http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ mirrored file For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== < Main Page Chapter 4 Modern Humans There are two current theories about the origin of Homo sapiens. One is described as `Multiregional' because the proponents believe that there had been ancient populations living in various part of the world who individually produced after generations of development their own version of Homo sapiens each of which is represented by a contemporary race in the world today. The other view is put forward by those who believe that Homo sapiens evolved only in Africa and took part in later migrations `Out of Africa'. This view is buttressed by research on mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA) which suggests that human lineages descended from an ancestral population of ten sons of a genetic Adam and eighteen daughters of Eve who lived in Africa and began to split up about 144,000 years ago. Modern humans turned up in Europe between 43,000 and 36,000 years ago, having appeared in the Near East some 45,000 BP. From about 40,000BP carbon-14 dating (referred to also as Radiocarbon, RC dating etc) can be used as a means of dating organic remains. It is one of a number of scientific techniques borrowed by archaeologists from other disciplines. Carbon 14 is an isotope of carbon 12 which is present in the air we breathe. All living creatures, both animals and plants, ingest Carbon 14 so that the level of Carbon 14 in their bodies is the same as that of the surrounding atmosphere. When an organism dies, the Carbon 14 in its body begins to decay at a known rate called the half-life, a period of time at the end of which half the Carbon 14 in the remains of the organism has disappeared. Determination of the amount of surviving radioactivity in a sample allows a calculation to be made which gives the length of time in radiocarbon years since the organism died. This determination is never exact. It is quoted with a +/- symbol at the end of it meaning that there is a 2 to 1 chance that the true figure lies within that bracket. To give an example, if the determination 1500+/-150BP was given, there is a 50% chance that the correct date is between 1350 and 1650BC. Obviously in these circumstances it is important to provide a number of samples for testing so as to cut down the odds. Another problem is that scientists now know that the level of Carbon 14 in the atmosphere has fluctuated over time and allowances have to be made for this. A third difficulty is that radiocarbon years are not the same length as calendar years. However, nowadays Carbon 14 determinations can be calibrated against the dendrochronology sequence which is obtained from annual tree-rings and this provides a date in calendar years and obviates most of the difficulties. Such dates are often expressed in terms of calBP or calBCE or calAD, the `cal' indicating that they result from tree-ring calibration. In Europe it is difficult to support the Multiregional theory because of the intervention of Homo neanderthalensis in the sequence. Modern man could not have evolved from that species since anatomically and genetically there are so many differences and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the main factor involved in the appearance of modern man in the region is a migration from Africa. With its appearance we are now in the Upper Palaeolithic and at Mladec and Ptredmostí, the earliest and largest sites in central Europe containing fossils and flint tools that are assigned to the Aurignacian technology that succeeded the Chatelperronian and dates from around 32,000BP. The bones exhibit a more robust appearance than those of later Upper Palaeolithic people and these seems common in fossils from this early Upper Palaeolithic period and is claimed by some scholars to suggest some contribution from the Neanderthal population. Later there is the famous site at Abri Cro-Magnon, Les Eyzies in France dated to between 32,000 and 30,000 BP where five individuals were buried with Aurignacian tools. In western Europe, the earliest dates for the technology so far known, around 38,000BCE, come from the cave site of El Castillo, south of Santander in Spain while the earliest dates in Italy in the Fumane cave on the southern edge of the Alps lie between 34,000 and 32,000 BCE and in France for the Aurignacian industry from the Abri Pataud (Aquitaine), the dates centre around 32,000BC. Aurignacian tool-kits are characterized by blades wider and bulkier than later Upper Palaeolithic industries, scrapers are common and common too are bone points with split bases presumably hafted as weapons. Small sculptures appear in association with these tools together with pierced fox canines, shells and ivory beads, all used for personal adornment. The Aurignacian tool-makers favoured large, all-the-year-round camp-sites with a number of satellite camp-sites for special activities. Recent research points to at least three distinct Aurignacian artistic traditions dating to before 30,000 years ago: Danube valley ivory figurines (mammoth, wild horse, bison, panther and cave lion), engravings from the Dordogne caves in western France and the Fumane paintings near Verona in northern Italy. (Conard) By this time temperatures in Europe had plummeted to -10 degrees C in winter and the Neanderthals retreated into southern Europe as did the Aurignacian tool users who were apparently so decimated by the glacial cold that for a time they were reduced to a few refugees in southwest France, Spain and the shores of the Black Sea.. In western Europe the most prolific evidence for the earlier history of Homo sapiens comes from south-west France, particularly in the region of the Dordogne where people took refuge from the cold in caves and rock shelters (called abris) or camped during the warmer seasons in the river valleys. Like the Neanderthals, the people of the Upper Palaeolithic period were big game hunters but they also vividly recorded the animals they knew on the walls of their caves. A growing body of evidence suggest that modern humans, virtually from the moment they appeared in Ice Age Europe, were able to produce startingly sophisticated art. Very similar engravings have been found chiselled into sandstone cliff faces about 400 miles south of Cairo and have been dated provisionally to around 15,000 years old. Of more than 160 figures so far found, most are of wild bulls, some two metres wide. Their stylistic affinities to carvings in Europe of about the same period seems to suggest that human societies were developing along parallel artistic lines at about the same way in the two areas despite the contrasting climatic conditions. One interesting suggestion is that they may have domesticated the horse, for a study of some horse-teeth from the period shows evidence of a condition known today as crib-biting which occurs when bored horses, tied up for long periods, gnaw the nearest trees and so wear down their teeth in a characteristic manner. However, a recent study of ancient DNA suggests that the domestication occurred during the 3rd millenium BC on the steppes of central Asia. Early archaeologists concerned themselves chiefly with the flint tools found in large quantities in cave excavations. As a result they devised a system to label the different industries they identified with names derived from the sites where they were first found in France. These artefacts were used for both domestic and hunting activities and perhaps for other purposes since two bodies have been found in Italy and Sicily with flint points embedded in their bones. According to most investigators today different types of Upper Palaeolithic tool-kits represent major cultures. So, the Aurignacian industry in western Europe named after the Aurignac rock shelter in the French Pyrenees was succeeded by the Gravettian named after the site of La Gravette in the Dordogne in southern France some time before 25,000BC. This culture in France is often known as Upper Perigordian. The word 'culture' is archaeological shorthand for a collection of associated traits that show up in archaeological investigations and appear to be characteristic of a particular area at a particular time. The Gravettian users appeared in eastern Europe 29,000 to 30,000 years ago equipped with new tools such as javelin-like throwing spears and fishing nets which allowed them to catch a wider range of prey. They also had clothing to keep the cold out such as sewn furs and woven textiles and possibly more specialised social structures and. their ability to tough out the colder climates dominating Europe 18,000 to 25,000 years ago revitalised the human population. The earliest dates for the Gravettian technology are around 27000BC, probably overlapping with the Aurignacian. It contains more varied tool types, most smaller than the Aurignacian. Burins (chisel-ended tools) are common along with small points, many of them almost certainly used for working leather and perhaps for carving bone and antler. Paintings appear on slabs and rock-shelter walls and the best-known `venus' figurines are carved. A well-known Gravettian site is that at Corbiac on the Dordogne river (Aquitaine). This must have been a summer camping-place for two 'tents' were excavated together with three open-air hearths. Further east is the famous site of Dolní Vestonice in the Pollau mountains of the Czech republic which has been interpreted as a temporary camp for hunting mammoth, large numbers of whose bones were discovered close to a group of tented wind-breaks. It was from this site that the famous piece of Gravettian scupture came - the Venus figurine. The Gravettian technology was current until 22,000/20,000BC when it was supplanted by the Solutrean, named after French site of Solutré. During this period of Gravettian technology, there is good evidence for deliberate burial, mainly in the centuries between 27,000 and 23,000BP. The deceased are characterised by the use of red ochre pigment to stain the skeleton, the inclusion of bones of large animals and sometimes objects of personal adornment placed in the graves. It has been claimed that these are special people, buried with special ceremony after a lifetime in which they had suffered from various pathological disorders or from injuries. A young boy with hyperarctic body proportions buried at Lager Velho in Portugal is an example, a condition that is said by some authorities to be evidence of hybrid modern human-Neanderthal ancestry. By about 20,000BP the climate was at its most extreme. During this bitter period the Solutrean technology replaced the earlier one. Its users developed the method of pressure flaking by which thin flakes of flint, instead of being struck off, are spalled off by pressure from a bone, wood or stone tool. It produced flint objects that have been described as the most beautiful flint tools ever made. They include laurel leaf and willow leaf projectile heads and small points for arrowheads. Most of these Solutrean tools are found inside caves for, as can be imagined, people at that time favoured sheltered cave-dwellings rather than open sites. The Solutrean technology in its turn was succeeded by the Magdalenian about 1700BC. It was current at the end of the last ice-age so that the ameliorating climatic conditions resulted in equipment designed to cope with the new environment. Apart from new flint tools, the artifact assemblages contained barbed harpoons made from antler and but some traditional objects in bone and ivory, like the enigmatic bâton percé. It was made out of a lavishly-decorated antler with a hole bored in one end and, although the first examples date from as early as the Aurignacian culture and were in use for thousands of years, their function is unknown. The type-site of the Magdalenian culture is the Abri de la Madeleine in the Vézère valley (Aquitaine). This was reindeer country at the time but it also carried herds of bison and wild-horses and salmon in the river. The rock shelters under which people lived covered camping places strung out side by side for a hundred metres along the valley. A similar site in the Dordogne is estimated to have housed between 400 and 600 people presumably assembled there for the annual reindeer migration through the valley. Most excavation in western Europe has been done on cave sites for their deeper stratigraphies are more rewarding than those on open sites. One of the most informative is the well-known site of Laugerie-Haute in the Vézère valley where a six-metre depth of deposits covering an area 180 by 35m records over 20,000 years of the Upper Palaeolithic sequence. More work on open sites has been done in eastern Europe. At one place in the Don valley a possible long house has been excavated which had a gabled wooden roof and eight interior hearths. This is an area where the mammoth was still the prey. Further west at Mezhirich' in the Ukraine this fact is made patently obvious by the discovery of 385 mammoth bones packed into a circular area four to five metres in diameter. It may have been the remains of a hut and is one of a number of similar finds in the Ukraine. In the Urals the appearance of painted mammoths on cave walls is another reminder of the importance of the beast to Upper Palaeolithic hunters in Russia. The oldest known cave paintings date back more than 30,000 years and were created over more than 20,000 years from the period of the Aurignacian toolmakers to Magdalenian times in the areas of the greatest concentration of population. Over this long span it is remarkably consistent - the same inventory of animals repeated in a variety of comparable attitudes. Wall paintings or engravings can be difficult to date but portable art - decorated objects small enough to be carried around - can sometimes be found in archaeological deposits and can support other chronological indicators. Five early examples of successful datings are: 1. Aurignacian sculpture in dated sites in Southern Germany up to 35,000BP 2. Pigments tested in the Chauvet cave in France - c31,000BP 3. Painting fallen from a wall between two Solutrean layers (.c.15,000BC ) in the Charente valley. 4. Engraved stone plaques in Upper Magdalenian layers (c.10,000BC) in the Dordogne. 5. Engraved pebbles from the very end of the Magdalenian period also from the Dordogne dating c.8000BC. But there are other, less exact, chronological indicators. By putting together classes of evidence - from excavations, from the study of reasonably-dated portable art and from pigments on cave walls a chronological framework is beginning to be established. An unprecendated discovery of the Chauvet painted cave in the Ardeche region of France north-west of Avignon at Vallon-Pont-d'Arc where, importantly, the cave floor has been undisturbed since the Ice Age. On the soft sand and surrounded by the footprints of the inhabitants are hearths, discarded flint tools, animal bones and cave bear skulls lying on the floor in the centre of the main chamber. Study of the life-style and perhaps of the physiology of the group who produced these pictures can now be attempted in much greater detail than ever before. The 250 animals so far identified on the walls are drawn with red and black pigments. Their variety is astonishing. Amongst the Upper Palaeolithic menagerie are woolly rhinoceroses, horses, lions, bears, reindeer, mammoths, ibex, giant deer, a leopard. a hyena and an owl. Testing of samples from charcoal pigments of two drawings has produced dates of 30,340 and 32,410BP, indicating that the drawings were done over a span of 1,300 years during the Aurignacian period and so are amongst the earliest examples of human artistic endeavour.. This long span of time provides information about the period of occupation of a particular cave and perhaps says something about the uses to which it was put. Study of the arrangement of images in major caves like Lascaux in the Dordogne suggests that bison and horses appear more frequently than other animals in large chambers and passages while bears and lions are usually found in isolated places containing few other figures. Barbed dots are found more frequently inside chambers and galleries off the main passages. It seems also that the image-makers of 25,000-30,000 years ago tended to work near cave entrances and that their descendants went deeper underground. In a more primitive style are the only cave paintings discovered in England, at Creswell Crags in Derbyshire, where representations of two birds, one, a bird of prey and the other a crane or swan, have been discovered. Both date from c12000 BC The latest explanation of the cave paintings (Lewis-Williams) suggests that they were fixed visions produced while the makers (shamans?) were in a state of altered consciousness and these makers saw the images as floating on the membrane (the uneven surface of the rock) between the real world and the other world behind it out of which they metamorphosed. The shamans would have been the intermediaries between this world and the other and perhaps able to take on the characteristics of the animals that inhabited both worlds. Portable art, the name given to the exquisite figurines and small sculptures of the period, seems to have emerged earlier than the wall pictures and has been more widely produced. Examples come from eastern Europe and Russia while a recent find of a water bird, a horse's head and a half-human, half-lion figure carved from mammoth ivory has been made in Hohle Fels Cave in Germany dating from before 30,000 years ago. Like the paintings in the Grotte Chauvet, they are as sophisticated as anything created in later millennia. In contrast to the glories of the wall paintings and figurines of the last (Magdalenian) phase of the late Upper Palaeolithic, the art of the final centuries declines to the painted pebbles found in excavations in the cave of Mas d'Azil in the Pyrenees whose occupation levels stretch from the Aurignacian to the Bronze Age, At the end of the Palaeolithic period, the climate improved. The reindeer, prey of the people using the Magdalenian technology in western Europe moved further north. The hunters either followed them or stayed behind to prey on other animals and sea-food. Different problems faced those who stayed behind. Instead of vast herds of game that could be killed en masse by lying in wait along the migration routes, elusive forest animals arrived with the spreading woodland. Snaring, trapping and other techniques that had played secondary roles in reindeer times were refined and used more intensively and the bow-and-arrow must have evolved into a major weapon. The Neanderthals [LINK] main page [LINK] A Changing Way of Life [LINK]