‘Yes, it is a natural temple. About 10 per cent of the caves in this area have painting in them, and, usually, it is the largest caves which have been chosen. So these paintings have been made for religious reasons, if you like. These are sacred sites, and they are not painting here just for fun.’
We turned a corner and the walls were covered – wherever there was a flattish space – with line drawings of animals: elk, horses and ibex.
Lorblanchet gestured around him.
‘Animals everywhere … because these people were, of course, hunters and gatherers, so they painted their world around them, and the animal world. And for them, the animals were not only game, but also spirits.’
At the back of the cave there was a small image of a man – lying stretched out, with what looked like spears stuck into him. This was an unusual theme. I felt as though I was looking at an illustration of a myth that has long since lost its meaning. There were also abstract shapes that could be seen as the head and shoulders of humans, or perhaps as vulvas. These were ancient drawings, dating to before the LGM.
‘We know now, after studying this cave for years and years, that Cougnac was used intensively during the Gravettian,’ said Monsieur Lorblanchet, ‘then the cave was forgotten. But then it was rediscovered by Magdalenian people, and the cave again was a sanctuary. There is a gap of 10,000 years between the oldest paintings and the most recent painting in Cougnac.’
Around the earlier paintings there were finger-daubed spots of paint, often double, and around some a mist of applied red ochre. And these had been dated much later, to around 20,000 years ago, the Magdalenian period. Monsieur Lorblanchet mused about the original meaning of these paintings, and the meaning to the later artists. Did they imagine these images had been created by their ancestors or by ancient spirits? From archaeology carried out in the cave, there seemed to have been a large patch of red ochre on the floor at the entrance to the main chamber – Lorblanchet imagined the later, Magdalenian visitors dipping their fingers in the pigment and touching the walls around the ancient symbols.
For Lorblanchet, the next, modern rediscovery of the paintings meant that they were once again being incorporated into a belief system, as we tried to understand what they meant to our ancestors, and gazed at, analysed, replicated and reproduced the ancient images. It is interesting to think about these artistic creations as still conveying information, communicating messages within complex social networks. How many people around the world today have seen those images and gone home with the postcards?
It is also rather wonderful to think of those hunter-gatherers, those ancient Europeans, who, even as the climate chilled around them, carried on making art. During the icy grip of the LGM, it was somehow still important to decorate spear-throwers, carve mammoth-ivory animals – and paint caves. The Solutrean is marked out not only by a change in hunting technology, but by a flowering of art and ornamentation. Although making art doesn’t seem to be immediately relevant to survival in an increasingly hostile environment, many archaeologists believe that the painted caves tell us something very important about Ice Age society: that the proliferation of art indicates an increasing complexity of social networks. So – and perhaps even more tellingly than a new style of stone point – the cave art represents a social and cultural adaptation to survival in extreme environments.2
Perhaps these ‘cave art sanctuaries’ were landmarks in the Ice Age landscape, marking out territories for particular groups, and maybe they were places where people aggregated and which confirmed a feeling of group identity.4
‘These people were nomads, of course,’ said Lorblanchet, ‘but they had a territory. And by painting a cave it is a way for them to say, here is our sacred place, here are our gods, our belief, we are here. Like the church today is in the middle of the village, the painted cave was in the centre of the tribal territory.’
Meeting up of local bands – to exchange materials, plan collective hunts or hold ceremonies, perhaps – would have provided opportunities for the exchange of information important to long-term survival. Information could also be passed down the generations. Many archaeologists view the cave art as part of an ‘information system’ – very similar to the place of rock art in Australian Aboriginal culture. ‘Information system’ is little more than a very dry term for what is, essentially, storytelling. Stories could contain useful information – about the landscape, animals or society – extending human experience beyond a single lifetime. Maybe images, like those spotted horses at Pech Merle, were used to illustrate tales. For the hunter-gatherers packed into that corner of Ice Age Europe, on the edge, art and storytelling may have been crucial to survival.3,4
Lorblanchet also thought that paintings contained an expression of identity that we could still understand.
‘I also believe, by their painting, they show that they were exactly the same as us, you know,’ he said. ‘They are good artists, excellent. They had the feeling, the sense of artistic beauty. And by this act of painting in caves they also expressed themselves as different from the neighbours. The neighbours who were the Neanderthal people.’
We can’t leave our ancestors, struggling to survive the wintry chill of the LGM, without looking at them a little closer. Compared with the brown-skinned ancestors of all the Out-of-Africa lineages, it seems that Europeans were getting paler, with a handful of mutated genes reducing melanin production in skin cells. One gene, imaginatively called SLC24A5, appears to be responsible for around 30 per cent of the skin colour difference between indigenous Europeans and Africans.5
Northern and eastern Europeans are incredibly diverse in appearance, in the variety of hair and eye colours in particular. Hair can be black, brown, pale blond, yellow-blond, or red. Eyes may be brown, hazel, blue or green. Some have suggested that this great variability in coloration is random: a product of genetic drift, perhaps, or the result of relaxed reduced selection pressure for dark skin (along with hair and eyes), as populations spread north, leaving other ‘colour genes’ free to vary. But there is an interesting theory that all this diversity is due to sexual selection. What if the harshest years of the LGM meant that many young men died while hunting, leaving women outnumbering men? Polygyny might be one solution, but it would have been difficult to provide food for a harem. So competition for men may have been fierce. In that competition, something that made a woman stand out from the crowd – a strikingly different hair or eye colour, perhaps – could make the difference to whether or not she managed to pass her genes on.6 It’s a fascinating theory, but ultimately impossible to test, and doesn’t explain why coloration should have become so diverse in Europe and not elsewhere.
Archaeology and genes tell us how, after the LGM, humans re-expanded across Europe, from their principal Ice Age refugium in Iberia.7,8,9,10 The changing climate was once again matched by a change in technology. The new European industries – the Magdalenian and Epigravettian – were hugely variable, but there was a general explosion in the use of antler as a material for producing tools, and the harpoon was invented.2 Tiny bone points were fitted into antler and wooden spear points.
At 16,000 years ago, populations are re-established north of the Loire, and by 13,000 years ago Britain was reoccupied. The human recolonisation of Europe was part of a general faunal expansion northwards, but some animals were missing from the post-glacial landscape: whether because of climate, hunting or both, there were no more mammoths or woolly rhinos.
Technologies continued to evolve in the late Pleistocene, and by 11,000 years ago the first definite evidence of the bow and arrow appears. The replacement of steppe-tundra with woodland meant that the large herds of horse, bison, saiga, and that ‘Ice Age larder-on-the-hoof’, reindeer, disappeared.2 It seems quite counter-intuitive that the warming of Europe actually created a significant challenge to its human (and animal) inhabitants, but the altered environment required the invention of new ways of living off the landscape. The trend towards intensified subsistence that began in
the run-up to the LGM continued, with even more hunting and trapping of small animals and birds, fishing, and gathering of molluscs. Ice Age technology was gradually replaced by Mesolithic tools: bows for hunting, reaping knives and axes for felling trees, as the Europeans adapted to newly wooded landscapes, as well as to estuarine and coastal environments. Europe became populated more widely and more densely than ever before, and quite soon an innovation from the Middle East would allow even greater population numbers to be sustained on the landscape.2
New Age Mesopotamia: Göbekli Tepe, Turkey
The end of my European journey would take me back to where I had started, to Turkey, and to the most spectacular archaeological site I have ever seen.
I travelled down the south-east of Turkey, about thirty miles north of the Syrian border, to the ancient town of Sanli Urfa. I was in Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. In Urfa, modern buildings clustered around Roman ruins on the slopes, but I was after much more ancient archaeology.
I travelled for around an hour, west of Urfa, then turned off the main road on to a dusty track, which wound up through a rocky valley and on to a limestone escarpment. Eventually, the track ran out and I found myself at the bottom of a conical hill, with a site hut and an empty tent. As I walked up the hill, German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt came halfway down to meet me.
‘This hill is not made by nature,’ Klaus explained as we walked up it. ‘It’s a tell, a man-made mound created by the ruins of these Stone Age structures. It reaches up about fifteen metres above the natural limestone plateau. I was suspicious when I first saw this site: no force of nature could make such a mound of earth in this location.’
Klaus had discovered this site while surveying the area for potential Palaeolithic sites in 1994. Local farmers had been turning up masses of stone tools in the fields on and around the hill, and occasionally hitting very large stones with their ploughs. Archaeologists had got wind of this before, but assumed that the stones were the remains of a medieval cemetery. But when Klaus investigated, he found finely worked blades, and large, rectangular stones buried in the ground – and so large that they could not be moved or lifted. When he started excavating the site in 1995, he found that these stones were something truly remarkable. They were just the tops of great, T-shaped standing stones. Some were more than two metres high, and, as the archaeologists dug deeper, they found that the stones were arranged in a circle, with two larger standing stones in the centre of the ring. But there wasn’t just one stone circle at Göbekli Tepe: Klaus had excavated four so far, and from geophysical surveys of the hill he supposed that there might be twenty to twenty-five of them, still buried in the rubble of the hill.
Klaus led me to the top of the hill and showed me a stone circle. I was bowled over by it. Archaeologists were busy with a small crane, moving a large fragment of one standing stone from where it had fallen. There was an engraved figure of a person on the narrow outer side of one of the standing stones, at the edge of the circle. There were other stone walls at the top of the hill, which Klaus thought might have enclosed smaller sanctuaries. Rather strangely, there was no sign of habitation, such as hearths, up on the hill: it appeared to have been exclusively a sacred site rather than a settlement.
As we walked down the other side of the hill, I suddenly saw more stone circles, even more impressive than the first one at the top of the hill. The circles were wider and the standing stones taller – and more elaborately decorated. On the sides of the stones there were beautiful, low-relief carvings of foxes, boar, birds, scorpions and spiders. On the inner edge of one stone there was a full-relief, 3D carving of an animal, perhaps a dog or a wolf. It had been carved from the stone in one piece. While I was there, Turkish archaeologists uncovered an animal head sticking out, gargoyle-like, with formidable fangs, from the wall enclosing one of the stone circles.
There seemed to be several phases of building at Göbekli Tepe. The lower, older and more impressive stone circles appeared originally to have been put up as just that: a ring of large standing stones. Then stone walls had been added, creating inner and outer circles. In some places, there were slabs laid on the standing stones as though the ring had originally been covered with a corbelled roof.
The architecture and stone sculpture at Göbekli Tepe is remarkable. But what made it even more arresting was the date. ‘It’s been here, buried in this hill, for 12,000 years,’ said Klaus.
So Göbekli Tepe appeared to be a temple site – built by hunter-gatherers. It challenged paradigms of the origins of the Neolithic. Based on previous evidence, archaeologists have suggested that the emergence of the Neolithic involved a sequence of developments that goes something like this: population pressure led to increased need for food, led to the adoption of agriculture, led to stratified societies and new power structures, led to organised religion. What Göbekli Tepe seemed to show, though, was a complex, hierarchical society – where stonemasons could be tasked with building temples – and organised religion, in the context of a hunter-gatherer society.
It’s difficult to know how to categorise Göbekli Tepe. As a site representing something somewhere between the Upper Palaeolithic and the Neolithic, Klaus thought that perhaps the best label would be ‘Mesolithic’, but then this would have been a very different Mesolithic from the nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle, further north in Europe. Having said that, the stone toolkit at Göbekli Tepe was similar to some of the tanged point cultures of central Europe, in the late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic. But other archaeologists, too, talk about a transition straight from the hunter-gathering Palaeolithic to the agricultural Neolithic in the Levant, missing out the Mesolithic. The first step towards this new way of life began around 14,500 years ago, with the appearance of the Natufian culture in the Levant.1 Hunter-gatherers began to do a new thing: they settled down in villages, in which they stayed all year round. At this point, the development of agriculture seems almost inevitable. The appearance of grinding stones, mortars and pestles at archaeological sites suggests that wild cereals were important in the Natufian diet. There are also dog burials from this time: it seems that man’s best friend had arrived.1
Klaus suggested that this may have been because gazelle hunters in Turkey required similar technology to the reindeer hunters further north, but also that perhaps there was some kind of connection or communication between the societies of Turkey and those around the Black Sea and the Crimea. However, the complex society and ritual suggested by the stone-circle temples was something else entirely. There was nothing even vaguely like it in Europe – with this scale of monumental architecture – until well into the Neolithic. So, instead, then, Göbekli Tepe is called ‘early Neolithic’, with the implicit understanding that many of the classic features of the Neolithic, like pottery – and in particular, farming – were yet to come.
What sort of rituals were taking place at Göbekli Tepe? The symbolism there seemed to be dominated by animals: snakes were the most common, sometimes appearing singly, or stacked up like waves. Wild boar and foxes are also common motifs, along with leopard-like creatures and stylised aurochs heads. Birds were also depicted: perhaps geese or ducks. The images didn’t seem to relate directly to animals that were being hunted, as boar and snake bones are very rare in the rubbly backfill at Göbekli Tepe. Gazelles were an important food animal, but only one carving of a gazelle has been found at the site so far. This is a bit like the Ice Age caves of France, where one of the most commonly hunted animals, reindeer, is rarely depicted.2 Perhaps the various animals represented different ‘clans’ that came to the temples?
Weirdly, the large T-shaped standing stones appeared to have arms, bent at the elbows, with hands clasped at the front. They had no faces, no eyes, nose or mouth, but Klaus thought the stones represented immense, abstract human figures.
‘Who are these beings made of stone?’ he asked, rhetorically. ‘They are the first deities depicted in history.’
He suggested that the animal motifs carve
d into the sides of these giant ‘figures’ might be guardians or protectors of the megaliths, but in some cases carefully grouped animals suggested that their meaning went further: perhaps they were representing stories or myths.2
‘Maybe these are pre-hieroglyphic messages,’ Klaus suggested.
Where the sex of the animals could be discerned, they always appeared to be male, and a small ‘ithyphallic’ figure with an out-of-proportion semi-erect penis had also been discovered at the site. This was very different from the famous, much later site of Çatal Hüyük in Turkey, where female imagery was common – although inside houses rather than temples. Çatal Hüyük also contained many depictions of vultures, which seemed to be associated with death. There were no pictures of vultures at Göbekli Tepe – but there were many snakes, and objects decorated with snakes have been found among grave goods at other sites of almost the same age.2 To Klaus, the predominance of ‘aggressive’ animals, snakes, and absence of female/fertility symbols suggested that Göbekli Tepe might be a burial site – or at least a place dedicated to a cult of the dead.
The monumental architecture and the clustering of the stone circles certainly seemed similar to complexes of burial mounds found in the (much later) megalithic cultures of Neolithic Brittany and the UK. But Klaus hadn’t, as yet, found any evidence of burials at the site. He was just about to excavate part of one of the higher stone circles where he thought that a large, flat stone might just be covering a burial.
Klaus’s team had also found large quantities of stone tools in various stages of production, including nodules, half- and fully-prepared cores, and blades. Evidence of flint-working usually occurs in occupation sites, but here it was in what seemed to be a purely ritual space. Klaus thought that the flint-knapping was somehow part of the rituals that had been carried out there. But it was difficult to draw conclusions about how Göbekli Tepe fitted into the lives of the people who had constructed it, given that no settlements or any kind of camps of the same age have yet been found in the area around the hill.
The Incredible Human Journey Page 34