My European Family

by Karin Bojs

  In the eighteenth century, relations between the Swedish state and the Sami improved somewhat. Linnaeus writes enthusiastically about his encounter with the Sami in his book Lachesis Lapponica: A Tour in Lapland. In particular, he notes how healthy and vigorous elderly Sami people were in comparison with the Swedish-speaking farming population.

  But taxes were burdensome and the lives of Sami people were subject to numerous restrictions. They were supposed to stick to what was seen as their traditional way of life. They were supposed to herd their reindeer and live in mountainous areas, where they were not in competition with Swedish-speaking farmers. There were periods when they were not permitted to live in rectangular houses, but only in round Sami huts, and they were not allowed to own more than five goats.

  Naturally there was constant interchange between Swedish-speaking and Sami-speaking groups. People inter­married and had children together. Many Sami began to increase their reliance on farming as a means of subsistence. But at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, Swedish colonialism took on a new form. Ore, forest products and hydroelectric power became more important to the economy. It was in that context that ‘racial biology’ flared up.

  ‘Racial biology’ and ‘racial hygiene’ (eugenics) constitute a long, dark chapter of the history of ideas in the West. Their worst consequence was the Holocaust during the Second World War, the systematic execution of millions of people – in most cases because they belonged to groups such as Jews and Roma. Another tragic consequence was forced sterilisation, which, in Sweden, affected mainly the people known as travellers – or ‘vagrants’, as they were called at the time.

  One of the fundamental tenets of ‘racial biology’ was that people belonged to different races, rather as dogs or horses could be of different breeds, and that the intermingling of these races could be disastrous. Miscegenation (racial mixing) would cause the ‘racial stock’ to deteriorate. One of the sources of inspiration of these murky ideas was genetics, coupled with the new biology, which developed rapidly in the early twentieth century.

  The patterns governing heredity that Gregor Mendel discovered in the 1860s had no impact outside Brno in his lifetime, and after his death they were forgotten until the turn of the century. Charles Darwin, on the other hand – Mendel’s contemporary – had an immediate breakthrough in the 1860s with his theory of the origin of species. When Mendel’s findings were rediscovered, the biologists of the early twentieth century sought to fit the two systems of thought together. And a great deal went wrong in the century’s first few decades.

  Mendel’s genetic laws quickly became an indispensable tool for plant and animal breeding. Crops and animals cross-bred thanks to this new discipline gave better yields, which was important in a society where many people went hungry. In that context, ideas about how genetics should also be used as an instrument of social engineering became increasingly influential – not just to prevent hereditary diseases, but also to overcome poverty and crime and to improve ‘the race’ in general. It was thought that the people as a whole were becoming increasingly enfeebled, as more and more of them abandoned farming and settled in towns.

  These currents of thought were very widely shared across virtually the whole political spectrum: social democrats, conservatives, members of the Farmers’ Party (Bondeförbundet) and liberals, all of whom had their reasons for taking a posi­tive view of ‘racial hygiene’. However, these ambitions for improving ‘the race’ were increasingly combined with much older ideas about the ‘Germanic race’, which many in Germany – and Scandinavia too – regarded as culturally superior. This Germanic nationalism had been developing little by little ever since the seventeenth century.

  In Sweden, an Institute for Racial Biology was established in Uppsala in 1922. It was one of the world’s first completely state-run institutes of ‘racial biology’, though others were to follow. One of them was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology in Berlin, a driving force behind the Holocaust that collaborated with Josef Mengele, a German SS officer and physician at Auschwitz concentration camp.

  The instigator and first director of Sweden’s State Institute for Racial Biology, the medical doctor Herman Lundborg, had an almost manic interest in classifying the people of Sweden – especially the Sami. He worked principally in the contemporary discipline known as ‘physical anthropology’. Much of his time was spent measuring crania and comparing family trees from church records. He collected data from over 100,000 individuals, most of them national servicemen, whom he attempted to classify by assigning labels such as ‘Germanic type’, ‘Sami type’, ‘gypsy’ and ‘vagrant’. For long periods, he left the institute in Uppsala to its own devices in order to travel around northern Sweden measuring Sami people. He visited villages and markets, measuring people wherever he possibly could. He was accompanied by a photographer who took frontal, rear and side views of his research subjects.

  Lundborg’s thesis was that the Sami belonged to the so-called ‘short-skulled type’, while people of Germanic stock supposedly had elongated skulls. However, no matter how many measurements he took, he found no statistical evidence for any such pattern.

  He was pensioned off as director in the mid-1930s. A new director was appointed at the State Institute for Racial Biology, and it took a completely new direction, focusing on hereditary conditions and widespread diseases such as tuberculosis. In the 1950s it underwent a change of name, becoming the Institute for Human Genetics, and it later became known as the Institute for Medical Genetics. In other words, the change of name came many years after its actual research had ceased to include cranial measurement and ‘racial biology’.

  But Lundborg continued to classify people. In 1938 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in Heidelberg, Germany, at the behest of the foremost Nazi race ideologue, Hans F. Günther. He became increasingly anti-Semitic; one of the beliefs he held was that the State Institute for Racial Biology was being undermined through Jewish influence on the press. He became an open supporter of Nazism.

  And Lundborg was by no means alone in his racist views on the Sami people. As late as 1947, the Swedish Tourist Board published a book called De svenska fjällapparna (‘The Mountain Lapps of Sweden’). The author was Ernst Manker, director of the Nordic Museum’s ‘Lapp Department’. One of the first few chapters is entitled ‘Race and Temperament’. Kjell-Åke Aronsson of the Sami Museum, Ájtte, considers its wording so offensive that he refuses to quote from it. But I want to know what sort of language was used.

  I seek out the book myself in the Nordic Museum’s library and read, among other things, that the Sami appear to be ‘the last vestiges of a distinct tribe descended from a white-yellow aboriginal race’ and how they ‘are not really very good-looking by Indo-European standards’. It is possible to use ‘coaxing and indirect manoeuvres’ to ‘get these reindeer-herders where you want them, at least to some extent’, notes Manker. While Lapps are notably quick-witted and very animated, according to Manker, they are also ‘unstable and Bohemian’, and they are of a ‘protean and malleable’ disposition.

  Perhaps the most offensive form of words by today’s standards is Manker’s opinion of the Sami’s business sense. He describes their ‘limitless cunning and stinginess’ and quotes an acquaintance as saying, ‘I’d rather make a deal with 10 Jews.’

  This book, it is worth remembering, was published two years after the end of the Second World War, at a time when no one, but no one, could deny what had happened during the Holocaust.

  There are reasons why relations between some of Sweden’s Sami and the Swedish Tourist Board may still be tense. And this background explains why some Sami are suspicious of geneticists with ideas about their early history.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Pottery Makes its Appearance

  Archaeologists working on excavations at Tågerup in Skåne have identified layers from a period that began 8,500 years ago and ended a full 1,700 years later. The site shows clearly
how a first settlement flourished for several centuries at the time of an older culture known as the Kongemose. But then all traces of human life cease for 300 years. The period of extreme cold 8,200 years ago must have dealt a serious blow. However, the coup de grâce for the Kongemose culture seems to have been the flooding of the settlement at about the time that Doggerland disappeared into the depths of the sea. About 300 years later, a new culture known as the Ertebølle made its appearance.

  During the earlier period, the Kongemose, life was easier. There was relatively little competition for natural resources. People were few and far between. It was easy to find enough to eat, and people had ample free time. This meant they could focus their full attention on making attractive artefacts from high-quality flint, as well as bone, antlers, wood and plant fibres. Children could spend plenty of time at ‘flint school’, learning to be skilled and aesthetically aware toolmakers like their elders. That they practised is evident from the half-finished objects they left behind.

  Skåne archaeologists interpret the bone remains found in the settlement as showing that the Kongemose people were discriminating and persistent hunters. They selected mainly the youngest and oldest deer, thereby maintaining stocks for future generations. The only buildings at the settlement seem to have been a single longhouse and a few round huts.

  By contrast, during the later period corresponding to the Ertebølle culture the settlement was more like a large village with hundreds of inhabitants. There were several large permanent buildings. At the water’s edge were elaborate systems of traps made of wooden posts and poles, designed to catch eels and other fish.

  These people seem to have indiscriminately hunted anything and everything that was edible. They were not concerned about the age of the deer they shot. Hedgehogs and squirrels were also perfectly acceptable prey. Tools of flint, bone and antler were produced quickly and carelessly. Function was all that mattered now; aesthetics and perfectionism were set aside.

  A skeleton reveals that one of their children died with an arrow in his back – perhaps in an internal conflict, perhaps as the victim of a rival group.

  Life during the Ertebølle period was clearly harder than it had once been. But then came a significant innovation that may have helped make life easier. People began to use ceramic vessels for cooking.

  ***

  As I described in Chapter 5, the people of Dolní Věstonice made clay figurines, which they laid in the fire to make them explode – perhaps as a serious ritual, perhaps as an entertaining party piece. That was happening a good 30,000 years ago. But making complete earthenware pots for cooking is a different matter – and considerably trickier.

  The most ancient ceramic vessels we know of today were discovered in East Asia. At the time of writing, the very oldest examples of ceramics are a few potsherds from Xianrendong cave in China. Having been dated at about 20,000 years, they were made when the last part of the Ice Age was at its very coldest. Other finds from the same location show clearly that the people who lived in Xianrendong cave were hunter-gatherers. Ancient remnants of ceramic pots have also been found at the River Amur in Siberia and in Japan.

  The oldest known ceramics in Japan are known as Jomon. The earliest finds date back some 15,000 years. Archaeologists have analysed burnt leftovers found on potsherds. The level of various isotopes in the traces of food shows that Jomon vessels were used chiefly for cooking saltwater fish or marine mammals. Yet these pots were found inland, a long distance from the nearest sea coast. To make an educated guess, the early potters on the Japanese islands may have caught fish such as salmon and eels on their way upstream to spawn. These fish were put in the pots and cooked on a fire to make an early type of salmon or eel soup.

  In the past, many archaeologists believed that the art of pottery was first developed when people went over to farming. But that has been proven wrong. The finds from the Xianrendong cave in China date back more than 10,000 years before the first farming at the same location. And it is absolutely clear that the Jomon vessels from Japan were used by people who lived by hunting and fishing.

  A more pertinent question today is who first came up with the technology for making earthenware pots. Were these people from Siberia, China or Japan? Did the first farmers in the Middle East learn how to make clay pots from East Asians or Africans, or did they invent the art themselves, independently of anyone else? There is no consensus on this among archaeologists. Some believe the technology must have been invented in one place and have spread from there, while others think pottery may have been developed independently in several places.

  In any event, we know that the first traces of earthenware pots in Denmark and Skåne date back some 6,700 years to the Ertebølle hunting culture. Indeed, the world’s first example of spiced food is to be found in just such vessels.

  Ertebølle vessels were large and had a pointed base. They were ideal for making fish soup for a group of people. The pointed underside prevented food from burning too easily. Chemical analyses of potsherds show that pots in northern Europe were also used to make fish soup. In shards of Ertebølle vessels from Denmark and northern Germany, researchers have also identified microscopic traces of seeds from the Alliaria petiolata plant (commonly known as garlic mustard or Jack-by-the-hedge), a relative of mustard that has peppery seeds.

  In earlier times, archaeologists equated both pottery and the use of seasoning with farming societies. It was thought that hunter-gatherers lived in a more primitive way, that they wanted only to fill their bellies and lacked time and energy for the finer things in life – such as herbs and spices that provide flavouring but no nourishment. We can now dismiss that view. The world’s oldest known seasoned dish is a Nordic fish soup spiced with peppery garlic mustard seeds.

  Ertebølle pottery also includes small, shallow bowls that were probably used as lamps. They resemble the stone lamps used by people from the Magdalenian culture when they were creating their cave paintings. Both types of lamp are small bowls designed to hold animal fat; a wick made of plant material would have been dipped in the fat and lit.

  So it is clear that hunting peoples in northern Europe were using pottery some 6,700 years ago. The question is how the technology arrived here. Is it possible that the art of pottery came directly from East Asia via hunting peoples in Russia? Some archaeologists think so. An older school of thought is that pottery is more likely to have spread from people who had begun to live on farming in the Middle East.

  When I consult Russian archaeologists on the matter, it turns out that there is an element of truth in both views. The very oldest known pottery in eastern Europe is about 8,900 years old and was found at an archaeological site called Rakushechny Yar on the lower reaches of the River Don, a few dozen kilometres from where it flows into the Sea of Azov. The people of Rakushechny Yar kept domestic cattle and sheep even in those early days. Their buildings and stone tools also resemble those of farming peoples in the Middle East, on the other side of the Black Sea.

  From the herders of Rakushechny Yar, pottery spread to hunting peoples in other regions of what is now European Russia. This diffusion was slow to begin with. Russian archaeologists believe that clay vessels were initially status symbols used for ritual purposes rather than everyday objects. But ceramic vessels gradually became increasingly common. The art of making pottery spread further westwards and northwards, and gradually all the way to the Baltic Sea.

  By about 7,000 years ago, clay pots had reached the Baltic and Finland, including the Åland Islands. The type of pottery concerned is called Comb Ware, as combs were used to make the typical patterns on the outside.

  Ertebølle pottery reached Denmark and southern Sweden some 6,700 years ago. The Ertebølle pottery of the southern Scandinavian hunting peoples shows the influence of Comb Ware from the east. However, it also has technical similarities with a type of pottery used by farmers from more southerly parts of the continent, known as Linear Band Ware. Quite simply, it is a hybrid between the pottery of the e
astern hunters and that of the southern farmers. Clay vessels – one of the greatest technological advances ever to reach Sweden – were a mix. Just as the people would be.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Farmers Arrive

  Just a few centuries after the earliest pottery found in southern Sweden and Denmark, traces of agriculture also appear.

  The question of how that came about has been the most toxic issue ever to dog archaeology in Sweden. In fact, that applies not just to Sweden, but to Europe as a whole. I have been a science journalist for several decades, and in virtually no other area have I heard researchers express such virulent views of intellectual opponents and new findings.

  According to the conventional wisdom, which has prevailed since at least the 1970s, hunters reinvented them­selves as farmers. The hunters who already peopled southern Sweden gradually began to acquire the various components of agriculture, such as the practice of keeping cattle, sheep and pigs, and the cultivation of wheat and barley. After a while, growing crops and raising livestock became their main means of subsistence. There were no immigrants in the picture – or, if immigration had any bearing on the arrival of agriculture, it was of very marginal significance.

  This, for example, is the picture given by the standard work that has dominated Swedish academia for decades, Arkeologi i Norden (‘Archaeology in the Nordic Region’). The section of this work that covers early agriculture is heavily based on a doctoral thesis from 1984 referring to cattle bones and traces of grain that, it is claimed, can be linked to the older hunting culture and date back approxi­mately 6,200 years.

  However, the remains in question were dated solely by the order of the layers in which they were found; that is, by their stratification. This is an extremely unreliable method of dating, as objects can easily shift up or down in the soil. Radiocarbon dating is much simpler and cheaper now than it was in the early 1980s. New measurements show that objects described in the doctoral thesis are considerably more recent than has been claimed. The few pieces of evidence that have played so decisive a role in the writing of Swedish history over the last 30 years are simply not up to standard.