The emergence of symbolic culture, classically identified with European cave paintings of the Ice Age, is now seen, in the light of recent groundbreaking discoveries, as a complex nonlinear process rooted in a remote past and in different regions of the planet. Research and results collected by archaeologists, ethologists interested in primate cognition and cultural transmission, evolutionary psychologists modeling the emergence of meta-representations, biologists, philosophers, neuroscientists and an astronomer, call into question our conceptiom of human nature and animal behavior, and create epistemological bridges between disciplines that build the foundations for a novel vision of our lineage’s cultural trajectory and the processes that have led to the emergence of human societies as we know them.