Within ten thousand years or so of leaving Africa, small numbers of moderns had settled throughout much of southern Eurasia and Europe. How and when they did so are two hotly debated questions. We are still looking for a needle in a haystack, but this time the hay has been more thoroughly sifted than that in northeast Africa. The pickings are slim, as you might expect with only tiny numbers of people on the ground, compounded by difficult preservation conditions. All we have to work with are thin occupation levels in river valley soils in eastern Europe and in caves or rock shelters in the Danube Corridor and in the west. Fortunately, we have one defining moment: another massive volcanic eruption that scattered ash over much of eastern Europe 39,000 years ago.
The eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in August A.D 79 decimated the Roman towns of Herculaneum and Pompeii on the Bay of Naples and killed thousands of people. Vesuvius was nothing compared to the Campanian explosion that devastated the same area 39,000 years ago, but had nothing to do with the former.(5) The violent upheaval collapsed huge caldera spanning some 89 square miles (230 sq. km) in an area that now lies under Naples and the northwestern portion of the Bay of Naples. Lava flows from the eruption extended over at least 50 miles (80 km). A huge ash plume rose as much as 27 miles (44 km) into the atmosphere and descended over a large area of the eastern Mediterranean and more than 1550 miles (2500 km) northeast across the Balkans and into eastern Europe. Like the Toba eruption, the Campanian explosion must have caused widespread disruption to hunting territories and food supplies over a wide area. Fortunately, people were thin on the ground, which meant that a significant number survived during the ensuing cold event by moving into areas where game and edible plants could be found. The distinctive volcanic ash layer from the eruption forms an invaluable marker of known age in archaeological sites of the time over an enormous area. A classic “volcanic winter” followed the eruption.
The Campanian eruption was but a geological dwarf compared to the Toba cataclysm of 73,500 years ago, but its deposits are a godsend to the archaeologist chasing the Cro-Magnons, who colonized the north immediately before the cataclysm. Fortunately for science, their tools and food remains occasionally appear above and below the ash (tephra) layers from the explosion, which are like the filling of a chronological layer cake, even as far away as a place named Kostenki by the Don river valley in the Russian Federation.
Tiny numbers of people settled on these eastern plains. Their footprints have left but the lightest imprints in the soil, even at long-occupied locations like Kostenki, a place famous for its mammoth bones and archaeological sites. (The Russian word kost’ means “bone”). Most of the numerous Kostenki settlements and those at nearby Borschchevo, lie at the mouths of large ravines cut into the west bank of the Don River, where springs come to the surface and where game must have abounded. The first settlers occupied camps on the second terrace above the river, which lie below and above the weathered ash layers from the Campanian eruption.
Generations of archaeologists have worked at Kostenki, but none with the thoroughness of an international team of scientists who worked there in 2001-4. They used a battery of paleomagnetic, radiocarbon and luminescence tests, also pollen and soil samples, to date these critically important layers. (6) It was cold when a small group of modern humans (identified at present from a single, highly diagnostic tooth, which may allow us to extrapolate beyond a single individual) settled briefly at Kostenki 14 with bone-tipped spears and other light weaponry between about 45,000 and 40,000 years ago. Temperatures were much warmer somewhat later when visitors to the nearby Kostenki 17 site. Another single tooth shows they were moderns, who used both blade and bone tools, also perforated shell ornaments. There are other artifact scatters, too, which contain both blades and older artifact forms such as scrapers and triangular points.
Kostenki provides one archaeological footprint of the first settlers, perhaps as early as 45,000 years ago, but the toolkit from levels prior to the Campanian tephra is unique to the Don Valley, with no ties to contemporary artifact forms in the Near East or to sites further west. This should not surprise us, for the newcomers were highly mobile, few on the ground, and accustomed to adapting to local conditions with new hunting weapons and tools.
And
The Löwenmensch, “the Lion Man”, is a man with a lion head, who appears to straddle the human and animal realms, as if he has the ability to transform himself from a hunter into the hunted. There is something mystical here, a connection between the living and the supernatural quite unlike anything we have encountered before. The Lion Man is the oldest known example of an imaginary being.
Löwenmensch comes from Hohlenstein Stadel (“Hollow Rock Barn”) cave, which lies in the cliff of that name at the southern edge of the Lone Valley in the Swabian Alps of southern Germany. In 1939 archaeologists Otto Völzing and Robert Weltzel discovered an occupation layer in the cave, which was remarkable for its numerous fragments of mammoth ivory. The outbreak of World War II abruptly ended the excavations, which did not resume until 1954, when they lasted for another seven years. The layer proved to be more than 34,000 years old.
The Hohlenstein collections lay virtually forgotten in the Ulm Museum until the late 1960s, when Joachim Hahn began piecing together some larger ivory fragments, which had come from a niche in the cave. To his astonishment, they formed a human figure with a lion’s head. When Elisabeth Schmid and Ute Wolf finally completed the reconstruction in 1988, they had pieced together an elongated carving just over 11 inches (28.1 cm) long. The left arm bears slanting marks that may represent scarring or tattoos. The upright posture is definitely human, but the feet seem pawlike. They do not allow the figure to stand on its own, as if it was placed in a hole or leaned against something. Almost certainly, the figure is male, for there are no breasts. The Lion Man epitomizes the fluid mental boundary that separated late Ice Age people from their prey, for they, among the first of all humans, were aware of the supernatural realm that surrounded them on every side.
Trappers Moravia in the Czech Republic, early spring. The ptarmigan croak loudly as they feed on lichens among the rocks at water’s edge. Wide swathes of pale blue sky on a rare sunny day 27,000 years ago compete with roiling white clouds borne on the strong north wind. The white-feathered birds zoom close to the fast-flowing, ice-strewn river, but they really prefer to walk, practically invisible in the snow, grubbing for food among the dark boulders at water’s edge. Some distance away from the water, two women stand motionless, slightly upwind, watching the birds. The day before, they’d built simple fences of reeds parallel to the river with tempting gaps in the middle, laced with bait. Ever-inquisitive, the ptarmigan investigate the barrier, pecking among the sand and snow at its base. A bird pokes its head into the defile, then starts through, neck forward, heading for the bait. There’s a quiet snap. A noose slips tightly around the ptarmigan’s neck. As it flutters helplessly, one of the women kills it with an antler club and sets the snare anew... .
We can only guess at Cro-Magnon trapping, both by assessing the animal bones of their quarry that survive and by intelligent and critical use of information from historic groups living in arctic and subarctic environments. Both snares and traps are, for the most part, simple but highly effective devices that one can safely assume have changed little over the past 25,000 years. Hares and rabbits, for example, repeatedly follow the same trails, which show up clearly in snow. In historic Arctic societies, the trappers would erect a light fence on either side of the trail, then set a snare in the opening attached to a pole balanced on an X-shaped pair of poles. The hare would enter the noose and trigger the trap, which lifted it, helpless, into the air. Such snares could be set in a few moments, are deadly efficient, and were surely used during the late Ice Age. Judging from the large quantities of hare bones in some of their sites, they certainly were.
Reindeer hunters
The Vezère Valley, France. The men have watched for the reindeer for days. They sit, warmly clad, on high crags above the valley in the cool fall sunshine of 25,000 years ago. Below them, the mud-brown Vezère flows sluggishly, riffling gently across the shallows of the ancient crossing place. Nearby, the camp of skin tents is abuzz with expectation, spears and spear throwers at the ready, scrapers and knives close to hand. A still-warm breeze stirs the leaves of the dark conifers at water’s edge. And the hunters wait and wait... .
Next day, light mist floats atop the trees. There’s a soft backdrop of movement, as if of gentle breathing, in the gloom. Suddenly, a cry, a summons to the hunt. The reindeer are coming! Excited men, women and children leap to their feet, grab weapons and tools, hunters to the fore, lining the river banks, nestled among boulders and trees. Each carries a bundle of spears and his spear thrower. The press of reindeer arrives, heading northward, a crowding host of beasts fifty yards wide. The stream parts on either side of a grove of trees, and then comes together again as the host approaches the sloping riverbank. Moments later, the leaders enter the ford and splash across to the other side. Those behind them move inexorably in their footsteps, an orderly, intent highway of living things. Some cross in deeper water with powerful, buoyant legs, antlered heads a-tilt, packed so closely together that you could cross the river on their backs.
Dozens of beasts flow to the other bank before the hunters strike. They rise from behind rocks and trees and move forward, aiming at the nearest animals in the shallows. The thud of spears hitting living flesh echoes across the valley. Crossing reindeer fall before the onslaught, trapped in the river by the momentum of the animals pressing forward and cutting off their retreat. Those approaching the ford break formation. They run back and forth in short bursts, upstream, then downstream, before stampeding along the river bank and out of sight. A battlefield of dead and wounded beasts litters the ford. The men prance among them, jumping nimbly clear of slashing antlers. They deliver death blows with spears and clubs. Some they kill with sharp stone knives, severing their spinal columns with a quick slash. Reindeer blood pumps into the stream. The Vezère turns dark red. Long crimson streamers of brighter color streak far downstream before the current disperses them. Minutes after the hunt, more than thirty reindeer lie still at the ford.
Now the hard work begins. The men drag the carcasses from the water to the sloping river bank. There they split open the bellies with a single long stroke, reaching inside the stomach cavity to disembowel their prey. They remove the liver and kidneys, then detach the hindquarters from the trunk. Reindeer tongues are a delicacy, so they evulse them by slicing through the skin under the tongue. People grab hunks of fresh meat and fat, wolfing them down as the blood spills over their chins and clothes. Meanwhile, deftly and without fuss, men and women skin each animal helped by their sons and daughters, who learn the art alongside them.
As the shadows lengthen, the men sit around a fire just outside the camp telling tales of the hunt. Their sons sit with them, hanging on every word, reveling in the storytelling. The gentle sounds of animal movement are still a backdrop to their consciousness, as the endless migration ebbs for the night. A man suddenly points. Another reindeer herd is crossing the ford just upstream of the camp. This time, the hunters just watch. The beasts swim effortlessly across the stream in a solid mass, then move onto higher ground. They head straight for the camp fire, then split into two groups as they flow past the hearth, completely oblivious to the sitting Cro-Magnons. Three of the beasts come so close that the men wave and shout at them with an easy familiarity and literally push them away. Moments later, they are gone, melting into the dark shadows. The men around the fire are completely unfazed, for they think of the reindeer as living beings, friends just like themselves... .
More on reindeer hunts . . . Rangifer tarandus, the reindeer, must have been the stuff of legend and ritual to the men and women who lived off them. Thousands of fragmentary Rangifer bones lie in the occupation levels of rock shelters of southwestern France, but they presumably represent but a fraction of the enormous numbers of them taken by Cro-Magnon hunters every year. Many of the bones in the shelters may have come from solitary hunts during summer and winter, when small groups of reindeer browsed in quiet river valleys. A hunter and his son might stalk a beast, or a group of young men go after an animal crossing a stream, just as they did other game like ibex and red deer. But almost all the reindeer taken during the year must have come from the harvests of spring and fall, when thousands of them would have migrated to and from the foothills of the Pyrenees to avoid heat and mosquitoes in the deep river valleys of the Dordogne, among them the Célé and the Vezère.
Why, then, do we find relatively few traces of the enormous numbers of carcasses butchered and processed by the hunters? The answer may be a simple one. Most of the reindeer bones we know about come from caves and rock shelters where people lived. Most spring and fall hunts were probably based on temporary camps of hide tents. By the time the hunts were over, huge piles of rotting reindeer carcasses would surround the encampments. The fresh meat would have attracted lions, hyenas, and wolves like magnets. Even upwind, the smell of decaying carcasses and the flies would have been pervasive. No sane hunting band would linger at such places longer than necessary, even with large, smoky fires burning. They would collapse their tents and move on, carrying large amounts of meat and hides back to their base camp to be dried, smoked, and processed for later use. Grease rendering by boiling softer body parts would have yielded large quantities of fat that would keep for months. Within a few years, the piles of reindeer bones would have decayed and vanished, leaving nothing for the archaeologist to explore thousands of years later.
The people would have hunted migrating reindeer in spring, but, like humans, the beasts would have been lean and fat-deprived after the long winter months. The herds were in their best condition in late summer and fall. Their coats were soft and springy. A mature reindeer can carry as much as 30 pounds (13.6 kg) of fat or more under its hide. This was why the fall hunt was of prime importance to the Cro-Magnons, for it was then that they acquired their stocks of fat, hides, and dried flesh to meet winter needs.
As the Ice Age ended: By 16,000 years ago, the northern ice sheets were in full retreat across Britain and Scandinavia. The constant winds carried seeds northward, as did birds and migrating animals. By now, cold-tolerant herbs and shrubs had colonized Central Europe’s rolling hills. As temperatures continued to rise, woodland spread northward across what had once been permafrosted landscape. Not that the warming was constant. Europe’s climate juggled like a yo-yo in irregular cycles of colder and warmer conditions, triggered by Dansgaard-Oeschger events about every 1500 years, which brought about brief warming, then more prolonged colder times.
Incredible although it may seem, beetles are a reliable barometer of Ice Age temperatures. Boeraphilus henningianus was commonplace in Britain during the Last Glacial Maximum and only flourishes in Finland and northern Norway today. During the Bölling, Boeraphilus vanished completely, replaced by beetle species that were much the same as those in Britain today—summer temperatures averaging as high as 62.6 deg F (17 deg. C).(3)
By 13,500 years ago, extensive birch, pine, and poplar forest covered Britain, northern Germany, and much of southern Scandinavia in another warm spike known in some areas as the Allerod Oscillation.
All these climatic shifts were rapid by geological standards, but effectively imperceptible for the Cro-Magnons. (Not, of course, that they called themselves Cro-Magnons. They formed dozens of small bands and larger groups, each with their own names and identities, long lost to history.) The hunters were aware of subtle changes even within a span of a generation—unusually early springs, earlier nesting seasons, less snowfall and lusher grazing for horses. The timeless routines of hunting and gathering continued their endless cycles through the seasons. Measured in the brief generations of the day, people still lived the way their grandfathers had and knew that their descendants would have the same kinds of lives. Their world revolved around small hunting territories, local river valleys, and the gatherings when people came together and intelligence passed from band to band. As warming continued, much of the talk must have revolved around changing prey. From the hunter’s point of view, the echoes of rising global temperatures brought gradual, but profound, changes in ways of obtaining food.(4)
As temperatures warmed and woodland spread outward from the sheltered valleys where it had survived even the coldest winters, reindeer migrations shifted as most of the great herds moved northward with the shrinking tundra. The Cro-Magnons had always taken some red deer, which had thrived in the south throughout the last glaciation. Now red and roe deer, also wild boar, became the most common prey. For thousands of years, the hunters had harvested migrating reindeer herds in spring and fall. Such hunts required cooperation, as did the pursuit of large animals like aurochs and bison. As woodland spread and open country shrank, so hunting in wooded landscapes changed from an often-communal pursuit into a more solitary enterprise. The hunter stalked boar and deer in the forest, using traps and nets as before, but also the spear, and, perhaps most important of all—the bow-and-arrow. They also took a much wider range of smaller animals, all of them familiar from earlier times, but now of greater importance as much of the Ice Age bestiary became extinct or moved northward with the tundra. Rabbits and migrating waterfowl were valued foods in diets where people ate far more plant food than the mere cup full or so they had consumed each year in much colder times.
Such was the flexibility of Cro-Magnon life that the changeover to warmer landscapes was effortless, even if it involved major changes in ancient routines. Altamira and Niaux were among the last great painted shrines used by Cro-Magnon hunters for many generations. Their last hurrah came after 12,000 years ago, when the great traditions of painting and engraving faded away after more than 20,000 years.
