Smithsonian Journeys Experts

Paul Pettitt is Professor of Palaeolithic Archaeology at Durham University (UK). He specialises in Palaeolithic art and in the long-term development of the treatment of the dead. Hi PhD (Cambridge University 1999) focussed on Neanderthal stone tool technology in Southwest France based on collections held in the National Museum of Prehistory in Les Eyzies. From 1995-2001 he was Senior Archaeologist in the Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit at the University of Oxford as well as Research Fellow in Archaeology and Anthropology at Keble College, Oxford. From 2003 he was Lecturer, Senior Lecturer (2006), and Reader (2008) in Palaeolithic Archaeology at the University of Sheffield, and in 2013 he took up his professorial chair at Durham. In 2003 he lead the team which discovered the UK's only Palaeolithic cave art (at Creswell Crags), and subsequently he was part of the small team that demonstrated that Neanderthals created the first European Cave art, through dating of art in El Castillo and other caves in Spain. His survey of the biological and behavioural evolution of Homo sapiens was published by Thames and Hudson in 2022 (Homo Sapiens Rediscovered: The Scientific Revolution Rewriting our Origins). He is currently researching aspects of the visual psychology that underpins the earliest cave art.