The Incredible Human Journey (47 page)

‘Pech Merle is very interesting. In this case, there are six hand stencils around the horses, sometimes right and sometimes
left hands. But from the same individual, the same man. And pigment analysis showed that the pigment of the horses is exactly
the same as the pigment of the hand stencils. So probably the same man did the horses and the six hand stencils, at the same
time.’

‘So you think those stencils are the artist’s signature, a maker’s mark?’ I asked.

‘Yes, I think the main meaning is really a signature. Like in Australia. Australians visiting burial sites, they left their hand stencils during the visit, just to say I went there; I visited my
uncle or my grandmother and I left a mark of my visit near the burial.’

‘But the French caves are not burial sites,’ I volunteered.

‘No. It is very exceptional to find a burial in the European caves. But it could also be a way to say, I went to this church and left a mark of my visit.’

I was intrigued to hear Monsieur Lorblanchet talk about the caves in religious terms.

After the hand-stencil demonstration, Monsieur Lorblanchet took me into the cave of Cougnac itself. We walked down steps again,
to a door in a wall and into a dank room displaying various stone curiosities, including pieces of medieval masonry and an
elaborately carved stone sarcophagus lid. Then we descended more steps into the cave itself. Just as in Pech Merle, I was
taken aback by the natural beauty of the cave. Cougnac was smaller in size, and the ceiling was much lower, but it was absolutely crammed with slender stalactites. It felt
as if we were entering a temple, and I asked Lorblanchet if he thought that the caves had indeed been sacred places for their
Ice Age decorators. He thought that they had: he saw the caves as sanctuaries, special places to which artists kept returning.

‘Yes, it is a natural temple. About 10 per cent of the caves in this area have painting in them, and, usually, it is the largest
caves which have been chosen. So these paintings have been made for religious reasons, if you like. These are sacred sites,
and they are not painting here just for fun.’

We turned a corner and the walls were covered – wherever there was a flattish space – with line drawings of animals: elk,
horses and ibex.

Lorblanchet gestured around him.

‘Animals everywhere … because these people were, of course, hunters and gatherers, so they painted their world around them,
and the animal world. And for them, the animals were not only game, but also spirits.’

At the back of the cave there was a small image of a man – lying stretched out, with what looked like spears stuck into him.
This was an unusual theme. I felt as though I was looking at an illustration of a myth that has long since lost its meaning.
There were also abstract shapes that could be seen as the head and shoulders of humans, or perhaps as vulvas. These were ancient drawings, dating to before the LGM.

‘We know now, after studying this cave for years and years, that Cougnac was used intensively during the Gravettian,’ said
Monsieur Lorblanchet, ‘then the cave was forgotten. But then it was rediscovered by Magdalenian people, and the cave again
was a sanctuary. There is a gap of 10,000 years between the oldest paintings and the most recent painting in Cougnac.’

Around the earlier paintings there were finger-daubed spots of paint, often double, and around some a mist of applied red
ochre. And these had been dated much later, to around 20,000 years ago, the Magdalenian period. Monsieur Lorblanchet mused
about the original meaning of these paintings, and the meaning to the later artists. Did they imagine these images had been
created by their ancestors or by ancient spirits? From archaeology carried out in the cave, there seemed to have been a large
patch of red ochre on the floor at the entrance to the main chamber – Lorblanchet imagined the later, Magdalenian visitors
dipping their fingers in the pigment and touching the walls around the ancient symbols.

For Lorblanchet, the next, modern rediscovery of the paintings meant that they were once again being incorporated into a belief
system, as we tried to understand what they meant to our ancestors, and gazed at, analysed, replicated and reproduced the
ancient images. It is interesting to think about these artistic creations as
still
conveying information, communicating messages within complex social networks. How many people around the world today have
seen those images and gone home with the postcards?

It is also rather wonderful to think of those hunter-gatherers, those ancient Europeans, who, even as the climate chilled
around them, carried on making art. During the icy grip of the LGM, it was somehow still important to decorate spear-throwers,
carve mammoth-ivory animals – and paint caves. The Solutrean is marked out not only by a change in hunting technology, but
by a flowering of art and ornamentation. Although making art doesn’t seem to be immediately relevant to survival in an increasingly hostile environment, many archaeologists
believe that the painted caves tell us something very important about Ice Age society: that the proliferation of art indicates an increasing complexity of social networks. So – and perhaps even more tellingly
than a new style of stone point – the cave art represents a social and cultural adaptation to survival in extreme environments.
²

Perhaps these ‘cave art sanctuaries’ were landmarks in the Ice Age landscape, marking out territories for particular groups,
and maybe they were places where people aggregated and which confirmed a feeling of group identity.
⁴

‘These people were nomads, of course,’ said Lorblanchet, ‘but they had a territory. And by painting a cave it is a way for
them to say, here is our sacred place, here are our gods, our belief,
we are here
. Like the church today is in the middle of the village, the painted cave was in the centre of the tribal territory.’

Meeting up of local bands – to exchange materials, plan collective hunts or hold ceremonies, perhaps – would have provided
opportunities for the exchange of information important to long-term survival. Information could also be passed down the generations.
Many archaeologists view the cave art as part of an ‘information system’ – very similar to the place of rock art in Australian
Aboriginal culture. ‘Information system’ is little more than a very dry term for what is, essentially, storytelling. Stories
could contain useful information – about the landscape, animals or society – extending human experience beyond a single lifetime.
Maybe images, like those spotted horses at Pech Merle, were used to illustrate tales. For the hunter-gatherers packed into
that corner of Ice Age Europe, on the edge, art and storytelling may have been crucial to survival.
^3
,
4

Lorblanchet also thought that paintings contained an expression of identity that we could still understand.

‘I also believe, by their painting, they show that they were exactly the same as us, you know,’ he said. ‘They are good artists,
excellent. They had the feeling, the sense of artistic beauty. And by this act of painting in caves they also expressed themselves as different from the neighbours. The neighbours who were the Neanderthal people.’

We can’t leave our ancestors, struggling to survive the wintry chill of the LGM, without looking at them a little closer.
Compared with the brown-skinned ancestors of all the Out-of-Africa lineages, it seems that Europeans were getting paler, with
a handful of mutated genes reducing melanin production in skin cells. One gene, imaginatively called SLC24A5, appears to be
responsible for around 30 per cent of the skin colour difference between indigenous Europeans and Africans.
⁵

Northern and eastern Europeans are incredibly diverse in appearance, in the variety of hair and eye colours in particular.
Hair can be black, brown, pale blond, yellow-blond, or red. Eyes may be brown, hazel, blue or green. Some have suggested that this great variability in coloration is random: a product of genetic drift, perhaps, or the result
of relaxed reduced selection pressure for dark skin (along with hair and eyes), as populations spread north, leaving other
‘colour genes’ free to vary. But there is an interesting theory that all this diversity is due to sexual selection. What if
the harshest years of the LGM meant that many young men died while hunting, leaving women outnumbering men? Polygyny might
be one solution, but it would have been difficult to provide food for a harem. So competition for men may have been fierce.
In that competition, something that made a woman stand out from the crowd – a strikingly different hair or eye colour, perhaps
– could make the difference to whether or not she managed to pass her genes on.
⁶
It’s a fascinating theory, but ultimately impossible to test, and doesn’t explain why coloration should have become so diverse
in Europe and not elsewhere.

Archaeology and genes tell us how, after the LGM, humans re-expanded across Europe, from their principal Ice Age refugium
in Iberia.
^{7
,
8
,
9
,
10}
The changing climate was once again matched by a change in technology. The new European industries – the Magdalenian
and Epigravettian – were hugely variable, but there was a general explosion in the use of antler as a material for producing
tools, and the harpoon was invented.
²
Tiny bone points were fitted into antler and wooden spear points.

At 16,000 years ago, populations are re-established north of the Loire, and by 13,000 years ago Britain was reoccupied. The human recolonisation of Europe was part of a general faunal expansion northwards, but some animals were missing from the
post-glacial landscape: whether because of climate, hunting or both, there were no more mammoths or woolly rhinos.

Technologies continued to evolve in the late Pleistocene, and by 11,000 years ago the first definite evidence of the bow
and arrow appears. The replacement of steppe-tundra with woodland meant that the large herds of horse, bison, saiga, and that
‘Ice Age larder-on-the-hoof’, reindeer, disappeared.
²
It seems quite counter-intuitive that the warming of Europe actually created a significant challenge to its human (and animal)
inhabitants, but the altered environment required the invention of new ways of living off the landscape. The trend towards
intensified subsistence that began in the run-up to the LGM continued, with even more hunting and trapping of small animals
and birds, fishing, and gathering of molluscs. Ice Age technology was gradually replaced by Mesolithic tools: bows for hunting,
reaping knives and axes for felling trees, as the Europeans adapted to newly wooded landscapes, as well as to estuarine and
coastal environments. Europe became populated more widely and more densely than ever before, and quite soon an innovation
from the Middle East would allow even greater population numbers to be sustained on the landscape.
²

New Age Mesopotamia: Göbekli Tepe, Turkey

The end of my European journey would take me back to where I had started, to Turkey, and to the most spectacular archaeological
site I have ever seen.

I travelled down the south-east of Turkey, about thirty miles north of the Syrian border, to the ancient town of Sanli Urfa.
I was in Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. In Urfa, modern buildings clustered around Roman ruins on the
slopes, but I was after much more ancient archaeology.

I travelled for around an hour, west of Urfa, then turned off the main road on to a dusty track, which wound up through a
rocky valley and on to a limestone escarpment. Eventually, the track ran out and I found myself at the bottom of a conical
hill, with a site hut and an empty tent. As I walked up the hill, German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt came halfway down to
meet me.

‘This hill is not made by nature,’ Klaus explained as we walked up it. ‘It’s a
tell
, a man-made mound created by the ruins of these Stone Age structures. It reaches up about fifteen metres above the natural
limestone plateau. I was suspicious when I first saw this site: no force of nature could make such a mound of earth in this
location.’

Klaus had discovered this site while surveying the area for potential Palaeolithic sites in 1994. Local farmers had been turning
up masses of stone tools in the fields on and around the hill, and occasionally hitting very large stones with their ploughs.
Archaeologists had got wind of this before, but assumed that the stones were the remains of a medieval cemetery. But when
Klaus investigated, he found finely worked blades, and large, rectangular stones buried in the ground – and so large that
they could not be moved or lifted. When he started excavating the site in 1995, he found that these stones were something
truly remarkable. They were just the tops of great, T-shaped standing stones. Some were more than two metres high, and, as
the archaeologists dug deeper, they found that the stones were arranged in a circle, with two larger standing stones in the
centre of the ring. But there wasn’t just one stone circle at Göbekli Tepe: Klaus had excavated four so far, and from geophysical
surveys of the hill he supposed that there might be twenty to twenty-five of them, still buried in the rubble of the hill.