Prehistoric Archaeology III: The Lithic Cultures of Europe from the Acheulian and Mousterian through the Châtelperronian, Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solutrean and Magdalenian to the Azilian, Tardenoisian, Maglemosian and Kitchen Midden, the Natufian, and the Early Farming Villages of the Near East at Jericho, Jarmo, Çatalhöyük and Shanidar

The Acheulian takes its name from Saint-Acheul, a suburb of Amiens in the Somme valley of northern France, where handaxes were found in river gravels with the bones of extinct animals; Jacques Boucher de Perthes had argued from the nearby gravels of Abbeville in the 1840s that such tools proved human antiquity, and the visit of Joseph Prestwich and John Evans in 1859, the year of Darwin's Origin, persuaded the scientific world. The older, cruder handaxes of the Somme were once separated as the Abbevillian; they are now read as early Acheulian. The Acheulian reached Europe later than Africa and Asia, from about 700,000–600,000 years ago, and lasted to about 250,000–200,000 years; its makers were Homo heidelbergensis and early Neanderthals. Its sites include Boxgrove in Sussex (about 500,000 years, with a hominin tibia and butchered horse and rhinoceros), Swanscombe on the Thames (a skull of about 400,000 years with Acheulian handaxes), Terra Amata at Nice (about 380,000 years, where Henry de Lumley claimed oval huts and hearths in 1966), and Torralba and Ambrona in Spain (elephant butchery). The tool kit is the handaxe and cleaver with flake tools; the late Acheulian of central Europe with its asymmetric handaxes is sometimes called the Micoquian. The Clactonian, a flake-and-chopper industry without handaxes at Clacton-on-Sea and Swanscombe's lower levels, runs beside the early Acheulian in Britain. The Mousterian, named from the rock shelter of Le Moustier on the Vézère in the Dordogne, is the Middle Palaeolithic culture of Europe, from about 300,000–250,000 to about 40,000 years ago, made by the Neanderthals. It is a flake industry on Levallois and discoid cores, rich in side-scrapers, Mousterian points, denticulates and notches, and sometimes small handaxes. François Bordes sorted Mousterian assemblages by the proportions of his 63 tool types into facies — the Typical, the Charentian (Quina and Ferrassie), the Denticulate and the Mousterian of Acheulian Tradition (with handaxes; types A and B) — and read them as the tool kits of distinct cultural groups; Lewis and Sally Binford read them instead as the tool kits of different activities (the Bordes–Binford debate of the 1960s and 1970s), and Paul Mellars as stages in time. The Mousterian is also the culture of the first deliberate burials, at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, La Ferrassie, Le Moustier, Kebara and Shanidar.

The Upper Palaeolithic of western Europe, from about 45,000 to about 12,000 years ago, was ordered by Henri Breuil (1912) into Aurignacian, Solutrean and Magdalenian, with Lower, Middle and Upper Aurignacian stages. In 1933 Denis Peyrony separated Breuil's Lower and Upper Aurignacian as a distinct "Perigordian" tradition, named from the Périgord (the Dordogne), which he thought ran parallel to the true Aurignacian: the Lower Perigordian was the Châtelperronian, the Upper Perigordian what is now called the Gravettian. Later work showed that the two are separated in time by the Aurignacian and are not one continuous tradition, so "Perigordian" has fallen out of use and the Châtelperronian and Gravettian are named separately — which is why the syllabus lists all three. The Châtelperronian (about 45,000–40,000 years; the Grotte des Fées at Châtelperron, Allier) has the Châtelperron point or knife, a curved backed blade, alongside Mousterian-like scrapers; at Saint-Césaire and at the Grotte du Renne at Arcy-sur-Cure it is associated with Neanderthal remains, and the Arcy ornaments raised the question — still argued — whether late Neanderthals made them independently or in contact with incoming modern humans. The Aurignacian (about 43,000–33,000 years; the cave of Aurignac, Haute-Garonne) is the first culture of anatomically modern humans across Europe: heavily retouched "Aurignacian blades", carinated and nosed scrapers, split-base bone points, beads, and the earliest figurative art — the ivory figurines of the Swabian Jura (the Löwenmensch of Hohlenstein-Stadel, the Hohle Fels figurine and bone flutes of about 40,000–35,000 years) and the paintings of Chauvet cave (about 36,000 years). The Gravettian (about 33,000–26,000 years; La Gravette, Dordogne) spread from the Atlantic to Russia: Gravette points and backed bladelets, and the "Venus" figurines — Willendorf in Austria, Lespugue in France, Dolní Věstonice in Moravia, where figurines were modelled in clay and fired, thousands of years before pottery — together with rich burials (Sungir in Russia, Grimaldi) and mammoth-hunting camps on the plains. The Solutrean (about 24,000–19,000 years; Solutré, Saône-et-Loire; the syllabus's "Solutrian") coincides with the Last Glacial Maximum in France and Iberia and is defined by superb bifacial points shaped by pressure flaking, often after heat treatment of the flint — laurel-leaf and willow-leaf points, shouldered points — and by the first eyed bone needles toward its end. The Magdalenian (about 17,000–12,000 years; the rock shelter of La Madeleine, Dordogne), the culture of the late-glacial reindeer hunters, turned to bone and antler: barbed harpoons (single-row then double-row), spear-throwers carved with animals, perforated batons (bâtons percés), eyed needles, and backed bladelets; it is the culture of the great painted caves — Lascaux (about 17,000 years), Altamira in Spain, Niaux — and of mobiliary art on antler and bone. The Upper Palaeolithic ends with the warming of the late glacial, when the Magdalenian gives way to the Azilian.

The end of the last glaciation, about 11,700 years ago, replaced the open tundra and steppe of western Europe with birch, pine and then mixed oak forest; the reindeer herds moved north, sea level rose and drowned Doggerland between Britain and the continent, and people adapted with smaller game, fish, shellfish, plants and a toolkit dominated by microliths. The Azilian, named by Édouard Piette after his excavations (from 1887) in the cave of Mas d'Azil in the Ariège, is the transitional, Epipalaeolithic culture that follows the Magdalenian in south-western France and northern Spain, about 14,000–10,000 years ago: short thumbnail scrapers, small curved-backed Azilian points, flat harpoons of red-deer antler with a perforated base, and pebbles painted with dots and bands of red ochre — the only art, a startling impoverishment after the Magdalenian caves. The Tardenoisian (the syllabus's "Tardenoisean"), named from Fère-en-Tardenois in the Aisne, is the fully Mesolithic culture of France and Belgium in the early Holocene, defined by geometric microliths — trapezes, triangles, rhomboids — made by the microburin technique and hafted as arrow tips and barbs; its sites are often on sandy heaths. The Maglemosian (the syllabus's "Maglamosean"), named from Maglemose ("big bog") near Mullerup on Zealand in Denmark, is the early Mesolithic of the North European Plain from about 9000 to 6400 BCE, when Denmark, Britain and the Low Countries were joined across Doggerland: waterlogged bog sites preserve its bone and antler work — barbed points and leisters for fishing, antler axes and mattocks — with flint core axes and flake axes for woodworking, microliths, and dugout canoes and paddles; Star Carr in Yorkshire (excavated by Grahame Clark in 1949–51; about 9000 BCE), with its wooden platform and antler head-dresses, belongs to the same world. The Kitchen Middens (Danish køkkenmøddinger) are the great shell mounds of the late Mesolithic Ertebølle culture of Denmark and southern Sweden, about 5400–3900 BCE: heaps of oyster, cockle and mussel shells, fish and animal bones, hearths and burials, investigated by the Danish commission of Worsaae, Steenstrup and Forchhammer from 1848 in one of the first interdisciplinary projects in archaeology. The Ertebølle people were sedentary or semi-sedentary coastal foragers who adopted pointed-based pottery and traded with neighbouring farmers before farming itself arrived; their transverse arrowheads and core axes continue the Maglemosian tradition.

The Natufian is listed by the syllabus among the Mesolithic cultures, but it belongs to the Levant, not Europe, and it is the prelude to the Neolithic. Dorothy Garrod named it in 1928 from the cave of Shuqba in the Wadi en-Natuf north-west of Jerusalem, and excavated it further at the Mount Carmel caves (el-Wad, 1929–34). It dates from about 15,000 to 11,500 years ago (about 12,500–9500 BCE) and is the first culture of sedentary or semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers: at Ain Mallaha (Eynan) in the upper Jordan valley, Jean Perrot found round, semi-subterranean stone-footed houses. Natufian people harvested wild wheat, barley and rye with sickles set with flint blades that took on a characteristic "sickle gloss" from the silica in the stalks, ground grain and seeds in deep stone mortars with pestles, hunted gazelle, and made lunate geometric microliths with a distinctive bifacial (Helwan) retouch; they buried their dead in cemeteries, sometimes with dentalium-shell head-dresses, and at Ain Mallaha an old person was buried with a puppy — among the earliest evidence of the domestic dog. At Abu Hureyra in Syria rye may have been cultivated during the cold Younger Dryas. Their sedentism, storage and reliance on cereals are why the Natufian is read as the threshold of farming. Theories of how farming began have followed one another: V. Gordon Childe's "Neolithic Revolution" (Man Makes Himself, 1936), driven by desiccation that concentrated people, plants and animals at oases (the oasis theory, after Raphael Pumpelly); Robert Braidwood's "hilly flanks" or nuclear-zone theory, that farming began in the uplands of the Fertile Crescent — James Breasted's term of 1916 — where the wild ancestors grew, tested at Jarmo; Lewis Binford's marginal-zone or population-pressure model (1968), in which growing populations spilled into less favourable land and had to cultivate; Kent Flannery's "broad-spectrum revolution"; and more recent views of niche construction, ritual and feasting — prompted by Göbekli Tepe in south-eastern Turkey, whose carved stone enclosures of about 9600 BCE were built by people who had not yet domesticated plants or animals.

In the Fertile Crescent — the arc from the Levant through south-eastern Turkey to the Zagros foothills of Iraq and Iran — the eight "founder crops" (emmer and einkorn wheat, barley, lentil, pea, chickpea, bitter vetch and flax) were domesticated between about 9500 and 8000 BCE, and goat, sheep, cattle and pig soon after. The Neolithic of the Levant is divided, after Kathleen Kenyon's work at Jericho, into a Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA, about 9500–8500 BCE) and B (PPNB, about 8500–6500 BCE), followed by the Pottery Neolithic. Jericho (Tell es-Sultan), by a perennial spring near the Dead Sea, was excavated by John Garstang in the 1930s and by Kenyon in 1952–58. Above a Natufian base, its PPNA town of round mud-brick houses was enclosed by a massive stone wall with a solid stone tower about 8.5 metres high and an internal staircase — a monument older than any other in the world when found, and argued over since as defence, flood protection or communal ritual. In the PPNB the houses became rectangular with plastered floors, and the dead were buried under them; some skulls were removed and their faces modelled in plaster with shells for eyes — the "plastered skulls" of Jericho, read as ancestor veneration. Jarmo, a small mound in the foothills of the Zagros in Iraqi Kurdistan, was excavated by Robert Braidwood of the Oriental Institute, Chicago, in 1948–55 precisely to test his hilly-flanks theory, with botanists, zoologists and geologists in the team: about 7000 BCE, it was a village of some twenty-five mud-walled houses and perhaps 150 people, with domesticated emmer and einkorn wheat and barley, domestic goats (and sheep), stone bowls, clay figurines, and pottery only in its upper levels. Çatalhöyük (the syllabus's "Çatal Huyuk") on the Konya plain of central Anatolia, excavated by James Mellaart in 1961–65 and by Ian Hodder from 1993 as a reflexive, post-processual project, was occupied from about 7100 to 6000 BCE by a population of several thousand in houses of mud brick packed wall to wall, with no streets, entered by ladder through the roof; its houses were rebuilt on the same plan many times and held burials under the platforms, wall paintings (hunting scenes with bulls and deer, vultures over headless bodies, a possible town plan with a twin-peaked volcano), plastered bull horns and bucrania, and figurines including the seated woman flanked by felines that Mellaart read as a Mother Goddess — a reading Hodder's team, finding little evidence for female dominance in diet or burial, has questioned. Its obsidian came from the volcanoes of Cappadocia and was traded widely. Shanidar, a large cave in the Zagros of Iraqi Kurdistan excavated by Ralph Solecki in 1951–60, is famous first for its Mousterian layer with the remains of ten Neanderthals — among them Shanidar 1, who survived severe injuries, and Shanidar 4, the "flower burial" whose pollen may instead have been brought by burrowing animals — but its upper Proto-Neolithic levels, with a cemetery of about 10,600 years ago, and the nearby open village of Zawi Chemi Shanidar, where early domestic sheep were claimed for about 9000 BCE, place it at the beginning of village life in the Zagros; that is why the syllabus lists it with the early farming sites.