A Journey Trough the ice inferno of the Stone Age
Europe, forty thousand years ago.
Four dots moving along the bank of a river in a black and gray landscape of the Ice Age,
the only signs of life on a cold autumn day.
Dense morning fog swirls gently over the slow-moving water, which stirs restlessly in an icy breeze.
Pine trees crowd the riverbank, near a large clearing where aurochs and bison dig through
the snow for food.
The fur-clad Cro-Magnon family moves slowly - a hunter with a handful of spears, his companion,
carrying a leather pouch of dried meat, a son and a daughter.
The five-year-old boy runs back and forth with a small spear.
His older sister stays with her mother, also carrying a hide bag.
A sudden gust of wind lifts the clinging darkness on the other side of the creek.
Suddenly, the boy screams and points, then runs in terror to his mother.
The children burst into and cling to her.
A weathered, hirsute face with heavy brows stares silently from the undergrowth on the
other bank.
Expressionless, yet watchful, its Neanderthal owner stands motionless, seemingly oblivious
to the cold.
The father looks over, waves his spear, and shrugs.
The face disappears as silently as it appeared.
As light snow falls, the family resumes their journey, the father ever vigilant, his eyes
never still.
During the climb to the rock shelter, he tells his children about their elusive, silent neighbors,
rarely seen and almost never met face to face.
There were more of them in the days of his father and grandfather when he first saw them.
Now sightings are unusual, especially during the cold months.
They are people different from us, he explains.
They do not speak like us; we cannot understand them, but they never harm us.
We just ignore them...
Somewhere in Europe, 22,000 years ago.
Having lost the memory of those strange "fellow travelers," the clan prepares for a new, cold
day.
Outside the cave, a freezing rain is falling.
In a corner, a large campfire is constantly being checked and stoked by women and boys.
A group of adults, after many days of waiting in vain for good weather, are preparing to
go hunting.
Children cry.
“Roll intro” Scenes like this must have occurred thousands
of times on the European continent during the Upper Paleolithic, between 40,000 and
12,000 years ago.
It was a time of glaciation, but also of creative explosion, when Neanderthals became extinct
and members of our species, Homo sapiens, colonized the vast territory, moving according
to climatic changes.
We are in the Würm glaciation, the last one that affected Europe and which we know as
the Last Ice Age.
It began about 110,000 years ago and reached its peak, the coldest phase, between 25,000
and 19,000 years ago.
At that time, sapiens - known in Europe as Cro-Magnons - were the only inhabitants of
the lands stretching from the Atlantic coast of Europe to Siberia.
But they were also present in Africa, Asia, and as far away as Australia, and some scholars
believe they had even arrived in North America.
The Cro-Magnons were the first fully modern Europeans, not only the creators of the marvelous
cave paintings at Lascaux and elsewhere, but the most adaptable and technologically inventive
people who ever lived on Earth.
The prolonged encounter between Cro-Magnons and archaic Neanderthals between 45,000 and
30,000 years ago was one of history's defining moments.
The Neanderthals survived for about 15,000 years in the face of the newcomers but were
eventually pushed aside by the far superior intellectual capabilities and cutting-edge
technologies of the Cro-Magnons, which enabled them to thrive in the intensely harsh climate
of the Ice Age.
How did they manage to endure such an extreme environment?
And what legacy did they leave behind after the cold millennia?
Approximately 22,000 years ago, the average annual temperature in the warmer regions of
southern Europe was 6° centigrade colder than today.
In our everyday lives, a 6-degree drop, even during the same day, would go completely unnoticed,
but globally, speaking of average temperatures, this is a climate change of enormous magnitude,
with winters A 6-degree drop in the average meant having temperatures in the winter that
could be as low as 30 degrees below zero.
During this period North America and Europe were virtually covered in ice, and in areas
that were even further north, such as those in the Arctic, average annual temperatures
were even about 14 degrees Celsius lower than they are today.
Only in Africa, in the equatorial zone, did the climate remain fairly temperate, giving
the settled Sapiens who still resided there, unaware of what was happening in the north,
a livable and prey-rich environment.
But we should not imagine a precipitous escape...
Fleeing something that takes millennia before its effects are felt is something that befits
sudden catastrophes, certainly not very slow phenomena like ice ages.
Nor does calling what happened a conscious migration seem appropriate...
From the human point of view, changes are almost imperceptible, making themselves felt
after generations.
Eventually, certainly, some places did become inhospitable, but they had already been abandoned,
or rather the flora and fauna had been gradually replaced, and the Cro-Magnons had probably
limited themselves to following prey into their new territories.
It was not an escape, perhaps more a letting go of environmental changes.
We ignore how many Cro-Magnons lived on the continent during the Upper Paleolithic.
At first, they formed small clans, which gradually organized into large concentrations, resulting
in complex social systems in constant movement.
The movement was a hardship for pregnant women and young children, and it added to an already
low birth rate: two or three years usually elapsed between children.
This was the period reserved for breastfeeding.
Since the mortality rate was very high, perhaps over fifty percent, the population grew slowly.
However, it continued to increase because of the excellent ability to adapt to the natural
environment, which is the greatest achievement of sapiens.
For shelter in the colder months, our Ice Age ancestors did not live in deep caves,
as was once believed, but merely sought escape in natural rock shelters.
These were usually large depressions carved into the walls of river beds, under a protective
ledge.
The openings were then draped with large skins to protect against piercing winds, while inside
tents made of wooden poles covered with sewn skins were built.
Everything was situated around a blazing hearth, which reflected heat and light onto the rock
walls.
Hunters were still forced to venture outside even in winter, beating the windswept tundra.
In small groups, armed with spears, they hoped for encounters with bison, deer, and mammoths,
and with the nighttime temperatures plunging they improvised shelters in dome-shaped huts
partially dug into the earth, built with a latticework of mammoth bones, covered with
clods of earth or animal skins.
But all this still would not have been possible without clothing capable of preserving them
from freezing, and without the invention of a refined domestic tool--guess what?
When the first sapiens found themselves grappling with the frigid European climate, at the time
of their migration from the Middle East, they found nothing better than to drape themselves
in loose, unshapely skins--clothing that could not, except poorly, retain body heat.
But everything changed about 30,000 years ago with what many claim to be one of the
most important inventions in human history: the sewing needle!
It was a miracle of ingenuity that allowed man to sew a skin-covered, snug-fitting, made-to-measure
garment onto himself.
Ice Age tailors carefully selected different animal skins - reindeer, Arctic foxes, hares,
even birds such as ptarmigan - and sewed together three or four layers of insulating material.
While the men hunted, the women remained in camp most of the time, not only preparing
food but also devoting enormous amounts of time to making clothing and preparing hides
and furs.
Skinning and tanning must have gone on year-round, but the most intense tailoring would have
taken place in the weeks before the fall reindeer hunts, before temperatures dropped precipitously.
Thus harnessed, hunting parties could leave their temporary shelters without fear of freezing.
And if fate was in their favor, they returned to their cozy caves with meat from bison,
deer, goat, horse, rhinoceros, and, north of the Pyrenees, reindeer and wooly mammoth.
Any kind of meat was welcome because it was not easy to hunt.
Nonetheless, sapiens were very skilled at hunting and fishing, and could rely on a diverse
arsenal made of wood, bone, stone, and horn: zagales, or small spears, and thrusters to
hurl them, harpoons, and hooks.
If they wanted to take down large animals, they used traps and planned hunting parties
in good time, but they often preferred the capture of small animals, which they accompanied
with vegetables, fish, eggs, or seafood.
They ate salmon and also a lot of deer.
And on the coasts, they harvested seafood such as clams, capelin, or shellfish.
Everything came in handy.
The tartar on the teeth of these sapiens indicates that half of the food was plant-based: fruits,
grasses, seeds, tubers, mushrooms, vegetables...
at least until cooling became more intense and it became even more difficult to harvest
them.
By any measure, these people were efficient, ingenious hunters.
Everyone, man or woman, adolescent or small child, lived in intimate association with
their surroundings in a way that is unimaginable to modern Westerners.
Above all, their art tells us that they were consummate observers.
The Cro-Magnon spent most of their time not hunting but watching-for hours, days, even
weeks.
They lived among a bestiary whose behavior they knew as well as their own.
They were familiar with the animals routines of feeding and drinking, birth, courting,
and death.
Every hunter knew when reindeer were in top condition, the subtle color changes in the
fur of arctic foxes, the sometimes dramatic changes in appearance that accompanied different
social behaviors in all manner of beasts.
Every Cro-Magnon knew more about animal behavior than most twenty-first-century biologists.
They lived so close to their prey that they were part of their quarry’s lives.
It was this knowledge, based on meticulous observation, that made them successful hunters.
You need only look at the details of cave paintings and engravings on antler fragments
and weapons to realize this.
Individual paintings and smaller engraved pieces tell us much about late Ice Age animals.
A reindeer raises itself to a standing position by using its forelimbs.
A male sniffs the genitals of a female as they lie engraved on an antler beam.
The differing sizes of their antlers portray their sexes.
Horse manes are full, just as they were in life; the bison depicted on cave walls lack
the thick pads of hair characteristic of American bison, an adaptation to their violent head-to-head
clashing.
Cro-Magnon art, when examined judiciously, is a mine of information about the species
the people hunted.
For instance, a hunter watching large herbivores spends at least half of his time watching
them eat.
Cro-Magnon artists sometimes depicted habitual grazers doing just that.
Horses normally prefer medium-height grasses but occasionally will stretch their necks
downward to crop much shorter grass.
The artists painted or engraved some of them feeding in this manner, as they did such quiet
activities as a bison grooming its flank.
But they drew many more animals with their tails alert or in threat postures.
The artists had a “distinct taste for excitement.”
At La Mouthe cave, Dordogne, France, we see two mammoths sparring head-to-head.
There are courting scenes between reindeer, that artists depicted in autumn, with fully
developed antlers… and the distinctive summer and winter coats of horses, which in very
cold environments, in winter, grew hair around the jaw that looked almost like a beard.
All the horses in Grotte de Chauvet wear such winter coats.
Bison painted in northern Spanish caves like Altamira often have reddish bay hair and black
legs, manes, and tails.
Those further north bear less-spectacular coats, often gray-brown.
Over thousands of years, the routine of Cro-Magnon life remained unchanged from one generation
to the next.
Their existence revolved around the cycle of the seasons, familiar environments and
landscapes, the customary movements from sheltered winter base camps into summer encampments,
and the annual gatherings where neighboring bands came together for a few brief days.
Experience counted for everything, the cumulative lore of generations passed from father to
son, mother to daughter, knowledgeable hunter to neophyte.
The passage of time was cyclical, too, marked by the constant realities of birth and death,
by abundance and scarcity, and, above all, by the mass hunts of summer and fall.
As long as these hunts continued, survival was ensured.
The world of the ancestors and the living continued to pass on to those still unborn.
Twelve millennia ago witnessed a gradual climatic amelioration that proceeded in fits and starts,
with quite rapid warming at times.
Ice sheets covering the Alps and Scandinavia retreated dramatically, and sea levels rose
considerably.
The ongoing warming saw Cro-Magnon groups move back into areas they had abandoned thousands
of years earlier, then hunt progressively further north into river valleys that extended
across the tundra and onto the open plains as conditions continued to improve.
Now Cro-Magnon society adapted to new circumstances, somewhat warmer temperatures, and more-favorable
hunting conditions.
This was probably a time of tentative advances, and sometimes retreats, across more-open terrain,
as always following the herds of horses, reindeer, and other game that had been the foundations
of human life for thousands of years.
Then came the Neolithic period, agriculture and the transition to a settled human society
... with the building of the first villages ... and then towns.
But that is clearly another story.