Period· The columns of time
Upper Palaeolithic
50 ka → 11.7 ka
In the space of a few millennia, and across most of Eurasia, the things people leave behind change character: long regular blades, tools of bone and antler, beads worn on the body, animals painted on walls, and graves furnished for the dead.
What the evidence shows
No single invention defines these 38,000 years; a bundle does, and the bundle is what makes it striking. Bar-Yosef, reviewing the whole dossier, keeps the word revolution while dwelling on its ambiguities: the elements are neither simultaneous nor everywhere present, and several of them appear far earlier in Africa. What is genuinely new is their coming together, and their persistence. From this point onward the archaeological record starts to look like that of people who decorate themselves, bury their dead deliberately, and leave images meant to be seen.
Bounds and conventions
The opening at 50,000 years is a rounded convention, and a generous one. Assemblages called Initial Upper Palaeolithic are dated to before 45,000 years ago in Bulgaria and in the Levant, while in southern Africa and in Australia comparable repertoires appear earlier, later, or in a different order entirely. The band marks where a European sequence begins, not where modern behaviour does.
A conventional boundary: the shift to the Upper Palaeolithic and Later Stone Age is drawn out, around 50 to 40 ka, and differs from region to region.