The Incredible Human Journey

by Alice Roberts

  Svetlana led me into a room lined with shallow wooden drawers and cupboards, and she started unpacking artefacts. She took a velvet-covered board and laid out a beautiful bone necklace that had been found with a child’s skeleton. There was an oblong of mammoth ivory inscribed with a stippled spiral pattern on one side, and with three snake-like lines on the other. Svetlana said that it had been proposed to be some kind of shamanic map, with the central hole in it representing a connection between worlds above and below the physical realm of existence. It was certainly a mysterious object, but it is surely impossible to know whether the design was anything more than decoration.6, 7

  Nestling in tissue paper in boxes were miniature figurines, like small ivory dolls. Some were thin and rangy, whereas a couple were a bit more buxom, and reminiscent of the European ‘Venus’ figures. Some were naked, with carved breasts, but others appeared to be clothed. One was clearly wearing a hat, and her body was scratched, textured, suggesting fur clothes perhaps. Bone awls and needles have been found at several sites from this period, indications that the technology to make clothes was in place. In fact, there are eyed needles dating to about 30,000–35,000 years old from Kostenki, in Ukraine, and Tolbaga, to the south of Lake Baikal. A needle from Denisova Cave in the Altai has been reported as being even older, perhaps as much as 40,000 years old, although this may be an overestimate.8 But even without any of this material evidence (forgive the pun), the technology to make clothes could have been inferred: it would have been impossible for the Ice Age Siberians to have survived without substantial fur clothing.

  The feet of several figurines were pierced through, as if they had been intended to be worn as pendants – though they would hang upside-down. And then there were two ivory, bird-like figures, only about 6cm long, with outstretched necks and stubby wings. Were they geese? Or swans? I imagined those ancient Siberians, huddled in tents against the growing cold of the Ice Age, carving these objects by the firelight. Was it just something to do on those long, cold evenings, or did these female figures and birds hold some meaning for those people? Could they have been mythological or shamanic emblems? Some anthropologists, arguing from analogy with recent ethnographic studies, have suggested that the pierced figurines and birds represented spirit helpers that were designed to be attached to a shaman’s costume.6, 7 Their meaning has long since been lost, but they are very beautiful objects.

  Mal’ta and the other sites from Siberia between 30,000 and 20,000 years ago show us that the hunter-gatherers in this region were surviving, and, given the artistic outpouring in Mal’ta, even flourishing, as glacial conditions set in. And the similarity between tools and art produced in Siberia and Europe at this time suggests that there were communication networks linking communities across a vast area. People seem to have been moving around the landscape, using large base camps, with smaller hunting camps like satellites around them. The base camps were often a long way from any outcrops of rock ideally suited to making tools – presumably their location was determined more by the proximity of animals to hunt. But this meant that stone tools either had to be made from less than ideal, coarse rocks, or that finer stone had to be carried long distances. Many of the stone tools at Mal’ta were small blades, or ‘bladelets’, made from correspondingly miniature cores. Perhaps it was a need to economise, to make the most of scarce supplies of decent stone, that drove the toolmakers to make smaller and smaller blades?4

  The animal bones from Mal’ta show that these Ice Age Siberians were hunting a wide range of animals: woolly rhinoceros, mammoth, bison, reindeer, horse and red deer, as well as hares, Arctic foxes and wolverine, and geese, gulls, grouse and ptarmigan. There were a great many reindeer antlers at Mal’ta, but these might have been scavenged for use in house-building, as reindeer naturally lose their antlers each year. At numerous places on the Russian plain, around and immediately following the LGM, and including the famous site of Mezhirich, mammoth tusks were used in the construction of huts.

  Leaving the Hermitage, I crossed over the River Neva and made my way to the back door of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Another museum, another back door, and another corridor with store rooms full of bones. The Institute is famous for its mammoths. In the exhibition hall upstairs there were stuffed mammoths, towering over dioramas of more reasonably sized mammals. There were even mummified mammoths, which had survived, frozen in permafrost, to the present day. Downstairs in the store rooms there were stacks of enormous bones, huge skulls, and piles and piles of tusks. I stood next to a femur, and the mammoth thigh bone reached up to my chest. The animal it came from would have dwarfed me. Mammoths would have been formidable prey for those ancient hunters on the steppe.

  Mammoth remains, from the Pleistocene, have been found all over Central Asia, from the Arctic Ocean in the north to Mongolia in the south. Collections of mammoth bones often turn up in riverbanks, from animals or skeletons that have been swept up by rivers and redeposited. But mammoth bones and tusks have also been found at archaeological sites, alongside evidence of human activity and occupation.9

  The interaction between humans and mammoths on the plains of Siberia, in Europe and in North America, has been widely debated. Certainly in Siberia it seems that humans were using mammoths, presumably eating their meat, and using their bones and tusks to build houses, carve tools and make art.5 In western Siberia, there are a few sites with evidence of ‘mammoth processing’, where practically complete skeletons have been found along with stone tools and traces of fire. But it is impossible to tell if these mammoths had been hunted or had been collected as frozen carcasses. Other sites suggest that the ancient Siberians were choosing to camp near collections of old bones and tusks, which they could then gather to use. Such collections in the banks of lakes and rivers represented mammoths which may have died hundreds or thousands of years earlier, maybe by falling through the ice.9

  The last mammoths appear to have inhabited the far north of Siberia up until around 10,000 years ago. So what finished them off? For some researchers, the answer is obvious: humans. But this really does depend on humans having actively hunted mammoths in Siberia. From research that has tried to assess fluctuations in mammoth and human populations, it seems that people made very little impact on mammoth populations, at least until well after the LGM. During the Pleistocene, human population sizes were small, and were concentrated south of the main ranges of the mammoths. Mammoth populations actually appear to have expanded after the LGM, during the cold snap called the Younger Dryas, but at around 13,000 years ago their numbers started to dwindle, and by 11,500 years ago they had all disappeared. Now, this does coincide with the continued expansion of human populations; perhaps, for an already shrinking and stressed mammoth population, a modest amount of hunting by humans might have been enough to tip the balance towards extinction.10

  There were major changes in the climate and environment at this time: the world was warming up and the mammoth steppe was disappearing, and for some researchers this is enough to explain the extinction of woolly mammoths and other Pleistocene megafauna.11, 12 As far as archaeological evidence from Siberian middle Upper Palaeolithic sites is concerned, there is often no way to tell if mammoth remains have come from hunted or scavenged animals.5 In fact, there is no definite evidence of mammoth-hunting in Siberia, but there is plenty of evidence of humans collecting bones and tusks from already ancient mammoth ‘death sites’.

  The idea of those Ice Age hunters as big game specialists, or exclusive ‘mammoth hunters’, does not stand up to scrutiny. The hunters appear to have been generalists; large mammals like woolly rhino, mammoth and bison are actually rare in archaeological sites. Medium-sized animals such as reindeer, red deer and horse are much more common. And the hunters were also bringing back small game like fox and wolverine, as well as birds like geese, gulls, grouse and ptarmigan.5, 12 Wolf bones are also common – but this may be domestication rather than predation: perhaps first evidence of man’s best friend.12 />
  So, for the time being the question of whether it was climate change, overkill by humans or a mixture of the two that eventually did in the mammoths is far from settled.13, 14

  After the worst of the Ice Age, while megafauna like the mammoths had disappeared for good, other plants, animals and humans started to spread northwards again as the climate warmed. But using a word like ‘warm’ to describe Siberia is somewhat misleading, as I was about to find out: I was going to stay with the reindeer hunters of the north.

  Meeting with the Reindeer Herders of the North: Olenek, Siberia

  I was heading for the coldest inhabited place on earth: northern Siberia. Winter temperatures there can fall to below –70 degrees. First, I flew to Yakutsk, where, as I stepped off the plane and inhaled the icy air, I felt my bronchi constricting in protest. It was about –20 degrees. At the airport, I met my guide, anthropologist Anatoly Alekseyev. From the airport we drove through snowy streets, past ramshackle houses that were visibly subsiding into the permafrost, and past a huge statue of Lenin in the square, his right hand outstretched. Although I’d heard Yakutsk described as a modern Klondike run by diamond merchants, there was little outward evidence of this wealth. There were lots of new bars and casinos, and very smart women in chic fur hats and high-heeled boots, but the whole place still felt very run down. Arriving at the hotel, and stepping from the icy cold into an overheated foyer, I was clearly entering a different culture from European Russia. There were woven panels of horse hair depicting long-bearded old men and reindeer. People’s faces – including Anatoly’s – were also very different here from those in St Petersburg or Moscow. Gone were the large noses and long faces. The majority of people were now much more oriental-looking, with broad cheeks, narrow eyes and small noses.

  The following day we caught another, smaller prop plane and flew further north, from Yakutsk to the village of Olenek. We were sharing the aircraft with a crowd of very smart-looking Siberians: men in suits and women in exquisite long fur coats and hats. The flight took us over a snowy landscape sparsely covered in larch forest. We followed the meandering River Lena, icebound and covered in snow, northwards, then peeled away to the west.

  The plane landed at Olenek, and from my seat just behind the wing I could see the wheel make contact with the runway, kicking up an impressive plume of snow. And as we slowed to a halt we could see a welcome party assembled on the runway: a group of women dressed once again in long fur coats, one in a crimson coat lined with white fur, like a female Santa Claus, and a circle of dancers dressed in traditional fur outfits that looked almost Native American. One woman held out a round loaf with a small pot of salt embedded in the middle of it; I tore off a piece of bread, dipped it in the salt, and ate it. Children ran up with necklaces made of reindeer antler and hung them around our necks. I had arrived in Olenek on the eve of their annual reindeer festival, as had many others from the region, including diamond-mine owners and politicians – ‘Big Fircones’, as the Russian phrase puts it.

  Anatoly and I somehow got swept along with the diamond oligarchs, and ushered into the Regional Administrators’ office, where we were treated to a discourse on the progressive changes being made in the village. Although I had never been to Russia before this trip, the whole meeting felt rich with Soviet overtones. When the meeting drew to a close, I was given a key-ring emblazoned with a badge of the Reindeer Festival. Then Anatoly and I took a rugged little Toyota van across the frozen River Olenek to our lodging on the opposite bank.

  We were staying in Marina Stepanova’s single-storey wooden house, with a woodshed and an outside toilet near the fence, flanking the driveway. There were steps up the porch and a heavy, felt-edged front door (which had to be shut quickly as you passed through so as not to let the heat out of the house). Inside, a small hallway, with hooks for coats, led straight into a room with a tiny kitchen on the right and a dining area on the left. There were two bedrooms at the back of the house. The house was toasty warm: a central wood-burning stove was kept alight during the day, to melt ice for water as well as providing heat, and at night hot water flowed into radiators in each room from a remote boilerhouse. Marina was staying with family, though popping in to cook us meals – very generously letting us take over her house for a while.

  As Anatoly and I settled in, Piers Vitebsky appeared: a great bear of a man, he would help me understand Evenki culture as I experienced it over the coming days. Piers was an anthropologist who had specialised in shamanism, spending time with tribes in India and northern Siberia. He headed up Anthropology and Russian Northern Studies at the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University, and it was through Piers that Anatoly had developed his interest in anthropology and become a historian of his own people.

  Marina’s dinners were generous and unchanging. There were hunks of white bread, biscuits and sweets, arranged on a cake stand in the centre of the table. We had cups of tea made with hot water from electric urns, and cranberry juice. There were small bowls of carrot and cabbage salad, and, when we sat down, huge steaming dishes of potatoes and reindeer meat would appear. Essentially, every time we left the house for any length of time, when we returned this spread would be awaiting us. I was reading Piers’ book on his experiences living with the Eveny reindeer herders (Anatoly’s people), where the camp cook would always have dinner ready in the tent for the herders returning from working in the cold. Marina was maintaining the custom in the village.

  Later that day we crossed back over the frozen river to visit the museum in Olenek, where Piers gave me a guided tour of local Neolithic pot and stone tools, scale models of Evenki ‘sky burials’ with coffins on stilts, items of clothing stitched together from reindeer skin, and shamanic paraphernalia – including a shaman’s coat adorned with iron animals and complete with reindeer-hide ‘tail’. The shaman’s assistant would apparently hold this two-metre-long tail to anchor the shaman and pull him back to earth after he had been flying in a trance. I had hoped to see a shaman, but the Soviet regime had made them particularly rare and shy. That night, though, we went along to a concert in the village hall, where, along with folk rock and pop, we were treated to full-on shamanic kitsch with a folk singer dressed in a quasi-traditional costume, beating a skin drum, accompanied by reindeer dancers. This was the opening night of the Reindeer Festival.

  The following day, I went to the festival itself, held on the frozen river. Two ‘chums’, tepee-like tents, had been erected within an arena framed with coloured flags. People were out in their best furs: little girls dressed cutely, head to toe in white fur, women in long fur coats, men in fur jackets. Teams of reindeer waited patiently inside the enclosure, tethered to their sleighs ready for the races and some of the animals were wearing beautiful bead-embroidered headdresses and trappings. I don’t think I’d ever seen a real, live reindeer before arriving in Siberia. Now there were reindeer everywhere, looking like mythical creatures in the bright snow and sunshine. Throughout the day there were various reindeer races: children riding reindeer, women racing single-reindeer sleighs, men racing double-reindeer sleighs on 3 to 8km tracks up and down the frozen river. People had come to the festival from all over Yakutia and the neighbouring district of Zhigansky, a geographically enormous area, something like the size of Britain and France combined. Some of the reindeer had literally flown in – by helicopter. It was still, as these festivals would have been when all the reindeer herders were truly nomadic, an opportunity for a scattered population to come together, and, in particular, for young men and women to meet up.

  I went up to the river cliffs above the festival to get a panoramic view of the sleighs as they approached the finishing line, the arena and the chums. Then we headed back to Marina’s where dinner was waiting for us. But we weren’t stopping long. The time had come for the next leg of my journey, to an even more remote place. All around Olenek, reindeer herders lived in mobile camps – and I was going to one of them, some 70km from the village.

  I packed up my ge
ar in a kitbag and wrapped myself up in layers and layers of merino wool thermals, fleeces, a jacket and, finally, a reindeer fur coat. My feet had got cold in the afternoon, walking around in my Baffin boots. Marina looked at them with disdain and produced a pair of reindeer boots, so I stuffed my feet into two pairs of thick woollen socks and then into the furry-inside-and-out boots. On my head: a black woollen hat, two buffs around my neck, pulled up over my nose, and sealed with a pair of ski goggles so that no skin showed. I tugged a hood trimmed with wolf fur firmly down and around my well-wrapped face, and pulled on two pairs of gloves: an inner silk pair and an outer, fleece-lined, wind-proof pair. Then I walked stiffly out of the house and down the steps of the porch to where some of the men we’d seen racing earlier in the day were loading our gear on to sledges behind snowmobiles.

  We had planned to leave for this journey at six o’clock. Piers had warned us about the difference between ‘intentional time’ and ‘real time’ in northern Siberia. It was gone nine o’clock when we left and the orange sun was resting on the horizon. Piers, Anatoly and I were each to travel with a reindeer herder, on separate snowmobiles pulling sledges. I jumped on to a sledge, sitting with my back against a pile of bags. Then we set off – bumpily – along the snowy road, heading west into the setting sun. My goggles started to ice up almost immediately; all I could see were occasional glimpses of trees in the upper margins of the goggles, but most of my field of vision was a uniform yellow-grey. We hurtled along, with the sledge riding up over the bumps and crashing down on the other side.

  It wasn’t long before we started to spread out, travelling far apart, as the air darkened and cooled around us. It was like a strange exercise in selective sensory deprivation: all I could see now was dark grey, and my ears filled with the chainsaw-like drone of the snowmobile. As tempting as it was to sleep, I had to be an active passenger: as we veered, rolled, pitched and jolted along, I concentrated on hanging on to a thin rope binding down the tarp under me. Failure to hang on would mean coming off at the next bend or bump. And as I was effectively blind, I could not anticipate when the sledge would try to buck me.