PALAEOLITHIC AGE

The Palaeolithic or the Old Stone Age is the earliest phase of human prehistory. It extends from the appearance of our first ancestors to about 10,000 years ago. Human beings used tools of stone and lived on hunting and gathering. The Palaeolithic period is subdivided into three parts Lower, Middle and Upper Palaeolithic period. The economy of a typical Palaeolithic society was a hunter gatherer economy. In this age humans lived by gathering plant foods (foraging) and hunting animals. Humans hunted wild animals for meat and gathered food, firewood, and materials for their tools, clothes, or shelters. Palaeolithic people learned to make increasingly sophisticated tools and to control fire, and they acquired language. Evidence of religious faith and practice, as well as of magic, goes as far back as archaeology can take us. Palaeolithic humans made tools of stone, bone, and wood. The climate of the Palaeolithic Period spanned two geologic epochs known as the Pliocene and the Pleistocene. Both of these epochs experienced important geographic and climatic changes that affected human societies.

LOWER PALAEOLITHIC
The lower Palaeolithic is the earliest subdivision of the Palaeolithic age. It spans the time from around 2.5 million years ago when the first evidence of craft and use of stone tools by hominids appears in the current archaeological record, until around 300,000 years ago, spanning the Oldowan ("mode 1") and Acheulian ("mode 2") lithics industries. Oldowan tools mark the beginning of the Palaeolithic age. It contained tools such as choppers, burins and awls. Lower Palaeolithic humans used a variety of stone tools, including hand axes and choppers. The oldest recognizable tools made by members of the family of man are simple stone choppers, such as those discovered at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. These tools may have been made over 1 million years ago by Australopithecus, ancestor of modern man. Fractured stones called eoliths have been considered the earliest tools, but it is impossible to distinguish man-made from naturally produced modifications in such stones. Lower Paleolithic stone industries of the early species of humans called Homo erectus include the Choukoutienian of China and the Clactonian, ChelleanAbbevillian, Acheulian and Levalloisian represented at various sites in Europe, Africa, and Asia, from 100,000 to 500,000 years ago. Stone tools of this period are of the core type, made by chipping the stone to form a cutting edge, or of the flake type, fashioned from fragments struck off a stone. Hand axes were the typical tool of these early hunters and food-gatherers. The social organization of the earliest Palaeolithic societies remains largely unknown to scientists.

MIDDLE PALAEOLITHIC

The Middle Paleolithic period includes the Mousterian culture, often associated with Neanderthal man, an early form of man, living between 40,000 and 100,000 years ago. Neanderthal remains are often found in caves with evidence of the use of fire. Neanderthals were hunters of prehistoric mammals, and their cultural remains, though unearthed chiefly in Europe, have been found also in N Africa, Palestine, and Siberia. Stone tools of this period are of the flake tradition, and bone implements, such as needles, indicate that crudely sewn furs and skins were used as body coverings. Since the dead were painted before burial, a kind of primitive religion may have been practiced. Evidence from archaeology and comparative ethnography indicates that Middle Palaeolithic Age people lived in small egalitarian band societies similar to those of Upper Palaeolithic societies

UPPER PALAEOLITHIC
Upper Palaeolithic is the third and last subdivision of the Palaeolithic or Old Stone Age as it is understood in Europe, Africa, and Asia. The transition from the Middle Palaeolithic to the Upper Palaeolithic is considered one of the major revolutions in the prehistory of humankind. The term Upper Paleolithic period was coined in Western Europe, the homeland of the discipline of prehistoric archaeology. Historically, it designated the time when Homo sapiens sapiens replaced the European Neanderthals. The cultural manifestations of blade-dominated lithic assemblages along with mobile and cave art were seen as the hallmarks of the achievements of the new people. However, most of the Upper Paleolithic sites include of carved, sculpted, or engraved objects, and caves usually occupied by the Upper Palaeolithic peoples usually contain wall paintings. The shift from Middle to Upper Palaeolithic is called the Upper Palaeolithic Revolution. One of the most striking features of this transition is that it took place during a period of relative climatic stability. Primary characteristics that distinguishes this transition include differences in stone and bone technology, subsistence site size, seasonality of occupations, long distance contacts, and population densities. It comprised new technologies, hunting techniques, human burials, and an artistic tradition of astonishing proficiency. This period has the earliest remains of organized settlements in the form of campsites, some with storage pits. These were often located in narrow valley bottoms, possibly to make hunting of passing herds of animals easier.

AURIGNACIAN (CA. 35,000-27,000 BC)

The Western European Aurignacian has served as the holotype for the initial wave of changes that mark the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic. The culture has a widespread distribution over Eurasia and Siberia (Sungir). The Aurignacian tool industry is characterized by worked bone or antler points with grooves cut in the bottom. The Aurignacian provides ample evidence of the typological and technological diversification of stone tools, especially blade-based tools; the frequent

manufacture and use of tools based on novel organic materials, such as antler, bone, and ivory; changes in subsistence pursuits, including both greater hunting specialization and the use of such new resources as aquatic food; the increasing complexity of inter-group social interaction, linked possibly to rising population densities; and the emergence of complex symbolic behaviour including personal ornamentation as well as portable and stationary art.

GRAVETTIAN CULTURE
The Gravettian culture was located across Europe. Gravettian sites generally date between 26,000 BCE to 20,000 BCE. It is named after the type site of La Gravette in the Dordogne region of France where its characteristic tools were first found and studied. The diagnostic characteristic artifacts of the industry are small pointed restruck blade with a blunt but straight back, a carving tool known as a Noailles burin. Artistic achievements of the Gravettian cultural stage include the hundreds of Venus figurines, which are widely distributed in Europe. It is characterised by a stone tool industry with small pointed blades used for big-game hunting (bison, horse, reindeer, and mammoth). People in the Gravettian period also used nets to hunt small game. The earliest evidence of Gravettian culture comes from the Buran-Kaya caves in the Crimean Mountains (southern Ukraine), dating to 32,000 years ago.

SOLUTREAN INDUSTRY
The Solutrean industry is a relatively advanced flint tool-making style of the Upper Palaeolithic, from around 22,000 to 17,000 BP. The Solutrean has relatively finely worked, bifacial points made with lithic reduction percussion and pressure flaking rather than cruder flint knapping. Large thin spearheads; scrapers with edge not on the side but on the end; flint knives and saws, but all still chipped, not ground or polished; long spear-points, with tang and shoulder on one side only, are also characteristic implements of this industry. Bone and antler were used as well. Faunal finds include horse, reindeer, mammoth, cave lion, rhinoceros, bear, and aurochs. Solutrean finds have been also made in the caves of Les Eyzies and Laugerie Haute, and in the Lower Beds of Creswell Crags in Derbyshire, England. The hunters of the Solutrean phase of the Upper Paleolithic entered Europe from the east and ousted many of their Aurignacian predecessors. The Solutrean wrought extremely fine spearheads, shaped like a laurel leaf. The wild horse was their chief quarry.

MAGDALENIAN CULTURE
The Solutrean as well as remnants of the Aurignacian were replaced by the Magdalenian, the final, and perhaps most impressive, phase of the Paleolithic period. The Magdalenian culture refers to one of the later cultures of the Upper Paleolithic in Western Europe, dating from around 15,000 BCE to 7,000 BCE. The Magdalenien is characterised by regular blade industries struck from carinated cores. The seashells and fossils found in Magdalenian sites can be sourced to relatively precise areas of

origin, and so have been used to support hypothesis of Magdalenian hunter-gatherer seasonal ranges, and perhaps trade routes. Cave sites such as the world famous Lascaux contain the best-known examples of Magdalenian cave art. The site of Altamira in Spain, with its extensive and varied forms of Magdalenian mobillary art has been suggested to be an agglomeration site where multiple small groups of Magdalenian hunter-gatherers congregated. Reindeer hunting is clearly the focus of subsistence activities for most of the Magdalenian sites in the Paris Basin. Some European late Upper Paleolithic cultures domesticated and raised reindeer, presumably for their meat or milk, as early as 14,000 BP. Here artifacts reflect a society made up of communities of fishermen and reindeer hunters. Surviving Magdalenian tools, which range from tiny microliths to implements of great length and fineness, indicate an advanced technique. Weapons were highly refined and varied, the atlatl first came into use, and along the southern edge of the ice sheet boats and harpoons were developed. However, the crowning achievement of the Magdalenian was its cave paintings, the culmination of Paleolithic art. The exploitation of bone and antler as raw materials for the production of daily or ritual tools and objects became a common practice in the Upper Paleolithic. Systematic use of grinding and pounding stone tools began during the Upper Paleolithic. Systematic use of body decorationsbeads and pendantsmade from marine shells, teeth, ivory, and ostrich egg shells are recorded from both Europe and the Levant. These are considered to communicate the self-awareness and identity of the individual as well as the social group. Long-distance exchange networks in lithics, raw materials, and marine shells during the Upper Paleolithic reach the order of several hundred kilometres. The Upper Paleolithic witnessed the invention of improved hunting tools such as spear throwers, and later bows and arrows and boomerangs. Human and animal gurines, decorated and carved bone, antler, ivory and stone objects, and representational abstract and realistic images, either painted or engraved, began to appear in caves, rock shelters, and exposed rocky surfaces by 36 Ka. Structured hearths with or without the use of rocks for warmth banking and parching activities were recorded in Upper Paleolithic sites. Storage facilities, generally known from northern latitudes where under-ground freezing kept food edible Storage occurs in Upper Paleolithic sites after the initial phase. Distinct functional spatial organization within habitations and hunting stations such as kitchen areas, butchering space, sleeping grounds, discard zones, and the like are relatively common in Upper Paleolithic sites. Potential differences in subsistence activities were also taken into account as differentiating the Middle from the Upper Paleolithic.

ART
Increasing evidence of burial with grave goods and the appearance of anthropomorphic images and cave paintings may suggest that humans in the Upper Paleolithic had begun to believe in supernatural beings. One of the main features of the Upper Paleolithic is the emergence of art and adornment, which began to appear around 25,000 BCE from Africa to Australia, and became common around 18,000 BCE. People began to adorn themselves with bone, beads, and probably body paint. They created a wide range of artfrom cliff and cave paintings, to figurines and bas-relief sculpture, to ornamental tools. Musical instruments, such as bone flutes, make their first appearance around this time. The

famous cave paintings of France and Spain feature beautiful images of Pleistocene mammals, including cave bears, lions, woolly rhinoceroses, mammoths, horses, bison, and aurochs (the ancestors of domestic cattle). The cave paintings of Chauvet have been dated to 32,000 and those at Lascaux to 17,000 years ago. At Lascaux the anthropomorphic paintings show depictions of strange beasts such as ones that are half-human and half-bird and half-human and half-lion. This hybrid human-animal motif suggests that cave art was produced for shamanistic rituals, intended to connect with or gain strength from the animals being represented. Venus figurines, which appeared briefly across Europe around 23,000 BCE, are thought to represent fertility goddesses.