My European Family

by Karin Bojs

  The only individual belonging to the Aurignacian culture whose DNA has been analysed is the Kostenki-14 man from Russia, who belonged to the U2 haplogroup. The three Gravettian individuals from Dolní Věstonice belong to the U5 and U8 groups. While that circumstance provides rather little DNA evidence for Svoboda’s theory of two separate migratory waves, there is no counter-evidence. He may well be right, and analyses of fossil DNA may provide more evidence in his favour in the long run.

  If the theory is correct, the Aurignacian and Gravettian cultures both originated in the Middle East some 50,000 years ago and arrived in Europe in two separate waves. The group from which both originated included ‘Ursula’, a woman from haplogroup U who became the foremother of all the individuals falling into a total of nine subgroups: U2, U4, U5, U8, and so on. People belonging to the original group in the Middle East made repeated attempts to migrate into Europe. However, just two waves of migration during the Ice Age had a permanent impact: the Aurignacian culture, which arrived here over 43,000 years ago, and the Gravettian culture, which appeared some 34,000 years ago.

  The rich finds from Dolní Věstonice provide a huge amount of information about life in central Europe between 34,000 and 20,000 years ago. The evidence shows how the people regularly returned to their settlements. Some of them may have lived permanently at Dolní Věstonice. They were highly specialised in hunting mammoths, but their diet also included hares and birds.

  There are a number of finds of personal ornaments, such as perforated foxes’ teeth and beads, but fewer than is usual in remains from the Aurignacian culture. The Gravettians seem to have focused on decorating their headgear.

  A number of art objects have been preserved. The most famous of these is the ‘Venus of Dolní Věstonice’, a large-breasted female figure made of fired clay. She is several thousand years older than the oldest ceramic vessels we know of, which were found in Japan and China.

  The people of Dolní Věstonice were nomads who had no desire to lug heavy ceramic vessels around, Svoboda explains. They cooked their food in containers made of hide, heating the water with hot stones taken from the fire. That was the Stone Age version of our kettles – and it was a surprisingly effective method.

  Instead, they used clay to make miniature figures of both animals and people, which archaeologists have discovered in large numbers. Many of them are broken, and the vestiges have been found directly next to hearths. It looks as if the inhabitants of Dolní Věstonice moulded objects out of clay, then put them on the fire before they had had time to dry out completely. That made the moisture in the clay expand, and the object explode like popcorn. We can only speculate about whether exploding clay figures were a party piece just for entertainment, or whether they were part of some rite.

  Another notable occupation in Dolní Věstonice seems to have been bashing each other over the head. It looks as if clubs or other hard objects were involved. Many skulls show signs of serious injuries, though they healed before the individuals concerned died of some other cause.

  One of the questions hotly disputed by researchers is whether the people of Dolní Věstonice kept domesticated dogs. The excavations have revealed many wolf bones, some of them from unusually small wolves. Many archaeologists interpret these small wolf skeletons as a sign that they were more probably tame dogs.

  Svoboda is diplomatic when discussing this subject. He works with a number of other researchers whose views on the matter vary considerably. However, he draws attention to a factor that may be decisive: though there are large numbers of bones from animal prey in the settlements, none of them appear to have been gnawed by dogs. What that suggests is that wolves approached human settlements because they could readily gain access to meat there. But they remained on the periphery and did not become our tame companions until later. I shall return later to the heated debate about the first dogs.

  The Venus of Dolní Věstonice is quite corpulent, as are many other female figures of which archaeologists have found fragments. They have so much subcutaneous fat that the skin on their backs falls into folds. This is something of a paradox, as bones and teeth reveal that the people of Dolní Věstonice suffered periodically from famine. Life could be hard on the plains of central Europe, with huge temperature swings. Finally, about 20,000 years ago, it grew so cold that people could no longer remain there. This was the beginning of the very coldest period of the Ice Age.

  Central Europe was no longer habitable. The mammoth hunters of Dolní Věstonice moved to regions where the climate was milder and life more bearable. As for me, I now travel down to south-west France and Spain. I have reason to believe that some of my forebears made their way to that region.

  Chapter Six

  Cro-Magnon

  I travel to Les Eyzies-de-Tayac, and find lodgings at Cro-Magnon itself. Les Eyzies lies in the hills of the Dordogne, in south-west France, a few hours’ journey east of Bordeaux by local train. For anyone interested in studying Europe’s Ice Age, this is the centre of the world. Tourists come in their hundreds of thousands to view archaeological sites, cave paintings and museums. The little village is well set up to accommodate all these Ice Age tourists.

  Everything began with Cro-Magnon. A well-to-do local farmer, Magnon by name, planned to build a road across his land to the new railway station. His labourers gathered stones for the road from a rock shelter (abri in standard French, cro in the regional dialect). Such shelters are a common geological phenomenon in these hilly limestone regions. The hillside is hollowed out by groundwater percolating through and by frost erosion, leaving a sheltered space with a natural roof.

  Several human skeletons of ancient appearance were discovered under the Cro-Magnon rock shelter. This happened in 1868, just a few years after the discovery of the Neanderthals in Germany. Charles Darwin’s work On the Origin of Species had come out recently, and a broad section of society was beginning to understand that human beings had been in existence for much longer than the 6,000 years claimed by certain Bible scholars.

  Examination revealed that the skeletons from Cro-Magnon were not Neanderthals; they were more like people living today. Europe’s first anatomically modern humans were dubbed Cro-Magnons.

  Today, the house nearest to the Cro-Magnon shelter is a guesthouse. It is built into the hillside, so some of the corridors have walls of rock. The actual site of the excavations, which now counts among the less impressive ones in Les Eyzies, is just behind the landlady’s laundry room.

  The modern menu is rather easier on the jaw than the food of the Ice Age, with café au lait and buttery croissants for breakfast. The location is just as attractive as when the first people chose to live here. You can still bask in the evening sunlight and gaze out over the river – with a refreshing glass of kir these days.

  Ice Age people often chose to live in the mouths of caves or under rock shelters facing south-west, where they were warmed by the sun and the hillside shielded them against the chill north wind. And they nearly always looked out over water.

  There is some disagreement among archaeologists about whether the people who lived at Cro-Magnon belonged to the Aurignacian or the Gravettian culture. They lived at around the time of the transition between the two, and the earliest excavations were rather chaotic. However, there are many other sites nearby where work was more systematic, enabling the viewer to trace the whole of prehistory metre by metre and layer by layer.

  Abri Pataud, just a few hundred metres from Cro-Magnon, is an example. There are traces of Neanderthals at the lowest level; then comes a level with no remains. The first modern humans, typical representatives of the Aurignacian culture, appeared about 35,000 years ago.

  Archaeologists have found bones from six individuals at Abri Pataud: two women, each with a newborn baby; a five-year-old child; and an adult male. The best-preserved skeleton is that of a woman who was in her twenties and about 1.65 metres (52∕5 feet) tall. Her jawbone shows damage resulting from a very serious dental inflammation – so serious t
hat it may have led to a painful death, if it was not childbirth that killed her. Ice Age hunters hardly ever suffered from caries – they consumed too little sugar and starch for that – but wear and tear and inflammation could cause other serious dental conditions.

  As yet, no reliable DNA analyses are available from either Cro-Magnon or Abri Pataud. One attempt was made by a German researcher called Johannes Krause, who started his investigations with the most famous skeleton of all, Cro-Magnon 1, which is kept at the Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Humankind) in Paris. Krause attempted to extract DNA from several bones, but only one of his analyses was successful. He then ran isotope tests on the bone in question. By comparing different forms of one of the elements present, nitrogen, he hoped to find out what kind of food the individual concerned had lived on.

  As we have seen, the diet of European Ice Age people contained relatively little carbohydrate, but it was rich in protein from meat and fish. Yet the bone that supposedly belonged to Cro-Magnon 1 seemed more like one from a modern vegan – or a cow fed only on grass.

  Krause then had the bone radiocarbon-dated, which revealed that it dated back only to the fourteenth century AD. The levels of nitrogen isotopes were entirely plausible for a poor individual living in the Middle Ages on a diet consisting almost exclusively of porridge, with practically no meat. The bone was rapidly removed from the collections at the Musée de l’Homme.

  The last traces of the Gravettian culture petered out some 20,000 years ago in Les Eyzies, just as elsewhere in Europe. It was followed by a culture known as the Solutrean.

  Abri Pataud and various other sites clearly show how the climate cooled down dramatically around this time. In the present day, the average temperature in Europe is about 12 degrees Celsius (54 degrees Fahrenheit). When the Ice Age was at its coldest, between 18,000 and 19,000 years ago, the average temperature was about minus four degrees (25 degrees Fahrenheit). Horses, which had previously been a common prey, became much rarer. The animals that remained were mainly reindeer, bison and a number of predators that were resistant to cold, such as Arctic foxes and wolves.

  And humans. Curiously enough, human culture blossomed – as the great museum in Les Eyzies clearly shows.

  ***

  The Musée National de Préhistoire in Les Eyzies-de-Tayac is a large, lavishly appointed museum run by the French state. It is partly built into the light-coloured limestone hillside, just like the Cro-Magnon guesthouse.

  A whole floor of the museum is given over to Ice Age tools, most of them of stone, though there are also some made of antler, bone and ivory. They are systematically arranged in the display cabinets by chronological period and culture. It is quite difficult for an amateur like me to make out the transitions between Neanderthals and modern humans, and between the Aurignacian and the Gravettian. But the transition from the Gravettian to the Solutrean, which took place around 20,000 years ago, is striking, even for the most inexpert observer.

  The tools belonging to the Solutrean culture are dramatically different and far more sophisticated. They are wafer-thin, polished, sharp and aesthetically pleasing. Some of them are so beautifully fashioned and of such exaggerated size that they can hardly have been used for practical purposes; they must have been decorative objects. The flint of which they are made is of a particularly high quality and often came from rocky outcrops 50 kilometres (30 miles) away. These tools were probably made by skilled specialists; knapping flints to fashion these willow leaf-shaped points was not a task that could be performed by just anyone.

  On the other hand, it does look as if just about everyone made their own spear-throwers out of antlers. That is apparent from their rather more amateurish shapes and the images incised in them. Spear-throwers, or atlatls, were an innovation that made it easier to hunt in the open landscape of the Ice Age. They enabled hunters to use the principle of leverage and put more power into throwing their spears.

  Sewing needles also appeared for the first time in western Europe during the Solutrean period. The museum’s display shows how they were fashioned step by step, starting with a mammoth tusk. Only in Russia have older finds emerged, as I mentioned earlier.

  People have been wearing clothes for a long time. Mark Stoneking at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig has used an unconventional method to calculate the age of clothes – analysing DNA from body lice. By comparing different species of body lice, and by making comparisons with head lice and the lice that live on chimpanzees, he has been able to estimate that the history of clothes goes back about 107,000 years. Admittedly, he gives his margin of error as several thousand years, but he is still more precise than any previous researcher has dared to be. Stoneking’s analyses of louse DNA also show that people had already begun to wear clothes in Africa.

  Archaeologists in many places have found stone scrapers that were probably used to prepare animal skins for making clothes. Even Neanderthals possessed this technology. This skill was a precondition for anyone attempting to live in any region other than the tropics. Clothes must have been absolutely essential, both in cooler parts of Africa and the Middle East, and for the first inhabitants of Europe.

  But cloaking oneself in an animal hide and piercing a few holes with an awl so as to join two pieces of hide together, forming a simple tunic, is one thing. Using needles to make anoraks with fur-lined hoods, well-fitting leggings and watertight boots is quite another.

  Needles with eyes may not sound particularly impressive to modern-day people, but during the coldest periods of the Ice Age they meant the difference between life and death. Warm, weatherproof clothes made of hide must have been absolutely vital in such a bitterly cold climate, and eyed needles facilitated the task of making them. Needles could also be used to make nets and fish traps. This made it possible to fish and hunt in a more flexible way, enabling all the members of a group to join in, regardless of their physical capabilities. Needles may well be among humankind’s most significant inventions.

  Clearly there was a technological leap forward in the development of western Europeans here in south-western Europe, at the very point when the Ice Age was at its coldest. It was Jiří Svoboda, the archaeologist from Brno, who gave me the best explanation for this. He believes that groups of people from more northerly regions of Europe were forced by the cold to move southwards. The various groups met in the new, cold and challenging environment and pooled their knowledge. This conglomeration of people with different skills became an ideal breeding ground for development and innovation.

  Genetic research supports the hypothesis that people migrated from northern Europe to warmer places of refuge during the coldest period of the Ice Age, between 25,000 and 18,000 years ago. The locations where they took refuge were in various regions of southern Europe, such as the area around the Black Sea, present-day Greece and Italy, and further east in Siberia.

  I have reason to believe that people related to me in the direct maternal line spent the coldest years of the Ice Age here, near Les Eyzies-de-Tayac in south-west France, or in northern Spain.

  The results from the Icelandic company deCODE Genetics told me that I, in common with about 1 in every 10 Europeans, belong to the U5 group. But in the summer of 2011 I got in touch with some Swedish family history researchers who had started to take an interest in the opportunities offered by DNA analysis. We took a closer look at the results I had received from deCODE and worked out that I belong to one of the two subgroups of U5, namely the one called U5b. That, in its turn, is divided into three smaller subgroups, and I belong to the first of these, U5b1.

  Figure 3 Ursula’s daughters. The woman called U5 or ‘Ursula’ lived in Ice Age Europe over 30,000 years ago. The branch labelled U5b1 probably originated in Spain or south-west France during the coldest phase of the Ice Age.

  There is much to suggest that U5b1 emerged within the group that sought refuge in south-west Europe during the coldest period of the Ice Age; that is, when the region was dominated by the culture we know as the Solutrean. One im
portant clue is where the most variation exists among present-day people. In the case of U5b1, variation appears to be greatest in the regions around the Pyrenees, in south-western France and northern Spain.

  Another quite unexpected piece of evidence was published in 2005. In this, a group of Italian researchers showed that a subgroup of U5b1 found in nearly half of all Sami people is closely related to one found among the Berbers, the original inhabitants of North Africa. Their lineages seem to have diverged a few thousand years ago. This new information was startling, as there are 4,000 kilometres (2,500 miles) between North Africa and northern Scandinavia. The most credible explanation is that people belonging to the U5b1 group migrated in different directions; some went northwards when the Ice Age loosened its grip somewhat, so that some of their descendants ended up in northern Scandinavia. Others went southwards, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar and migrating into Africa.

  A third line in the evidence is provided by DNA analyses of fossilised human bones from western Europe. At the moment there are only a few such analyses of sufficiently high quality, and they are from a period later than the Solutrean. However, these analyses lend some support to the idea that U5b1 was common in south-west Europe during the coldest phase of the Ice Age.

  One of the very best sources of finds from the Solutrean culture is called Laugerie Haute. It took me about half an hour to walk there from the Cro-Magnon guesthouse. Laugerie Haute is, in fact, one of the very best sources of finds from all the cultures that have existed in the region over at least the last 20,000 years. Archaeologists have excavated 43 layers, ranging from the Aurignacian culture to the Solutrean and the Magdalenian culture that succeeded it.

  The huge rock shelter seems to have provided a shared camping area, a spot where several smallish groups congregated for part of the year, especially in the autumn, when they had best access to their prey. About 100 people seem to have lived here at any one time, corresponding to three, four or five smaller groups. There was no need for them to live under cramped conditions; the sheltered area under the rock overhang is the size of two tennis courts. Most of the roof has fallen in now. The ground is strewn with enormous rocks.