 In the year of our Lord, 1868, a discovery was made in southwestern France that is now regarded as one of the most substantial finds of human activity and dates to 30,000 years ago. The discovery of the things in a cave in France show that humans were in a state of survival in the distant past and this transforms the understanding process of human activity not only in the European region but also across the planet. The excavation of this site in France yielded objects such as flints, animal bones and even human skulls. Geologist Louis Laudet took charge of this discovery and he unearthed the partial skeletons of four adults and an infant at the Cro Magnum Rock Shelter as well as perforated shells and animal teeth fashioned into necklaces, flint tools, a worked reindeer antler and an object crafted from ivory. The human remains were eagerly compared with fossils of an archaic species known to us today as the Neanderthal man, found 12 years earlier in Germany. However, the 30,000 year old skeletons of what became known as the Cro Magnum men were different to Neanderthals, being more slender and having the same rounded skull with a high vertical forehead as us modern human beings. Cro Magnums lived at the same time as Neanderthals in Europe during the last Ice Age but they had a more advanced culture in that they were identified as a prehistoric subspecies or race of humans that emerged in Europe and went extinct when our kind arrived on the scene, a great instinct of survival unfolded. We survived, others did not. In the 150 years since their discovery of these remains an understanding is beginning to form. The survivors it seems came from a society that collapsed, forcing people to caves and underground cavities but these weren't a primitive people. This was a people capable of extraordinary creativity who made stunning artworks depicting their natural world. Such works include a piece of mammoth tusk engraved with two beautifully observed reindeer crossing a river, carved at least 13,000 years ago and discovered near Tullis in the 1860s and the extraordinary Lion Man Orenstein style cave made 40,000 years ago and discovered in the Lohn Valley in Germany in 1939. These works took great skill, patience and time. The Lion Man, a 30-syteminer sculpture with a man's body and a lion's head is carved from tough mammoth ivory which researchers calculated would have taken about 400 hours. These are the workings of a people sitting something out, waiting, remembering, creating the things they could remember and passing that on generationally. Perhaps the most famous example of Cro-Magnum creativity is the astonishing Lascaux Cave complex whose richly decorated walls were discovered by teenagers in 1940. The imagination and ambition of the artist who created these colorful paintings 20,000 years ago which includes scenes of animals and even constellation maps is remarkable. For instance, painted on the wall of the shaft of the Dead Man Cave is a bull, a bird man and a bird on a stick. Their outlines with the eyes of the bull representing bright stars of the Northern Hemisphere's Summer Triangle. When they were painted, this region of sky would have never set below the horizon and would have been especially prominent at the start of spring. Near to the entrance of the Lascaux Cave complex is a magnificent painting of a bull with a map of the Pleiades star cluster hanging over its shoulder. Remarkably within the bull painting, there are spots that might represent other stars found in that region that today forms part of the constellation Taurus, the bull. The people who made these detailed cosmic maps were making sense of their world through measurements of natural phenomena and conveying this through beautiful lasting ornamentation. To put this in context, nothing beyond a few shaped flints have been discovered in the archaeology of earlier stone age humans. There appeared to be something different about the way Crow Magnans thought and behaved, far more like the way we think and behave today, actually. And this has led to the theory that modern human culture, including the use of symbolism and the development of complex language, began to emerge 40,000 years ago in creative explosion in Europe after something dramatic had happened beforehand. Over the past century, the term Crow Magnan has been replaced by the name Behaviourally Modern Humans, and this is to distinguish them from the more ancient, but also anatomically modern humans that paleontologists discovered. Human origins experts, in other words, began to think that we were actually the direct descendants of the Ice Age artist and that they didn't go extinct, they just developed into us over many generations, and this does attest to the gap in the historical record that confounds our understanding. We didn't begin, we adapted and re-emerged more than once, and we are probably destined to do the same again. Fossil evidence reveals that anatomically modern humans emerged in Africa at least 200,000 years ago, but recent finds have pushed that date back to perhaps 300,000 years, 400,000 years, all the time we keep pushing time back, and this is down to the trauma in the mind of the cataclysmic soul. It's a survival reflex to not remember traumatic events that saw us forced to survive, and we also know from fossil and genetic evidence that people outside Africa are descendants of a human population that migrated from the continent roughly 80,000 years ago. These African ancestors took advantage of a rare wet spell, relying on a network of aquifer fed springs and ventured into the Middle East. From there they moved slowly eastwards at a rate of an estimated one mile per year. At some point from around 40,000 years ago in Europe, we see evidence of these behaviorally modern humans in a sudden flourishing of culture artifacts in the archeological record. So what caused anatomically modern people to turn into behaviorally modern people? Was it a genetic switch that created a different type of cognitively superior person? These questions matter because the notion of a great leap forward in our species, cognition occurring in Europe has contributed to a long-standing belief in there being some sort of European expectationalism, but what do you guys think about this anyway? Thanks below and as always, thank you for watching.