The Incredible Human Journey

by Alice Roberts

  I headed to the Czech Republic, taking the train to Brno, then heading south to the small town of Dolní Vìstonice (pronounced ‘dolny vyestonitseh’), close to where one of these mysterious female figures was found. There I met up with Jiri (pronounced ‘Yurjy’) Svoboda at the museum in Dolní Vìstonice. Upstairs in the museum, he brought out shallow boxes full of the finds from the archaeological site. There were numerous animals carved from mammoth ivory, including a tiny, beautifully observed head of a lion. There were also strange bone spatulas, about the length and shape of shoehorns, but flat.

  ‘What on earth’, I asked Jiri, ‘are these?’

  ‘If you go to ethnography, you can find a whole variety of uses for pieces like that. You might use it for cutting snow, for example. Eskimos have tools like that. But I have also seen a similar tool in Tierra del Fuego for taking bark from trees. And the Maoris of New Zealand have similar pieces as prestigious, symbolic weapons. Unfortunately it’s very difficult to find any use-wear on the edges, so we can only guess.’

  And then Jiri brought out the Dolní Vìstonice ‘Venus’. She was a strange little figure, just over 10cm tall, made from fired clay. She was very stylised, with an odd, almost neckless head; the face was a mere suggestion, with two slanting grooves for ‘eyes’. She had globular, pendulous breasts, and wide hips. Her legs were separated by a groove, and another groove ran around her hips, as though indicating some kind of girdle. On her back, pairs of diagonal grooves marked out her lower ribs. Compared with the stick-thin and often clothed female figurines I had seen in the Hermitage, from the Siberian site of Mal’ta, this ‘Venus’ was more rounded and buxom, and splendidly naked.

  I asked Jiri what he thought she represented. He was cautious: the real meaning of these mysterious prehistoric objects is lost, and we can really only guess what they symbolised. Was she a deity? Did she represent some kind of archetypal female, or did she perhaps combine male and female sexuality in one? Jiri covered up her upper half, and the legs of the figurine, with that deep groove between them, could certainly be taken to represent a vulva. Then he covered up the legs, and her head and breasts were transformed into male genitalia.

  ‘So perhaps she is a combination of the two symbols: male and female.’

  ‘Do you think she could be a deity, a goddess?’ I asked.

  Jiri laughed. ‘Well, maybe a deity. But it depends on how you define that. I think there is some kind of personification, some symbolism here, that is depicted in the shape of a female body. There is certainly some meaning, but it’s very difficult to know exactly what.’

  There were other objects in the collection from Dolní Vìstonice that seemed to represent sexuality in some way, including a small ivory stick with a pair of protruding bulges – which could be seen as breasts or testicles. Jiri certainly saw some connection between the archaeological signs of widening social networks and the development of symbolism represented by objects like the ‘Venus’.1

  Whatever the Dolní Vìstonice ‘Venus’ meant to the society who made her, she was special in another way – because she was made of clay. She is among the first ceramic objects in the world – and one of some 10,000 pieces from Dolní Vìstonice and the nearby site of Pavlov. At 26,000 years old, these ceramic objects pre-date any evidence of utilitarian pottery, i.e. ceramic containers, by some 14,000 years.4 Many of the fired clay pieces were just irregular pellets, but among them were works of art – more than seventy, nearly complete, clay animals, and the Venus figurine. But there were also thousands of fragments of figurines, many of which had been found in what seemed to be purpose-built kilns up the hill from the occupation area. Analysis of the kilns suggested that they produced temperatures of up to 700 degrees C. The preponderance of ceramic fragments has led some archaeologists to formulate a rather bizarre theory: that the figurine-makers were pyromaniacs, deliberately exploding their creations in kilns – and the smashed figurines were the relics of a strange prehistoric form of performance art. Pottery specialists argued that the pattern of breaks in the clay fragments was commensurate with heat-fracturing, but I remain quite sceptical about the deliberate explosion theory. We were looking at the earliest ceramics in the world – presumably there was a fair amount of experimenting going on – so was it really that surprising that many of the pottery creations had exploded? And it seems reasonable to imagine that successfully fired figurines would have been removed from the kilns, while leaving behind fragments of exploded pieces. Not only that, but the exploded fragments could feasibly have been incorporated into the structure of the kilns; this is something that has been seen, admittedly thousands and thousands of years later, in clay pipe kilns, where broken pipes are included in the kiln.5

  Dolní Vìstonice is also famous for a strange burial, where three individuals were placed in the ground at the same time. There were two male skeletons on either side of a skeleton whose sex was difficult to determine, but which was definitely pathological. The skeletons lay in unusual positions – the individual on the left lay with his arms stretched down and out towards the person in the middle, his hands lying over the pelvis of his grave mate, while the male skeleton on the right was buried face-down. Red ochre covered the heads of all three, as well as the pubic area of the middle skeleton. Wolf and fox canines and ivory beads were found around the heads of the three skeletons.6

  It seems that these three individuals were indeed buried together, at the same time, and this in itself is very unusual. It is possible that they were related: certainly, they shared unusual anatomical traits, including absence of the right frontal sinus (the space in the skull bone above the eyes), and impacted wisdom teeth.7 But why did they end up in the same grave? They are all quite young: one was a teenager, the other two were in their early twenties. Some archaeologists have suggested their youth indicates a particular adverse circumstance befalling the Gravettian population of Dolní Vìstonice, but, from the other human remains at the site, death in early adulthood does not seem to have been particularly unusual.8

  The deformed leg bones and spine of the middle skeleton have been variously ascribed to rickets, paralysis or congenital anomalies, but it is difficult to be certain about what caused the bony abnormalities in this individual. Although only in their early twenties, he (or she) had already developed osteoarthritis in the right shoulder. Despite the fact that this individual was young when he or she died, there is no indication that the deformities caused this person’s death. What is certain, though, is that this individual would have had a very obvious pathology; some archaeologists have argued that this could have been part of the reason that he (or she) was accorded respect, and selected for what seems to have been a special burial.6

  There are certainly unique things about the Dolní Vìstonice burial – but there also aspects of it, in particular the use of ochre and the ivory ornaments, that indicate it was part of a culture that stretched across Europe – and I mean right across Europe – in the Gravettian. Around the same time as the Dolní Vìstonice burial – about 27,000 years ago – a man was buried at Paviland Cave on the Gower in South Wales, with ochre and ivory rods in his grave. And at Sunghir, some 200km north-east of Moscow, about 24,000 years ago, a man and two children were buried along with ochre, fox pendants and thousands of ivory beads, apparently sewn on to clothing.9

  Jiri Svoboda and I left the museum and drove up the road to the archaeological site of Dolní Vìstonice – which was now, like most of undulating lower slopes of the Pavlov Hills, covered in grapevines. We climbed the hill to the top of the vineyard, where Jiri pointed out the locations of the two main sites, on slightly raised ridges perpendicular to the slope.

  ‘To our left is the first site that was excavated in this area, in the twenties,’ Jiri explained. ‘There was a priest going to Dolní Vìstonice church, from Pavlov, and he noticed, in the cut of the road, bones and charcoal coming out. When it was excavated, that is where the Venus and the other clay figurines were found.’

  The second site
had been discovered during commercial quarrying in the mid-eighties.10

  Jiri pointed along the ridges to our right. ‘The triple burial was on the next one – at the site of Dolní Vìstonice 2. It looks like people may have been burying their dead in the settlement, inside a hut. And probably other people didn’t go in any more, and the hut collapsed, and that would be the burial.’

  Jiri explained that Dolní Vìstonice was just one of a series of settlements along this escarpment, and he also placed it in its wider geographical – and chronological – context. Where we were standing, on that hillside in Moravia, formed part of a corridor that also led through southern Poland and lower Austria, a low-lying passage between the Carpathian Mountains in the east and the Bohemian Massif in the west. It allowed fauna – including humans – to move from south-west to north-east on the European plain.

  At the end of the Pleistocene, between 30,000 and 20,000 years ago, the Moravian landscape would at times have been partly wooded, mainly with conifers, but also with oak, beech and yew. These species make it sound as if the climate was rather more pleasant than it actually was; even when there were trees around, snails indicate very cold temperatures, more like subarctic tundra. The climate was fluctuating, and there were even colder, drier periods when the landscape would have been transformed into a treeless steppe.1

  ‘It’s difficult to find a present-day analogy,’ said Jiri. ‘Siberia has a zonality of its own today – it’s different in the south and the north – but it’s possible to imagine what it would have been like here. Mean annual temperatures were very low. But although the winters were much colder than today, some of the summers could have been quite hot.’

  Whereas Aurignacian sites often occupied higher ground, the Gravettian sites of Austria, Moravia and southern Poland are clustered along the mid-slopes of river valleys. The hilltops would have been too cold. The large mammals hunted by the Gravettians would have passed through the valleys, and so the camps were well positioned to intercept the herds.1

  ‘We can imagine a forested landscape below, and the slopes covered by steppe, but again with some conifers. The sites control the valley, and the game was in that valley. This is the place where we can imagine mammoth herds.’

  These Gravettian sites seemed to represent more than just temporary hunting camps: they appear to have been occupied through the year. The intensity of the occupation layers, the richness of artefacts – including things which were both delicate and time-consuming to make, the stability of the house structures – all point to a less nomadic and more sedentary existence.

  ‘These big sites were almost long-term settlements,’ explained Jiri, as we stood looking down over the vineyard and the gently rolling ridges. ‘But at the same time people were quite mobile. So probably they combined the two: some people stayed at the campsite – here – and others went off to find raw materials and to hunt.’

  It reminded me of the Evenki, with their villages and satellite hunting camps.

  ‘It always depends on local conditions,’ said Jiri. ‘Because normally, of course, hunter-gatherers are mobile people, but there were time periods and specific environments and strategies that enabled more sedentary ways of life.’

  The new culture that swept across Europe seems indeed to have been a movement of people and genes – and not just ideas (see map on page 207). Analysis of European mtDNA has revealed two lineages: the haplogroup H (the most common in Europe) and pre-V, which appear to have originated in the east, around the Caucasus Mountains, between the Black and the Caspian seas, and spread across Europe between 30,000 and 20,000 years ago.11,12,13

  But just as this second wave of Europeans spread from east to west, Europe was becoming colder. As the LGM approached and the ice sheets descended, northern Europe – as well as northern Siberia – was all but abandoned. Even the cold-adapted, fur-clad, reindeer-hunting Gravettians couldn’t survive in those truly Arctic conditions. Archaeology and genetics – European mtDNA and Y chromosome lineages – record the contraction of the population into refugia in the south-west corner of Europe.

  Sheltering from the Cold: Abri Castanet, France

  So it was that I made my way to south-west Europe – to the Périgord region, practically synonymous with the Dordogne département, whose caves and rockshelters contain an incredible record of Ice Age life.

  Heading north from Toulouse, I drove through up through wooded gorges so typical of the Dordogne, where the large rivers running west from the Massif Central to the Atlantic have etched the limestone bedrock. I eventually hit the Vézère Valley and followed it west, reaching the town of Les Eyzies, famous for its many rockshelters. The valley was wide and plunging, framed by limestone cliffs which were incised with a deep, horizontal groove. These grooves in the cliffs – high enough to stand up in – were used as rockshelters by modern humans, or, as these ancestors are known in France, in honour of the first fossil found, Cro-Magnon man.

  I continued along the Vézère Valley, through the small hamlet of Le Moustier – famous as the place where Mousterian tools were first discovered, though in my journey I had now left the Neanderthals behind. Turning off the main river valley and following a road leading up one of its tributaries, through the village of Sergeac, and into a narrow wooded valley, the Vallon de Castel-Merle, I eventually reached the site of Abri (rockshelter) Castanet. As I pulled up, American archaeologist Randall White emerged to greet me.

  ‘When does the occupation here date to?’ I asked him.

  ‘We have good radiocarbon dates of 33,000 years ago,’ Randall replied.

  As an early Aurignacian site, Abri Castanet represents evidence of that first wave of modern human colonisers into western France. At that time, during the Würm interstadial of 40,000 to 30,000 years ago, the climate would certainly have been cold, though not fully glacial.1 During early Aurignacian times, the valleys of the Vézère and its tributaries would have been covered in grassy steppe, with woodland on south-facing slopes and in sheltered valleys.

  ‘We know the people were living here at Castanet in mid-winter,’ said Randall, ‘when it was probably about 35 degrees below zero outside.’

  That sounded cold enough – almost as cold as it had been in Olenek – but Randall thought that people would have been able to keep warm in the deep rockshelters.

  ‘There are holes in the rock where we think they were running lines to drop animal skins down to close off the interior space,’ explained Randall. ‘And then are fireplaces inside. I think they’re making their world a fairly comfortable place.’

  A team of American students were busy trowelling away in the rockshelter. They had come down into the Ice Age floor surface, where, among natural stones pressed into the ground, there were stone tools and flakes lying around. There was a dense black layer in one part of the rockshelter – the remains of an ancient hearth. As sediment was excavated, it was bagged up and carefully wet-sieved. The sievings were retained and dried, then Randall and his team painstakingly picked through the material, looking for minute fragments of flint and bone. There were clues here as to how the Aurignacians had survived the long, hard winters.

  ‘The bottoms of our sieves are absolutely full of burned animal bone. A large percentage of the animal bone they’re bringing in from hunting is being consumed as fuel,’ explained Randall. But bone fires would not have been straightforward. ‘Bone is a terribly difficult thing to burn. There’s relatively little wood charcoal here, but they seem to be adding wood to bone fires to keep the temperature above a certain threshold. It must have been a constant focus of their attention, keeping these fires going. They’re collecting dung for fuel as well. We take fire and heat for granted, but I don’t think they did at all.

  ‘This was a very diverse environment,’ Randall told me. ‘Reindeer dominate at Castanet, but we have the remains of nine large herbivore species as well as a lot of birds and some fish. This was a pretty good environment for hunters and gatherers, even though it was cold.’
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br />   The fauna roaming this landscape would have included reindeer, horse, bison, ibex, as well as animals more suited to forest environments, like boar, roe and red deer.2

  Excavations at Abri Castanet had also turned up hundreds of stone beads. Most of the beads from Castanet were quite tiny, the majority less than half a centimetre across. They were shaped like tiny baskets, and had been carved out of soapstone. Without wet-sieving of the sediments from the rockshelter, to wash out the dirt from the holes in the beads, they would just have looked like tiny stones and could easily have been disregarded.

  ‘It’s interesting to imagine people here, in winter, making all these thousands of beads. Probably done around these fireplaces, like the way we do embroidery or knitting, like a craft. It occupied time on those long nights,’ mused Randall.

  Like Nick Conard, Randall White was interested in what we could learn about Ice Age society from its art and ornaments – in fact, particularly from personal ornaments, which he believed were much more than just trinkets: to him they were important representations of belief, values and social identity.3 While many facets of personal adornment – clothing, body painting and organic ornaments – don’t usually survive in the archaeological record, those little stone beads had stood the test of time at Abri Castanet.

  Randall and his team had discovered beads in various stages of manufacture, so it had been possible to work out how the beads had been made: starting with a rod of stone, which was then scratched round and round until a bead blank could be snapped off. The blank would be thinned and flattened at one end, then pierced by gouging on both sides, and finally trimmed down into the classic basket shape. Although made of soapstone, the method – of taking a baton and dividing it into blanks, then gouging out perforations – was similar to that in German Aurignacian sites, like Geissenklösterle, where ivory beads had been made.4,3 The beads had also been polished to a high lustre. Thousands of years before metals were discovered, these people were clearly after the same qualities we enjoy in jewellery today.