‘She came from the coast, travelling,’ he said. ‘She is carrying lots and lots of dilly bags.’ The woman was pictured wearing a headband, from which were hanging fourteen or so stripy dilly bags, and Wilfred said that each one contained a baby.
‘Once she came, she put down one baby, and gave him a language and a skin-name, a clan. Then she came to another place. The second one, she gave him a different clan, skin-name, language. Then she kept travelling. The third one, she gave him a different language, different moiety. She kept travelling, putting down these babies – the ancestors of us.’
The story went on. Yingana was seeding Australia with its original people.
‘I’ve been trying to find out how people first got to Australia,’ I said. ‘I’ve been looking at fossils and genes. We think that perhaps the ancestors came from the north, from across the sea.’
‘From the north – yes. Creation mother may have come ashore from Macassar way, from somewhere in Indonesia. That’s my guess.’
This was fascinating. But it was probably wasn’t the amazing coincidence it at first seemed. Wilfred was an educated man. He knew that Macassar (Indonesia) lay to the north, but he was also prepared to incorporate this knowledge into his understanding of the traditional stories of the origin of his people.
But other Aboriginal stories also seem to have their starting point in the north. Bruce Chatwin tried to trace ‘songlines’, the sacred songs that describe the journeys of ancestors across the landscape of Australia, and he wrote:
The main Songlines in Australia appear to enter the country from the north or the north-west – from across the Timor Sea or the Torres Sea – and from there weave their way southwards across the continent. One has the impression that they represent the routes of the first Australians – and that they have come from somewhere else.
We emerged from between the clefts in the massive boulders on to an eagle’s-nest viewpoint overlooking Gunbalanya and the hills around: Turtle Dreaming Hill and Magpie Goose Dreaming Hill. I sat near the edge, with Wilfred and Garry, looking out at the land their ancestors had inhabited. I had rarely felt such a strong sense of place. And that flowed from Wilfred and Garry. The hills, creeks and billabongs belonged to them in a loose but powerful way, because their ancestors had lived here, and because they had walked all over this landscape and knew it so well. Aboriginal people in places like Gunbalanya still go on walkabout, travelling to visit friends and relations – as so many of us do – but also to remind themselves of ancient stories and their landscape. Wilfred and Garry’s sense of belonging in a landscape seemed not to be tied to one particular place, but to the idea of a journey across the countryside. It seemed like an ancient – but not at all primitive – idea, perhaps something that many of us, settled in a very sedentary existence in villages, towns and cities, feel we have lost.
So I had found evidence of the first Australians. I had followed the faint traces of the first colonisers all the way to Sundaland – and Sahul.
And I had met people in Australia who had taught me something about what humans are, passing on knowledge from generation to generation through art, and still feeling the need to roam in the landscape.
3. Reindeer to Rice:
The Peopling of North and East Asia
After the initial colonisation of the southern and eastern coasts of Asia (not shown on this map), Asian genes (mitochondrial and Y chromosome) reveal colonisers spreading up the rivers, making their way north of the Himalayas and reaching Siberia.
Trekking Inland: Routes into Central Asia
The southern route out of Africa scattered people along the coast from India to South-East Asia and Australia. But what about the rest of Asia? There was a vast expanse of land to the north and east. Today that land is mainly occupied by two vast countries: Russia and China. But in the Palaeolithic it was one great wilderness, teeming with wildlife: prime hunter-gatherer territory.
I was on the search for the first Russians and Chinese. How did they penetrate the continent and just how far north would Palaeolithic technology let them venture? I was also interested in faces, and the origins of characteristic East Asian features, and this enquiry would take me back to that debate about replacement versus regional continuity, a recent African origin of modern humans or multiregional evolution.
Analysis of mitochondrial DNA in northern Asia has shown that all the lineages can be traced back to M and N in southern Asia (see page 101). This means we can be sure that people moved out of Africa, along that southern, beachcombing route, and then flowed northwards to populate northern Asia.1 Populations spreading northwards from the South Asian coast could have followed rivers inland – but a massive barrier stood between South and Central Asia, stretching all the way from Afghanistan in the west to China in the east: the Himalayas.
In Out of Eden, Oppenheimer2 described potential routes around and through this mountainous barrier, allowing access to Central Asia, following rivers inland. The Indus may have led colonisers up to the Khyber Pass, skirting the Himalayas in the west. Colonisers could have tracked northwards along the rivers of South-East Asia. If the beachcombers had continued up and along what is now the Chinese coast, they could have then moved westwards, along what would become the Silk Road, just north of the Himalayas. People could have also spread in from the west, from the Russian Altai.
Once populations were established north of the Himalayas, the vast expanse of Central Asia and Siberia lay open to colonisation. Siberia itself is huge, covering about 10 million km2 and stretching from the Altai and Saian mountains in the south, to the shore of the Arctic Ocean in the north; from the Ural Mountains in the west, to the Pacific in the east. The environment here was about as different from the tropics, where early modern humans had flourished, as it could possibly have been. There would have been many new challenges facing the early pioneers: a lack of plants to eat, extreme cold and sometimes even a scarcity of wood for building shelters or burning for warmth. Colonising Siberia would have required new adaptations, new ways of hunting: a whole new suite of survival skills.
Mitochondrial DNA from populations across modern Siberia contains a record of a complex process of colonisation, with a mixture of lineages from European and Asian branches, presumably relating to incursions from both the west and the south, from modern-day Mongolia. Genetic diversity is greatest among Altaians, suggesting that modern humans have been in that region the longest. Unlike the long, thin, rake-like distribution of mitochondrial DNA branches in South-East Asia, which maps so well on to coastal dispersal from west to east, the branching bush of mtDNA in Siberia gives us less insight into the actual routes into the icy north.3
Considering that Central Asia is so huge, the archaeological evidence for early modern human colonisation north of the Himalayas is scarce. The earliest archaeological evidence comes from a site far north of the Himalayas: Kara-Bom in the Russian Altai. Kara-Bom is an open-air site, situated at the foot of a steep cliff, close to tributaries of the Ursul River. The site was excavated during the 1980s and early 1990s. Digging down through five metres of sediments at the foot of a slope, the archaeologists found evidence for three phases of occupation. The deepest layer contained Middle Palaeolithic, Mousterian tools, including Levallois cores and flakes as well as finished tools including points, side-scrapers and knives: it looked like a fairly standard Neanderthal toolkit.4 In the next layer up at Kara-Bom, the archaeologists found the clear signature of modern humans: early Upper Palaeolithic tools, including prismatic cores left over from blade manufacture, and plenty of blades, retouched on one or both sides, as well as end-scrapers, side-scrapers and burins. Above that again were late Upper Palaeolithic tools including microblades.
In the 1980s, archaeologists used conventional radiocarbon dating to age the Upper Palaeolithic layer at Kara-Bom, and reported a date of about 32,000 years old. In the 1990s the archaeologists used the new, more reliable method of AMS radiocarbon dating, on charcoal from the microblade layer, and obtai
ned a date of about 42,000 years old.5, 4
The animal bones also excavated from Kara-Bom provide us with a good idea of how rich the area was in terms of animal life: there were bones of horse, woolly rhino, bison, yak, antelope, sheep, cave hyena, grey wolf, marmot and hare; it sounded as if it would have been a good place for the Palaeolithic hunters.
In fact, there is a scattering of Upper Palaeolithic sites in southern Siberia, stretching as far east as Lake Baikal, as well as a couple further south, in Mongolia.6 So far, Kara-Bom has produced the oldest date for modern humans in Central Asia, but several other sites in southern Siberia are nearly as ancient, dating to between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago. Although some are cave sites, most are open-air camps, like Kara-Bom. These Upper Palaeolithic sites have characteristic stone tools, but also artefacts made from bone, ivory and antler, as well as deer-tooth pendants. In terms of evidence for art, there’s really not much from the Siberian Upper Palaeolithic. Just a few sites have produced objects that could be construed as artistic artefacts: a stone disc coloured with red ochre, a possible carving of a bear’s head on a woolly rhinoceros vertebra and an ivory sphere.
Judging by tools in deeper layers, quite a few of the sites seem to have been used by archaic humans, perhaps Neanderthals, long before moderns got there. Ted Goebel places the colonisation of southern Siberia by archaic humans in the Middle Pleistocene, somewhere between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago, with modern humans moving in to occupy the area between 45,000 and 35,000 years ago. Could Neanderthals have still been living in Siberia when modern humans arrived? Dates and ancient DNA results from Okladnikov Cave in the Siberian Altai suggest that this may have been a possibility. Mousterian tools were found in the cave, but of course those could have been made by modern humans or Neanderthals. Some researchers suggested that teeth found in Okladnikov Cave, dating to around 40,000 years ago, were Neanderthal, but others disagreed. There were also some fragments of bone, too smashed up for us to be sure what species they belonged to. But geneticists recently managed to extract ancient DNA from those bits of bone – and they did indeed turn out to be Neanderthal. This is extraordinary because it suggests that the Neanderthals penetrated a lot further into Asia than previously thought, and that there may well have been overlap with modern humans, as in Europe.7 (We don’t know if those Neanderthals and modern humans ever met each other, though, and this is a question that will be pursued in the next part, The Wild West: The Colonisation of Europe.)
Although it is clear that archaic humans, including Neanderthals, lived in the mountainous regions of southern Siberia, they did not seem to get any further north, into the subarctic and Arctic regions. And the first modern humans to live in the area were also limited to southern Siberia. It appears that these first colonisers were, as Goebel puts it, ‘tethered to places on the landscape’, where there was suitable stone for making tools and plenty of animals to hunt. There’s no evidence of long-distance trade networks: tools were made from local stone. In this respect, it’s a similar picture to Europe in the early Upper Palaeolithic. But there is a distinct difference in the types of tools being made. The stone tools from the early Upper Palaeolithic of Siberia, and from China, too, are a bit of a strange ‘mixed bag’ when compared with the European toolkits. There are ‘modern-looking’, light-duty tools like small end-scrapers, borers, points and burins, but there are also very old-fashioned looking tools like side-scrapers, Mousterian-like points and sometimes even hand-axe type tools. Some archaeologists have argued that this shows a lack of technological development in isolated large populations, but others have said it can be explained functionally: the toolkits reflect different patterns of hunter-gatherer subsistence in particular environments. This functional and ecological interpretation also gets us away from the idea that humans were always on a quest to make ‘better’ tools. Instead, they were making what they needed to survive in particular place.8
On the Trail of Ice Age Siberians: St Petersburg, Russia
I travelled to St Petersburg to find out more about Ice Age Siberia. It was mid-spring and the River Neva (‘Nyeva’) had almost completely broken free from winter ice. Just a few plates of ice clung to its edges and floated like diminutive icebergs under its bridges.
In a restaurant in St Petersburg I met up with Russian archaeologist Vladimir Pitulko to find out about an exciting site in the far north-east of Siberia. Until just a few years ago, it was thought that modern humans hadn’t got as far as the Arctic Circle until after the LGM, around 18,000 years ago. But Pitulko had been excavating a site which suggested that the early modern human colonisers had adapted to the extreme conditions, and spread further north than any archaic humans had managed, right into subarctic and arctic Siberia, well before the LGM. The site was called Yana: it was an Upper Palaeolithic site frozen into the permafrost.
In 1993, geologist Mikhail Dashtzeren found a foreshaft, or spear end, made from woolly rhino horn, in the Yana Valley. (Foreshafts allow speedy replacement of broken spear points, thought to be a great advantage when hunting large game.) The artefact was the first sign of a Palaeolithic site eroding out of the permafrost – a site to become known in full as Yana RHS (Rhinoceros Horn Site). Excavations began some years later, in 2002. The archaeologists found stone tools made from flinty slate, including side-scrapers and end-scrapers. These are all based on flakes: there is no sign of blade manufacture from Yana. There were vast quantities of animal bones, mainly reindeer, but there were also mammoth, horse, bison, hare and bird bones. Nearly all the bones showed signs of scraping. Two further foreshafts were found, made from mammoth ivory, and a bone punch, or awl. The finds were radiocarbon dated to around 30,000 years ago.1
The date of Yana places it just on the transition between a ‘warmer’ period, when larch and birch forests would have covered northern Siberia, and a cold phase, when the landscape became treeless tundra. The average temperature would have been colder than today.1, 2
The date and location of Yana are significant: modern humans were in the Arctic well before the LGM. And the stone tools and ivory foreshafts preshadow some of the earliest implements found in the Bering land bridge region – and the Americas.1
Pitulko was returning to dig at Yana that summer, and I made arrangements to fly out and meet him there. But it wasn’t to happen. In the end, the vagaries of Russian airline schedules thwarted my plans, and my chance of seeing the evidence for the Ice Age inhabitants of the far north was to be cruelly denied.
Between 26,000 and 19,000 years ago, the world was cooling towards the Last Glacial Maximum (or ‘LGM’). In northern Europe this meant the advance of ice sheets. In Siberia, the drying climate created a vast, almost unimaginably arid plain: the ‘mammoth steppe’.3 The steppe was so dry that many plants and animals were driven to local extinction in the north. Flora and fauna that survive today in the Arctic tundra, including humans, gradually retreated thousands of miles to the south, or to the far north-east, to the land exposed between Asia and North America: Beringia.3 Although the Upper Palaeolithic people of Siberia had become experts in surviving in extreme conditions, colonising the Arctic, they were now put under immense pressure. The number of archaeological sites dwindles as the Ice Age was reaching its climax around 19,000 years ago.4
Most of Siberia would have been locked in permafrost, but areas of southern Siberia, around the Transbaikal and Yenisei rivers, would have been slightly milder. Human and animal populations may have survived in these refugia while most of Siberia was an Arctic waste. The Siberian environment around the LGM is hard for us to imagine: it was very different from anything in existence now. There were combinations of plants and animals living on the mammoth steppe that we just don’t see today. Imagine this vast, treeless plain. All the vegetation was low-level, mostly grasses and sedges, no trees. And in it there were some animals which we recognise as cold-loving creatures such as reindeer and Arctic foxes, but alongside them were others that we’d associate with much warmer environments today, like chee
tahs, hyenas and leopards. Ice Age Siberia was a place of extremes, with colder winters but warmer summers than today.3
Around this time there was also a change in culture in Siberia, typified by a site called Mal’ta, about 80km north of Irkutsk.5 The site was discovered in 1928, by local peasants, who found some bones along the road to Moscow. When archaeologists arrived to dig the site, they uncovered the remains of a Palaeolithic camp with substantial, semi-subterranean houses. They retrieved more than 44,000 stone tools, and over five hundred artefacts made from bone, ivory and antler. Among these were spectacular pieces of art, including some thirty human figurines and fifty carvings of birds, in mammoth ivory.6 New radiocarbon dates from Mal’ta place the site at around 21,000 years ago – practically right on the LGM.5
The artefacts from Ice Age Mal’ta are now kept in the Hermitage in St Petersburg and this was another reason for my visit to that beautiful city in European Russia. I entered the magnificent building on the banks of the Neva through a back door, then navigated my way through galleries full of much more recent, spectacular artwork. At the end of a long corridor I approached a large wooden door and waited to be admitted. I was met by a curator, an extremely smart and petite Russian woman named Svetlana Demeshchenko.
Behind the first door was another door. I followed Svetlana through it, and then up a spiral staircase until we reached the upper level and the door into the archaeological offices and stores. This was a different world from the grand state rooms of the Hermitage, with their polished floors, neoclassical sculptures and gilded pillars. There were corridors flanking by tall wooden cupboards, faded posters of archaeological exhibitions, and I caught glimpses of offices, in one of which were archaeologists poring over papers, surrounded by piles of dusty books and a jungle of houseplants.
The Incredible Human Journey Page 19