The purpose of this paper is to add to the existing body of research on the American world history curriculum, paying particular attention to the challenges of teaching about a historical era for which new knowledge emerges regularly and old paradigms are being questioned constantly. It does so in four sections. The first section examines research done on the Upper Paleolithic and the "symbolic explosion" to lay out some of the possible issues that can be explored by paying attention to this time period. This is followed by a discussion of how such inquiry challenges modernist history projects. The third section examines educational scholarship that explores how world history has been situated within the American school curriculum, noting various possible models for teaching world history and how such models remain entrenched in a modernist project of internal development. The final section describes how current American state world history standards treat the Paleolithic, focusing on both the opportunities and limitations that are built into these tools, and the possible ways they could shape what students and teachers might ask and seek to understand.