Cultural features associated with modern humans, such as careful burial of the dead, the production of art in the form of elaborate cave decoration, and the decoration of objects of everyday use, date from this period.

Between 100,000 and 38,000 BCE, African cultures have adapted to desert, savanna, and forest environments, with distinctive toolkits for each.

Hunting, fishing, and gathering remain the basic way of life, but Africans employ a wider range of strategies in exploiting different environments.

The Venus of Hohle Fels (also known as the Venus of Schelklingen), an Upper Paleolithic “Venus” figurine found near Schelklingen, Germany, is dated to between forty thousand and thirty-five thousand years ago.

Belonging to the early Aurignacian, at the very beginning of the Upper Paleolithic, which is associated with the assumed earliest presence of Homo sapiens in Europe (Early European Modern Humans), it is the oldest undisputed example of Upper Paleolithic art and figurative prehistoric art in general.

The figurine is a representation of a woman, putting emphasis on the vulva and the breasts.

Consequently, it is presumed to be an amulet related to fertility.

It is made of a woolly mammoth tusk and had broken into fragments, of which six have been recovered, with the left arm and shoulder still missing.

In place of the head, the figurine has a perforation so that it could have been worn as a pendant.

Archaeologist John J. Shea suggests it would have taken "tens if not hundreds of hours" to carve the figurine.

...the Meadowcroft Rockshelter located near Avella in Washington County, in southwestern Pennsylvania, United States, dated to sixteen thousand years BP.

These discoveries have raised doubts about the "Clovis First" theory, and have led to alternative proposals for the routes of colonization and the diffusion of culture through the continent, in a heated dispute that has not been solved.

Pedra Furada is the most controversial of the excavated prehistoric settlements in the Americas, indicating a human presence there as early as 50,000 BCE.

Pedra Furada ("drilled rock") is an important collection of over eight hundred archaeological sites and rock paintings in Brazil that suggest a human presence prior to the arrival of Clovis people in North America.

The discoveries are the subject of debate as they apparently contradict the "Clovis first" view for humans in the Americas, or short chronology theory, with the first movement beyond Alaska into the New World occurring no earlier than fifteen thousand to seventen thousand years ago, followed by successive waves of immigrants.

Pedra Furada provides arguments for the proponents of the long chronology theory, which states that the first group of people entered the hemisphere at a much earlier date, possibly twenty one thousand to forty thousand ears ago, with a much later mass secondary wave of immigrants.

Genetic studies of indigenous peoples have concluded that the "colonizing founders" of the Americas emerged from a single-source ancestral population that evolved in isolation, likely in Beringia.

The isolation in Beringia might have lasted ten thousand to twenty thousand years.

Age estimates based on Y-chromosome micro-satellite place diversity of the American Haplogroup Q1a3a (Y-DNA) at around ten thousand to fifteen thousand years ago.

This does not address if there were any previous failed colonization attempts by other genetic groups, which could be represented by those settling the Pedra Furada site, as genetic testing can only address current population ancestral heritage.

The earliest known remains of Early European Modern Humans (EEMH) have been radiometrically dated to approximately 35,000 years before present.

A four-hole flute, excavated in September 2008 from a German cave, is the oldest handmade musical instrument ever found, according to archaeologist Nicholas Conrad, who assembled the flute from twelve pieces of griffon vulture bone scattered in the Hohle Fels, a cave in the Swabian Alps of Germany.

At a news conference on June 24, 2012, Conrad said the 8.6-inch flute was crafted thirty-five thousand years ago.

The flutes found in the Hohle Fels are among the earliest musical instruments ever found.

Sri Lanka's earliest archaeological evidence of human colonization appears at the site of Balangoda, whose Mesolithic hunter gatherers arrived on the island about thirty-four thousand years ago and lived in caves, several of which have yielded many artifacts from these people, currently the first known inhabitants of the island.

The Swabian Alb region has a number of caves that have yielded mammoth ivory artifacts of the Upper Paleolithic period, totaling about twenty-five items to date.

These include the lion-headed figure of Hohlenstein-Stadel and an ivory flute found at Geißenklösterle, dated to thirty-six thousand years ago.

This concentration of evidence of full behavioral modernity in the period of forty to thirty thousand years ago, including figurative art and instrumental music, is unique worldwide.

Nicholas J. Conard speculates that the bearers of the Aurignacian culture in the Swabian Alb may be credited with the invention, not just of figurative art and music, but possibly, early religion as well.

In a distance of seventy centimeters to the Venus figurine, Conard's team found a flute made from a vulture bone.

Additional artifacts excavated from the same cave layer included flint-knapping debris, worked bone, and carved ivory as well as remains of tarpans, reindeer, cave bears, woolly mammoths, and Alpine Ibexes.

A lion headed figure, first called the lion man (German: Löwenmensch, literally "lion person"), then the lion lady (German: Löwenfrau), is an ivory sculpture that is the oldest known zoomorphic (animal-shaped) sculpture in the world and one of the oldest known sculptures in general.

The sculpture has also been interpreted as anthropomorphic, giving human characteristics to an animal, although it may have represented a deity.

The figurine was determined to be about thirty-two thousand years old by carbon dating material from the same layer in which the sculpture was found.

It is associated with the archaeological Aurignacian culture.

Its pieces were found in 1939 in a cave named Stadel-Höhle im Hohlenstein (Stadel cave in Hohlenstein Mountain) in the Lonetal (Lone valley) Swabian Alb, Germany.

Due to the beginning of the Second World War, it was forgotten and only rediscovered thirty years later.

The first reconstruction revealed a humanoid figurine without head.

During 1997 through 1998, additional pieces of the sculpture were discovered and the head was reassembled and restored.

The sculpture, 29.6 centimeters (11.7 inches) in height, 5.6 centimeters wide, and 5.9 centimeters thick, was carved out of mammoth ivory using a flint stone knife.

There are seven parallel, transverse, carved gouges on the left arm.

After this artifact was identified, a similar, but smaller, lion-headed sculpture was found, along with other animal figures and several flutes, in another cave in the same region of Germany.

This leads to the possibility that the lion-figure played an important role in the mythology of humans of the early Upper Paleolithic.

The sculpture can be seen in the Ulmer Museum in Ulm, Germany.

Australian aboriginal people show considerable genetic diversity but are quite distinct from groups outside Australia.

Having come originally from somewhere in Asia, they have been in Australia for at least forty thousand years.

Most of the continent, including the southwest and southeast corners as well as the Highlands of the island of New Guinea, was occupied by thirty thousand years before the present.