The Late Paleolithic occupies a key position in the Stone Age. Firstly, at the turn of the Middle and Upper Paleolithic, the evolution of fossil hominids ends and a "real" man appears – Homo Sapiens.
Secondly, the variety of stone and other tools increases abruptly, composite ones appear: inserts, tips, sewn clothes.
Finally, the main social innovation of the Lower Paleolithic was exogamy – the exclusion of the closest relatives from marital relations. The prohibition of incest (incest) required social regulation of marriage, the genus and family appeared.
The replacement of the evolutionary type of development with the historical one brought such radical changes in a rather short time compared to the pace of anthropogenesis, which can be defined as a Paleolithic revolution. The product of this revolution was the fundamental anthropological, psychophysiological, psychosocial, spiritual unity of mankind, which will be preserved in history despite the differences in the economic, political, social, linguistic, and everyday development of human communities.
Therefore, the Upper Paleolithic is the epoch when humanity, in addition to biological and species uniformity, acquires that level of integrating ties, which is called culture. Culture is born at the end of the ancient Stone Age as an established system, whereas at the starting point of anthropogenesis we can only talk about individual zones of cultural behavior. The specificity of Paleolithic cultural studies is that its typologies are based on very local and limited material, and the universal laws that emerged from the late Stone Age belong to the deepest, amorphous, dark constants of cultural existence. The archaic basis of civilization is perceived as a collective unconscious formed from a number of discoveries, including the secret of using fire – in South Africa a million years ago. A person used fire earlier than he learned to deliberately extract it. Archaeologists find traces of the use of fire during excavations of the sites of the ancestors of man – a synanthrope and a Neanderthal. Initially, natural fire was used, which arose from spontaneous combustion of dead leaves and grass, from volcanic lava, lightning, etc. Human ancestors, having learned to evaluate the useful properties of fire, preserved it by throwing combustible material into the fire, or in special pits with an angle. The arbitrary production of fire dates back to the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic. There are several ancient ways of producing fire: scraping, drilling and sawing, based on the friction of two pieces of wood against each other (this is how the cross, revered since ancient times, was formed in ancient Egypt, the cross ankh "symbol of life", the shape of which was preserved in the Coptic cross, was placed with the deceased in the coffin), later – carving fire from flint , etc . Scraping is probably the oldest method. Drilling is the most common method of making fire in the past among the peoples of Asia, Africa, America, Australia. Sawing was known to the peoples of West Africa, Indonesia, the Philippine Islands and Australia. The production of fire by carving from flint from the beginning of the Iron Age was improved with the help of flint and existed until the invention of phosphorus matches and, later, lighters in the 19th century. The significance of fire for man is enormous. The ability to make fire "for the first time gave man dominance over a certain force of nature and thereby finally separated man from the animal kingdom" (Engels F., Anti-During, 1953, p. 108). The fire was used for protection from the cold and predatory animals, for lighting, cooking, during round-up hunting of animals. Later, a person learned to use fire for various technical purposes: for firing pottery, when making boats, etc. Among many peoples, getting fire, as well as borrowing someone else's fire, and preserving it is associated with a number of prohibitions and ritual restrictions. The fire became an object of ancestral and later family property. The family cult of the fire of the "sacred hearth" among many peoples was associated with the cult of ancestors.