Levantine Aurignacian

Levantine Aurignacian period

Similarities with Aurignacian are found in the manufacture of blades and in the processing of bone tools.

The Levantine Aurignacian follows chronologically the Emiran and Early Ahmarian in the same area of the Near East, and closely related to them.

The carving of a horse with traces of a layer of ocher painting from HaYonim Cave, now in the Israel Museum, is generally categorized as Aurignacian and variously dated to 40,000-18,500 BP. This may be one of the earliest known manifestations of human art, together with the ocher pieces of the Blombos Cave, before the outpouring of parietal art in Europe.

The Levantine Aurignacian is part of the technological shift from the Middle Paleolithic to the Upper Paleolithic, but the arrival of modern humans Homo sapiens in the Levant still predates the Levantine Aurignacian by tens of thousands of years. The earliest Upper Paleolithic entity is the local Ahmarian, with the first full-fledged blade/bladelet technology, to which the Levantine Aurignacian succeeds, possibly after a few thousand years of co-existence. The Emiran period and the Ahmarian period form the very first periods of the Upper Paleolithic, corresponding to the first stages of the expansion of Homo sapiens out of Africa. From this stage, the first modern humans probably migrated to Europe to form the beginning of the European Upper Paleolithic, including the Aurignacian culture. There is a possibility that the Levantine Aurignacian was the result of reverse influence from the European Aurignacian, but this remains unsettled.