Upper Palaeolithic: the Creative Explosion of Homo sapiens in Europe (40,000 to 10,000 BP)
Between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago, the first Homo sapiens of Europe produced an unprecedented cultural flowering: Lascaux, Altamira, Chauvet, the Venus figurines of Willendorf and Hohle Fels, the bone flutes of the Swabian Jura, the decorated burials of Sungir. This dossier traces the great cultures of the Upper Palaeolithic -- Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solutrean, Magdalenian -- their contributions to human history, their relationships with the last Neanderthals, and what ancient genomics reveals about the repeated migrations that shaped glacial Europe.
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