Europe’s First People: The Story of the Aurignacian Culture

Around 43,000 years ago, a new people spread rapidly across Europe. They hunted horse and reindeer on the cold steppe, crafted sophisticated tools from bone and antler, carved animals from mammoth ivory and painted some of the greatest masterpieces of Paleolithic art. Across much of northern and central Europe stretched an immense landscape of windswept grasslands, herb-rich steppes and frozen tundra. Powerful winds swept across the open plains, while mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, reindeer and wild horses migrated over enormous distances. For hundreds of thousands of years, this continent had been the domain of the Neanderthals. Then from about 50,000 years ago, groups of homo sapiens crossed into the continent from the east and southeast. But the first groups of pioneers attempting to colonise this cold and strange land ultimately disappeared. Only later did one tradition spread across almost the entire continent. Other than Neanderthals, they were the first of our ancestors to establish themselves across Ice Age Europe and the first to leave a lasting legacy. This is the epic story of the people who succeeded where others had failed, the first to truly make Ice Age Europe their home, the Aurignacians. Tracking payments is just as straightforward. Customers can pay securely through the portal and choose from a range of payment methods, while Odoo can connect directly to your bank to automatically track payments and give you a clear overview of what's been paid, what's still outstanding and what's due next. And best of all, Odoo's first app is free for life, including unlimited hosting and support. So if you're interested in streamlining the way you manage your invoices or in any of Odoo's other applications for your business, please use the link in the description below. Thank you to Odoo for sponsoring the video. During the later part of the Pleistocene, Europe's climate fluctuated repeatedly between colder and somewhat milder phases, sometimes changing quite dramatically within the span of only a few human generations. But through this ongoing instability, much of Europe's landscape remained remarkably open. Pollen records, lowest deposits and animal assemblages indicate that extensive areas of Central and Eastern Europe were dominated by open grasslands and steppe vegetation. This environment, often referred to as the Mammoth Steppe, stretched across Eurasia, from France to Siberia. It supported an extraordinary abundance of grazing animals like horse, bison, saiga antelope, reindeer, musk ox and mammoth. For people, this was a landscape of opportunity. It was a bounty of seemingly limitless animal resources, but also of course, it presented an immense challenge. Food resources were abundant in practice only if hunters possessed the knowledge and technology to exploit them. Herds migrated seasonally over vast distances, winters were severe and fuel could be scarce, and populations of both humans and prey remained widely dispersed. Survival demanded careful planning, intimate environmental knowledge and social cooperation. Long before the Aurignacians appeared, the Neanderthals had thrived in Europe under these conditions for well over 300,000 years. I think everyone knows by now that these people weren't the primitive cavemen they were once depicted as. They were in fact highly capable hunter-gatherers, whose behaviour became increasingly sophisticated over time. They controlled fire, manufactured effective stone tools, hunted large animals, cared for injured members of their communities, and in some places, maybe buried their dead. Increasing evidence also suggests that they occasionally used pigments, maybe collected feathers and eagle talons for decoration, and engaged in symbolic, artistic practices of their own. It's hard to even conceive the length of time represented by hundreds of thousands of years, isn't it? Neanderthals were enormously successful people. It's impossible not to admire their tenacity. Of course, their survival all those years wasn't inevitable. All those people, those groups and individuals, had to fight on generation after generation. Then sometime before about 50,000 years ago, the first modern homo sapiens begin to be seen in the archaeological record in Europe. The evidence for them comes from collections of new forms of stone tools, and also fragments of human remains, though the tools and remains aren't necessarily found together. There were several relatively short-lived and relatively localised archaeological traditions appearing during this period. In this period, what had been the Middle Paleolithic gives way to the initial Upper Paleolithic. The tool industries across Eurasia in this era can show elements of the earlier and later eras either side of them, and so get called transitional industries. Along with this stone tool evidence, ancient DNA analysis has revealed a really fascinating and complex story of repeated colonisations of Europe or parts of it that were ultimately unsuccessful. The first groups of brave colonists striking out into these new lands seem to have largely come to an end without leaving any descendants. One of the most important discoveries comes from Baciu Ciro cave in Bulgaria. Here, the remains of several early homo sapiens dating to about 45,000 years ago were associated with an initial Upper Paleolithic artefact assemblage of blades, bladelets, bone tools and ornaments made from cave bear teeth. Other evidence comes from Pestera Cuesi in Romania. One individual known as Cuesi I lived at roughly the same time as the Baciu Ciro people. There are some reconstructions of another individual from this site, Cuesi II. Like the people of Baciu Ciro, however, Cuesi appears to belong to a lineage that ultimately disappeared. Ancient DNA reveals these early colonists carried Neanderthal ancestry inherited from just a few generations earlier. And interestingly, these branches aren't genetically all that closely related to later Europeans. Rather, it looks like these early European colonists branched off from groups related to those who also colonised Eastern Eurasia. But that doesn't mean these early Europeans came in from East Asia. This is such an incredibly long time ago, they're not really that closely related to anyone alive today. And when the so-called Out of Africa separation took place, something like 70,000 or 60,000 years ago, the Eurasian branch would ultimately branch again into separate West Eurasian and East Eurasian groups. There would also be ongoing gene flow between these two groups in Central Asia for thousands of years. But these earliest modern humans in the initial Upper Paleolithic were so close to this East-West separation and Out of Africa that they were, in effect, a bit of both and neither. Then there's the site and individual known as Zlaty Kun, discovered in what's now the Czech Republic. She is extremely old as well, from probably around 45,000 years ago. Her exact archaeological association isn't clear, but genomic analysis suggests her lineage seems to have branched away long before the later populations that eventually spread across the continent. Genetic discoveries like these have illuminated our understanding of Europe's first modern humans. Rather than a single migration replacing the Neanderthals, we now see there were multiple expansions. Different groups entered Europe at different times, probably from different directions, carrying different traditions and slightly different ancestries. Some populations survived relatively briefly, others perhaps persisted for centuries or even millennia before disappearing from the record altogether. This was a harsh and difficult environment, so you can see how these first groups with probably quite small populations could have died out. A couple of harsh winters in a row, perhaps, and some bad decisions, maybe conflicts with Neanderthals, and a population of one or two hundred people could have been whittled down to nothing. And sometime around all this, about 39,500 years ago, there was an enormous volcanic eruption in Italy known as the Campanian-Ignimbrite eruption. It ejected vast amounts of ash into the atmosphere, which might have had a climatic impact, and so negatively affecting Europe's populations. In places where the wind-blown ash cloud settled, it formed a layer that archaeologists can see at some sites, creating a kind of chronological marker. They call it the Sea Aetephora. This was once suspected of being the event that finished off the Neanderthals and formed the dividing line between the Middle Paleolithic and the initial Upper Paleolithic. It's almost certainly not that clear cut, but it was a devastating event. You always wonder what our ancestors made of massive events like this when they witnessed them. Anyway, in this dynamic and uncertain world, archaeologists first recognised the emergence of what they call the Proto-Orygnation. Appearing first in South-East and Southern Europe before spreading westwards, Proto-Orygnation assemblages are characterised by distinctive blade-look production, carefully prepared stone cores and increasing use of bone and antler technologies. It's probably the technological and cultural precursor to the classic Orygnation, carried by the ancestors of the Orygnation people. It's thought likely that these people started out in the Levant, and then migrated along the Mediterranean coasts and following the Danube Valley. But the possible precursor technologies from the Near East don't have agreed precise chronologies, so it's not entirely clear. At one point, the local tradition known as the Levantine Orygnation was thought to be ancestral to the European one, but better dating suggests it's actually later, and so maybe represents a migration into the region from Europe. Anyway, the Orygnation itself then appears across Europe as a remarkably consistent technological tradition, defined by long blades, characteristic bladelets, spit-based antler points, personal ornaments, and an increasingly rich symbolic material culture. It gets its name from the Cave of Aurignac in southwest France, which was excavated in the mid-19th century. The distinctive tool types found there were what defined the early Upper Paleolithic layer throughout Europe. Incredibly, these excavations also uncovered 17 human skeletons in the cave, but we don't know what era they came from because they were reburied in the local cemetery and have never been discovered again. And this technological complex is what they called the Orygnation, which then gave its name to the era and to the people living at the time using these tools. Unlike the populations represented by Bacchicuro, Huasi, or Zlatikun, the people associated with this tradition didn't appear and then vanish. Instead, they expanded across much of Europe, adapting successfully to environments ranging from the Atlantic coasts of Iberia to the lowest plains of Central Europe. It's interesting to consider why it was these people, the Orygnations, who succeeded, where the earlier expansions failed. What made these people so special? Within a few thousand years of their first appearance, Orygnation sites are found across an enormous area of Europe. Their characteristic stone tools, split-based antler points, ornaments and artistic traditions appear from northern Spain and southwest France to the Danube Valley, southern Germany, Belgium and beyond. There are certainly regional variations. However, archaeologists recognise a surprisingly consistent technological tradition over thousands of kilometres. Along with their broad geographical distribution, the Orygnations inhabited a range of environments, and their activities in these diverse landscapes were best preserved within caves. In the Aach Valley of southwestern Germany lie several of the most famous Orygnation sites, including Geissenklöstel, Höhlefels and Vogelherd caves. These caves overlook the limestone valleys of the Swabian Jura. During the Orygnation, this region was considerably colder than today, and open grasslands dominated much of the surrounding landscape, while patches of woodland occupied sheltered locations. Herds of horse, reindeer and other grazing animals moved along these valleys, attracting generations of hunters. The caves themselves offered natural shelter. You can see why somewhere out of the wind and rain and snow would be so attractive in a harsh environment. Good caves and rock overhangs must have been a precious natural gift to these people, drawing them back over and over again. Excavations have revealed repeated occupations spanning thousands of years. Paths, stone tools, worked ivory, ornaments and animal accumulated layer upon layer, preserving an unusually detailed record of Orygnation life. However, Orygnation communities didn't all live in caves all the time, they're just the places where evidence is best preserved. At Willendorf II in Austria, famous today because of the nearby Grevetian-era Venus figurine discovered at the original Willendorf site, archaeologists excavated an important open-air Orygnation occupation buried beneath thick deposits of wind-blown loess. Loess soil forms when fine dust, ground from glacial sediments, is carried by strong winds and gradually accumulates across the landscape. These deposits not only preserve archaeological sites remarkably well by covering them up, but they also provide valuable evidence for reconstructing past environments. By combining the study of loess layers with pollen analysis, microscopic land snails, animal remains and radiocarbon dating, researchers have been able to place various Orygnation occupation layers within changing climatic conditions with considerable precision. Sites like Willendorf remind us that caves represent only a small part of Orygnation life. These people were mobile hunters to a greater or lesser extent and also lived in open-air camps that rarely survived so well. Another important site is Abri Castanet in southwest France. Unlike the deep and sometimes painted caves that would later become famous, Castanet seems to be an everyday living site beneath a limestone rock shelter. Excavations uncovered hearths, stone tools and ornaments made from pierced animal teeth and marine shells, along with engraved limestone blocks that once formed part of the shelter's ceiling itself. I'll talk more about this later, but one of the pretty revolutionary aspects of the Upper Paleolithic was this widespread adoption of artistic expression. Not just in special cave sites, but it had probably become entwined with daily life, and we can imagine these people wearing bead necklaces as they went about their daily tasks. Anyway, my point is there was no single Orygnation way of living. Some communities repeatedly occupied cave sites overlooking river valleys. Others established open-air camps across the lowest plains of Central Europe. Others again lived beneath rock shelters in Western Europe. I often imagine what it was like for the groups living generation after generation on the rocky Mediterranean coasts. So although the Orygnation was defined by a pretty consistent range of tool types, the people who used them were in fact able to adapt to many environments and the varied animal resources offered by these places. And we know the kinds of animals they hunted and ate, because when archaeologists excavate these sites they will often find the remains of some of these animals. Species can usually be identified from characteristic features of individual bones and teeth, and even fragments of them. Cut marks left by stone tools, percussion damage from marrow extraction, burning and patterns of bone breakage help distinguish human activity from the work of carnivores or natural processes. At many Orygnation sites, horse and reindeer dominate the faunal assemblages. They were the key species they relied on, the classic ones if you like, that the Orygnations are most known for hunting. This is especially true in much of Central Europe, where both species were abundant on the open steppe. Their seasonal movements through the landscape would have offered predictable opportunities for organised hunting. These were fast, large animals and successful hunts would have required understanding their movements and behaviours, and having the right tools, local knowledge, group planning and preparation. Each animal would be a prize, providing enormous amounts of calories and nutrients from the meat, fat and organs. The bones, hides and sinews were also vital resources for these people too. But they didn't only hunt horses and reindeer, they also hunted red deer, ibex, chamois, bison and other large animals in significant numbers depending on the surrounding environment. It could be that this Orygnation trait, their great adaptability was a reason they were able to be so successful where previous groups had failed. So what about the largest and most iconic Ice Age megafauna, the mammoth? Didn't these people hunt mammoths? It's an interesting question because mammoth ivory is one of the defining raw materials of the Orygnation. The remarkable carvings from the Swabian Jura that I'll talk about later were fashioned almost entirely from mammoth ivory. However, mammoth bones generally make up only a small proportion of faunal assemblages at many Orygnation sites. There's surprisingly little evidence for active hunting of mammoths, but there is some, so we know that at least some groups knew how to do it. The degree to which mammoths were hunted or scavenged in different regions is debated. They were undoubtedly important animals within Orygnation society. Their size and strength and their tusks must have been awe-inspiring to see, but the archaeological evidence suggests they weren't a printable source of food across most of Europe. I really want to emphasise again that animals represented far more than just meat. They provided raw materials essential for survival. Antler and bone were collected and worked into tools like projectile points. Ivory was carved into figurines, ornaments and tools. Hides were processed with specific tools and would have been turned into clothing, bags, shelters and so on that they absolutely relied on. Much of these people's lives would have been spent processing animal remains. We can imagine them at their camps, with hides spread around in many different stages of processing, being worked on all day by different people. Stone tools would have been constantly being made, and wooden and osseous tools carved. You think of the smells of meat drying by the fire, and the sounds of scraping and chopping, and people talking amongst themselves as they worked. But compared with the thousands of stone tools and animal bones recovered from Orygnation sites, human remains from this era are extremely rare. It's these few individuals, and more recently their ancient DNA, that tell us about who the Orygnations actually were. The relative lack of human remains from this era is partly, of course, a consequence of preservation. Human skeletons survive a long time only under favourable conditions, and this was tens of thousands of years ago. Human bones had to survive acid soils and warm, humid conditions as the whole continent kept changing drastically over all that time, with glaciers expanding and retreating, the ground freezing and thawing, and entire coasts being submerged as sea levels rose. Also, even though we're talking about a period of up to 10,000 years, the total population size at any one time was relatively small. There are various estimates for the actual number, but suffice it to say there weren't that many people around at any one time. On top of that, the practice of intentionally burying a person was likely a very rare event. Almost everyone was probably left out in the landscape, and burials were practised almost never, as far as we can tell, in the Orygnation. Burials become more common, though still very rare, in the later Gravetian era. Preservation, as you might expect, is usually best at some cave sites, but it's worth remembering that many excavations of these sites took place during the 19th and early 20th centuries, before modern archaeological techniques had been developed, and fragile fragments of human remains weren't always looked for or recorded. However, there are important discoveries of human remains related to this culture. I must mention the very famous Cro-Magnon I from Dordogne, southwestern France. Discovered long ago in 1868, the remains found in the rock shelter there became so influential that Cro-Magnon was once widely used as a synonym for all the early Upper Paleolithic Europeans. Today, however, anthropologists and archaeologists rarely use the term other than in its historical sense. They prefer to call them European Early Modern Humans, or EEMH instead. Cro-Magnon I is a male who was probably about 40 when he died. The famous Cro-Magnon man was for a long time considered the defining earliest Ice Age individual that wasn't a Neanderthal, the first proper European, if you like. But more recent radiocarbon dating has shown he lived later than expected, around 28,000 years ago in the Gravetian period. Even so, the Cro-Magnon discoveries remain historically important for understanding this broader era. And anyway, the Gravetian did develop out of the Aurignacian. But much of the Aurignacian genetic evidence that we do have comes from partial remains, often just single bones or even a tooth from cave sites. They might have left most people exposed in the landscape, but they must have had more complex mortuary customs too, involving taking bodies or parts of them into caves for deposition. Among the most important sites for genomes from the Aurignacian era are those of Kostenki in Western Russia and Goyet Caves in Belgium. The individual known as Goyet Q1161 dating to about 34,000 years ago refers to just one bone, which was excavated in 1868, along with many others from a broad era covering thousands of years. Kostenki, on the banks of the River Don, is one of the most famous sites of Paleolithic Europe. It's not actually a single site at all. Known collectively as the Kostenki-Borshevo complex, there's actually more than 20 separate Upper Paleolithic sites, preserving occupations spanning almost 30,000 years. People kept coming here because it was such an attractive place. The Don formed one of Eastern Europe's great natural corridors and vast herds of grazing animals crossed the surrounding steppe. Hunters could camp in open-air sites on the river terraces and along gullies and ravines by the freshwater springs emerging from the chalk valley sides. And many of these abandoned campsites were gradually buried beneath wind-blown loess, preserving layer upon layer of human history. Few places allow archaeologists to watch the of Ice Age Europe unfold with such extraordinary continuity. The individual known as Kostenki-14 dates to about 37,000 years ago, which is the Aurignacian era. Kostenki-14's precise archaeological association is debated, but he belonged to populations that formed part of the earliest enduring branch of West Eurasians. Unlike the earlier people from groups like Wesey and Vlatikun, whose lineages appear to have contributed little to later Europeans, these individuals belonged to populations that would continue into the later Upper Paleolithic. And ongoing ancient DNA analyses have shown that Aurignacian-associated populations were genetically related but also formed their own clusters, and that these clusters would continue to be seen in later populations. Individuals from Goya Cave in Belgium belong to a major western lineage, while contemporaries elsewhere in Europe, like Kostenki-14, occupy intermediate positions or belong to different clusters or branches. You see these branches continuing into the Gravettian and onwards, although genes were also shared between them. Also, some lineages ultimately come to an end, at least after the last glacial maximum about 20,000 years ago. All this means that although the Aurignacian era is defined by an overarching toll industry, there are regional archaeological differences and regional genetic differences within this broader West Eurasian population. Like with most things, the more you look into it, the more complicated it gets. One of the few actually Aurignacian burial sites is Ladik Cave in the Czech Republic. Excavated more than a century ago, Ladik produced the remains of several anatomically modern humans dating to the early Upper Paleolithic. Their skeletons show modern human anatomy and features, certainly, but they also demonstrate that the distinction between late Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens was not always visually obvious. The recent mixing between the two human types must have had a phenotypical influence. These were robustly built people with large faces and powerful jaws. Kostenki-14 has the most incredible looking skull. 19th and early 20th century physical anthropologists attempted to determine racial characteristics using the shape of the skeleton itself. They measured hundreds of anatomical features and compared them with living populations. Many concluded that individuals such as Cro-Magnon and Kostenki possessed what they described as mainly Europoid characteristics, rather than Asian or African, although some had some of these traits too. This is why old reconstructions show them with robust, archaic looking European features and sometimes modern European pigmentation. Soft tissues, hair and skin, of course, don't survive from this period and facial reconstructions build up from the skull itself. The underlying anatomy determines the approximate position of muscles, eyes and many facial features, while the thickness of soft tissues can be estimated using data from modern populations, but all the reconstructions you see have some degree of artistic interpretation. Hair colour, eye colour and skin pigmentation, however, require DNA evidence. We can only estimate these things based on the genes that we know are related to pigmentation. Different genes have greater or lesser impact, and many work together in complex ways that we don't always understand, and the further back in time we go, the less reliable our knowledge becomes. But probably everyone had dark hair, brown eyes and relatively darker pigmentation than Europeans today. Some people may have already carried some variants associated with lighter pigmentation, but they were probably uncommonly expressed. They lacked many of the genetic variants responsible for the very lightest skin seen in Northern Europe today, but they also didn't have the combination of pigmentation genes seen in modern African populations. If you put their DNA into pigmentation prediction tools, some of them, like Stinky14, get an intermediate skin tone result, which is what many Mediterranean people score as today. It's like olive skin. But I don't think any of these tools are very accurate for low coverage samples from populations from so long ago. There's different types of melanin too, and people all around the world don't just have lighter or darker skin, do they? There's also spectrums of red, blue and yellow tones. So Aurignacians probably had a distinct West Eurasian pattern of pigmentation that no longer exists in quite the same form, like many aspects of their physical appearance, you could say they looked broadly like archaic West Eurasians, but with some East Eurasian characteristics and even African ones. But although they're ancestors of European people, and are most closely related to European people rather than to anyone else, this was such an incredibly long time ago that they also didn't look quite like anyone today. There aren't really enough remains to confidently reconstruct average heights across all the populations, I don't think, although there are a few limb bones here and there that some people have extrapolated from. Cro-Magnon was Grevetian, and his height was estimated as up to 182 centimetres, or about 6 feet. Certainly they were robust and well-built people, like Kostenki14 for example, a young man who was maybe more like 160 centimetres or 5 foot 3. When he was excavated, they said he had some features reminiscent of Papuans or Melanesians, which makes sense considering the relatively recent branching between East and West populations. It's strange to look at the face of someone from so long ago, isn't it? Despite being maybe 38,000 years old, it's so tangible you can almost imagine what it would be like to speak to him. Their bones do reveal the demanding, strenuous lives they led. Muscle attachment sites show they grew up doing strenuous physical activity, as you would expect, and the bones are robust, reflecting repeated mechanical loading through life. On the one hand, their dental health was good, however dental wear on the teeth could be seen with Mladek and Peshtera Mweri1, not simply because of hard chewing, but because teeth were often used as tools, like using the teeth as a third hand to grip cordage and so on. It's overwhelmingly the stone tools they used that survive to today, but those tools represent only one component of a much richer technological system. The ancient knappers carefully prepared stone cores before removing long blades and smaller bladelets in controlled sequences. The resulting blanks could then be modified into scrapers, burins and other specialised implements. These different tools were used for a huge array of tasks, including processing animal and plant materials with scrapers and pounders, and for cutting and shaping wooden and osseous materials, and for making clothing, bags and other vital products. But bone, antler and ivory required different techniques altogether. Antler was an incredibly useful and abundant material. The Aurignacians were the first to take full advantage of it, and later Europeans would do the same for thousands of years. Along with long stone blades, split-based antler points are one of the defining artefacts of the Aurignacian. They formed the tip of projectile weapons, javelins or perhaps darts, launched by Atlatl. The split base was so they could be attached to a wooden shaft. It's thought that in a landscape where antler was everywhere, but trees were precious, a good shaft was more valuable than the point. So the point could get stuck in the muscle and hide of a prey animal, and if they were to break, they would break at the weak point, leaving the shaft intact for a new point to be attached. These were sophisticated composite tools. They would have used throwing sticks for hunting too. In fact, the world's oldest known boomerang was found in a cave in Poland dating to about 40,000 years ago, and it was made from mammoth ivory. It was thought that the bow and arrow was a sophisticated development used more at the end of the Paleolithic and in the Mesolithic, as it was more suited for hunting smaller game in the spreading woodlands of that era, but recent research has suggested that the Aurignacians used the bow and arrow too. The Atlatl, or spear thrower, is a tool that works like a lever to launch javelins or darts with greater force. They were probably used at this time, but the oldest surviving ones, I believe, are from the later Seleucian or Magdalenian, where they can be quite beautifully decorated. Including decorations, ornaments and artwork in special places and in everyday life, however, does date back to the Aurignacian. The explosion of incredible artwork is one of the most famous and impressive things about these remarkable people. Much of the famous European cave art dates to later eras, especially the Magdalenian, but Europe's beautiful, sophisticated figurative cave paintings and engravings begin, as far as we know, with the Aurignacians. Deep within Chauvet Cave, in southern France, archaeologists encountered one of the greatest artistic discoveries of the 20th century. There are hundreds of stunning images of many Ice Age species across the walls, as well as hand stencils and abstract symbols like dot patterns. When the cave was discovered in 1994, some researchers initially doubted its great antiquity. The paintings seem to be too sophisticated to be among Europe's oldest. The dating has been debated and, like with many sites of this era, it's actually really hard to nail down. But radiocarbon dating of charcoal pigments, together with dating of associated occupation layers and other independent evidence, has shown that many of the paintings probably belong to the Aurignacian to about 36,000 to 32,000 years ago. The animal figures are deceptively simple in terms of technique, but they reveal a remarkable artistic sensibility bringing these prehistoric animals to life. There's a sense of life and movement and character to them. Some of them do that thing seen in later cave art where they use the undulations of the surface beneath them to emphasise the shape of animal, giving them a partially three-dimensional form. There's at least 13 species represented, like horses with their stiff dark manes, and woolly rhinoceroses with their great curving horns. There's this incredible sense of movement in some of the panels or scenes. They might be depicting herds and prides, because the animals are individuals, in different poses as if captured in different movements. And sometimes they seem to convey something like animation, where it seems that way to me, like the same rhino moving through time. The panel of lions, stalking bison and rhino, looks to me as if the eyes of the lions are somewhat aligned, so that it draws your eye along these flowing, bounding predators to the prey, making you the viewer into a hunter too. They also engraved animals into the surfaces that were covered with a kind of soft clay layer, maybe just with a finger. I love the horse and the owl, but my favourite out of all the animals has to be the bear in red pigment. It looks almost like a modern cartoon character. And Chauvet wasn't the only cave site. Aurignacian cave art is also known from sites including El Castillo in Spain, and maybe Coliboya cave in Romania, and others, although the chronology of some painted caves remains debated. We don't know why all this artwork was created. Some researchers have proposed it was related to hunting magic, like they'd paint this stuff to enhance hunting success. Others suggest shamanic rituals, mythological narratives, teaching, territorial identity, or combinations of many different functions. Some see these deep cave sites as exclusive locations, with access limited to ritual specialists like shamans or something. Other people suspect artwork might have been much more widespread at the time, like the entrances to caves, or even the walls outside, and painted on wood or bark, and on people's skin. And it's only because the deep cave locations preserve this art that we think it was special and limited. But maybe it was different, in different places and times. This was over thousands of years after all. But art being integrated into daily life is seen in the personal ornaments these people created and wore. They made beads out of different materials like ivory, stone and bone, but commonly animal teeth like red deer and fox canines in inland sites, and shell beads in coastal ones. Beads can be identified by the perforations that were made through them. Sometimes these have been examined microscopically and they can see the wear from cordage showing they were strung on a necklace or bracelet or worn on clothing. Sometimes wear on one side of the perforation shows wear it was rubbing from being suspended as a pendant. They even used human teeth as pendants in some cases. Presumably these teeth had belonged to beloved relatives and were worn after their death in remembrance. Maybe some people today would think that's weird, creepy and gross, but I suppose it was a way of keeping a part of their loved ones and their spirits around. And probably some of you oddballs watching this would do the same. Different groups favoured different types of ornaments, worn in unique local ways which would have helped reinforce group identity. You can imagine when these groups met one another for trade and intermarriage or whatever else they got up to, they would be able to identify one another on site by their outfits. It's more complicated than this in practice, but it's pretty incredible to think about the coastal tribes covered in jangling shells meeting the woodland people with red deer teeth beads and the steppe hunters with ivory beads and so on. Their clothing, which we can't see directly of course, was surely distinct as well, made from the skins and furs of their local favoured prey animals. What an incredible time this was, they had such a rich cultural life and perhaps surprisingly, music provides another glimpse into Aurignacian society. At Geissenklösterle, Holerfels and nearby caves, archaeologists recovered carefully crafted flutes made from bird bones and mammoth ivory. Dating back to perhaps as far as 43,000 years ago, these are the oldest securely dated musical instruments presently known. Whether these were played to accompany rituals, celebrations and storytelling or simply passing long winter evenings by the fire, these wonderful instruments remind us that Aurignacian life wasn't just a hard slog of hunting and survival, there was also this sense of artistic expression and cultural identity that's so tangible and yet just out of our reach. Most tangible of all perhaps, are the astonishing small figurines they carved that include some of the oldest representations of human bodies in the world. At Vogelherd cave, archaeologists recovered exquisitely carved mammoths, horses and other animals fashioned from mammoth ivory. The dating of them spans about 43,000 to 34,000 years ago but I wouldn't trust the exact dating too much. Most are only a few centimetres long, they're really tiny yet they display remarkable anatomical detail. The sculptors carefully observed the proportions of the animals around them while also simplifying forms into elegant recognisable figures. I like how the predators and the horses are sort of stretched out and long as if to convey their speed as they stretch out in a run. The lion's head is pointed forward as if its eyes are fixed on its prey, while the bison and mammoth are solid and squarish to emphasise their great mass. They were probably carved around the campfire and then carried around from place to place before some were ultimately left here and never recovered by their makers. Again, whether these tiny things were amulets for protection or charms to bring hunting success or toys for children to play with, we don't know for sure. But they do have some interesting properties I'll talk about in a moment. Nearby at Holer Fells, excavations in 2008 uncovered another extraordinary ivory object. Known today as the Venus of Holer Fells, at 40 to 42 thousand years old, it's probably the oldest undisputed example of a depiction of a human being in the world. Carved from mammoth ivory, the figurine emphasises breasts, abdomen and genitalia while omitting the head. Every time I show this object, people tell me it looks like a rotisserie chicken. Again, it's really tiny, just six centimetres high and was probably worn as a pendant. Whether it represented fertility, personal identity, feminine power or something else entirely is unknown, but clearly it must have been something like that. Most of the famous Venus figurines come from the later Grevetian era, but clearly this eternal fascination with the abundant female form goes back to the Aurignacian. Perhaps the most famous discovery from the Swabian Jura is the Löwenmensch figurine, or the Lion Man from Hohlenstein Stadel. It might be 41 to 35 thousand years old, and it's extremely special indeed. More than 300 fragments of mammoth ivory were painstakingly reconstructed to reveal this figure, apparently with a human body and the head of a cave lion. Obviously no such creature has ever existed, so unlike the animal figurines and voluptuous Venus, the Lion Man represents something imagined rather than observed. Interpretations of what it shows vary quite a lot. Some think it has male genitalia, but other people think it could be female. Is it a lion standing on hind legs, perhaps in the process of becoming human? Or is it a mythical half-lion, half-human creature or spirit perhaps? Maybe it's supposed to be a shaman wearing a lion pelt over their head during a ritual where they magically become this hybrid creature. It was found 30 metres or 100 feet deep inside the cave, along with other artefacts suggesting this might have been a from normal life, where special rituals could be performed. Whatever its original significance, it demonstrates the cognitive capacity, the imaginative ability to combine elements of the real world into entirely new concepts. Maybe there's some degree of survivorship bias, but it does seem that the Aurignacian is a real leap in cognitive abilities. Clearly, in these societies, their symbolic expressions were highly developed, so much so that some people have argued that their artwork included writing. Various studies have suggested that repeated marks engraved upon bone, antler and stone artefacts may represent Upper Palaeolithic symbols and that these may have functioned as a systematic form of notation, even perhaps tracking months of the year and associated birthing seasons of certain animals. There was a 2026 paper that got a huge amount of mainstream and social media attention, as it was reported with headlines suggesting that Ice Age Europeans invented writing. The actual research examined these artefacts and converted markings on them into symbols and recorded those as sequences before running different kinds of statistical analyses on them. The results were compared to other kinds of writing and the only one that looked similar on the resulting graphs was Proto-Cuneiform from early Mesopotamia. This is because Proto-Cuneiform was used as an administrative tool and so often consisted of repeating symbols, probably recording quantities like tallies. But all that supposes the transcription of the Aurignacian markings is even valid in the first place. These lines might be decorative, meant to convey the texture of fur or the patterns on the skin or some other quality. The authors say to that that decorations could also be signs at the same time. But what might have happened here, in some cases at least, is that decorative hatching, for example, was transcribed as a series of individual Xs and then analyses were run on these rows of Xs with the results showing that they are a series of Xs, which looks on their charts like the kind of information density seen in Proto-Cuneiform. So one possibility is the Aurignacian marks were something like tallies, each notch, hatch or dot being a mark for counting. People have suggested hunters might have taken the figurines out hunting and kept a tally of animals they spotted or killed. Or perhaps they recorded that species' migration season and were used as tools for learning. It's possible but we don't know of course. Paleolithic tally marks aren't limited to the Aurignacian and there may be even older examples found in Africa. Notches and hatches and V-shapes aren't only on figurines, they appear on other bone and ivory artefacts too. The most interesting part of the research, I think, is that certain symbols or patterns tended to appear on certain artefact types and not others. Crosses or cross-hatching appears only on animal figurines, especially on horses and mammoths and on tools. While dots occur most frequently on anthropomorphic figurines like the famous mammoth ivory adorant figure from Gyson Colostal Cave dating to 35,000 to 32,000 years ago and also animal figurines, especially lions, but never on tools. This might just be due to there being few samples from some of these categories like human figures. But it could also be that these are symbols with their own meanings. Or it could be decorations, perhaps crosses represent the texture and appearance of the shaggy fur of stephorses and mammoths, while the dots convey the soft texture of feline fur. And perhaps people wore lion skins, hence their association. Then again, if rows and columns of dots represent a particular texture of fur, then perhaps the line between abstract artistic depictions and symbols isn't so clear cut. Anyway, as always I'll include key sources including this one in the description so you can read all about this yourself if you're interested. But it's possible that as much as 40,000 years ago, these people were already developing increasingly abstract ways of depicting, storing and transmitting information and these traditions lasted for thousands of years. However, this long-lasting society would not go on forever. During the later Aurignacian, Europe entered another period of environmental change. Climatic oscillations continued to reshape habitats and their animals. By around 34,000 years ago, new technological traditions began appearing across Europe. Archaeologists recognised these as the earliest Gravettian. For quite some time, Aurignacian and Gravettian communities occupied different parts of the continent simultaneously, so there wasn't some sudden cultural turnover. An ancient DNA shows an equally complex picture. Some Aurignacian-associated populations appear to have persisted, while others were replaced or absorbed as Gravettian populations expanded. Rather than a single moment of replacement, the Aurignacian-Gravettian transition seems to represent several centuries of demographic change, technological innovation and regional interaction. But the Aurignacian ancestry and cultural legacy would continue in these later people, the Gravettian, Solutrean and Magdalenian. And although the Gravettian and later cultures would continue to adapt and develop over thousands of years, much of Paleolithic European practices began with the Aurignacian. They adapted to a wide range of environments, spanning much of the continent, exploiting a range of resources, from shellfish to horses and mammoths. They produced some of the earliest known figurative sculptures, musical instruments and cave paintings. And they were the first to demonstrate that symbolic expression had become a central part of human life in Europe. To me, this is the first time that European history becomes truly tangible. I think I've said that word a lot in this video, because when you look at their incredible artefacts, you can almost feel what it must have been like to have been an Aurignacian. Even over 30,000 years later, you can feel the mines that carved this ivory, painted this limestone and made shell beads. You can almost hear their voices echoing from the cave walls and the music they played on their bone flutes. I think it's the sophistication of these people, the sudden richness of their material culture, that allows us to grasp not only how they lived, but something of how they thought and how they saw the world. Thank you very much to my patrons and channel members for supporting this channel. Please support my work on Patreon or as a channel member so I can continue to produce this kind of video. And please do hit like and subscribe to the channel and let me know if you're interested in more Paleolithic era content. Now to find out more about the beliefs of our Ice Age ancestors, please watch this video now on the Gravetians. Thank you for watching.