The Modern Mind's Hand: A Narrative Review of the Upper Paleolithic, from Aurignacian Beads to the Dated Caves

Abstract

The Upper Paleolithic is the archaeology of modern humans' European debut: the blade industries and bone tools of the Aurignacian, the Gravettian's venuses and burials, the Solutrean's laurel-leaf points at the Last Glacial Maximum, and the Magdalenian's reindeer economies and painted caves—the forty millennia whose art, ornament, and organization the discipline reads as the modern mind's hand at work. This article presents a narrative review of the primary literature of that archaeology, from Breuil's 1952 Quatre cents siècles d'art pariétal and Leroi-Gourhan's 1965 Préhistoire de l'art occidental, which fixed the cave art's chronology and structure, through Straus's 1977 Cantabrian faunal economy, Conkey's 1980 Altamira aggregation argument, White's 1989 Aurignacian bead production, Mellars's 1989 emergence synthesis, Straus's 1991 Last Glacial Maximum survey, Stiner and colleagues' 1999 population growth pulses, Conard's 2003 ivory figurines, Joris and Street's 2008 Middle-to-Upper record, Audouze and Enloe's 1997 Verberie magdalenian resolution, and Pike and colleagues' 2012 uranium-series dating of the caves. The synthesis is organized around three themes: the artistic settlement, in which the parietal and portable arts were organized and finally dated; the economic and demographic reading, in which faunal economies, aggregation sites, and small-animal pulses traced the moderns' expansion; and the cultural sequence's refinement, in which the four cultures' borders, beads, and figurines were re-dated and re-attributed. It is concluded that the Upper Paleolithic's literature is the modernity debate's archive—and that the dated caves and figurines have made the modern mind's hand measurable.