The Incredible Human Journey (41 page)

‘Any place where people come together, interbreeding is the most normal thing in the world. So I think there were occasionally
encounters where interbreeding took place, but not very often, and so it didn’t contribute very much to our genetic make-up
or our anatomy.’

While it’s difficult – even impossible – to summarise the interactions that may have occurred between the two populations
over so many thousands of years, the question ‘Why did we survive to the present while Neanderthals disappeared?’ is still
relevant. Even if members of the two species never came face to face, they were in competition with each other in the landscape.
And there was archaeological evidence for different subsistence strategies, which, for modern humans, included different and
possibly more flexible technology, as well as culture and complex social networks, which may ultimately explain why we are
here today and the Neanderthals aren’t.

Later that day, Nick took me to Vogelherd itself, in the lush Lone Valley, where excavations were ongoing. A team of archaeological
technicians and students were busy digging down through the spoilheap (or ‘backdirt’) of the original excavation, finding
plenty of evidence that had been discarded by the first archaeologists who dug there.

‘The site was first dug in 1931, and all of the material was dumped outside the cave,’ explained Nick as we walked past the
cave entrance. ‘We’re systematically digging through it all to find out what they missed.’

It looked like a very pleasant place to be digging. The cave was set on a hill above an idyllic, lush, green valley. I asked
Nick what it would have been like 35,000 years ago.

‘If you’re talking about the Ice Age, you think of ice: white, stark, and inhospitable. That’s wrong. I mean, it was cold
in the winter, but in the spring and summer it would be more like it is today: lots of grass, greenery, really abundant fodder
for the animals. Just think about a mammoth: the archetypal animal of the Ice Age. A mammoth eats about one 150 kilos of grass
every day to stay alive. The mammoth steppe was a very rich environment, and at these sites in the Lone Valley we see abundant
remains of woolly rhino, mammoth, reindeer, horses, all kinds of animals.’

‘But it must have been very cold during the winter here?’ I suggested.

‘Well, yes. But humans – and Neanderthals – can live almost anywhere as long as there’s something to eat, and materials, particularly
hides, to make clothing out of, and controlled use of fire.’

Nick wandered around the site, visiting trenches to see what finds had emerged that day. These included fragments of flint
blades, quite typical of Aurignacian toolkits. The sediment was being bagged up as it was removed, and would be sieved. It
was only through this careful sifting of the soil that Nick’s team had found the fragments of ivory that made up the ivory
flute, and the head of the bird carving.

But Vogelherd had contained disappointments as well as revelations. On first excavating it in 1931, archaeologists dug out some 300m
³
of sediment from inside the cave, finding Middle and Upper
Palaeolithic artefacts in distinct layers. The latter included a rich collection of Aurignacian tools and artefacts, which
have since been radiocarbon dated to 30,000 to 36,000 years ago. The archaeologists also found modern human remains including
two crania and a mandible, embedded in the Aurignacian layer. These bones, in association with the Aurignacian tools, seemed
to provide conclusive evidence that modern humans were the makers of this technology. The findings from Vogelherd tallied
with the discoveries at the Cro-Magnon rockshelter in France, where modern human skeletal remains – ‘Cro-Magnon Man’ – had
been found associated with Aurignacian tools.
²
This link between modern humans and a particular technology meant that archaeologists could assume the presence of modern
humans, in the absence of skeletal remains, when they found Aurignacian tools and artefacts. At other sites, Neanderthal remains
had been found associated with Mousterian (Middle Palaeolithic) tools. So it seemed that each of these populations had a clear
‘signature’ that archaeologists could use to map out their sites and territories in Europe.

In 2004, Nick Conard and his colleagues published radiocarbon dates for the skeletal remains from Vogelherd: they dated to
a mere 4000 to 5000 years ago. It looked as if they were intrusions from late Neolithic burials near the cave entrance. The
‘association’ with the Aurignacian layers in the cave was incidental. This disappointing result had wide implications. Vogelherd
had been a key site for demonstrating that modern humans made the Aurignacian. And in 2002, radiocarbon dates had been published
for the Cro-Magnon skeletal remains as well, showing them to be about 28,000 years old: too young for the Aurignacian tools
in the rockshelter, although nowhere near as young as the Vogelherd bones had turned out to be.
²
The identification of modern human sites through Aurignacian tools alone was starting to look decidedly shaky.

Vogelherd, along with a generous scattering of other Aurignacian sites, including Hohle Fels and Geissenklösterle in Germany,
and Willendorf in Austria, had also been used to support the theory that the ‘Danube Corridor’ provided a route for the early
modern human colonisation of central Europe.
³
But the radiocarbon dates of the Vogelherd and Cro-Magnon bones meant that archaeologists could no longer assume that the
spread of Aurignacian technology represented the ingress of modern humans in Europe. As shocking a suggestion as it may seem
to Palaeolithic archaeologists who have relied on Aurignacian tools as signs of modern humans, there was now nothing to suggest
that this was a reasonable assumption to make. Indeed, there was nothing now to refute the hypothesis that Neanderthals might
have made those tools and even those beautiful ivory carvings and flute from Vogelherd.
²

When I interviewed Nick, however, he did not seem like a man about to consign a lifetime’s work to the dustbin of prehistory.
There was still reason to think that it was modern humans who made the Aurignacian. The Oase skull and mandible showed that modern humans were
in
Europe, close to the Danube, by 40,000 years ago. The Aurignacian appears suddenly in Swabia, and is always ‘on top of ’,
i.e. later than, Mousterian (Middle Palaeolithic) archaeology, and in some places where both Middle and Upper Palaeolithic
artefacts have been found, there has been a distinct gap, an ‘occupation hiatus’ between them.
¹
It seems too much of a coincidence to think that the existing, Neanderthal population of Europe would have started manufacturing
a completely new-looking toolkit just as modern humans arrived on the scene: it seems more likely that it was the moderns
who brought that technology in.

And there were still some sites that seemed to hold up that association between modern humans and the Aurignacian. The site
of Ksar ‘Akil in Lebanon is important in this respect, as it produced a modern human skeleton alongside that ‘transitional’
half-Middle, half-Upper Palaeolithic ‘pre-Aurignacian’ industry. The burial dated to 40,000–45,000 years ago, and the layers
overlying the skeleton were full of classic Levantine Aurignacian tools.
^4
,
5

The site of Mladeè in the Czech Republic, which was first excavated in the nineteenth century, has produced over one hundred
modern human fossils, in association with classic Aurignacian tools, including bone points. In 2002, a date was published
for the calcite overlying the skeletal remains: 34,000–35,000 years ago.
⁶
This looked like a good candidate for reaffirming the link between moderns and the Aurignacian, but a direct date on the
bones themselves was needed to clinch it. A few years later and a radiocarbon date for the fossils themselves was published,
placing them at around 31,000 (uncalibrated radiocarbon) years old.
⁷
Although less well dated than Mladeè, there are also several French sites where modern human remains and Aurignacian tools
have been found together: Les Rois and La Quina in the Charente, and Brassempouy in the Pyrenees.
⁵

Palaeolithic archaeologists everywhere must have breathed a huge sigh of relief. Once again – and actually even more surely
than before the Cro-Magnon and Vogelherd redating upset, now that it was based on direct dating of human remains – the assumption
that the Aurignacian – everywhere – was made by modern humans seemed well founded.

‘We don’t have Neanderthal bones, or modern human bones, here,’ said Nick. ‘We have dates that correspond to the period of
the last Neanderthals and the first modern humans – in theory, it could be either. But the most plausible explanation is that it’s modern humans.’

Having seen the beautiful artefacts from Vogelherd, I left the dig and Nick Conard, and drove a mile or so down the valley
to meet experimental archaeologist Wulf Hein for a practical lesson in the differences between Middle and Upper Palaeolithic
technology. I wanted to get to grips with the Mousterian and the Aurignacian – literally.

Wulf Hein was an expert flint knapper and aficionado of all things Palaeolithic. His car was full of crates of flint, various
spears, spear-throwers, bows and arrows. The finished objects were beautiful, but I really wanted to know how the flint tools
were made, and to see the Levallois and prismatic core techniques in action.

We sat in a field in the idyllic Lone Valley, having spread out a blanket to catch any stray bits of flint. In this archaeologically
rich area, Wulf was very concerned that he didn’t confuse any archaeologists in the future by adding new, twenty-first century
flint tools to the archaeological record. He took a Levallois core out of a crate; it was flattish and he had made it into the shape of a tortoise shell by knocking
flakes off the periphery – making it into a ‘prepared core’. He struck it with a pebble – expertly – and a large flake detached
itself from the middle of the disc-like core. Middle Palaeolithic technology starts off with simple flakes struck from cobbles. The Mousterian industry of the Middle Palaeolithic
takes this a stage further, with flakes produced from a prepared (Levallois) core, just as Wulf Hein had demonstrated. It
is named after the site of Le Moustier in the Dordogne, where Neanderthal fossils were found alongside their characteristic
tools.

Wulf then took a stone that had been carefully prepared into a cone shape out of the crate, and handed it to me: I was to
make a blade from this prismatic core. Under his expert guidance, I gripped the core between my knees, held the tip of a piece
of antler close to the edge of the stone, and struck the antler with a pebble. A long, thin and extremely sharp blade detached
itself from the side of the core and fell to the ground.

‘Oh, nice one!’ exclaimed Wulf.

‘Are you proud of my work?’

‘Yes, I am. I’m astonished. It took me forty years.’

I think my success had more to do with beginner’s luck – and having a good teacher.

There it lay, a blade, the hallmark of the Upper Palaeolithic, the foundation of the classic Aurignacian industry. This technology
was named after the site of Aurignac in the lower Pyrenees, excavated in 1860. The sort of tools that characterise the Aurignacian
include long, thin slivers of flint called
lames Aurignaciennes
(Aurignacian blades) – like my blade but retouched all around the edges, as well as end-scrapers and burins, carinate (keeled)
scrapers and tiny bladelets. The functions of these tools are being debated – especially the carinate ‘scrapers’ and the bladelets
that are made from them. Are the unretouched bladelets waste products from making such a scraper? Or are the bladelets really
what the maker was after, and the ‘scraper’ is actually just a small core – not a tool in itself?
⁵
Even though the precise functions of all these pieces of flint aren’t yet understood, the shapes are very characteristic.

Archaeologists have long believed that knapping blades from a prismatic core was much more efficient than the old-fashioned
Levallois technique: the manufacturer can produce many blades from one prismatic core. In comparison, the Middle Palaeolithic
Levallois technique just gives you a few flakes from one tortoise-shaped core. However, I later met up with experimental
archaeologist Metin Eren, in Exeter, who had spent years making and comparing Middle and Upper Palaeolithic flakes and blades.
His results had been surprising: the initial preparation of the prismatic cores actually produced more waste than discoidal
cores, and thin blades didn’t last as long as flakes. So, in terms of producing usable cutting surfaces, it seems that there
actually wasn’t much to choose between discoidal and prismatic cores, flakes and blades, in terms of efficiency.
⁸

Now I had seen very early evidence of (small) blade production, in Africa, Europe and Arabia, going right back into the Middle
Palaeolithic. But there’s more to the Upper Palaeolithic than prismatic cores and long blades. Bone and antler tools are also seen to be
characteristic of this culture. These materials do (rarely) pop up in other Middle Palaeolithic contexts – like Blombos Cave
and Howiesons Poort in South Africa. Perhaps this isn’t surprising for those are modern human sites.
⁹
(Just to throw a spanner in the works, there’s some evidence of Neanderthals making bone points as well.) Other elements that
are considered particularly characteristic of the Upper Palaeolithic are grinding and pounding stones, suggesting more processing
of vegetables was going on, and widespread use of body decorations like shell, tooth and ivory beads. (Now, I had seen evidence
of much earlier use of ochre and ornamentation, but before the Upper Palaeolithic it is very patchy.) There appears to have been much more long-distance transport of raw materials, sometimes over hundreds of kilometres, compared
with generally shorter distances in the Middle Palaeolithic. Carved figurines – as I had seen from Vogelherd and Hohle Fels
– appear in the Upper Palaeolithic, along with cave painting (more of which later). It’s not straightforward, but, as a package,
the Upper Palaeolithic does seem to be something special: it is still a useful category.