The Levant witnessed a gradual transition from simple nomadic societies to more complex sedentism. The earliest signs of this fundamental change in human life appeared during the Last Glacial Maximum.

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Migration out of Africa, interbreeding with Neanderthals, and colonization of Eurasia. What can stone tools, bone tools, and ornaments discovered in the Middle East tell us about those fateful events?

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19,000 to 12,000 years ago ... As shifts to social dynamics took place in Africa, both human creativity and brutality flourished.

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25,000 to 12,000 years ago ... Human life was gradually changing across Africa at the end of the Pleistocene. One element of this transformation was a shift in what people ate.

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25,000 years ago ... Right at the peak of the Last Ice Age, most people living on the African continent finally embraced microlithic tools, an innovation that had been around for tens of thousands of years.

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45,000 to 30,000 years ago ... Signs of Late Stone Age culture start appearing across sub-saharan Africa, hinting at long-distance contact between once isolated peoples.

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60,000 to 45,000 years ago ... Signs of cultural change started to appear among hunter gatherers in Africa, leading to the end of the Middle Stone Age, a period that had lasted hundreds of thousands of years.

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12,800 to 11,700 years ago ... In the cold of the Younger Dryas, at the peak of megafauna extinction, the descendants of Clovis fragmented into a range of new cultures across North America.

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Around 13,000 years ago, a wide range of large animal species started disappearing. The circumstances strongly implicate humans.

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13,000 to 12,000 years ago... From megafauna hunters in Tierra del Fuego to Amazonian rock painters, the formation of early South America hunter gatherer societies was a complex process, and a sudden burst of distinct human cultures appeared at the end of the Ice Age.

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