The invention of writing was not a single event, but rather a gradual evolution, preceded by the use of symbols, possibly originating for ritual or cultic purposes.

Researchers from the University of Victoria in Canada suggest that Neolithic cave painters employed symbolism as a form of early communication.

"...Von Petzinger and Nowell were surprised by the clear patterning of the symbols across space and time—some of which remained in use for over twenty thousand years.

Their research identifies twenty-six distinct signs, which may represent the earliest evidence of a graphic code used by humans shortly after their arrival in Europe from Africa—or possibly even earlier, suggesting they brought this practice with them.

If confirmed, these findings would support the growing body of evidence that the so-called "creative explosion"—once thought to have occurred later—actually began tens of thousands of years earlier than previously believed.

Modern humans learn to modulate voice into audible oral speech in the period beginning around 70,000 BCE; this is a development apparently not accomplished by other archaic hominids and one peculiar to our species.

Some also learn at this time to count beyond “one, two, and many.”

Northeastern Eurasia (49,293 – 28,578 BCE): Upper Pleistocene I — Steppe, Ice, and the Making of the Northern Corridor

Geographic and Environmental Context

During the late Pleistocene, Northeastern Eurasia extended from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific, encompassing the mammoth-steppe plains of East Europe and Western Siberia, the Altai–Yenisei uplands, and the Amur–Okhotsk–Bering frontier of Northeast Asia.
It was not a single region but a triadic system of worlds:

• East Europe, the western steppe edge, framed by the Don, Dnieper, and Oka valleys — a land of loess terraces and braided rivers supporting dense megafaunal herds.

• Northwest Asia, the Siberian interior, from the Urals through the Ob–Irtysh–Yenisei corridor to the Altai, where glacial basins and intermontane valleys served as refugia amid vast permafrost plains.

• Northeast Asia, the Pacific rim and Beringian shelf, where tundra-steppe met coastal polynyas, bridging the continents long before human migration reached the New World.

Across these subregions, the environment graded from continental aridity in the west to maritime cold along the Pacific — a spectrum of adaptation that tied Eurasia together along its northern rim.

Climate and Environmental Shifts

The interval encompassed alternating Dansgaard–Oeschger warmings and Heinrich cold pulses leading into the Last Glacial Maximum.

• In East Europe, permafrost advanced to the Dnieper and Don basins; vegetation alternated between steppe grassland and dwarf-shrub tundra.

• In Northwest Asia, continental cold and aridity dominated; the Ob and Yenisei braided into unstable channels; loess and dust storms swept the forelands of the Urals and Altai.

• In Northeast Asia, cold was tempered by oceanic moisture. Ice-edge upwellings in the Okhotsk and Bering seas sustained rich marine ecosystems, even as inland basins froze.

Periodic interstadial thaws re-greened the valleys, drawing herds northward and humans with them; stadials drove retreat to riverine refugia.
The result was a dynamic equilibrium of expansion and contraction rather than a single glacial standstill.

Lifeways and Settlement Patterns

All three worlds supported high-latitude foraging economies built on mobility, storage, and memory of place.

• In East Europe, loess-terrace camps overlooked reindeer and mammoth migration corridors. Semi-recurrent bases at Kostenki, Sungir, and along the Dnieper combined hunting, butchery, and craft production.

• In Northwest Asia, the Altai foothills and Minusinsk Basin hosted recurrent winter shelters, while open Ob–Yenisei valleys served for summer mammoth and bison hunts.

• In Northeast Asia, river-mouth camps and coastal flats supported dual economies of inland big-game and maritime sealing and fishing. Seasonal movements linked river confluences, upland passes, and shelf-edge hunting grounds.

Each subregion achieved local stability through broad prey portfolios and cyclical mobility tuned to glacial rhythms.

Technology and Material Culture

A shared Upper Paleolithic technological grammar spanned the entire northern corridor:

• Blade and microblade industries, adapted to portable composite weapons, formed the technological backbone from the Don to the Anadyr.

• Bone, antler, and ivory were fashioned into points, awls, harpoons, and eyed needles — evidence for tailored fur clothing and cold-weather dwellings.

• Obsidian sources in the Altai and Kamchatka and flint quarries in the Don basin anchored far-flung exchange networks.

• Personal adornment — beads of tooth, ivory, shell, and amber — and ochre burials underscored enduring symbolic systems linking the Eurasian north to the rest of the Upper Paleolithic world.

The breadth of these parallels reveals not isolation but interoperability across extreme distance.

Movement and Interaction Corridors

Northeastern Eurasia was defined by movement — the continual negotiation between ice, water, and wind.

1. The Steppe–River Network: Don–Volga–Ural–Ob–Yenisei channels allowed seasonal following of herds and diffusion of tool types and ornaments.

2. The Altai–Mongolia Crossroads: A mountainous hinge connecting western and eastern populations, where genetic and cultural exchanges mixed Siberian and East Asian lineages.

3. The Amur–Okhotsk–Bering Rim: Shelf and river corridors provided both overland and coastal pathways toward Beringia, the eventual gateway to the Americas.

These arteries made the northern fringe not an end of settlement but a conveyor of innovation and populationbetween continents.

Cultural and Symbolic Expressions

Symbolic behavior mirrored subsistence breadth.
Engraved bones, ivory figurines, and ochred burials appear in all three subregions, expressing a shared spiritual engagement with animals and ancestors.
Altai and Don sites yield portable art and ivory figures, while the Amur and Lena valleys preserve carved bone and antler motifs of reindeer and mammoth.
Fire-ringed hearths and ritual hearth renewals suggest continuity of place and group identity across generations.
In these expressions, the northern peoples joined the global Upper Paleolithic symbolic sphere while imprinting it with an Arctic signature of endurance and cyclical return.

Environmental Adaptation and Resilience

Resilience depended on technological insulation, ecological diversity, and social connectivity.
Fur clothing, hide shelters, and stored fuel allowed wintering at 60–70° N; seasonal migration between coast, river, and plateau distributed risk; and wide alliance networks permitted exchange of mates, materials, and knowledge across immense ranges.
When one valley froze, another thawed — and people already knew the way.

Genetic and Linguistic Legacy

Populations rooted in this corridor carried the genetic foundations of later Arctic and Beringian peoples.
From East Europe through the Altai to the Amur, gene flow linked Eurasia’s west and east, seeding the ancestry of the First Americans and shaping linguistic substrates later echoed in circumpolar families.
Northeastern Eurasia thus became the cradle of the circumpolar continuum — a trans-Beringian cultural ecology that would persist for tens of millennia.

Transition Toward the Last Glacial Maximum

By 28,578 BCE, ice sheets and permafrost deepened, narrowing the habitable band to river valleys and steppe oases.
Yet humans remained throughout, their territories contracting but not vanishing.
The East European plains anchored the west, the Altai–Yenisei belt sustained the interior, and the Amur–Bering coast reached outward toward a new continent.

Northeastern Eurasia therefore stands as a model of The Twelve Worlds principle: its subregions were self-contained in ecology yet outward-looking in connection, bound less by shared geography than by the long, unbroken thread of movement — the first great northern highway of the human story.

Northeast Asia (49,293 – 28,578 BCE): Upper Paleolithic I — Mammoth-Steppe, Sheltered Coasts, and First Long Ranges

Geographic and Environmental Context

Northeast Asia includes eastern Siberia east of the Lena River to the Pacific, the Russian Far East (excluding the southern Primorsky/Vladivostok corner), northern Hokkaidō (above its southwestern peninsula), and extreme northeastern Heilongjiang.

• Anchors: the Lower/Middle Amur and Ussuri basins, the Sea of Okhotsk littoral (Sakhalin, Kurils), Kamchatka, the Chukchi Peninsula (with Wrangel Island offshore), northern Hokkaidō, and seasonally emergent shelves along the Bering Sea and northwest Pacific.

Ancient North Siberians and the Deep Eurasian Split

The earliest securely identified human population associated with Northeast Asia belongs to a previously unknown lineage now termed the Ancient North Siberians (ANS). Genomic evidence from the Yana River sites (Yana RHS) indicates that these peoples were established in northeastern Siberia by at least 38,000 years ago, well before the Last Glacial Maximum.

The ANS diverged from Western Eurasians shortly after Western Eurasians themselves separated from East Asians, placing the ANS at a pivotal early junction in Eurasian population history. Culturally and biologically distinct, they adapted to extreme high-latitude environments long before the formation of later Siberian populations.

Crucially, these early inhabitants are not ancestral to most later Siberians and do not represent a continuous population into the Holocene. Instead, they form an early, now largely vanished branch of Eurasian humanity whose genetic legacy survives only in diluted form.

Climate and Environmental Shifts

• Last Glacial Maximum (c. 26,500–19,000 BCE) dominated the latter half of this interval: colder, drier conditions; permafrost pushed south; sea level ~100 m lower exposed broad coastal plains.

• Inland mammoth-steppe mosaics (grass–forb) alternated with open larch; coastlines were wider, with ice-edge polynyas supporting marine life.

Subsistence and Settlement

• Big-game foraging focused on mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, horse, bison, and reindeer on river terraces (Aldan–Amur–Anadyr).

• Coastal scouts used intertidal flats and pack-ice edges to take seals, walrus, seabirds, and winter fish.

• Camps clustered at confluences, aeolian bluffs, and paleo-shorelines; repeated seasonal use left dense knapping scatters and hearths.

Technology and Material Culture

• Blade and microblade industries from local obsidian (e.g., Hokkaidō, Kamchatka) and high-quality chert; hafted composite points for thrusting/spear-throwing.

• Bone/antler/ivory harpoons, awls, eyed needles; tailored cold-weather clothing and boots.

• Personal adornment: drilled tooth/shell pendants, beads, engraved bone; ochre widely used.

Movement and Interaction Corridors

• River highways: Lena–Aldan–Amur trunks guided seasonal migrations.

• Shelf-edge “kelp highway” along the Okhotsk–Bering coasts supported over-ice travel in winter and nearshore voyaging in summer.

• Wrangel–Chukchi–Beringia arcs linked Northeast Asia to the sub-glacial refugium on the far side of the strait.

Cultural and Symbolic Expressions

• Carved animal figurines and engraved bones reflect close predator–prey cosmologies.

• Ochre burials and hearth-centered activity zones suggest shared Upper Paleolithic mortuary and domestic traditions.

Environmental Adaptation and Resilience

• High mobility between coast–river–upland zones diversified diets and buffered risk.

• Cold-weather tailoring, layered shelters (snow/skin windbreaks), and fuel provisioning enabled wintering at high latitudes.

Genetic and Linguistic Legacy

• Ice-age Northeast Asian groups contributed key ancestry to Beringian populations; these, in turn, fed the founding gene pool of the First Americans.

• Deep links formed here between Arctic–sub-Arctic foragers that later radiated across the North Pacific rim.

Transition Toward the Next Epoch

By 28,578 BCE, foragers in Northeast Asia had mastered periglacial ecologies and coastal shelves. As climate wobble and deglaciation approached, river and shoreline corridors would become even more crucial for movement, exchange, and eventual trans-Beringian dispersals.

Central Europe (49,293 – 28,578 BCE): Upper Pleistocene I — Ice-Edge Worlds and the Corridors Between the Rivers

Geographic and Environmental Context

Late-Pleistocene Central Europe was less a single land than a loose archipelago of habitats caught between ice and plain, forest and steppe.
Its three great subregions formed parallel worlds, each facing a different horizon of connection:

• East Central Europe, stretching from the Carpathian Basin through the Moravian and Polish uplands, was a broad loess-steppe platform—cold, windy, and open, linked eastward to the Ukrainian plains.

• South Central Europe, the Alpine and Carpathian forelands, was a world of glacial valleys, meltwater terraces, and limestone shelters, continuous in culture with the northern Mediterranean refugia.

• West Central Europe, defined by the Rhine–Jura arc, served as a bridge between the Atlantic basins and the continental interior, its valleys and caves preserving the densest traces of human symbolism.

These three subregions touched but rarely blended. Each possessed its own climate rhythm, resource base, and exchange direction—making Central Europe a corridor of encounter rather than a unified realm.

Climate and Environmental Shifts

The era encompassed the build-up to the Last Glacial Maximum, marked by advancing ice sheets and periglacial drought.

• East Central Europe lay beneath fierce katabatic winds; loess mantled the plains, rivers braided across frozen ground, and vegetation shrank to steppe and tundra grasses.

• South Central Europe oscillated between frozen winters and brief warm interstadials: glaciers filled Alpine troughs while lowland oases along the Danube and Rhine supported willow, pine, and migrating herds.

• West Central Europe experienced repeated cycles of forest retreat and regrowth, its limestone valleys offering milder refuges when the northern plains froze.

Across the region, short-lived thaws—the Bölling–Allerød precursors—brought pulses of moisture and game, reawakening networks of movement before renewed cold sealed them again.

Lifeways and Settlement Patterns

Human presence threaded these worlds along rivers, caves, and terrace ridges.
Bands of twenty to forty people followed predictable seasonal circuits, their economies tuned to local constraints:

• On the eastern loess plains, foragers pursued mammoth, horse, and reindeer in open steppe country, camping on wind-sheltered bluffs above the Danube, Morava, or Vistula.

• In the southern forelands, smaller groups alternated between glacial valley hunts—ibex, chamois, red deer—and winter residence in limestone shelters such as those of the Swiss Plateau and Tyrol.

• Along the western Rhine and Jura, semi-recurrent occupation of caves and river terraces sustained communities rich in art and ornament, their subsistence broadening to include fish, birds, and gathered plants during interstadials.

Despite distance, these groups shared mutual rhythms: winter aggregation in protected valleys, spring dispersal onto the plains, and late-summer exchange at river junctions where herds converged and trade could occur.

Technology and Material Culture

A shared Upper Paleolithic toolkit unified the region while regional ecology drove variation.

• Blade and microblade industries dominated across the loess plains; Moravian and Polish sites specialized in fine chert and radiolarite production.

• In the Alpine forelands, antler and bone working produced projectile points, needles, and pendants—artistry often preserved in caves such as Vogelherd and Hohle Fels.

• Ochre use was near-universal; beads of shell, ivory, and amber marked social identity and inter-group alliance.

These artifacts reveal not only adaptation but memory—the technological continuity linking Magdalenian, Gravettian, and Aurignacian horizons across multiple climatic pulses.

Movement and Interaction Corridors

Rivers and passes stitched the subregions together, defining both movement and meaning.

1. The Danube–Tisza–Morava Axis served as the region’s vertebra, carrying people and materials from the Pannonian Basin westward to the Rhine and eastward toward the Pontic steppe.

2. The Rhine–Moselle–Jura Corridor connected the interior to the Atlantic, exchanging flint, shells, and ideas with France and the Low Countries.

3. The Alpine and Carpathian Passes—Brenner, St. Gotthard, and Moravian Gate—linked Central Europe with Italy’s northern refugia and the Balkans.

Through these conduits flowed not only tools and pigments but shared symbolic grammars—evidence that even as geography divided, communication endured.

Cultural and Symbolic Life

Symbolic creativity reached a profound maturity.
Across caves and campgrounds alike appear engraved plaquettes, figurines, and ochred burials, mirroring yet localizing the broader European Ice-Age tradition.

• In the west, ivory and limestone Venus figurines embodied fertility or continuity, perhaps exchanged among allied bands.

• In the south, painted and engraved animals—ibex, horse, bison—evoked the seasonal pulse of the hunt.

• In the east, portable ornaments and engraved bone served as tokens of connection across the wide steppe.

Ritual practices—hearth renewal, pigment scattering, burial of tools with the dead—provided spiritual ballast in an unstable world, rooting identity in cyclical return.

Environmental Adaptation and Resilience

Adaptation in Central Europe depended on mobility, cooperation, and foresight.
Layered clothing, well-insulated shelters, and stored fuel extended occupation deep into glacial winters.
Networks of kin and alliance allowed information to travel faster than ice: which valley still held red deer, which cave spring had thawed, which flint source remained exposed.
The interplay of diverse habitats—steppe, riverine, alpine—offered redundancy against failure; when one closed, another opened.

In this diversity lay the region’s strength: not uniformity but connectivity.

Transition Toward the Last Glacial Maximum

By 28,578 BCE, the Central European corridor tightened between advancing ice sheets and rising aridity.
Yet life persisted: steppe herds still crossed the loess plains, smoke still curled from Jura caves, and travelers still traced the Danube from one refuge to another.
Its three natural subregions—the eastern loess plains, the southern glacial valleys, and the western limestone uplands—remained largely self-contained, but each was part of a wider web reaching far beyond the heart of Europe.

Thus even at the peak of cold, Central Europe exemplified the premise of The Twelve Worlds: that the coherence of a region lies not in its unity but in the tension between its neighboring worlds, whose dialogue across ice, river, and mountain sustained human culture through the harshest ages of Earth’s memory.

East Central Europe (49,293 – 28,578 BCE) Upper Pleistocene I — Ice-Edge Steppes, River Terraces, and Cave Lifeways

Geographic and Environmental Context

East Central Europe includes the greater part of Germany (including Berlin, Munich, Hamburg), Poland, Czechia (Bohemia and Moravia), Slovakia, Hungary, northeastern Austria, and the Danube basin through the Carpathian arc.

• Anchors: Lower Danube terraces and loess bluffs, Iron Gates gorges (NE Serbia–Romania), Thracian Plain margins, Dobruja uplands, Carpathian forelands.

• Periglacial steppe–tundra covered plains; conifer pockets in sheltered valleys; Black Sea level sat far below modern.

Climate & Environmental Shifts

• Last Glacial Maximum: cold, arid, windy; braided rivers; expanded loess mantles; seasonal ice on the Danube margins.

Subsistence & Settlement

• Foragers hunted mammoth, bison, horse, reindeer on terrace shoulders; fishing and waterfowl exploited seasonally.

• Camps in loess promontories and caves/rock shelters; hearths, butchery floors, windbreaks.

Technology & Material Culture

• Blade–microblade toolkits; burins/scrapers; bone/antler points; eyed needles (tailored furs).

• Ornaments (pierced teeth, shell); broad ochre use.

Movement & Interaction Corridors

• Lower Danube trunkway; Iron Gates as winter refugium and crossing; steppe corridors across Dobruja to the Black Sea shelf.

Cultural & Symbolic Expressions

• Engraved bone/ivory animal imagery; ochred burials imply shared Upper Paleolithic symbolism with the wider Eurasian north.

Environmental Adaptation & Resilience

• High mobility between river–steppe–shelter niches; layered clothing and fuel caching enabled deep-winter occupation.

A farmer at Mezhirich, a village (selo) in central Ukraine, will dig up the lower jawbone of a mammoth in 1965 while in the process of expanding his cellar.

Further excavations will reveal the presence of four huts, made up of a total of one hundred and forty-nine mammoth bones.

These dwellings, dating back some fifteen thousand years, will be determined to have been some of the oldest shelters known to have been constructed by prehistoric man, usually attributed to Early European Modern Humans.

Also found on the site were a map inscribed onto a bone, presumably showing the area around the settlement; the remains of a "drum", made of a mammoth skull painted with a pattern of red ocher dots and lines; and amber ornaments and fossil shells.

The climate in Britain becomes cooler and dryer in what is known as the Younger Dryas period, from twelve thousand seven hundred to eleven thousand five hundred years ago.

Food animal populations seem to have declined although woodland coverage expanded.

Tool manufacture in the Final Upper Palaeolithic revolved around smaller flints but bone and antler work became less common.

Typically there are parallel-sided flint blades known as "Cheddar Points".

There are scrapers, some of which are marked with what may be calendars.

However, the number of known sites is much larger than before and more widely spread.

Many more open air sites are known, such as that at Hengistbury Head.

The Sacrum bone of Tequixquiac, an ancient paleo-Indian sculpture carved in a pleistocene-era bone of a prehistoric camelid, will be discovered by Mexican geologist and botanist Mariano de la Bárcena in 1870 in Tequixquiac, Mexico. The carving, dated around 14,000 BCE to 7,000 B.C.E., is considered among the earliest pieces of art from the North American continent. Although the original purpose of the sculpture is unknown, some scholars will say that the carving held some religious value due to the sacredness of the sacrum bone in later Mesoamerican cultures.

The carver was likely nomadic and hunted large animals such as mammoths and gathered fruits as evidenced by archaeological evidence found at the site. According to Bárcena, the carver likely used a sharp instrument to cut the holes.

  
 

The Late Stone Age communities of South Africa continue to rely heavily on plant foods, while also trapping and hunting animals with spears and arrows tipped with fine stone blades.

Shellfish, crayfish, seals, and seabirds are collected or caught along the shore, and fish are caught on lines, with spears, in traps, and possibly with nets.

They record the symbols associated with their belief systems in engravings on rock surfaces, mostly on the interior plateau, and paintings on the walls of rock shelters in the mountainous regions.