Two more carved stone blocks were found at the Fourneau du Diable rock shelter in France’s Dordogne region, and these have also been identified as belonging to the Solutrean tradition. In addition to this, archaeologists found within the Solutrean layers in the Cueva del Parpalló rock shelter, situated on the slopes of Montdúber Mountain in Valencia, Spain, literally thousands of painted stone slabs.
Figure 21.2. Carved stone block from the Roc-de-Sers shelter in France’s Poitou-Charente region, showing a horse (on the left), and bull, its head recarved as a boar. Solutrean period, ca. 17,000 BC.
Although direct evidence of ritual activity, and even burials, is sadly lacking when it comes to the Solutreans, it is proposed that the “placement of engraved blocks at some sites, the accumulation of painted slabs at Parpalló, and even the abundance of elaborate worked stone points at a number of sites all reflect some type of ceremonial or ritual activities.”13 In other words, the unique rock friezes found at Solutrean sites might well have had a magico-religious function similar to that of the decorated T-shaped pillars at Göbekli Tepe.
PURSUED BY A BULL
One block is of particular significance at Roc-de-Sers. It shows a human figure, a male it seems, with a pudding-basin haircut and slightly bent legs (see figure 21.3). He appears to be either baiting or escaping from a pursuer in the form of a huge musk ox, its three-dimensional head lowered in readiness to charge. The clear relationship between this human form and an aggressive bovine has led to comparisons with the Shaft Scene in the Lascaux Caves. This, as we shall recall, shows a reclining birdman being confronted by a wounded bison.
Figure 21.3. Left, drawing showing a musk ox pursuing a human figure from the rock frieze found at Roc-de-Sers. Right, the aforementioned human figure as seen on the rock frieze. Solutrean period, ca. 17,000 BC.
Yet the connection with Lascaux goes deeper, for stylistic and dating evidence indicates that its famous Shaft Scene was executed not by Magdalenian cave artists, as most prehistorians assume, but by Solutreans who entered the well shaft as early as 16,500 BC.14
SOLUTREAN BIRD CULT?
More incredibly, the only other human figure depicted among the stone blocks forming the frieze at Roc-de-Sers appears to be wearing a bird mask. It is carved on the very same block as the aforementioned musk ox and figure with pudding-basin haircut. This mask-wearing figure, which also has slightly bent legs, might well have an erect phallus, like the birdman in Lascaux’s Shaft Scene (see figure 21.4 on p. 186 to judge for yourself). Clearly, bird totemism, perhaps involving ecstatic states and mask-wearing rituals, could have been important to the Solutrean peoples of southwest Europe.
This conclusion is strengthened by the presence in various caves decorated during the Solutrean period of a strange abstract symbol known as the aviform. This is a long, thick, horizontal line, with downward-turned lines at each end and a vertical extension, either up or down, at its center.
Aviform means “birdlike,” and there is no denying the birdlike appearance of these devices, which are found so often that they might well be a sign of recognition among a particular Solutrean grouping or subculture. Yet if these are birds, then their downturned outer wings suggest they have adopted a gliding position, usually seen when birds are kept aloft by thermals generated by columns of warm air (see figure 21.5). It is a method of flight used particularly by raptors, vultures, seagulls, and storks, as well as by smaller birds such as swallows and swifts. Thus the aviform could represent either astral flight or the soul of the shaman in the form of a bird.
THE SKY PEOPLE
Maybe it was believed that a mask-wearing shaman could project his or her soul into a soaring bird to observe the herd animals below, providing vital information in advance of the chase. In this manner, high-flying birds taking advantage of warm air thermals might themselves have been identified as shamans that had adopted an avian form. If correct, then with the existence of the birdmen at Lascaux and Roc-de-Sers, we could be looking at evidence among the Solutreans of a semiorganized cult of the bird, which might easily have become associated not just with the sky but also with an imagined sky pole linked to the cosmic axis, something that seems depicted in the Lascaux Shaft Scene. Perhaps the Solutreans were the original sky people, with the aviform a visible sign of their sky-based religion.
Figure 21.4. Comparison of different bird-headed figures: left, the birdman from the Lascaux Shaft Scene, Solutrean period, ca. 16,500–15,000 BC; center, birdman from the rock frieze at Roc-de-Sers, Solutrean period, ca. 17,000 BC; and, right, ceramic bird goddess from the Vinča culture of southeast Europe, ca. 5500–4500 BC.
Figure 21.5. Left, two examples of Solutrean aviform signs from the Grotte du Placard rock shelter in France’s Poitou-Charente region, ca. 18,000 BC, and, right, a silhouetted kite gliding in flight for comparison.
That the Lascaux Shaft Scene might be the handiwork of Solutrean artists is incredibly important, for it could suggest they were carriers of the tradition that identified Cygnus as a celestial bird, with its bright star Deneb marking the entrance to a sky world reached through the Milky Way’s Great Rift. Remember, Deneb occupied the position of Pole Star from ca. 16,500 BC to 14,500 BC, precisely when Solutrean cave artists created the Lascaux Shaft Scene.
Thus it becomes possible that Solutrean knowledge regarding the execution of stone friezes in cave sanctuaries, along with their profound understanding of cosmic geography, bird totemism, and avian shamanism, might well have found its way to southeast Anatolia via the Swiderians. This enabled much earlier traditions, which all had their roots in the Kostenki-Streletskaya culture of the Russian Plain, to flower once more with the construction of the large sanctuaries at Göbekli Tepe, an event that undoubtedly helped catalyze not just the Neolithic revolution but also the rise of civilization.
SWANS AND WOLVES
Despite their compelling links to the Solutreans, the religious ideologies of the Swiderians have been more difficult to ascertain. The ancient rock art of the Russian Republic of Karelia, which borders Finland to the west, does, however, throw some light on the matter. Close to the shores of Lake Onega—where in 1936 a nine thousand-year-old cemetery was found and identified as belonging to the post-Swiderian Kunda culture—exposed rock surfaces are covered in carved petroglyphs, many of which belong to the Mesolithic age. Some show swans with exaggerated necks, like long poles. Others show swans sitting on top of poles that are being climbed by a small human figure. As at Lascaux, the poles almost certainly symbolize axes mundi, while the human figures are perhaps the souls of shaman travelling between the physical world and sky world. This suggests that the Swiderians, like the Solutreans before them, saw birds, and swans in particular, as symbols of a sky world reached via the Cygnus constellation (a belief probably going back to a time when Cygnus marked the celestial pole, ca. 16,500–13,000 BC).
Interestingly, a large number of bird bones, including those of the swan, have been recovered from the Mesolithic cemetery of Oleni Ostrov (Reindeer Island) on Lake Onega. Their deliberate placement alongside human burials has been compared with the shamanic practices of the indigenous Sámi population, who utilize bird and animal bones in rituals and see the spirit of the bird as associated with otherworldly journeys.15 Also, as we saw in chapter 10, the swan replaces the stork in the Baltic countries as the bringer of newborn babies into the world, another intimation that the swan was associated with the soul’s passage to and from the sky world.
Also of value is an examination of the beliefs and practices of those who much later occupied Swiderian territories in Central Europe. For instance, in the first millennium BC a collective of fierce tribal nations known as the Dacians, or Getae, inhabited the region between the Carpathian Mountains and the Black Sea, which was known as Dacia. They honored the “spirit wolf ” and saw themselves as “wolf people.”16
The Dacians venerated the wolf as “lord of the animals” and utilized its supernatural power against all they saw as evil, in which role
it became their “guardian warrior.”17 In fact, the Dacians’ bond with the lupine influence was so strong that they were apparently able to transform themselves into wolves to become werewolves, a connection with Romania and more specifically Transylvania and the Carpathian Mountains, all too familiar to Western popular culture. According to the Romanian historian Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), the Dacians conducted carefully orchestrated rituals featuring wolf pelts and psychoactive mushrooms in order to undergo “a total psychological transformation into wolves,” the origin most likely of lycanthropy, the belief that certain people can, quite literally, become wolves.18
Although the Dacians thrived a full nine thousand years after the Swiderians hunted the same territories, there is a distant echo of what could be a memory of a distant cataclysm in the Dacians’ use of the Draco, or Drago, battle standard. Its description as a wolf ’s head with the tail of a serpent and its proposed identification as a comet19 are too close to the Fenris Wolf ’s role in Ragnarök for this to be a simple coincidence. Were the Geto-Dacians unconsciously recalling the manner in which the world was brought to its knees by a comet likened to a heavenly wolf with a serpent’s tail? If so, did they inherit these ideas from indigenous peoples whose own ancestors inhabited the Carpathian Mountains as far back as Paleolithic times?
HUNTING WITH WOLVES
What we do know is that the Paleolithic hunters of Central and Eastern Europe actually began to work alongside wolves, training the animals to accompany them on hunting expeditions. Modern scholarship says that this act of cooperation between human and beast cannot be seen as simply a matter of taming friendly wolves to turn them into man’s best friend. Instead, it should be viewed as the adoption of “a new technology,” a new “weapon,”20 which, like the bow and arrow, would have increased the efficiency of the hunter during the chase. Yet from this taming of the wolf the relationship between human and beast emerged, and there is evidence for this even among campsites belonging to the Swiderian hunters.*921
Perhaps the Swiderians thus felt it necessary to quite literally take on the mantle of the wolf to ensure both the success of the chase and the safety of the herd against predators. Then, when the comet terrorized the planet in the guise of a sky wolf or sky fox, they played an active part in attempting to counter the supernatural creature’s baleful influence to prevent the sky pole from toppling and the world from coming to an end.
Might some memory of this supernatural sky creature have passed from the post-Swiderian cultures of northeast Europe into the myths and legends of their descendants in Scandinavia? Was a representation of this cosmic trickster, identified in Norse myth as the Fenris Wolf, carried aloft by the Geto-Dacians in the form of the Draco battle standard, and was it this knowledge that the Swiderians took with them all the way to Göbekli Tepe? If so, what motivated members of this Post-Solutrean culture to journey to such distant lands, and how exactly did they come to so strongly influence the peoples of southeast Anatolia? The answer, as we see next, seems to be the exploitation of minerals, in particular obsidian.
22
OBSIDIAN OBSESSION
Not only were the Swiderians an advanced hunting society with a unique stone-tool technology, but they also established sophisticated mining operations, some of the only accepted examples anywhere in the world during the Paleolithic age. At various locations within the Świętokrzyskie (Holy Cross) Mountains of central Poland they extracted “exotic” forms of flint, as well as hematite, used as ochre. In addition to becoming efficient miners, the Swiderians established long-distance trading networks to export high-quality stone tools as well as the “pre-form” cores to make new ones. Yet in addition to flint and ochre, one other mineral coveted by the Swiderians was the black volcanic glass known as obsidian.
Obsidian is a natural glass, usually black or gray, created when volcanic lava solidifies very quickly, without allowing any time for a crystalline matrix to form. Throughout the Middle and Upper Paleolithic ages, obsidian was a highly prized commodity all around the world. It was used by prehistoric cultures in Africa, Asia, the Americas, Australia, and Europe. The Solutreans also used obsidian to create their unique projectile points.*101
In Europe, there are only a handful of obsidian sources. Two can be found on small volcanic islands forming part of the Sicilian archipelago off the south coast of Italy. Another is located on a tiny island off the west coast of Italy, with a further source on the island of Sardinia. There is also an important ancient source on the Greek Cycladic island of Melos (or Milos), with another on the volcanic Greek island of Gyali, close to the southwest coast of Turkey.*11 The only other sources in mainland Europe are located in the Carpathian Mountains, the “land of obsidian,”2 within the Tokaj and Zemplén Mountains, which straddle the border between, respectively, northeast Hungary and southeast Slovakia (see figure 22.1).3†12
Figure 22.1. Map of obsidian sources in Europe and southwest Asia, along with sites mentioned in connection with the distribution of obsidian in the same regions.
THE FRANCHTHI CAVE
The obsidian trade was big business in the Upper Paleolithic, with examples from the island of Melos reaching an occupational site known as the Franchthi Cave in the Greek Peloponnese around 13,000 BC.4 This tells us that even at this early age, obsidian was being transported across the Aegean Sea from Melos to the Greek mainland, a minimum distance of 62 miles (100 kilometers).
Maritime trading on this scale can only have come under the control of an elite group, most probably a band of complex hunter-gatherers exporting obsidian across vast distances, initially by sea, and then by land. Professor Catherine Perlès, a prehistorian with the University of Paris, argues that the Melos obsidian trade was in the hands of “specialists,” who had the ability to navigate a familiar sea route and knew exactly where to find the raw material on the island.5
Melos obsidian might well have been transported as far as the Balkans in Neolithic times,6 confirming its incredible importance throughout Europe. For the Swiderians too it would seem to have held a special place in their stone kit. One survey of exotic materials found at late Paleolithic sites in the Carpathians showed that out of twenty Swiderian centers examined, all contained items made of obsidian.7 The only other contemporary Carpathian people that would seem to have taken a noticeable fancy to obsidian were the Swiderians’ neighbors in Hungary, the Epigravettians (i.e., late Gravettians), with a large number of items made from the volcanic glass being found in their settlement sites as well.8
LETHAL WEAPON
The Swiderians used obsidian to create super-sharp tanged points, such as the one found at a site in Wolodz, Subcarpathia, Poland.9 Being fashioned out of obsidian would have made these arrowheads among the most lethal weapons in the world. So sharp is obsidian that surgeons today use scalpel blades tipped with the black volcanic glass to make near-perfect incisions during operations.
Experts in Stone Age tool production often cite the story of Don Crabtree, one of the people responsible for the rebirth of stone knapping in the 1960s and 1970s.10 He apparently insisted that during an operation surgeons use obsidian blades that he himself had made. Incredibly, obsidian slices through tissue with such efficiency that it enables healing to take place easily. Metal blades, in contrast, make micro-rips in body tissue that can take much longer to heal.
CROW-FLINT FIRE
It might not have been just the sharpness of obsidian that appealed to the Swiderians, or indeed their neighbors, the Epigravettians. We cannot say exactly how the peoples of the Upper Paleolithic viewed obsidian on a subtle level, but the fact that it was found on the slopes of volcanoes, some of which might still have been active, tells us that it could have been associated with the element of fire.
Indeed, Hungarians living in the Carpathian Basin would use obsidian—picked up at prehistoric settlement sites—to kindle fire. They referred to it as varjúkova, “crow-flint,”11 as well as isten nyila, “thunder bolts” (or “godly arrowheads”),12 associatin
g it with the god of thunder and lightning. They even described obsidian as lebkövek, “meteorite-like stones,” in the belief that these shiny gray or black pieces of rock came from the sky.13
OBSIDIAN RELIGION
In Mesoamerican tradition obsidian was said to be blood that had congealed and gone black. Both the Aztecs and Maya used obsidian to create sacrificial knives, as well as blades and implements for autosacrifice; that is, bloodletting through self-inflicted incisions.
Scottish folklorist Lewis Spence (1874–1955) wrote in The Magic and Mysteries of Mexico (1922) that the Mesoamerican fixation with obsidian—what he called the “obsidian religion”—emerged from an epoch of human history when prehistoric hunters used obsidian weapons to hunt deer:
The deer was slain by the obsidian weapon, which, therefore, came to be regarded as the magical weapon, that by which food was procured [by the prehistoric hunters of Mexico]. In the course of time it assumed a sacred significance, the hunting-gods themselves came to wield it, and it [obsidian] was thought of as coming from the stars or the heavens where the gods dwelt.14
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