Palaeolithic

The Palaeolithic is conventionally divided into Lower, Middle and Upper phases, spanning from the earliest stone tool industries, associated with early hominins well before the emergence of anatomically modern humans, through to the world of fully modern human societies at the end of the last glaciation. Its Lower phase alone runs across nearly the whole of the period's roughly three million year span; the Upper Palaeolithic, by contrast, the phase most associated with cave art, figurines and elaborate burial, covers only its final tens of thousands of years, from roughly 40,000 to 10,000 BCE in Europe, a brief final chapter after an immensely long preceding history of toolmaking with little surviving evidence of ritual or symbolic behavior at all.

The period's end is a matter of convention rather than a single dated event. Archaeologists mark the transition to the Neolithic where farming and settled village life first appear, in the Near East, at sites in the Fertile Crescent, around 10,000 BCE, a shift that happened at different times in different regions of the world and did not reach some hunter gatherer societies for thousands of years afterward. The Palaeolithic to Neolithic boundary is therefore a boundary in subsistence and settlement rather than in belief as such, though the settled village life the Neolithic introduced brought with it new and more visible forms of religious architecture, from house shrines to the monumental structures built not long after farming itself began.

The painted cave systems of the Upper Palaeolithic, Lascaux and Chauvet in France, Altamira in Spain among the best known, depict animals almost exclusively, aurochs, horses, bison and deer rendered with a technical confidence that surprised early researchers unused to attributing such skill to people this far back in prehistory. Human figures appear only rarely and are often stylized, incomplete or combined with animal features, in sharp contrast to the careful naturalism given to the animals themselves, an asymmetry scholars have long taken as a clue to what the images were for, even though no text survives anywhere to confirm any specific reading.

The dominant scholarly interpretation reads the caves as sites of ritual rather than simple decoration, pointing to their frequent placement deep in cave systems far from any evidence of ordinary habitation, to superimposed layers of paintings added over long stretches of time at the same locations, and to occasional partial human or human animal figures read by some researchers as evidence of shamanistic trance practice, a figure transformed or transforming rather than simply depicted. This shamanistic reading remains genuinely contested rather than settled fact: it explains some features of the art well and others only speculatively, and rival interpretations, hunting magic, seasonal calendars, teaching sites, group identity markers, each account for part of the evidence without any one commanding full consensus. What is not contested is that image making of this sophistication, this early, already required people to hold and transmit shared symbolic meaning across generations, whatever that meaning specifically was.