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The Paleolithic or Palaeolithic (c. 3.3 million – c. 11,700 years ago) (/ ˌ p eɪ l i oʊ ˈ l ɪ θ ɪ k, ˌ p æ l i-/ PAY-lee-oh-LITH-ik, PAL-ee-), also called the Old Stone Age (from Ancient Greek παλαιός (palaiós) ' old ' and λίθος (líthos) ' stone '), is a period in human prehistory that is distinguished by the original development of stone tools, and which represents ...
Human history or world history is the record of humankind from prehistory to the present. Modern humans evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago and initially lived as hunter-gatherers . They migrated out of Africa during the Last Ice Age and had spread across Earth's continental land except Antarctica by the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago.
The proposed Indo-European migration has variously been dated to the end of the Neolithic (Marija Gimbutas: Corded Ware culture, Yamna culture, Kurgan culture), the early Neolithic (Colin Renfrew: Starčevo-Körös, Linearbandkeramic) and the late Palaeolithic (Marcel Otte, Paleolithic continuity theory).
A Paleolithic site on the Yana River, Siberia, at 71°N, lies well above the Arctic Circle and dates to 27,000 radiocarbon years before present, during glacial times. This site shows that people adapted to this harsh, high-latitude, Late Pleistocene environment much earlier than previously thought. [124]
The Neolithic saw the emergence of a "spiritual aristocracy" of people whose societal role was as mages, missionaries, and monarchs. In the Neolithic, shamanism was increasingly understood as the domain of an elite, rather than the Paleolithic conceptualisation where a relatively broad spectrum of society may be able to practice. [112]
The oldest human skeletal remains are the 40ky old Lake Mungo remains in New South Wales, but human ornaments discovered at Devil's Lair in Western Australia have been dated to 48 kya and artifacts at Madjedbebe in Northern Territory are dated to at least 50 kya, and to 62.1 ± 2.9 ka in one 2017 study. [26] [27] [28] [29]
Paleolithic religions are a set of spiritual beliefs and practices that are theorized to have appeared during the Paleolithic time period. Paleoanthropologists Andre Leroi-Gourhan and Annette Michelson believe unmistakably religious behavior emerged by the Upper Paleolithic, before 30,000 years ago at the latest, [1] but behavioral patterns such as burial rites [2] that one might characterize ...
Paleolithic art. Extinction of Neanderthals and other archaic human variants (with possible survival of hybrid populations in Asia and Africa). Appearance of Y-Haplogroup R2; mt-haplogroups J and X. after 25 ka Reconstruction of a Neolithic farmer from Europe, Science Museum in Trento. Last Glacial Maximum; Epipaleolithic / Mesolithic / Holocene.