Palaeolithic

The first tools were split stones with a sharp edge. Over time the work grew finer: from crude handaxes to thin flakes and composite tools, where a stone point was fixed to a wooden handle.

That last step matters more than it looks. Binding a stone point to a shaft means holding two ideas at once — the cutting edge and the thing that carries it — and it is the beginning of every assembled object since.

People lived in caves and light shelters, following herds of animals. Fire gave warmth, light and protection — and let them cook, which made food more nourishing.

Cooking is a kind of digestion done outside the body. Heat breaks food down before it is eaten, so the same meal yields far more energy and takes far less time to chew. The hours saved are hours that became available for everything else.

Cave walls were painted with animals: bison, horses, mammoths. Pigment came from clay and charcoal, and simple fat lamps gave light.

The animals are drawn with an economy of line any working illustrator would recognise as skill. Whatever these paintings were for, they were not made by beginners — and similar work appears in Europe and in Sulawesi at roughly the same time, almost certainly invented twice.

The dead were buried with tools and ornaments. People believed these things would be needed in another world, understood as a continuation of life on earth.

This is inference, not testimony. Grave goods tell us the burial was deliberate and that objects were thought to belong with the person; what exactly was imagined beyond that, nobody can recover.

The map shows where the evidence actually comes from, which is not the same as where people actually lived. Sites cluster where conditions preserve bone and stone, and where archaeologists have looked. Blank regions mean absence of evidence, not absence of people.