by Karin Bojs
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Very close to the grave of the Kostenki-14 man, in layers dating back to the same period, archaeologists have found needles along with a number of objects typical of the Aurignacian culture. There are tools made of bone and antler, and stones taken from rocky outcrops 1,500 kilometres (930 miles) away.
In addition, the Aurignacians of Kostenki made jewellery using the canine teeth of Arctic foxes and shells all the way from the Black Sea, 500 kilometres (310 miles) to the south. They also fashioned tubular beads with grooved spiral patterns out of the bones of foxes and birds.
Similar beads have been found throughout the region that has yielded Aurignacian finds. The site excavated at Abri Castanet in the French Dordogne was nothing less than a factory, where people mass-produced beads from mammoth tusks, reindeer antlers – and soapstone. Since that type of stone did not occur locally, they must have brought it from the Pyrenees, several dozen kilometres further south. The people in the hills of the Dordogne also adorned themselves with shells from both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic seaboard. Either they covered the whole distance on foot – up to 200 kilometres (125 miles) – or else they had extensive networks enabling them to barter goods with other groups.
The Aurignacians probably travelled from the Middle East through the region that is now Turkey. In any event, they travelled westward along the Danube just over 43,000 years ago. We can set aside the question of whether they had flutes and art objects made of ivory among their scant possessions, though I believe that to be the case. It is clear that their garments were embellished with various adornments.
Yet there were also anatomically modern humans – people like us – in Europe at an even earlier period. The very oldest remains at Kostenki are assumed to be of Neanderthal origin. But the objects dating from 45,000 years ago – and earlier – appear to come from modern humans. In other words, those layers are significantly older than both the Kostenki-14 man and all the finds ascribed to the Aurignacian culture.
Stone tools of at least equal antiquity – apparently produced by modern humans – have been discovered at a number of sites in Hungary and the Czech Republic. It would seem that small groups of our type of humans made incursions into Europe at a very early stage, perhaps starting even earlier than 50,000 years ago. But these early pioneers did not survive. It was not until the Aurignacians that Europe acquired a viable population of modern humans.
There are also a number of finds from Italy and Greece that are now generally attributed to modern humans. The culture to which they belong, known as the Uluzzian, was discovered in the 1960s. For many years the view prevailed that these tools and adornments belonged to a group of unusually sophisticated Neanderthals. The stone tools appear to show a curious blend of the Neanderthals’ production methods and those of modern humans. These finds also include shells and teeth perforated for use as pendants, remnants of red ochre, and tools made of bone. Just a few years ago, Italian researchers analysed two milk teeth from Italy’s Grotta del Cavallo. The shape of these teeth has now convinced many – though not all – experts that they in fact belonged to an anatomically modern human. The debate continues; there are no DNA analyses.
All traces of the Uluzzians came to an end around 39,300 years ago. There is most probably a connection with the major volcanic eruption that took place at that time, very close by. But before the Uluzzians disappeared, they managed to have a decisive impact on their surroundings. They – or other pioneering groups of modern humans – introduced new customs into Europe.
The Neanderthals were not slow to copy them. There was another noteworthy culture in western Europe that appears to be a hybrid between the respective cultures of the Neanderthals and modern humans. Known as the Châtelperronian, it has been identified in northern Spain and south-west France. The people belonging to this culture seem to have buried their dead on occasion, if only in a simple way, and they seem to have used personal adornments, arrows and, to some extent, coloured pigments.
Researchers have argued a great deal about who lay behind the Châtelperronian culture, but now, thanks to new and more sophisticated methods of radiocarbon dating, a picture is finally beginning to emerge. Everything suggests that the Châtelperronians were Neanderthals who imitated modern humans. Inspired by new arrivals in the region, they began to use personal adornments, make-up and spears.
The new and more precise radiocarbon dating was carried out at Oxford University under the leadership of Tom Higham. It suggests that all the Neanderthals of Europe disappeared at least 39,000 years ago; at any rate, there is no definite evidence of Neanderthals that is any more recent than that. But the new results of dating also show that Neanderthals and modern humans must have coexisted in Europe for thousands of years. That means there was ample time for the Neanderthals to acquire innovations from modern humans.
As we have seen, Jean-Jacques Hublin, the palaeontologist from Leipzig, is convinced that the two groups were suspicious of one another and that they kept their distance as much as possible. But he also suggests that they would sometimes have observed each other at arm’s length. This would have enabled the Neanderthals to see that the modern humans used spears, which they threw at their quarry – a brilliant invention that made hunting both safer and more effective. The older method was to run after your prey and spear it directly, a technique that Neanderthals had used for several hundreds of thousands of years. It meant risking your life, of course, but they had no better method.
The Châtelperronian finds show that they suddenly started to produce spears at the very time when modern human beings first arrived in Europe. Neanderthals’ spears were very similar to those of modern humans and could be used in exactly the same way, but the two groups made their stone tools in slightly different ways. This fact strengthens Hublin in his conviction that the Neanderthals copied modern humans at a distance. In his view, there was no question of the two groups fraternising with each other. He may, however, be able to concede that they bartered with each other on rare occasions. That would explain why the layers with Neanderthal artefacts contain beads similar to those of modern humans.
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The new ways adopted by the Neanderthals may have enabled them to survive for slightly longer; nonetheless, their downfall was a foregone conclusion once humans of our type began to take over Europe.
One of many attempts to account for the fact that we survived and they died out is based on the claim that we modern humans were supposedly less finicky about food. It was claimed that we were better at eating vegetables, such as roots rich in starch. But new research, including that of Amanda Henry at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, puts paid to that explanation. Having studied microscopic deposits on fossil teeth, she can bear witness to the fact that the Neanderthals also consumed a great deal of plant starch – so it is false to claim that they were very one-sided carnivores and died out for that reason.
On the other hand, we may have been better at catching fish and small, fast-moving animals such as hares and birds. It is conceivable that we were more skilled at making fishing nets out of plant fibres. Being able to fish and hunt using such nets was a major advantage. Firstly, it meant there was a more varied basis for people’s diet, which was thus more reliable. If there were no big animals to hunt, they could always go down to the river and catch a few fish. Secondly, it meant more members of the group could contribute their labour. Hunting large mammals could often be dangerous and physically demanding; only strong, healthy people could manage it. But laying and emptying fishing nets and traps was feasible even for weaker, older and disabled people. The art of fishing and hunting hares and birds may well have played a decisive role in securing our survival in Europe.
Maybe we outcompeted the Neanderthals by having more effective hunting methods. Maybe we simply killed them whenever the opportunity presented itself. I think Hublin is right in ascribing limited significance to climate change and sewing needles, but all the more to language, art, music and more ex
tensive social networks.
However, the fact that the Neanderthals were already subject to severe pressures in the late Ice Age, before we arrived, must have simplified matters. A number of DNA studies show that some of them were very inbred towards the end. A Neanderthal boy in the Denisova cave in southern Siberia had so little genetic variation that his parents must have been half-siblings or the equivalent, while their parents were themselves the result of many generations of inbreeding within a small, restricted group. A Swedish study shows that towards the end there can only have been a few thousand Neanderthals in the whole of Europe. Their population dwindled rapidly about 50,000 years ago, as can be seen from the fact that their DNA became less and less varied.
The arrival of modern humans, the period of cold and the volcanic eruption in Italy would thus have sounded the death knell for a group that was already extremely vulnerable.
In the past, some researchers insisted that the Neanderthals had ample intellectual capacity to develop their new culture in a wholly independent way. But such arguments are heard less and less these days. It is abundantly clear that the Neanderthals lived in Europe in very much the same way for several hundred millennia, but then suddenly changed their way of life as soon as humans like us turned up.
In her bestselling novels, Jean M. Auel describes how Ayla, a Stone Age girl belonging to a group of modern humans, grows up among Neanderthals. We cannot rule out the possibility that something like that may have happened in real life. There may have been individuals who moved between the two groups, bringing knowledge and traditions with them. After all, the genetic evidence shows that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred in the Middle East.
They also had hybrid offspring in Europe. For a long time, a number of anthropologists have claimed that certain excavated skeletons show clear anatomical features from both Neanderthals and modern humans. For instance, there are the two finds from the Peştera cu Oase cave in Romania: the cranium of a 15-year-old and the lower jaw of an adult. The latter specimen has been radiocarbon-dated, and its owner is estimated to have lived about 40,000 years ago.
In the spring of 2015, Svante Pääbo and his colleagues managed to prove that the lower jaw really does have a significant proportion of Neanderthal DNA – between 5 and 11 per cent of the genetic material. And the Neanderthal input had clearly come a mere four or five generations ago, as the pieces of DNA are in such long, unmixed sequences. That implies that the great-great-grandfather of the individual from Peştera cu Oase – or a relative at a similar distance in the ascending line – was a Neanderthal.
But people living in present-day Europe have no trace of this in our genetic material. In other words, when modern humans in Europe interbred with Neanderthals, their descendants must have died out. Researchers can only see definite traces of interbreeding somewhere in the Middle East about 54,000 years ago, and further east in Asia.
Neanderthals had bigger brains than ours, and they were by no means stupid. They were skilled hunters, and as regards dexterity they could give us a run for our money in many respects. Their stone tools were symmetrical and functional, and I have heard many archaeologists say how very difficult it is to learn how to make such tools. Clearly the Neanderthals also had the capacity to develop their technology, even if they did so by copying us.
But there is no credible evidence today to suggest that they made any use of art or musical instruments. They were probably unable to think in symbols to the same extent as we can. It is very clear that they had a feeling for symmetry, but not for what we consider to be aesthetics and art.
I had a eureka moment when I heard Jean-Jacques Hublin mention the difference between symmetry and aesthetics. I thought of the time when I used to work in a cake shop as a teenager and learned how to decorate cakes and gateaux. Nearly all beginners make the same mistake: they try to make the patterns completely symmetrical. Once I had plucked up the courage to get away from symmetry, the gateaux I decorated looked a lot more attractive. Defying symmetry – just suppose that is one of the keys to what is uniquely human?
Like Hublin, I believe we modern humans bore some of the responsibility for the demise of the Neanderthals. We can reflect on the moral guilt that that might imply, even if it has – hopefully – passed the statute of limitations by now. After all, the Neanderthals were a kind of human being, even if they were not quite like us. Is their disappearance comparable with driving a species of animal to extinction? Or would it be more accurate to regard it as genocide?
Whatever the conclusion, we should be very careful not to look down on the Neanderthals. They managed to inhabit Europe for much longer than we have done so far. They were here for at least a few hundred millennia; indeed, if you also count their forerunners – sometimes called Homo heidelbergensis – for over 400,000 years.
The Aurignacian culture dominated Europe for about 10,000 years. It, too, lasted for much longer than any realm we know of from historical time. But then a new wave of migrants arrived on the scene.
Chapter Five
Mammoths in Brno
The Czech city of Brno is classic ground for anyone with an interest in genetics. I have been here once before to write about the monk Gregor Mendel. It was he who showed in the 1860s that hereditary traits are passed on in discrete units, which we today know as genes. The monastery where Mendel worked still exists, having been refurbished after years of decline during the communist era. Monasteries were less than popular at that time. Biology, too, was regarded with great suspicion – particularly when Joseph Stalin held sway in the Soviet Union. Genetics was a particular taboo, held to be bourgeois and counter-revolutionary.
Now I am in Brno for the second time, I take the opportunity to have another look at the Augustinian monastery and museum that present Mendel’s life and work. The curly tendrils of a few pea plants in bloom are to be seen outside the entrance. Peas were the plants Mendel focused on, being easy and practical to work with. Cultivation was followed by calculation, time and again: yellow peas, green peas, red flowers, white flowers, tall plants, short plants, and so on. On the basis of seven characteristics he identified in peas, Mendel formulated the laws of heredity and described dominant and recessive traits.
It took over 40 years for Mendel’s findings to reach the world outside Brno. But once they started to be applied, they revolutionised the breeding of plants and domestic animals, and virtually the whole of biology. Unfortunately, his findings have also been misinterpreted. Today we know that heredity rarely works as simply as with Mendel’s green and yellow peas. Most characteristics are considerably more complex; they are affected by many different genes, as well as by environmental factors.
After visiting the Mendel Museum, I take the tram a few stops further on. This time, I’ve come to Brno to learn more about the great European Ice Age culture that followed the Aurignacian culture, known as the Gravettian.
Outside the city are a number of Europe’s most important Ice Age sites, the most famous of which is Dolní Věstonice. Many of the finds from these sites are on display at the Anthropos Pavilion on the outskirts of Brno. On the tram, I attempt to communicate with a group of Czech ladies in late middle age, to find out where I need to get off. English doesn’t work, so I resort to my extremely basic Russian. When they finally grasp what it is I want to know, they exclaim, ‘Aha! Mamut!’ One of them gets off at the same stop, not because she herself has any business there, but just to point me in the right direction. On arrival, I see what they were referring to. A gigantic woolly mammoth dominates the museum, two storeys high. The calf alongside the full-grown mammoth is nearly the size of a cow.
In the upper level I view the famous triple grave of three young people, all of whom died in their teens or twenties. In the middle lies a crippled woman whose skeleton displays apparently congenital deformities. She is on her back, with a man on either side of her. One of them lies face down next to the woman, his arm entwined with hers. The other is a little further away, but his han
d is outstretched over the woman’s pubis. Their heads are sprinkled with ochre, as is the woman’s crotch and the man’s hand.
Two of these individuals can be described as my relatives. Their mitochondrial DNA belongs to group U5, just like mine. But their U5 is a very early variant that does not correspond to any that exists today. The third individual – the one whose hand rests on the woman’s pubic area – belongs to group U8.
One interpretation is that the man and the woman belonging to group U5 are siblings, while the man from group U8 is the woman’s partner. Brother and sister lie alongside one another, their arms entwined. The woman’s partner lies a little further away, but his hand rests on her genital area. Their position in the grave reflects their relationship in life.
The young people in the triple grave lived approximately 31,000 years ago. But the oldest finds at Dolní Věstonice go back all of 34,000 years, according to the most recent datings. All of them have been assigned to the Gravettian culture. The tools and art objects of the Aurignacian and Gravettian cultures differ quite markedly.
At one of the city’s universities I meet Jiří Svoboda, the Brno archaeologist in charge of the excavations at Dolní Věstonice. A quiet man in his sixties, he is among Europe’s most respected archaeologists. Svoboda is convinced that the Aurignacian and Gravettian cultures represent two distinct waves of migration into Europe. The appearance of the artefacts indicates that the people of the Gravettian came from the south, from the Middle East and Mediterranean coastal areas.