My European Family

by Karin Bojs

  As regards hybridisation, you could say Auel was 30 years ahead of DNA research. When she wrote the book, there was no reliable scientific evidence of any such phenomenon. There were only individual skeletons, bones and teeth, regarded by some researchers as transitional forms.

  Various other aspects of Auel’s imaginative story are clearly mistaken. For example, she depicts the modern humans of our type as being blond and light-skinned, while the Neanderthals are described as being dark. But at the time the two met, things were probably the other way round. After all, anatomically modern humans had just left Africa, while the Neanderthals had developed in Europe and parts of Asia for several hundred millennia. Light skin improves people’s chances of surviving in northerly latitudes.

  Auel’s descriptions of the Neanderthals’ sign language and rigid social system are entertaining, and many of her inter­pretations are thought-provoking. She has clearly done her homework on archaeology, anthropology and botany. But we need to remember that her books are stories, not scientific works. Most of their content is pure fantasy.

  One of the reasons why the books have sold in such enormous numbers, especially among teenagers, is the many sex scenes some of them contain. Although the descriptions are empathetic and very detailed, their tone is acceptably innocent. The name given to consensual sex is ‘Pleasures’. But Auel’s descriptions of sex acts between the heroine Ayla and the Neanderthal man are less pleasant. They involve a series of brutal rapes.

  Over the last two years, when I told friends and acquaintances about the book I was writing, the question most frequently raised was what form sexual relations would actually have taken in practice. Most of those who allow themselves to speculate suggest the answer was rape, which tends to be my personal view. But such a scenario really provokes and upsets quite a few people. Some say there is absolutely no justification for speculating about issues that science can never settle conclusively. One of my closest friends accused me of taking a negative view of humankind. ‘Maybe a Neanderthal boy and a modern girl fell in love with each other – that’s just as feasible,’ she commented.

  Or, as a young female student said to her professor: ‘If they decided to have children together, they must have known each other for quite some time.’ Like so many other people, she based her reasoning on her own views on sex and morality. The professor in question was Jean-Jacques Hublin, director of the department of human evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. He is inclined to think that the encounters between Neanderthals and modern humans were over within a few minutes; his view is that they were acting in desperation.

  Hublin’s office is one floor down from Pääbo’s, and it is also dominated by a Neanderthal. His specimen has a little more flesh on its bones; it is a white plaster bust displaying carefully reconstructed musculature. The bust was created back in the 1920s on the basis of the information then available, and in essentials it is still completely in line with the latest research.

  Looking at the jutting, broad-nosed face impressed upon me even more just what a gulf there was between the Neanderthals and us. In my introductory story about the woman in Galilee who fell pregnant, I compared Neanderthals with trolls, the creatures that populate our old folk tales. This was not because I think it particularly likely that our troll myths originated in 40,000-year-old observations from real life. Rather, an encounter with a sizeable troll is something we can more or less imagine. The Neanderthals resembled us much more closely than today’s chimpanzees do – but the difference was nonetheless considerable.

  ‘I certainly don’t think modern humans and Neanderthals got on with each other. I imagine they kept out of each other’s way as much as possible,’ says Hublin. His scientific discipline, palaeontology, involves attempting to reconstruct what happened thousands of years ago on the basis of fossil bone finds. Such research inevitably entails a degree of uncertainty. The world’s foremost palaeontologists have somewhat different views on the differences between modern humans and Neanderthals and on the forms that encounters between the two groups took. Where opinions diverge, I have taken Hublin’s line in this book. His position at the Max Planck Institute is unique. Working in close collaboration with DNA researchers, primatologists, archaeologists and anthropologists enables him to constantly update the information that can be gleaned from ancient bones.

  The most ancient finds outside Africa of what are called ‘anatomically modern humans’ were discovered in Israel and are nearly 120,000 years old. But Hublin stresses that these archaic humans had not yet really developed into people like us. Presumably they died out without leaving any descendants. It was not until about 55,000 years later that a new wave of people migrated out of Africa (or possibly from the Arabian Peninsula). This time they were almost completely modern, with all that that implies in terms of skeletal shape and abilities. Israeli researchers have found a cranium from this group of modern humans in the Manot cave in western Galilee.

  The first thing that happened when these modern humans left Africa was an encounter with Neanderthals. Neanderthal remains have been found a mere 40 kilometres (25 miles) east of the Manot cave, in the Amud cave in the hills above the Sea of Galilee.

  Hublin stresses how thinly populated both Europe and Asia were at that time. The modern humans who had just arrived were not numerous, and the Neanderthals were under heavy pressure. The two groups can hardly have intermingled at watering holes; rather, they would have observed each other at a distance. They had sexual relations on a number of occasions. A small number of hybrid children were born and survived. A little later, the Neanderthals died out.

  Hublin is convinced that they became extinct because we arrived on the scene. They died out first in the Middle East and later in the Caucasus, Siberia and Europe. We outcompeted the Neanderthals thanks to superior hunting methods and greater mobility – or we simply killed them off. Some researchers propose other possible explanations; for instance, we may have survived periods of cold and volcanic eruptions more successfully because we were better at making warm clothes out of pelts, using a needle and thread.

  In Hublin’s view, all these suggestions are excuses. The Neanderthals had survived ice ages and cold spells for hundreds of thousands of years. Sometimes their numbers fell drastically, but there was always a resurgence when the climate grew warmer – until we arrived. According to Hublin, the only reason for the alternative explanations is to avoid confronting us with the truth – that we actually wiped out an entire group of human beings. The Neanderthals had lived in Europe and Asia for several hundred thousand years. Then we came and took over. (There are at least two similar cases of eradication of other archaic humans when Homo sapiens later migrated further eastwards within Asia. Once we had arrived, both the Denisovans and the pygmy-like Homo floresiensis on the Indonesian island of Flores disappeared.)

  While individual Neanderthals were physically stronger than us, we outdid them in other areas. Presumably we had superior powers of speech, as indicated by our slightly different FOXP2 genes. Language made it easier to maintain more extensive and cohesive networks. Finds of shells and rare stones show that some modern humans belonged to networks extending over 500 kilometres (310 miles), while Neanderthals exchanged artefacts over far shorter distances.

  There are one or two finds suggesting that Neanderthals buried their dead. But chimpanzees, too, sometimes cover their dead with twigs and branches. The claim that Neanderthals laid flowers in graves, an assertion made on the basis of a find in Iraq, is hotly contested. In contrast, there is much incontrovertible evidence that modern humans went to considerable lengths to bury their dead and provide them with grave goods.

  One other major and very clear difference is that modern humans played musical instruments and produced figurative art. There are a few simple patterns of lines that may have been incised by Neanderthals in Spain and by other, even earlier archaic humans on Java. But art representing animals, people and imaginary figures emer
ged only with modern humans.

  The world’s most ancient examples of musical instruments and figurative art have been found in Europe. The fact is that my forebears – in the direct maternal line – were among the anatomically modern, musical and artistic humans who first colonised Europe. This is revealed by DNA technology.

  ***

  The year after my first meeting with Svante Pääbo, I went on a fact-finding trip to Iceland and visited deCODE Genetics in Reykjavik, where I interviewed another pioneer in DNA research, Kári Stefánsson. He was then in the process of setting up the genetic research company deCODE, based on two special sets of circumstances. Firstly, Iceland is an island where people have lived in relative isolation; secondly, many Icelanders have an interest in genealogy. Some of them can trace their ancestry as far back as the ninth century, when the island was first colonised.

  At the time we met, Kári Stefánsson was a tall, fair-haired and strikingly elegant man in his fifties. Interviewing him was a curious experience, as other journalists have reported. It is his way to start by being singularly impertinent; then, if he thinks the journalist measures up, he changes tack, becoming friendly and opening up.

  Fortunately I passed Kári Stefánsson’s test. I got to spend a long time in his office, look at the fine maritime painting on the wall and listen to his plans. He gave a demonstration of his new software program, based on the exhaustive information that he had had a number of women copy from Iceland’s church records. Tap a few keys, and you could see your own family tree unrolling centuries into the past, and study your relationship with other Icelandic families. That may sound trivial in the light of today’s technology, but it was sensational in 1998.

  DeCODE’s researchers entered the information from these family trees in combination with DNA analyses from a large number of Icelanders. At the time, there was a heated debate on Iceland about the ethical and legal rules to be applied. One of the issues discussed was to what extent deCODE should have access to biological samples from the medical sphere. The debate calmed down eventually, and the company was granted extensive rights, but new legis­lation was also adopted that imposed certain limitations. Generally speaking, ethical regulations have become more stringent in most countries since the more Wild West-like conditions under which DNA research was conducted in the 1980s and 1990s.

  Since the company’s inception, Kári Stefánsson and deCODE’s researchers have produced a great many scientific findings, particularly about certain gene variants that can increase or reduce the risk of particular diseases. In purely scientific terms, their work has been a real success story. They publish articles in major medical journals virtually every month. However, they have been less successful in business terms; though deCODE was supposed to be a commercial enterprise, it has never made a profit. In 2009 the firm went bankrupt and was taken over by interested parties from the US biotechnology sector.

  Before that happened, deCODE began to sell genetic tests to private individuals on the internet, to make some money. I bought one of the tests, which was the most comprehensive that a private individual could purchase at that time. It covered a million ‘items’ in my DNA make-up and cost about SEK 15,000 (around £1,400). My reason for spending so much money was that I was doing research for my book Vikten av gener (‘The Weight of Genes’), which came out in 2011. I wanted to know how I would react to being told my risk of developing particular diseases.

  In fact, all the medical information I received had very little impact on me. There was a slightly higher risk in some areas, and a slightly lower risk in others. For example, I have a slightly higher risk than average of developing certain types of cancer. One of them is skin cancer, which – being blonde and very fair-skinned – I could have worked out for myself.

  I was also told I have the capacity to digest lactose, which means I can drink fresh milk – a common feature among northern Europeans, but one that is unusual in many parts of the world. That was hardly news to me; I had known for a long time that I can digest milk.

  There was another piece of information that I found far more fascinating, something I could never have predicted. I discovered that I belong to haplogroup U5.

  DeCODE’s technicians had examined the DNA located in my mitochondria, the tiny structures within cells that you can only inherit from your mother, which are passed on virtually unchanged from mother to daughter over many generations. Sometimes mitochondrial DNA does undergo small changes – mutations – that make for slight variations between one individual and another. Such variations can be classified into genealogical trees. A single haplogroup corresponds to a particular branch of the tree that has a common origin. In other words, all the branches and sub-branches that share this origin have a common female ancestor. This enabled researchers back in the 1980s to trace the maternal lineage of the whole of humanity right back to our primeval foremother ‘Eve’, who lived in Africa some 200,000 years ago.

  Now I learned that I was descended from one of ‘Eve’s daughters’, who is known to researchers as U5. You might also say I am one of the daughters of ‘Ursula’, as group U5 is sometimes called. The name comes from a book published by the British geneticist Bryan Sykes in 2001 to popularise contemporary DNA research. His book was heavily criticised by other researchers even at the time of publication. There have been tremendous advances in research since then, so the book’s contents are even less valid now than they were then. But since I like the name Ursula, I’ll stick with it.

  What the researchers were able to tell me when I got my results from deCODE was that the mutations typical of U5 were already present in Europe’s early hunter population. That means that the woman we can call Ursula was an Ice Age hunter and belonged to the first people who colonised Europe.

  I told two of my relatives with the same mitochondrial DNA about my results, and straight away their imaginations began to run riot. ‘I’ve always liked to go rambling,’ said one. ‘You can tell we’re descended from hunters,’ said the other, who spends a good deal of free time hunting.

  I explained that the fact that we belong to group U5 has very little – if any – impact on the traits we display. Mitochondria account for just a few thousandths of a per cent of our DNA, and the characteristics we inherit have been diluted many, many times since our foremother Ursula made her way into Europe.

  Figure 2 U is spread by Ice Age hunters. One of the daughters of ‘Eve’ is known as U and probably lived in the Middle East. Her descendants spread throughout Ice Age Europe, and into Asia and North Africa.

  It has more to do with feelings. We can think of our mother, grandmother, our grandmother’s mother – and then imagine another thousand generations of daughters and mothers. In my case, that takes me back to the Ice Age people who played the world’s oldest known flutes, who created the famous cave paintings, developed sewing needles and domesticated dogs.

  I decided to travel and take a closer look at how my relatives lived.

  Chapter Three

  The Flute Players

  I arrived in the Swabian Jura on a sunny September day with the tree-clad slopes glowing in shades of yellow and red. My companion was a young archaeologist from the University of Tübingen.

  At the entrance to the Hohle Fels cave we also met a local guide, Rainer Blumentritt, an elderly man who had discovered one of the local caves in his youth. Ever since that time, he has followed the work of the professional archaeologists at close quarters.

  It was at just this time of year, in early autumn, that the first Europeans would have come here too. Here, in the limestone caves, they could seek shelter for the winter, and it was here that they could hunt reindeer when the animals had most meat on their bones and were migrating in great herds.

  A few steps inside the mouth of the cave lies the chamber where these people lived. It looks like a cramped space, given that there were between 20 and 30 individuals in a group. They must have been crammed in together. But the young archaeologist accompanying me points out th
at it was probably warm and cosy as well. The fact that it was cramped made it easier to retain warmth during the cold winters of the Ice Age.

  Archaeologists have dug out layer upon layer, excavating a total of several metres. They have found traces of Neanderthals right at the bottom, after which there are no human remains to be found for several centimetres. Above that are numerous traces of modern humans like you and me. The most ancient layer belongs to a culture that archaeologists know as the Aurignacian, identifiable by the way in which its people fashioned their stone tools.

  According to the most recent efforts to date such remains, the people of the Aurignacian culture arrived in central Europe some 43,500 years ago. The first traces they left are to be found in Austria, at an archaeological site called Willendorf. The oldest finds in the Swabian Jura are nearly as ancient.

  Hohle Fels is not just a small cave where people once lived. My companion has prepared me for viewing what he calls ‘the cathedral of the Ice Age’. And indeed, the inner chamber does exceed all my expectations. The mountain opens out into a vast chamber reminiscent of nothing so much as the interior of a mediaeval church. Dim lamps glow in niches along the walls. Though they are electric, I am sure the light resembles that of the torches people used during the Ice Age.

  The young researcher from Tübingen and I walk around in awe, admiring the great chamber. You can climb up onto a shelf, as if in an amphitheatre. Then – quite unexpectedly – we hear the limpid tones of a flute. The local guide has switched on a recording relayed through loudspeakers. The acoustics in the high-ceilinged chamber are extraordinary. So this was what it sounded like when my forebears held their ceremonies.

  The flute we can hear in the recording is a reconstruction fashioned out of mammoth ivory. You can still buy ivory from extinct Siberian mammoths preserved in the permafrost – and it’s completely legal.