Europe
Page 20
Eurasia is far larger than North America, and it was always home to the largest section of the mammoth steppe. As Darwin’s rule informs us, creatures from larger regions more often invade smaller areas, so it seems anomalous that North America’s mammoths replaced Eurasian types, rather than the other way around. But this assumes equal population densities: North America did not have mammoth-killing upright apes, so it’s possible that the mammoth population of North America was denser than that of Eurasia.
The last European mammoths survived on the Russian plain, including the region that is now Estonia, until about 10,000 years ago. Incidentally, the remains of the last known mammoth in Europe were discovered in grim circumstances. In 1943, during World War II, desperately cold and hungry Russians dug into a peat bog near Cherepovets, 500 kilometres west of Leningrad, searching for fuel to keep warm. They found little peat, but at a depth of two metres they encountered huge bones, that were found to be the remains of a single mammoth. Someone took the time to deposit the bones in the local museum, and in 2001 some rib fragments were radiocarbon dated, placing the mammoth at between 9,760 and 9,840 years old.6
The range of the mammoth was contracting swiftly by 20,000 years ago, yet the great warming and ice melt did not begin until about 7000 years after that, so the pattern of mammoth decline is not a perfect match for climatic change. But humans had begun colonising the mammoth steppe, pushing as far north as the Arctic Ocean, perhaps accompanied by the domestic version of that tundra veteran, the wolf. It seems possible that by 15,000 years ago almost all the mammoth habitat on the Eurasian mainland was accessible to human hunters, and that only lonely Wrangel Island in the Arctic Sea lay beyond their grasp. It was there that the mammoth survived—for a full 6000 years after their extinction on the mainland. Wrangel lies 140 kilometres north of the Siberian mainland and is 7600 square kilometres in extent. Its mammoths were island dwarfs. The earliest human presence detected on Wrangel dates to about 3700 years ago, and the most recent Wrangel mammoth found date to about 4000 years ago, so (with Signor-Lipps and the limited precision of dating in mind) the arrival of humans is most likely the cause of their extinction.*
The extinction of the woolly mammoth, according to some researchers, sounded the death knell for the mammoth steppe, an ecosystem dominated by nutritious grasses, herbs and willow shrubs that thrived in a cold, dry climate. Bounded by great ice sheets that isolated it from the sea, it was a dry, dusty place of clear skies in which spring warmth could quickly penetrate the soil and trigger a vigorous growing season that provided abundant food and allowed giant mammals to flourish. About 12,000 years ago the mammoth steppe went into rapid eclipse. The Altai-Sayan region in Mongolia supports a last relic. It is the only region where saiga antelope and reindeer—two core mammoth steppe species—coexist today. In the absence of mammoth, climatic stability may have permitted this remnant to survive.
The mammoth steppe and other northern habitats supported a wide variety of mammals in addition to mammoths, including the woolly rhino, bison, horse, moose, muskox, reindeer, saiga antelope and Arctic fox. All are familiar as living creatures—except the woolly rhino. This member of the rhinoceros family originated not in Siberia, but on the Tibetan plateau. Its nearest living relative is the Sumatran rhino, from which it separated about four million years ago. At 1000 kilograms in weight, the Sumatran rhino is the smallest living rhino species, and today it survives only in tropical rainforest. But a more northern subspecies exists in Burma, which is larger and has hairy ears.** Perhaps four million years ago, something like it wandered into ever higher elevations in the Himalayas, giving rise by 3.6 million years ago to an ancestral woolly rhino. As the ice ages set in, the woolly rhinos found congenial conditions in the mammoth steppe that took hold across Eurasia, and they spread from France to eastern Siberia.
Two complete woolly rhinos were found preserved in tar seeps near Starunýa in Ukraine in 1929. These, along with mummified pieces preserved in permafrost, have enabled us to reconstruct a great deal about the vanished creatures’ appearance and lifestyle. Like the woolly mammoth, the woolly rhino was not as large as legend suggests. Weights have been estimated for females only; they reached about 1500 kilograms. Males are likely to have been larger but did not weigh as much as Africa’s white rhino. The woolly rhino had a broad upper lip like the white rhino, perfectly adapted for cropping a sward consisting of meadow plants, grasses and herbs.
Most of the woolly rhino’s anatomical peculiarities involve adaptation to life in the frigid north. Its covering of dense wool and long hair, short tail and short, narrow, leaf-shaped ears (unlike the more rounded ears of living rhinos), all limit heat loss. Its two horns were flattened in such a way that, had you seen it from straight on, they would have appeared very narrow. Wear reveals that they were used as snow-sweeps as the creature moved its head from side to side.7 Woolly rhinos appear to have become extinct in Britain by about 35,000 years ago, with the last inhabiting Scotland.8 They may have survived in western Siberia until 8000 years ago.
To fill out this ice-age herbivore bestiary, it remains to meet a couple of astonishing creatures that our ancestors may have encountered in Europe. The ‘unicorn beast’ (Elasmotherium sibericum) was a kind of long-legged rhino that weighed 3.5–4.5 tonnes—as much as an elephant. The very largest individuals inhabited the Caucasus region, on the border of Europe and Asia. The unicorn beasts were runners and grazers. Their popular name derives from the fact that they had a single horn which, judging by the indent it left on the skull, was a metre in circumference at the base and two metres long. A wound to a knee bone suggests that the great creatures used their horns to joust—most likely in altercations over females. Recently discovered fossils indicate that unicorn beasts survived to 29,000 years ago in the Pavlodar region of Kazakhstan.9 A rough outline of a hump-shouldered, single-horned creature drawn on the wall of Rouffignac Cave in France may be evidence that their range once extended to western Europe.
On 16 March 2000, the Dutch fishing trawler UK33 plucked the jawbone of a strange creature from the depths of the North Sea at Brown Bank, off the Norfolk coast. After about six weeks in the hands of fishermen, during which time it lost all but two of its teeth, the fossil came into the possession of Dutch palaeontologist Klaas Post, who recognised it as the right lower jaw of the scimitar-toothed cat, Homotherium. At up to 440 kilograms in weight, Homotherium was far larger than a lion, and its diet matched its size. A lair discovered in Friesenhahn Cave, Texas, was filled with the bones of juvenile mammoths. When the jaw was radiocarbon dated, it proved to be just 28,000 years old.10 Before this discovery, the species was presumed to have become extinct in Europe about 300,000 years ago. Signor-Lipps would have been pleased!
You might think that, in a contest between such a beast and a human, the result would be a foregone conclusion. But the history of the scimitar- and sabre-toothed cats suggests otherwise. These cats evolved in Africa, but by 1.5 million years ago, Homotherium was extinct there, and the sabre-tooths by one million years ago. Homo erectus evolved in Africa around two million years ago, and by a million years ago its brain size had increased and its technology improved.
Both scimitar- and sabre-toothed cats survived longer in Europe—until about half a million years ago, by which time the ancestors of the Neanderthals had arrived. Highly efficient hunters who used fire, the Neanderthals may have outcompeted both sabre-toothed and scimitar-toothed cats. Both types however, continued to thrive in the Americas until about the time humans arrived 13,000 years ago.11 This global history of extinction suggests that these great cats began to decline whenever humans or their ancestors showed up.
The discovery of the 28,000-year-old Homotherium bone should not be taken as evidence that humans and scimitar-toothed cats overlapped for long in Europe. Homotherium was gone from the more temperate areas of Europe by about half a million years ago, and the fossil dates from an extremely cold period. The great cat may have survived only in the far north, which was
largely beyond the range of human settlement until about 15,000 years ago.
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* A core fauna denotes a group of species that are always found in association.
* There appear to be no authenticated instances of modern humans eating mammoths. The infamous account of diners at New York’s Explorer’s Club feasting on a 250,000-year-old Alaskan mammoth in 1951 never occurred.
* Mammoths also survived on St Paul Island, Alaska, until about 5000 years ago.
** The subspecies, which had a very long second horn, and was much larger than the Sumatran animals, is known as Dicerorhinus sumatrensis lasiotis. Although the last confirmed specimens date to the nineteenth century, rumours suggest that it may still exist. It would be interesting to compare its DNA with that of the woolly rhino.
CHAPTER 31
What the Ancestors Drew
Great treasure troves of art, preserved in caves sealed for millennia by rockfalls, have been discovered in Europe, providing a glimpse of a lost world of European creativity. Arguably, the finest of this art is the oldest—from Chauvet Cave in southern France.* But if we are to see the world through the eyes of the mammoth hunters we must look at ice-age art as a whole. And there is no better guide for this than Alaskan hunter, artist, palaeontologist and naturalist R. Dale Guthrie—the man who named the mammoth steppe.
In his book The Nature of Paleolithic Art, Guthrie makes the point that ice-age art focuses on a particular subset of subjects. There are no depictions of buttercups, babies or butterflies, despite the fact that all must have abounded during the ice age. There are, indeed, almost no depictions of plants. The main focus of ice-age art, as far as food is concerned, is large mammals, with a lesser focus on edible birds, fish and insects, although almost all of the insect images represent the larvae of warble flies, a kind of maggot that lives under the skin of reindeer, and which is a delicacy among Arctic people today.1
Guthrie also observed that the ice-age artists didn’t depict generalised animals, but creatures of a particular sex and age, behaving in typical ways. For example, reindeer are depicted as either male or female (easily distinguished by their antlers), and in pre-rut (fat) or post-rut (thin) condition. Finally, he explains that the great majority of ice-age art is the work of ‘learners’ whose sketches and drawings contain many mistakes or are merely casual attempts.
The three great Palaeolithic art galleries of Europe are the work of master painters: Chauvet Cave in southern France, dating from 37,000 to 28,000 years ago; Lascaux Cave, also in southern France and dating to 17,000 years ago; and Altamira Cave in northern Spain, dating to between 18,500 and 14,000 years ago (though some of its images could be 36,000 years old).2 Although spanning a possible 25,000 years, and despite each having its peculiarities, the art in these galleries shares common elements of style, purpose and subject matter.
The images were drawn using similar materials, among the most important of which were ochre, haematite and charcoal. The most frequently occurring subjects are aurochs, bison, horses and deer. Chauvet’s depictions can be identified as 13 species, including a variety of carnivores, such as lions, leopards, bears, and cave hyenas. A thin, hairless elephant (possibly a straight-tusked elephant) is depicted, as are rhinos. The Chauvet rhinos appear to be hairless, often with a dark belt around their girths. All other ice-age depictions of elephants appear to be woolly mammoths, and other depictions of rhinos show more uniformly coloured beasts with shaggy fur—almost certainly woolly rhinos.
Lascaux has by far the greatest abundance of art, with about 2000 images, including a single human. Curiously, reindeer, the principal food of the inhabitants of Lascaux to judge from the bones preserved in the cave, is represented by just one image. Altamira, the most recent, has the fewest images. It contains a depiction that is possibly of a boar (Guthrie identifies it as a poorly executed bison). It is striking just how many species of Europe’s woodlands (including aurochs, deer and possibly woodland rhinos) are depicted at these sites.
Scenes of animals defecating are common in ice-age art, leading some experts to suspect that a ‘cult of defecation’ existed among our ancestors. Guthrie, however, argues that many large mammals defecate before fleeing, so we are seeing depictions of animals at the beginning of a chase. Other animals show spears sticking out of their bodies, or with guts hanging out of a belly wound, or coughing up what appears to be lung blood, denoting that the animal is dying. Another feature of the art is an abundance of red spots, which Guthrie interprets as blood droplets—the spoor that a wounded animal leaves as it flees. The case can thus be made that most depictions involve creatures being hunted.
Cave art also provides insights into hunting techniques. Guthrie thinks that hunting parties averaged about five people, that the hunters were well clothed and that they may have used subterfuge (such as donning deer antlers) to get near prey. Spear wounds tend to cluster around the thoracic region, and often there is no spear shaft visible, suggesting that a spear with a socketed head was used. Moreover, the few images of the hunters themselves usually show each one carrying a single spear, for which they may well have carried multiple heads. Images also show single, injured animals, rather than herds. There is abundant evidence that ice-age Europeans used spear-throwers, some of which propelled fletched darts (darts with feathers at the rear of the shaft).3 Fletched darts have the power to kill even when propelled from a great distance and are a highly sophisticated technology.
The fact that Guthrie dedicates his book to his boyhood mentors and friends might seem surprising—until you read that he thinks that most ice-age art was executed by feckless, idle youths. Analyses of handprints and finger smears left by the artists, mostly at sites away from the great galleries, suggest that the majority were made by young people, caught literally ‘red handed’ in the act of painting on cave walls. On occasion, the artists carried infants with them—the handprint of a very small child, along with the impression of its sleeve, is preserved at Gargas in France. Of a sample of 210 handprints, Guthrie determines that 169 were left by adolescent males and 39 by adolescent females or males aged between eleven and seventeen. A thorough study of the much more limited number of footprints gives a similar result. One engraving on a stone preserved at La Marche depicts a gang of four teenage boys, facial fuzz and all—perhaps self-portraits.
Many discoveries of ice-age art have been made by young people, including the galleries in Altamira, which were found by an eight-year-old girl, and the Lascaux galleries, which were discovered by eighteen-year-old Marcel Ravidat. It’s the young who have the greatest spirit of adventure—and the size and suppleness to explore dark crevasses and caves, so it may be no coincidence that the artists and the discoverers fall into the same age group. Except at Chauvet, Lascaux and Altamira, most works are casual and improvised, replete with mistakes and clumsy executions.
Many of the less-sophisticated works are sexual in nature. Among the most common images are stylised vulvas, whole flocks of which appear on some cave walls. Less common, but still frequent, are erect penises, more complete female nudes, copulations, and even scenes of bestiality. We can imagine the circumstances. It’s winter—frozen outside—and in the confines of a cave, mum and dad are being driven crazy by the high spirits of a group of bored adolescents. After a few harsh words, a youth grabs a torch and, taking a favourite baby brother with him for company, disappears with his gang into a crevice at the back of the cave, wherein lies a magic world, in which for a short time they can let off steam, and draw.
Some ice-age art remains enigmatic, including objects that resemble life-sized, erect penises carved from ivory, antler bone and stone. Were they not so old, they might be identified as dildoes. A final feature of Palaeolithic art that deserves comment is the large number of images of full-figured women. Less than 10 per cent of all depictions of females are of lean female forms, the remainder being described by Guthrie as ‘plump to corpulent’.4 None, incidentally, have pubic hair. Guthrie arg
ues that it is likely that ice-age European women depilated their pubic area (a practice common among tribal and western people today). He thinks that these images (along with the countless disembodied vulvas, some of which have been described as reindeer feet by prudish researchers) are the work of males who were depicting what interested them sexually. Supporting his argument, Guthrie notes that there are no females depicted wearing anything but rudimentary clothing (though hair-styles are shown), and where men are drawn (there are few images) they are clothed. Moreover, there are no depictions of infants, pre-pubescent girls or post-reproductive-age women.
Guthrie argues that ice-age art provides an accurate picture of the habits and appearance of those common large mammals that the artists were dependent on for their existence. The hunters brought meat home (often a cave) where it was shared, allowing women who were not lactating to wax fat on the bounty. The creation of Palaeolithic art was a largely male activity and much of it originated in ways similar to modern graffiti. It is a view of European ice-age art that is earthy and familiarly human, making the minds and culture of our distant ancestors readily accessible.
Despite the great consistency in ice-age art over the millennia, the relationship between animals and human hunters was changing. Using the ghostly outline of vanished cultures that is the archaeological record, we can make some guesses as to how. Spear points have left a continuous record of rapid technological and cultural development in Europe. Indeed, cultures have been characterised by their spear points. The culture of the human–Neanderthal pioneers, known as the Aurignacian (named after an archaeological site in France), was brief, lasting only a few thousand years. While the Aurignacians were capable hunters of the largest mammals, they were not equipped with the specialist flint points characteristic of later European cultures. Instead, they made finely crafted bone points to haft onto their spears, reserving the use of flint mostly for blades and scrapers.