A record of the Upper Palaeolithic human bone remains across Europe

The European Upper Palaeolithic (roughly 55,000–11,700 BP) marks a pivotal chapter in human prehistory, during which anatomically modern humans first radiated across the continent and developed the funerary traditions that produced the skeletal record we study today. Despite its importance, a unified and updated digital overview of this record was lacking.

PaleoHumans digitalises and structures the compilation originally assembled by Sergio Arenas del Amo and colleagues for their 2024 study published in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. The database integrates data on site locality, archaeological context, anthropological description, and mortuary behaviour for each documented individual.

The goal is to provide researchers, students, and the informed public with direct, queryable access to the palaeoanthropological record of Upper Palaeolithic Homo sapiens in Europe, facilitating reproducibility of the original analyses and enabling new research questions.

The database is structured around a five-level hierarchy: each Site contains one or more Archaeological Contexts (stratigraphic and cultural slices of the site), which group the Individuals recovered from those contexts (a single person, mixed individuals, or unassigned remains). Each individual has an associated set of Bones and Skeletons with curatorial and preservation data, while Funerary Contexts describe burial groupings within an archaeological context. Dating evidence is recorded as Dated Samples (origin material) plus one or more Dating Results.

Geographic coverage spans from the Iberian Atlantic coast to the Ural Mountains, bounded to the south-east by the Caucasus and Dardanelles–Bosporus Straits. The temporal scope covers the European Upper Palaeolithic sensu stricto: approximately 45,300–11,700 cal BP, from the earliest Aurignacian to the Pleistocene–Holocene boundary.

PaleoHumans serves researchers in palaeoanthropology, prehistoric archaeology, and human evolutionary biology who need structured access to the European Upper Palaeolithic skeletal corpus. It is equally useful for educators, students, and members of the interested public seeking documented information about early modern humans in Europe.

For full documentation of the inclusion criteria, biological methods, and chronological framework used to build this database, see the Methodology page.