The Palaeolithic is conventionally divided into Lower, Middle and Upper phases, spanning from the earliest stone tool industries, associated with early hominins well before the emergence of anatomically modern humans, through to the world of fully modern human societies at the end of the last glaciation. Its Lower phase alone runs across nearly the whole of the period's roughly three million year span; the Upper Palaeolithic, by contrast, the phase most associated with cave art, figurines and elaborate burial, covers only its final tens of thousands of years, from roughly 40,000 to 10,000 BCE in Europe, a brief final chapter after an immensely long preceding history of toolmaking with little surviving evidence of ritual or symbolic behavior at all.
The period's end is a matter of convention rather than a single dated event. Archaeologists mark the transition to the Neolithic where farming and settled village life first appear, in the Near East, at sites in the Fertile Crescent, around 10,000 BCE, a shift that happened at different times in different regions of the world and did not reach some hunter gatherer societies for thousands of years afterward. The Palaeolithic to Neolithic boundary is therefore a boundary in subsistence and settlement rather than in belief as such, though the settled village life the Neolithic introduced brought with it new and more visible forms of religious architecture, from house shrines to the monumental structures built not long after farming itself began.