Authors: Kent Flannery,Joyce Marcus
Such is the clamor of spawning catfish that their mouth-and-tail slapping can be heard hundreds of yards away. That sound is probably what attracted groups of Stone Age foragers to Wadi Kubbaniya, where they camped on exposed dunes. As the floodwater receded, tilapia could be caught by hand in their spawning holes, and catfish could be brought to the surface by driving oxygen from the water with kicks and splashes.
The number of fish caught was too many to eat at one time. An expedition led by archaeologist Fred Wendorf found more than 130,000 catfish bones at one camp, along with evidence that the heads of the fish had been removed and the bodies smoked or dried to be eaten later.
By October, as the water fell, dense mats of sedge called purple nut grass were exposed, as were thousands of club-rushes. The sedge mats were ten feet wide, and every ten-square-foot section could produce an incredible 21,200 tubers. The foragers harvested thousands of nut grass tubers with digging sticks and complemented them with the tubers and roasted nutlets of club-rush.
The plant collectors at Wadi Kubbaniya had learned that during October and November the nut grass tubers were small and tender; by February and March they had grown larger and harder and were filled with bitter alkaloids. Even these mature tubers, however, could be rendered edible by grinding them on stones and roasting them. Like smoked fish, the sedge and rush tubers could be stored, and they were high in carbohydrates.
From 19,000 to 17,000 years ago, Wadi Kubbaniya became a rich target for foragers who had developed techniques of drying, smoking, grinding, roasting, and storing, allowing them to stretch the Nile’s temporary abundance into months of food. And like their predecessors at Klasies River Mouth, these people had discovered the advantages of engineering the environment: the greater the number of mature nut grass tubers removed, the more densely the new ones would grow back the next year.
Judging by the skeleton of a young man buried at Wadi Kubbaniya, these fish-and-tuber collectors were anatomically modern, resembling today’s residents of Nubia and the Sudan. The youth had an asymmetrically developed right arm, suggesting that he had been a strong, right-handed spear-thrower. A chip of flint from a past wound was embedded in his shoulder, and a healed fracture of his forearm revealed that he had once used that arm to ward off a blow. His death came as the result of a spear-sized projectile that had left two flint barbs between his ribs and lumbar vertebrae.
Archaeology thus gives us two insights into our ancestors of that era. Both Klasies River Mouth and Wadi Kubbaniya show that they were keen observers of nature, with a rapidly improving technology and the foresight to modify their environment. The spear wounds in the Skhul Cave burial and the Wadi Kubbaniya youth show us something else: even as our ancestors improved their social skills, there were times when neighborly contact resulted in homicide. In other words, our ancestors were behaving more and more like us.
During the second half of the Ice Age, our modern-looking ancestors spread all over the world. This second major exodus was aided by the fact that much of the earth’s water was by then locked up in ice. Having so much water frozen into glaciers significantly lowered sea levels, temporarily turning large areas of shallow ocean floor into bridges between formerly separate landmasses. Now our ancestors could colonize places that their predecessors could not have reached.
With remarkable speed, some of them hiked east through the warmer parts of the Old World, including India and Southeast Asia. Once in the Far East, they took advantage of the fact that lowered sea levels had created the Sunda Shelf, an area of exposed former ocean floor that linked Cambodia and Vietnam to Sumatra, Borneo, the Philippines, Java, and the Celebes. All these regions could now be colonized.
Farther to the south, lowered sea levels had temporarily created an 11 million-square-mile continent called the Sahul Shelf, which incorporated Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania into a single landmass. Some 40 miles of open sea still separated the Sahul Shelf from the Sunda Shelf, but our Ice Age ancestors now had watercraft with which they could island-hop to the Sahul. They reached Australia more than 45,000 years ago and proceeded on to Tasmania. Their island-hopping took them to the Bismarck Archipelago 40,000 years ago and on to the Solomon Islands within another 12,000 years.
The later isolation of Australia and Tasmania created a cornucopia of information for anthropologists. Groups of foragers spread over both landmasses and then—as temperatures warmed, glaciers melted, and sea levels rose—the low-lying parts of the Sahul Shelf disappeared. From that point on the Australians and Tasmanians were cut off from the rest of the world for thousands of years, and their foraging way of life remained unaffected by most changes taking place on mainland Southeast Asia. To be sure, the natives of Australia created their own unique way of life and kept modifying it over time. The point is that any changes they made were indigenous and not the result of influence from mainland Asia, where innovations such as the bow and arrow, agriculture, and hereditary inequality were eventually to appear.
As exciting as the colonization of South Asia, the Sunda Shelf, and the Sahul Shelf may have been, it was no more exciting than the colonization of glacial northern Europe. Here our ancestors penetrated farther than any previous humans, in part by protecting themselves from the cold with fur clothing. They entered a Europe so cold that reindeer herds were roaming what is now southern France, and they camped along the migration routes used by those animals, hunting and eating them as they went along. But they also increased their hunting of fur-bearing animals such as the wolf, fox, bear, mink, and marten, and, using bone awls and needles, they tailored their fur into multilayered garments. Thanks to archaeology we know a great deal about these colonists of the frozen north, some of whose technology resembled that of recent Arctic hunters. And we have reason to believe that the color of their skin, and that of their Neanderthal neighbors, underwent change.
In 2007 it was reported that DNA had been extracted from the skeletons of two Neanderthals, one from Spain and one from Italy. Both DNA samples included a pigmentation gene called
MC1R.
This gene causes red hair and pale skin in children who inherit it from both parents.
A different group of scholars had previously reported the discovery of a gene called
SLC24A5
on human chromosome 15. This gene reduces the melanin, or brown pigment, in the human epidermis, leading to fairer skin. Today it accounts for 25 to 38 percent of the difference in skin color between European and African populations.
Anthropologists generally agree that when our ancestors lived in sunny Africa, their skin would almost out of necessity have been brown, because melanin gave them protection from cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation. Once our ancestors entered the cold, foggy, overcast environment of Ice Age Europe, however, dark skin offered them little advantage. In such an environment, pale skin facilitates vitamin D absorption, arguably outweighing the protection given by melanin. What this suggests is that while our African ancestors would have been dark-skinned, the overcast conditions of Ice Age Europe would have favored fair skin.
It is worth considering that the contrast between white and brown skin—a miniscule genetic difference that some recent societies have used to justify extreme social inequality—may simply have been nature’s way of protecting some people from skin cancer and others from vitamin D deficiency.
THE BRIDGE TO A NEW WORLD
Our ancestors who colonized the cold northern regions of Asia also underwent genetic change. One change was a lightening of the skin similar to that seen in Europe but caused independently, DNA experts believe, by a different set of genes.
The land surface of northern Asia, like that of Southeast Asia, became more extensive during the lowered sea levels of the Ice Age. For example, one land bridge connected Siberia to the islands of Sakhalin and Hokkaido, allowing for the colonization of Japan. Still farther to the north, lowered sea levels created another land bridge across the Bering Strait, linking Siberia to Alaska. The Aleutian Islands chain was also connected to Siberia by dense ice packs. At least 20,000 years ago Siberian hunters followed the game across the Bering land bridge into Alaska and found a whole new continent waiting for them.
Archaeologists now believe that the peopling of the New World involved several waves of immigrants. Some moved south through ice-free corridors into what is now Canada and the United States. Others may have moved even more rapidly down the Pacific coast with watercraft, reaching Patagonia before the Ice Age had ended.
Some linguistic evidence for the Siberian origins of Native American people seems to have survived. In 2008 Edward Vajda concluded that Ket, an indigenous language of Siberia, could be linked to a Native American language family called Na-Dené. Speakers of Na-Dené languages include the Athapaskans of Canada’s Yukon and Northwest Territories, the Apache and Navajo of the U.S. Southwest, and the Tlingit of Alaska.
Fifteen thousand years ago the New World was populated from Alaska to Patagonia, though nowhere densely. And when the glaciers melted back at the end of the Ice Age, sea levels rose and the Bering land bridge disappeared. Later arrivals with watercraft, almost certainly including the ancestors of the Eskimo, may have island-hopped along the now ice-free Aleutian Islands. Like Australia, the New World remained relatively isolated from the Old World until the visits of the Vikings and Christopher Columbus. Over more than 15 millennia, the Americas became a wonderful laboratory for social change, witnessing multiple independent cases of the emergence of inequality.
LIFE ON THE ICE AGE TUNDRA
The longer the Ice Age lasted, the more our ancestors appear to have behaved like the living hunting-and-gathering people studied by anthropologists. And the more like living groups these Ice Age foragers were, the greater the chance that archaeologists will be able to reconstruct their social behavior.
Some 28,000 to 24,000 years ago the plains of central and eastern Europe had been converted to a tundra, or cold steppe, by falling world temperatures. The good news was that this steppe had more resources than today’s Arctic tundra because, owing to its more southern latitude, it enjoyed more hours of sunlight. In addition, the premier game animal of central Europe was the woolly mammoth, a creature providing up to eight tons of meat. The bad news was that one had to hunt such mammoths on foot, armed only with a wooden spear.
Into this tundra strode the Gravettians, cold-adapted people whose tool kits resembled those of the recent Inuit, or Eskimo. Like the Eskimo, archaeologist
John
Hoffecker tells us, the Gravettians inhabited a land without trees and were forced to burn substitute fuels like mammoth bone. They used mattocks made of mammoth tusks to dig ice cellars, in which meat was preserved by freezing. The Gravettians created lamps that burned animal fat and used knives like the Eskimo woman’s
ulu.
At warmer latitudes our ancestors lived in ephemeral windbreaks of branches and grass, but the tundra was far too cold for that. At places like Gagarino in Ukraine, the Gravettians dug into the earth to create warmer semi-subterranean houses. Based on the number of hearths, archaeologists think that some Gravettian camps may have been occupied by 50 or more people for most of a season. Families came together to hunt mammoths and reindeer, then dispersed for a time, maintaining social networks through visiting, cooperating in ritual, and exchanging raw materials over hundreds of miles. Like the Eskimo, the Gravettians carved figurines in ivory, favoring images of women with huge breasts and hips.
The plains of Europe were at their most bitterly cold between 24,000 and 21,000 years ago, and the Gravettians did not hang around to see how much worse it would get. We pick up the story next at the site of Kostienki, on the great Russian plain east of Ukraine.
At Kostienki a sizable group of mammoth hunters lived in an enormous communal longhouse, 119 feet long and 50 feet wide. A row of ten hearths ran down the central axis of the structure, and along its periphery were pits filled with the bones of butchered animals. What this pattern suggests is that perhaps as many as ten related nuclear families, each with its own hearth, cooperated in the construction of a warm communal shelter and shared in the hunting, storing, and eating of mammoths. Archaeologist Ludmilla Iakovleva reports that Sungir, another camp of the same period, had human burials accompanied by more than 3,000 bone beads, not to mention pendants, stone bracelets, and ivory figurines.
Some 18,000 to 14,000 years ago the bitterest cold of the Ice Age had ameliorated, and people were drifting back to some of the areas abandoned by the Gravettians. The landscape was changing from tundra to an environment called taiga, essentially a brushy steppe with evergreens, willows, and birches.
* * *
On a promontory overlooking Ukraine’s Rosava River, just southeast of Kiev, lies a campsite of this period called Mezhirich. Mammoth and reindeer hunting would have been optimal here from October to May. During that season a number of families converged on Mezhirich, building smaller and more widely spaced houses rather than living in one large communal shelter. The houses were roughly 20 feet in diameter, and the total population of the camp may have been 50 people.
The houses at Mezhirich were unlike anything seen previously. The structures were probably framed with birch or willow poles and roofed with mammoth hide, none of which has been preserved. What survived were the walls built of mammoth bones stacked to the roof. Each family had its own architectural design. Dwelling 1 was made from 95 lower jaws of mammoths, laid chin-down using a herringbone pattern. The builders of Dwelling 4 alternated layers of chin-up and chin-down mandibles.
According to archaeologist Olga Soffer, the hunters of Mezhirich used mammoth tusk ivory to make figurines, pendants, bracelets, and scrimshawed plaques. Most remarkable, however, was the monumental work of art found in Dwelling 1. Here someone had propped up a mammoth skull and painted its forehead with dots, parallel lines, and branching designs in red ocher. Given how much floor space this work of art needed, we wonder if, after its use as a residence was over, Dwelling 1 might have been turned into a building where hunting magic was practiced.