctly human behavior, exploded into full expression.