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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Serie: The 50
- Sprache: Englisch
Humanity's written history stretches back only 5,000 years, a mere blip on the timeline of our existence. If you want to know what it really means to be fully human, to see the whole story, you need to go back. Way, way back. Prehistoric humans couldn't write, but they were adept at telling their own stories. On every continent and outpost where they gained a foothold, they left signs for modern man to decipher. From the Middle Bronze Age settlement of Arkaim on the Kazakh Steppes to the temples of the Olmec in Mexico; from one of the first European proto-cities at Nebelivka in Ukraine to the neolithic henges of Avebury and Stonehenge; from the dolmens of Antequera in the heart of Andalucía to the megalithic culture that thrived in isolation on Indonesia's tiny Nias Island.
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DISCLAIMER
The descriptions given in these articles are for general guidance only, and should not be used as a substitute for a proper travel guide or route plan. Neither the author nor the publisher shall be liable or responsible for any loss, injury or damage allegedly arising from any information contained in this book.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Prehistoric means, simply, ‘before history’, the era that began some 5 million years ago with the evolution of the first species of human, all the way to the advent of writing, which enabled the recording and remembering of events, ushering in the period we now call ‘history’. The invention of writing brought to an end our prehistoric existence. It gave our world a timeline, and made its past knowable to those who would come later. Because writing came to different cultures in different eras, a date that reflects the prehistoric in one part of the world isn’t necessarily prehistoric elsewhere. Prehistory ended early for the people of Mesopotamia when the Sumerians invented Cuneiform script around 3,500 BCE–3,000 BCE. But in parts of Papua New Guinea, the term prehistoric can refer to events that occurred among its scattered hill tribes just a century or more ago.
Anatomically modern humans – Homo sapiens – those that evolved from thick-skulled archaic humans around 200,000 years ago took a mere 150,000 years (or even less according to many theorists), to begin exhibiting the first signs of cognition involving abstract thinking and an awareness of art and symbolic expression. Fifty thousand years ago people were in most respects just like us today. They were living their lives and felt the impulse to tell their stories; to leave their marks in stone monuments, in cave drawings using pigments, and in all of the raw materials provided to them by the earth to make the things of everyday life: pottery, jewellery, clothes, wells, temples and cities.
The primary source of our knowledge of prehistory comes from archaeology, the science of unravelling and trying to comprehend past human activity by studying material remains. Yet while archaeological sites found across the world are growing in number every day, the information they give us is often fragmentary. Stone chambers, burial mounds, astronomical monuments, tools, ornaments and weapons often provide researchers with as many questions as answers. But what we now know is monumental compared to a century ago.
We know that humans began making jewellery about 85,000 years ago, thanks to a series of archaeological excavations in a cave near the Moroccan village of Taforalt. We know that the bow and arrow replaced the spear thrower 64,000 years ago, that we began making needles out of bone 50,000 years ago, and 42,000 years ago – at about the time we started to go deep sea fishing in Indonesia — we were making the first musical notes using Paleolithic flutes made of animal bone. Forty thousand years ago we began painting images of our hunter-gatherer lives on the walls and ceilings of caves. We drew sophisticated figurative art and geometric patterns, and even left haunting images of our hand prints in caves such as Argentina’s Cueva de las Manos, using the technique of ‘negative stencilling’. Twenty-five thousand years ago we were building our first settlements. North America was colonised 16,000 years ago, and a thousand years later animals were being domesticated. Twelve thousand years ago land ice began thawing in Denmark and Sweden and within 2,000 years most of the Ice Age megafauna was extinct. And soon after that came the Neolithic Age – the New Stone Age.
The Neolithic Age brought with it the beginnings of agriculture, the so-called ‘Neolithic Revolution’ that saw humans move from hunter-gatherers to sedentary farmers. Crops were harvested and small towns and villages began to evolve, as did larger proto-cities such as Çatalhöyük in Turkey, Sesklo in Greece and Jericho in the Levant. And with the advent of the Neolithic and after that the Bronze and Iron Ages came all of the names we are so familiar with today, and which dominate the pages of this book: Newgrange, Skara Brae, Chaco Culture, the Indus Valley, Stonehenge.
It’s a stroke of luck, really, that we have as much of our prehistoric world left to us as we do. Wars, the inexorable passage of time and the curiosity of man have not been kind to our ancestors’ legacies. In the 1800s ‘barrow digging’ was a popular pursuit among the landed gentry of Britain. In 1839 a naval officer who fancied himself as an explorer dug up 400 cubic feet of soil north-east of Stonehenge’s Altar Stone, and in the process destroyed any prehistoric features that would have been present. At around the same time Thomas Bateman, an English antiquary and self-confessed barrow-digger unearthed, but also forever damaged, prehistoric sites in England’s Peak District.
Over the centuries the looting of ancient tombs, as well as museum theft, have seen countless artefacts disappear forever into the hands of private collectors the world over, while the destruction of prehistoric sites caused by natural events, war and conflict makes for horribly depressing reading. In 1628 BCE a cataclysmic volcanic eruption on the Greek island of Thera (Santorini) devastated the Minoan city of Akrotiri. Mongol invaders in the 13th century destroyed ancient irrigation systems in Iran and Iraq as part of a general orgy of death, destruction and conquest that is estimated to have killed 5 per cent of the world’s population. More recently Mayan sites in Central America have been damaged in the name of development, while catastrophic damage has been done to Assyrian monuments in Syria and Iraq by the so-called Islamic State.
The entries selected for this book represent some of the most famous, and lesser-known prehistoric sites we are blessed to still have with us including rock art, temples, megaliths and proto-cities; everything from the raised burial mounds of Native Americans to the frozen graveyards of the woolly mammoth. Considering that 99 per cent of our species’ time on earth has been lived in our prehistory, it makes sense that if we want to come to an understanding of who we are, we need to better acquaint ourselves with those few windows that grant us the privilege of being able to look back upon faltering first steps, and humble beginnings.
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
BP – Before Present – a time scale used in radiocarbon dating that uses 1 January 1950 as its start point, reflecting the period when the practice became a reliable measurer of age
BCE – Before the Common Era – a secular year numbering system for pre-AD 1 dates
CE – Common Era – a secular year numbering system for post-AD 1 dates
Aceramic – ‘not producing pottery’ or ‘without pottery’ cultures in the Early Neolithic
Adze – a hand-held stone chipped to form a blade, set at a right angle to the handle
Baetyli – sacred stones that have been endowed with life
Broch – an Iron Age drystone hollow-walled structure endemic to Scotland
Burin – a lithic flake with a chisel-like edge used for engraving wood and bone
Dolmen – a single-chambered megalithic tomb
Lithic – descriptive of ground and chipped stone tools and their debris/byproducts
Menhir – large upright standing stone that can be solitary or a part of a group of similar stones
Microlith – extremely small stone tools
Midden – ancient waste dumps composed of various waste materials including vermin shells, sherds, animal bones, human excrement, lithics and general domestic waste
Nuraghes – megalithic stone towers endemic to the island of Sardinia
Oppidum – an ancient Celtic fortified town, usually but not always under Roman rule (plural oppida)
Orthostat – a slab-like large stone set in an upright position
Ossuary – a chest, box or other container used as a final resting place for human skeletal remains
Radiocarbon – (or C-14 dating) – scientific process whereby the age of an object can be calculated by measuring the rate of decay of the carbon in its remains
Rondels – Neolithic circular enclosures
Trilithon – two large megalithic vertical stones supporting a third stone laid atop the others like a lintel
Tumulus or barrow – a mound of earth and stones raised over a grave or graves; also called a burial mound
THE 50 GREATEST PREHISTORIC SITESOF THE WORLD
THE VÉZÈRE VALLEY
Location: Dordogne, France
Type: Various
Period: Various
Dating: 440,000 BP–12,000 BP
Culture: Various
Any other valley would consider itself blessed just to have within its boundaries a handful of the 147 Paleolithic sites and 25 painted caves lined with the world’s finest prehistoric art that lie scattered throughout the Vézère Valley in South-west France. That so much lies within so compact an area makes this meandering, limestone-encrusted valley one of the world’s premier prehistoric hotspots, with a preserved topography of rock shelters and overhangs that still testify to the sort of terrain prehistoric man was looking for when deciding where he should ‘settle down’. One of the cradles of European civilisation, humans have inhabited the Vézère Valley for more than 440,000 years, with flints dating that far back having been unearthed beneath a rock shelter at La Micoque on the right bank of the Vézère River near the town of Manaurie, in 1895. Excavations at La Micoque continued without interruption until the early 1930s, and the rock shelter has since been found to have been continually occupied for more than 300,000 years.
Excavations began in the valley in 1863, with the Vézère River’s meandering south-west course through the Dordogne a legacy of a great inland sea that once covered the Aquitaine region, only to retreat and leave in its wake a complex terrain of limestone plateaus and eroded valleys. Many of the valleys had galleries cut into their sides which in time developed large overhangs that gave protection from the weather and made ideal dwelling places for primitive man. It’s difficult to know where to start when cataloguing the valley’s wonders, though most would begin, no doubt, with a visit to Lascaux II. The replica cave opened in 1983 after the closure of the original, and fragile, Lascaux Cave in 1963. The original cave, which remained undiscovered until 1940, is over 17,000 years old and is filled with more than 2,000 drawings of humans and animals, as well as various symbolic and abstract signs. Lascaux II is its mirror image, created utilising the same techniques and pigments used in the original cave.
In the 25 kilometre length of the Vézère Valley between the towns of Les Eyzies and Montignac, there are fifteen caves with UNESCO World Heritage status. The Grotte de Rouffignac contains over 250 twelve-thousand-year-old friezes of mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses, all gorgeously rendered in black, painted in flickering candlelight by a small number of men and women – the Cro-Magnons, the first Homo sapiens to settle in Europe – who laid on their backs with the ceiling barely a metre above their heads to create what can still be seen today. Now referred to simply as ‘The Great Ceiling’, the floor has been lowered to allow for better access, and if you look closely you can even see scratch marks on the walls, made by hibernating bears from eons ago. Also a must-see is the Grotte de Font-de-Gaume with its 200-plus polychrome paintings (including bison, horses and mammoth) as well as Magdalenian-period engravings. The entrance to the Font-de-Gaume cave was first settled 25,000 years ago, and it is the only cave with coloured artwork remaining in France that can be visited, although access is extremely limited.
The valley is also home to some quite extraordinary friezes of animals sculpted directly into its abundant limestone, the most majestic of which is the Abri du Cap Blanc, a thirteen-metre-long frieze and one of the world’s finest examples of Paleolithic sculpture to have survived the Ice Age, still possessing outstanding depth and quality. The frieze consists of horses, bison and deer, and is the only frieze of prehistoric sculptures now open to the public. Another extraordinary though very small cave, located in the Gorge d’Enfer near to the village of Les Eyzies is the Abri du Poisson (circa 23,000 BCE) and its metre-long, life-sized sculpture of a male salmon (with a hook in its mouth!) etched into its ceiling. Access to the cave is by prior arrangement, but is worth the experience not only because fish are rarely represented in either cave paintings or rock engravings, but mostly because once you’re inside all you have to do is look up: this remarkably well-preserved sculpture is right above your head.
Another site that should not be missed is La Roque Saint-Christophe, a spectacular wall of limestone a kilometre in length and 80 metres high that rises along the banks of the Vézère River. Punctuated with a wealth of shelters and overhanging terraces hollowed out of the soft limestone, it began as a home for Neanderthal man 50,000 years ago, and has continued as a much-coveted defensive sanctuary ever since for Cro-Magnon people, Neolithic man, Gauls, Romans, Normans and Medieval princes. It was even a Renaissance-era troglodyte town and fortress that once occupied five levels of its cliff-face, the empty post holes in the limestone still clearly visible. There are no caves, and so no cave art either, and because of the constant use the site has received, what evidence there would have been of its earliest inhabitants has long since been obliterated. Now all that remains are various reconstructions of prehistoric and medieval life such as campfires, capstans, winches and cranes. But the limestone overhangs and shelters are extraordinary in their breadth and scale, and even include Europe’s largest stone staircase hewn out of a single piece of rock, the medieval ‘great staircase’. And yes, you can walk on it, too.
Those who live in this prehistoric valley are aware of the need to be good stewards. The owner of the Château de Commarque, Hubert de Commarque, has been not only restoring the castle since he purchased the site in 1962, but preserving its considerable prehistoric legacy including the remnants of a troglodytic community and the castle’s very own Magdalenian-era sculpture of a horse’s head in a sealed cave beneath its extensive fortifications.
The National Museum of Prehistory in Les Eyzies has the finest collection of prehistoric artefacts in France including a magnificent bas-relief carving on a fragment of a reindeer’s antler just a few centimetres in length depicting a now-extinct Steppe bison licking its flank (perhaps an insect bite?). Carved with great delicacy, it is all that remains of a spear thrower dating to the Magdalenian culture between 20,000 and 12,000 BCE; another reminder that the treasures of the Vézère Valley come down to us in both the very large, and the very small.
ATAPUERCA
Location: Atapuerca Mountains, Northern Spain
Type: Cave burial
Period: Pleistocene–Iron Age
Dating: 430,000 BCE–600 BCE
Culture: Neanderthal–Modern Man
There’s barely a period of human habitation in Europe that the site of Atapuerca on Spain’s Iberian Peninsula doesn’t attest to. The Pleistocene (Trinchera del Ferrocarril and Cueva Mayor), the Holocene (El Portalon de Cueva Mayor and Cueva del Silo), the Paleolithic, the Neolithic, the Bronze and Iron Ages, and over the divide into the pages of history to the Medieval period and beyond. A million years of history in one single, extraordinary site.
Located not far from the city of Burgos in the Atapuerca Mountains, a limestone-laced range filled with all manner of caves, tunnels and sinkholes, Atapuerca’s existence was first noted in an abstract reference to human remains published in a Spanish newspaper in 1863. Ninety-nine years later a team of spelunkers (cave divers) stumbled upon the cave and notified the local museum in Burgos, and in 1976 a mining engineer searching for bear fossils found a humanlike mandible. Atapuerca gave up its secrets slowly.
The site contains a fossil record of Europe’s earliest humans that is second to none, including the fragments of a jawbone and teeth dating to 1.2 million years ago – Homo antecessor – found in the ‘Pit of the Elephant’, the earliest known remains of humans to be found in Western Europe. It contains a record of occupation containing evidence not only of the earliest inroads made by civilisations that still are with us today, but of those that have long since ceased to be. Atapuerca’s ideal location in terms of climate and geography contributed to its longevity, and in addition to the fossil record there are paintings and panels that shed additional light onto the everyday lives of its inhabitants, depicting hunting scenes as well as geometric motifs and a wealth of human and animal-like figures.
One of the most famous discoveries made at Atapuerca is the legendary ‘Pit of Bones’, accessed via a vertical chimney, which first began to be studied in 1984, and again with renewed efforts after additional fossils were uncovered, in 1991. The 400,000 year-old bones – Homo heidelbergensis – found in the Pit of Bones from the Middle Pleistocene, a total of more than 6,700 fossils, belonged to 28 individuals of all ages and both sexes. They were heavier than later Neanderthals, around 150 pounds (68 kilograms), yet their brains were smaller, and the evidence gathered enabled studies to be made in the evolution of modern humans’ body shapes. The work here has also enabled scientists to identify four primary stages of human evolution over the past 4 million years: ardipithecus (arboreal and maybe bipedal); australopithecines, similar to the famous Lucy, mostly bipedal and possibly arboreal; archaic humans, the sort found at Atapuerca that belong to the group Homo erectus; and finally modern humans. Whether or not the bodies found here were purposely thrown in by their contemporaries in an act of burial is still hotly debated.
What is extraordinary about the findings at Atapuerca is that they include Neanderthals – archaic humans, in their ‘third stage’, putting an end to the theory they were merely a product of the adaptation required to live in the cold climates of Europe. The more of Atapuerca’s secrets that are uncovered, the more long-held theories about the distinctions between Homo erectus and the Neanderthals seem to evaporate. They now seem more like us than ever before. And just like us, thanks to a discovery in the Pit of Bones, even during a period of human history not known for its acts of violence because there were no territories to defend, a Neanderthal could still be provoked to murder.
Four hundred and thirty thousand years ago a disagreement took place between two Neanderthals that ended in a young adult being killed by two blunt force traumas to the skull. The similarity of each fracture suggests both blows were made with the same instrument, and the incident became the first known act of lethal violence to occur in the Homo genus. The cranium’s two wounds, T1 and T2, were not the result of a fall or accident. They were deliberate multiple blows delivered with the intention to kill. Chemical analysis of the remains revealed that the wounds had failed to heal before the person died, confirming the man or woman had died of their injuries. Found in a deep layer of red clay known as LH6, the skull’s first fragments were found in 1990 and pieced together years afterwards when its remaining pieces were uncovered. While it’s unclear what the weapon may have been, the wound is consistent with it being either a spear or some kind of stone axe.
The world’s first recorded murder makes for an extraordinary piece of forensic paperwork. AGE: Unknown. SEX: Unknown. CAUSE OF DEATH: Blunt force trauma. TIME OF DEATH: 430,000 BCE … give or take.
The commonly accepted notion of ‘encephalisation’, the evolutionary increase in the size and complexity of the brain, is also in danger of being undone by the discoveries at Atapuerca. No longer was Homo erectus presumed to be the singular, fortunate recipient of an evolving brain. According to the brain mass determined by the skeletal evidence at Atapuerca, the process occurred rapidly among Neanderthals too. Perhaps they were not the ‘super chimpanzees’ science had led us to believe. They talked, they clothed themselves and they evolved independently of us. They were our ‘mirror species’.
ÉVORA COMPLEX
Location: Alentejo, Southern Portugal
Type: Dolmen, menhirs, cave dwelling
Period: Neolithic–Chalcolithic
Dating: 50,000 BCE–3,000 BCE
Culture: Various
The Évora Complex is the name given to a collection of megalithic and other prehistoric sites concentrated around the town of Évora on Portugal’s Iberian Peninsula. The European megalithic tradition began in the seventh millennium BCE during the Neolithic period and extended into the Chalcolithic in the third millennium. Because the construction of menhirs is associated with the rise of agriculture, and with the Iberian Peninsula being one of Europe’s earliest crop growing regions, it’s hardly surprising that scholars consider it to be the birthplace of European megaliths.
One of Europe’s oldest megaliths, as well as one of the world’s first public monuments, is the menhirs of Almendres Cromlech in Southern Portugal’s Alentejo region, two hours’ drive south of the capital Lisbon. Built over successive phases from 5,000 BCE to 4,000 BCE it comprises two stone circles totalling 92 stones that form an oval measuring 196 feet (60 metres) by 98 feet (30 metres). They are the largest remaining group of stones left on the Iberian Peninsula, oriented to two different equinoxial directions with the majority having flattened faces that seem to look towards the sun. And its siting is no coincidence. The two latitudes over which the moon passes every 18.6 years as its inclination changes over the plane of the earth’s equator are the very same latitudes on which Almendres (and Stonehenge) sit. If you stand at Almendres on the full moon in spring, the sun will rise on the horizon at close to 110 degrees and head directly towards you, proof if any be needed that Neolithic peoples were acutely aware of the movements of the sun and moon. Almendres is also at the end of a 50 kilometre-long alignment that follows the spring’s full moon azimuth, an alignment that ends at the Xarex stone circles at Monsaraz – making it the Iberian Peninsula’s longest prehistoric alignment.
Now situated in the middle of a large cork plantation, the complex, often referred to as the ‘hill of the stone amphorae’ is one of the largest collections of menhirs in Europe, the oval shape of the complex the result of various additions and modifications over time.
Also not far from Évora is one of the jewels in Portugal’s megalithic crown – the Great Dolmen of Zambujeiro. The country’s only passage tomb, Zambujeiro was constructed sometime between 4,000 BCE and 3,000 BCE and is one of the largest such tombs in Europe and the only one on the continent where large upright stones line its internal walls. Of interest is a leaf-shaped stone close to the tomb’s entrance that gives the distinct impression it was intended to be placed in the tomb, but for whatever reason was never used. A sense of ceremony is seen in the two large stones that to this day still lie either side of the tomb’s entrance.
The well-defined mound itself, which has in the past been subject to some serious excavations, is 164 feet (50 metres) in diameter and close to 26 feet (8 metres) high. The entry stones are clearly shaped with the intention of supporting other stones which were never put into place. A slight bend in the passage, not dissimilar to what is found at Newgrange, takes you into a fabulous cathedral-like, polygonal chamber consisting of eight impressive granite stones devoid of any carvings and all of which lean inwards, all pressing into and supporting one another and thus sharing the considerable load. No skeletons were found inside. The capstone lies on the top of the mound and is broken into several pieces. At half a metre in thickness it would have weighed several tons before being split in two long ago, likely by lightning.
Also considered a part of the Évora Complex is the prehistoric rock art site of Escoural Cave, located between the Tagus River and the plains of the Alentejo. First discovered in the 1960s, this complex system of subterranean caves is a labyrinth of horizontal halls and galleries, a tangled network of karst and sheet-like deposits of calcite. Humans first ventured into Escoural Cave around 50,000 years ago during the Middle Paleolithic, and its cave art is comparable to the great caves of Lascaux and Altamira, though not as rich. Close by the cave can also be found the remains of Neolithic/Chalcolithic dwellings. With such an impressive concentration of sites spanning so long a timeline, is it any wonder the Évora region is sometimes referred to as the ‘Iberian Mesopotamia’.
GABARNMUNG ROCK SHELTER
Location: Northern Territory, Australia
Type: Rock art
Period: Upper Paleolithic
Dating: 46,000 BCE
Culture: Aboriginal
Australia’s Aborigines have greater claim than any other social group to being the world’s oldest living culture, with evidence dating back 40,000 years and some anthropologists suggesting as much as 60,000 years; an unheard-of continuity of civilisation by a nomadic people with few tools, but who lived in rare harmony with the land in the world’s lowest, flattest and driest inhabited continent. When European settlement began in the 1700’s, Aboriginal societies were present across every corner of this new frontier. They spoke 250 languages, languages which had within them innumerable dialects. Today only some 120 of these language groups remain, many of which even now are in danger of being forever lost. Whenever the handing down of a spoken language is broken, a new generation of children grow up without the ability to speak the language of their grandparents. Age-old links are severed. Add to that their systematic slaughter by settlers, and the fact their fragile language was only oral, not written, and it’s hardly surprising that those remnants of Aboriginal identity still left to us are now being seen as the precious and enduring treasures they are.
And nowhere is there a treasure as precious as the Gabarnmung Rock Shelter, located in Arnhem Land in the north-east corner of the Northern Territory. Perched high on a sandstone escarpment it is home to the Jawoyn people (and to the world’s second-oldest stone axe, circa 35,000 BCE), created by tunnelling into an existing cliff to create a mammoth 62 feet by 62 feet (19 metres by 19 metres) space with a ceiling ranging in height from 5.7 feet to 8 feet (1.75 metres–2.45 metres). Inside are 36 painted rock pillars that stretch upwards from floor to ceiling, the product of natural erosion but which seem to be not unlike the pillars of some ancient temple, seemingly supporting the cave’s ceiling and giving us something that is a rarity in the Aboriginal world: a structure, a dwelling. Not just a place of anthropology and archaeology, but of architecture.
