Period· The columns of time

Upper Palaeolithic

50 ka → 11.7 ka

The Upper Palaeolithic, from 50,000 to 11,700 years ago, brings together within a few millennia blade tools, bone and antler work, ornaments, cave art and prepared burials.

Period defined in Eurasia by a set of traits appearing within a few millennia: regular blade tools, bone and antler industry, personal ornaments, parietal and portable art, and prepared burials. It covers about thirty-eight thousand years.

What the evidence shows

No isolated innovation defines these 38,000 years: what characterises it is the durable conjunction of several traits. The blade, which usually opens the list, is a matter of raw material economy: from a core shaped into a prism, blades are detached successively, each long and sharp on both edges, so that the same mass of flint yields several metres of cutting edge where flake reduction yielded a few centimetres. For groups transporting their raw material over hundreds of kilometres, the difference is that of a reserve. Ofer Bar-Yosef, examining the record, retains the term revolution while noting its ambiguities: the elements are neither simultaneous nor universal, and several appear much earlier in Africa. From this period, archaeological documentation regularly attests ornament, intentional burial and the production of images meant to be seen.

Bounds and conventions

The opening at 50,000 years is a rounded and generous convention. Assemblages termed Initial Upper Palaeolithic are dated before 45,000 years in Bulgaria and the Levant, while in southern Africa and Australia comparable repertoires appear earlier, later or in a different order. The band locates the beginning of a European sequence and not that of a behaviour.

Conventional boundary: the transition to the Upper Palaeolithic and the Later Stone Age is spread out, around 50 to 40 ka, and differs by region.