Skip forward a few thousand years, and we move into the Copper Age and the emergence of the first-known Spanish cities. Los Millares, just to the north of modern Almería, was established around 3100 BC. It was discovered in 1891 during the building of a new railway line.1
Los Millares was a proper city state, home to upwards of a thousand people who dominated much of the local area. The culture, however, was martial and violent, as witnessed by its four lines of defensive walls. Archaeologists have found many arrowheads in the area, most of them bent or broken where they were fired by enemy forces against the residents. Life expectancy was not much more than thirty years, with high levels of child mortality. It was also a very hierarchical society, in which religion played a key role in establishing and maintaining strict social structures.
While the Los Millares culture eventually died out, it was quickly replaced by a new civilisation just a few miles away at a place known as El Algar, whose dominance came from a new technology, bronze-making.
Established around 2200 BC, the El Algar culture turned into a proper unified state whose boundaries stretched up towards the central Spanish Meseta highlands, and from today’s Murcia in the east to Granada and Jaén in the west. The bronze was used essentially to make weapons; knives, spearheads and arrowheads, swords and large curved axes abound at El Algar sites. When it came to killing, bronze gave you the edge, and this south-eastern corner of Spain turned into the Peninsula’s undisputed centre of metallurgy.
Archaeologists have argued over whether these Bronze Age cultures developed on their own (the so-called ‘Occidentalist’ theory) or whether they were imports from the East (the ‘Orientalists’). For the time being the Occidentalists have the upper hand, but some form of contact with the eastern Mediterranean continued in this period, as shown by some of the dead at El Algar being buried in jars, a tradition presumably borrowed from the Ancient Greeks, who carried out the same practice.
While these cultures were dominating the south, however, a new wave of immigrants was pouring in from the north towards the end of the Bronze Age in what would turn out – genetically speaking – to be the most important influx into the Iberian Peninsula.
Over the next few hundred years, waves of people from Europe would cross the Pyrenees, first the Urnfield culture (known as ‘proto-Celts’) who spread along the Mediterranean coast into modern Catalonia, and then in the Iron Age, waves of the Hallstatt peoples (‘proper’ Celts), who settled mostly in central and western areas. Today around two thirds of Spanish and Portuguese men carry R1b haplogroup Y-DNA, suggesting their ancestors arrived during this time. Celtic languages were still being spoken in some parts of Spain at the time of the Roman conquest.
Meanwhile, southern Spain was playing host to its own new wave of immigrants. The Phoenicians, master traders of the ancient world, had reached Iberian shores and in 1104 BC founded the city of Cádiz, the oldest surviving city in Western Europe. Shortly afterwards they also founded Malaga, Almuñécar and Lisbon. Along with things like writing, potter’s wheels and iron, they also introduced wine-making.
The genetic imprint which the Phoenicians left behind is interesting because it is quite localised. Perhaps not surprisingly, it is relatively high in the modern city of Cádiz, where some 10 per cent of the population can boast Phoenician blood. Meanwhile Ibiza, which also became a Phoenician colony, has as much as 13 per cent.
By the eighth century the Greeks were also alive to trading opportunities in the Peninsula – which they called ‘Iberia’ – and were spreading southwards from their colony in Marseille, setting up posts at Ampurias and along the eastern coastline as far south as Alicante. Unlike the Phoenicians, however, they appear to have kept their sexual activities in-house, as there is little Greek DNA in the general Spanish gene pool.
As their power waned, the Phoenicians and Greeks were respectively replaced by the Carthaginians and Romans. The most celebrated clash between these Mediterranean superpowers – the Second Punic War – started in Spain. Eventually, as we know, the Romans emerged victorious, Hannibal’s elephants notwithstanding. In the wake of the Carthaginian defeat, the Peninsula was slowly conquered by Rome’s legions.
Roman culture left an indelible mark on Spain, not least in the various Spanish languages spoken today (apart from Basque). But when it comes to genetics, the picture is murkier, as Roman DNA looks like a mixture of Celtic and Greek. Yet this may go some way to explaining the preponderance of the R1b haplogroup among contemporary Spaniards.
During the Roman period, another group from the East decided to make its way to Spanish shores. There is growing evidence to suggest that Jews migrated to the Peninsula long before the Diaspora of the first century AD, and that sizeable communities had existed for some centuries when the later influx arrived. In fact, the Sephardic Jews, as they became known (from the Hebrew word for Spain, ‘Sefarad’) maintained their own traditions that this was indeed so. The Jewish community played an important part in Spanish life for some two thousand years. The order in 1492 for them to convert to Catholicism or face expulsion came as a shock. Many stayed, demonstrated by the fact that today as many as 25 per cent of Spanish people have Jewish blood.
Towards the end of the Roman Empire and following its collapse, the Peninsula once again became a magnet for wandering peoples, this time a number of Germanic tribes, from the Vandals to the Suebi and finally the Goths. The Visigoths eventually dominated and managed to establish the first political entity which could be called ‘Spain’ – the kingdom of Hispania, which lasted until the Moorish invasion of the eighth century. Yet, as with the Greeks (and possibly the Romans), they left precious little in the way of genetic material. In the mid-twentieth century, during the Franco dictatorship, Spaniards were taught to view the Visigoths as their ancestors, rulers of a united, Christian nation which existed before Islam, yet Gothic DNA in the Spanish gene pool is noticeable for its absence.
The Visigothic kingdom was defeated by invading Muslims in AD 711, and within some ten years almost the entire Peninsula was under Moorish control. Given the various waves of peoples arriving from the eastern Mediterranean over the preceding millennia, this was nothing particularly new, although historically it has taken on enormous proportions. As for the Spanish gene pool, the invasion also brought fresh supplies. ‘Moors’ is an umbrella term to cover the numerous peoples who lived in Islamic Spain. The vast majority, genetically speaking, were locals who gradually adopted the ways of the new rulers. Arab and Berber blood predominated among the newcomers, but Persian and sub-Saharan African peoples also arrived in Spain in smaller numbers as part of a largely fluid culture that stretched from the Atlantic to the Hindu Kush. Today, some 10 per cent of modern Spaniards have ‘Moorish’ DNA. The fact that this is less than the amount of Jewish DNA underlies how most ‘Moors’ were actually local peoples – Spaniards.
The expulsion of the Moriscos – Spain’s last remaining Muslims – in 1609 saw the forceful removal of some three hundred thousand people, but as with the expulsion of the Jews a century before, many managed to stay behind. Large numbers even slipped back unnoticed into Spain over the following years.
Peoples and cultures coming and going, fresh ingredients for the Spanish crucible . . . The trend continues throughout the country’s history. In the early 1400s, the first Gypsies arrived, passing over the Pyrenees to travel to Santiago, and were given safe conduct by the king of Aragon. With the conquest of the New World, swathes of Spaniards left the Peninsula to seek adventure and fortune across the Atlantic. In turn, people from the other side started arriving in Spain, small in numbers initially, but increasing to their hundreds of thousands in only the past few years. Meanwhile, more waves of Spaniards have been leaving – around half a million forced into exile at the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939; another million in recent years following the economic crisis of 2008: young people seeking work and a better life, not unlike their Conquistador ancestors four and five hundred years before.
And all the while, at the land borders between Spain’s African exclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, thousands of young men and women throw themselves at the high fences and razor wire, dreaming of crossing to the First World.
For thousands of years these tides of humanity have swept across the Iberian Peninsula. And they still do.
1 The British were responsible for much of the expansion of the Spanish railway network in the nineteenth century, a fact reflected in the nearby coastal town of Águilas, where many of the local railway workers lived. To this day, Anglicanism is the majority religion in the town.
TWO CAVES
Both lie in northern central Spain, no more than a two-hour drive from each other. They have – to a foreign ear – confusingly similar names. Both are hugely important archaeological sites which give important clues to, and raise fascinating questions about, our prehistoric ancestors. And the discoveries of both originate in the late nineteenth century. Chronologically speaking, however, they could hardly be further apart, one dating back some thirty-five thousand years, and the other around a million. Both, however, represent ‘firsts’ in their respective ways.
The Sierra of Atapuerca lies a few miles to the east of the city of Burgos, not far from the birthplace of El Cid, an important stop on the Camino de Santiago, home to one of the country’s most magnificent Gothic cathedrals, and former capital, during the Spanish Civil War, of Franco’s ‘Nationalist’ government. It was here, in the 1890s, that a British businessman trying to cash in on Spain’s early industrialisation decided to build a railway line. Richard Preece Williams, head of the Sierra Company, Ltd, wanted to transport new sources of iron and coal to the Basque port city of Bilbao, where Spain’s early smelting factories were mostly centred. And so he created 40 miles of new track originating in the Sierra de la Demanda, to the south-east of Burgos, which would then link up with the existing network.
Preece Williams, however, did something odd when routing his new line, something which no one to date has been able to explain. Rather than following the River Pico, he made a detour to the north in order to go through the Atapuerca mountains. To do so slowed the project down and caused great expense, not least by having to blast a trench 800 metres long, 10 metres wide and up to 20 metres deep. Was he looking for limestone? Or perhaps phosphite, essential for producing fertilisers? Whatever it was, as a result the Sierra Company failed to prosper and went bankrupt in 1910, less than a decade after opening its new railway.
Thanks to Preece Williams’s whim, however, we now have much greater knowledge – if not always answers – about the first proto-humans, or hominids, in Western Europe.
Admittedly, some basic excavations of the area had taken place in the years leading up to the Sierra Company’s arrival, but it wasn’t until the 1960s and ’70s that studies began in earnest, taking advantage of the access to a complex and extremely ancient cave network which the railway had created.
As a result, the great findings of Atapuerca were made, and they caused a revolution in the study of early Man, one which continues to throw up new clues and puzzles almost every year.
The earliest signs of settlement in the complex are now thought to date to 1.2 million years ago, placing hominids in Europe many hundreds of thousands of years earlier than once thought. So old are these remains, and so recent their discovery, that they have yet to be identified: they show similarities with the earliest Homo remains from Africa and Georgia, yet have certain differences.
Other remains, found in a different cave, date to over eight hundred thousand years ago and have given rise to a new classification of early man – Homo antecessor. Both he and his predecessors are believed to have been involved in what is called Out of Africa I, the first theoretical movement of early peoples into the rest of the world starting roughly 1.8 million years ago. How these hominids reached Europe is unclear. Over the Sinai? Across the Mediterranean, then much lower than today? No one can say for sure. Even allowing for lower sea levels, the Strait of Gibraltar would still have been very deep and subject to strong currents.
Whatever their origins and routes taken, however, the Atapuerca mountains became a favoured spot. The area was used over many hundreds of thousands of years, with evidence of settlements there of Homo heidelbergensis, who lived between six hundred thousand and two hundred thousand years ago, and Neanderthals.
Elephants and rhinoceroses were some of the more exotic animals to have lived alongside early humans in these ancient times, and some of their bones show signs of having been cut into and scraped using stone tools. Atapuerca, with its sheltering caves and wealth of food supplies, was, in many ways, a desirable place to live.
But the living wasn’t always easy. Bone remains of Homo antecessor show the same marks and cuts as animal ones, a clear sign that cannibalism was prevalent.
And then there is the curious case of Cranium 17 . . .
One of the caves at Atapuerca is called the Sima de los Huesos – the ditch of bones. In it have been found the remains of almost thirty people, over six and a half thousand bone fossils in total. All of them belong to Homo heidelbergensis, precursor of Neanderthals, and among them figure some of the best-conserved remains of ancient man, including Cranium 5, nicknamed ‘Miguelón’ in honour of champion Spanish cyclist and five-times winner of the Tour de France Miguel Indurain. Also a male pelvis (nicknamed ‘Elvis’), considered the best example of the entire fossil record. Conclusions drawn from it suggest that Homo heidelbergensis was about the same size as us, if somewhat more robust.
All these bones lie at the bottom of a 13-metre-deep pit, and among them has also been found a stone axe (named ‘Excalibur’) made of red quartzite. Interestingly, the axe was never used, and was found in mint condition. Which raised the question, what was it doing there?
The conclusion is that the Sima de los Huesos was a primitive mortuary, a place where the dead were deliberately laid to rest. And the fact that Excalibur was thrown in there with them suggests an understanding of symbolism, of the concepts of ‘life’ and ‘death’. Homo heidelbergensis weren’t just human in the physical sense, they were also human spiritually as well.
The existence of Cranium 17 in the same pit, however, testifies to the fact that while our early Atapuerca ancestors may have conceptualised the other world, they were also prepared, on occasion, to hasten someone’s passage there.
Cranium 17 was found in over fifty fragments. When it was pieced together, two holes above the left eyebrow became apparent. Subsequent analysis confirmed the scientists’ suspicions: there was no sign of healing, so the cranial damage indicated the cause of death. Also, that the two holes had been made separately, with acute force acting downwards by a right-handed individual. In short, the original owner of Cranium 17 had been murdered.
Some half a million years old, and the mystery, only recently uncovered, now confronts us: why? Who was this person? Who killed him? (Or her; the gender is unclear.)
The only thing we do know is that the world’s first-known murder took place in Spain.
If Atapuerca suggests an early – though not exclusive – tendency towards violence, the cave of Altamira clearly demonstrates its opposite, another side of the Spanish soul, capable of producing breathtaking works of art.
On visiting the caves and seeing their paintings, Picasso declared, ‘After Altamira, everything seems decadent.’ The most celebrated conjunction of paintings inside the cave is often described as ‘the Sistine Chapel of the Palaeolithic’.
While Atapuerca is home to Western Europe’s first-known hominids, Altamira is the site of the Continent’s first identified Stone Age paintings. A local man named Modesto Cubillas found the cave in 1868 while looking for his lost dog. He told a local amateur archaeologist about it, but it took Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola two visits to discover the treasure on his doorstep. The first, in 1875, left him curious but unamazed. Only on a second visit, in 1879, did he understand, when his eight-year-old daughter accompanying him glanced up and exc
laimed: ‘Look, Daddy! Oxen!’
Sanz de Sautuola published his findings the following year, correctly identifying the cave paintings as being Palaeolithic. But such was the level of skill behind the artwork that his conclusions were rejected out of hand. The French in particular poo-pooed his arguments, even going so far as to claim that the Spaniard had hired a local artist to carry out a forgery. Nothing so beautiful or anatomically correct as the now-famous images of bison that decorate the Altamira cave could possibly be the work of primitive, ancient man . . .
The debate raged for several years, during which time Sanz de Sautuola died, a cloud still hanging over his name. It was not until the early twentieth century, when a host of other caves had been discovered in Spain and France with similar paintings, that his discovery was accepted as genuine.
And what had he found? Research to date the paintings continues, but what seems clear is that artworks were being produced in Altamira for some twenty thousand years. It is even possible that some of them – perhaps those found at similar sites – were the work of Neanderthals.
There are hand paintings, in which people would place a hand against the wall and spit over it a spray of paint made from natural pigments to create a negative effect. There are curious and unidentified abstract symbols. There are animals, such as deer and wild boar. And there are bison, lots of bison. What seems remarkable about them, apart from their spectacular artistic workmanship, is that many have been painted on to bulges in the rock to create a 3-D effect.
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