My European Family

by Karin Bojs

  German archaeologists have found fragments of a total of eight flutes in Hohle Fels and the nearby caves of Geissenklösterle and Vogelherd. At a museum in nearby Blaubeuren you can listen to the sound produced by recon­structions of these instruments. Four of the flutes are made out of bones from birds’ wings. They sound more or less like someone blowing into a bottle – a very hollow sound. Bones from swans’ wings make higher-pitched sounds, while those from vultures are larger, making for flutes with a deeper pitch.

  Making a flute out of the hollow bone of a bird may not appear to be a very sophisticated process; all that is necessary is to cut off the bone and drill holes at the appropriate points. It is the four ivory flutes, which produce a sound rivalling that of a silver flute in clarity and purity, that are truly mind-boggling. Carving a flute from a substance as hard as ivory called for great skill. You had to split a mammoth’s tusk in half, scoop out the inside, and stick the two halves together again, forming a completely airtight join. The Aurignacians probably used resin as glue. Observing the positioning of the holes enables us to imagine what the music they produced would have sounded like.

  Doubtless human beings have been singing and dancing since time immemorial, far longer than since the point when we first left the African continent. But the flutes from the Hohle Fels caves are the oldest musical instruments of which there is firm evidence. Researchers in Slovenia claim to have discovered an even more ancient bird bone with holes, which they believe to be a flute made by Neanderthals, but that find is surrounded by controversy. Nearly all other researchers are sceptical; they think the holes in the bone from Slovenia were produced by natural causes, perhaps by the bite of a hyena.

  There is a consensus, however, that the Aurignacians in the Swabian Jura played the flute.

  ***

  Not only did they have music in their lives, but they also created statuettes. Archaeologists working in the Swabian Jura have found around 50 figurines fashioned from ivory and stone.

  The largest of these is the Lion Man from the Hohlenstein-Stadel cave, an ivory figure with a head like that of a lion but the body of a man. It was made nearly 40,000 years ago and is about 30 centimetres (12 inches) tall. A contemporary reconstruction shows that it must have taken about six weeks – for a skilled and experienced person working all day long in full daylight – to make.

  In Hohle Fels, that great Ice Age cathedral, archaeologists have discovered a smaller lion man just 2.5 centimetres (one inch) tall that is more simply executed. Other finds from the same cave include a little ivory waterfowl, possibly a loon, and a particularly well-endowed female figure that is even older than the Lion Man and has been named ‘the Venus of Hohle Fels’. She has enormous breasts, and her genitals are clearly marked by a deep cleft between her legs.

  For a nomad constantly on the move between different dwelling places, it was practical for artistic artefacts to be small and easy to handle, and light enough to carry. We do not know exactly how they were used, but it requires no great leap of the imagination to see the connections between these art objects and shamanistic beliefs studied by ethnologists over the last 150 years among Swedish Sami, Siberian nomads, Native Americans and the South African Bushmen (also known as the San people).

  The cave lion was the largest and most dangerous predator that posed a threat to our forebears in the Swabian Jura. They certainly both feared it and admired its strength and speed. There are many descriptions of how shamans take on the shape of an animal in their ceremonies, often using masks to do so. It is not much of a stretch of the imagination to see the cave lion as part of this repertoire. Waterfowl, too, often play a special role in a shamanistic world view. This is because of their ability to make their way freely between the three levels of the universe; they can fly and thus reach the heavens, they can walk the earth like humans, and they can dive into the depths to reach the underworld.

  The large-breasted female figures appear in both Europe and Siberia throughout the nearly 30,000 years of the Ice Age. They may have had a place in female rites around fertility and giving birth. That, at any rate, is the view of Jill Cook, a curator of Stone Age art at London’s British Museum.

  Nicholas Conard, a professor of archaeology at the University of Tübingen who is in overall charge of the excavations at Hohle Fels, takes a somewhat different view. He prefers to extend the significance of these female figures to encompass fecundity in general, including the whole of nature and the wild animals that were people’s quarry. He has suggested that Angela Merkel, the Christian Democrat German chancellor, should wear a replica of the Venus of Hohle Fels around her neck. She has demurred so far; perhaps the figurine’s clearly defined genitalia are a little too provo­cative for the circles in which she moves.

  Some of the art objects from the Swabian Jura are more ancient than any other figurative art anywhere in the world. There are, of course, non-figurative motifs that are tens of thousands of years older than the objects found in Swabia, such as the zigzag patterns on stones from Blombos in South Africa, which have been dated as at least 75,000 years old. But the figures from the caves in southern Germany show that over 40,000 years ago people in Europe were able to depict both creatures that actually exist in real life, such as waterfowl, and imaginary beings, such as the lion men. They must have had mental powers just like ours today.

  Conard has advanced the rather provocative proposition that this figurative art first emerged when humans reached the region that is now Germany. He hypothesises that new challenges, such as a cold climate and rivalry with groups already living there, triggered abilities that had hitherto lain dormant. He concedes that people were discovering figurative art in other places too, but argues that those in Swabia were the first to do so.

  Conard is aware that his hypothesis is a provocative one. He says he is quite ready to abandon it as soon as archaeologists in other countries find indisputable proof of figurative art or musical instruments that predate the Swabian finds. But the reason why the oldest figurative art and the oldest musical instruments have been found in Germany may be that archaeologists have spent more time searching there than in most other places on earth. That was my own view when I met Conard in Tübingen in the autumn of 2013.

  And one year after my visit, strong indications emerged that he is mistaken. An international team of researchers published new information dating cave paintings from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The most ancient paintings, it transpired, are some 40,000 years old – about as early as the very oldest paintings in European caves, and nearly as old as the oldest statuettes from Swabia.

  When I asked Conard to comment on the new dates, he conceded that people on the other side of the earth were able to create art just as early as those dwelling in the caves of Swabia. However, he claims that the art found in Indonesia and that of Swabia may have developed in parallel, each quite independently of the other. He is now quite alone among the world’s leading experts in human evolution in holding this view. Most believe that art and music were already part of our baggage when we left Africa some 55,000 years ago. Culture has followed us on our wanderings ever since, both eastwards and westwards.

  I am nonetheless convinced that Conard has an important point in viewing art and music as playing a decisive role in our early ancestors’ ability to stay together and survive. But I believe that was the case in Africa, Europe and elsewhere. Creativity and artistic ability have been so crucial to our survival that these abilities are written into our genes – despite the dark downside.

  ***

  Self-expression through art, music and storytelling is one of the main forces that drive human beings. That was so during the Ice Age, and it remains so today. Yet some of us pay a high price for the continued existence of these features in the population.

  Talents such as being able to paint, play music and tell stories are in part hereditary. Families in which such gifts are common also tend to be affected by psychotic conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar d
isorder. Both these conditions affect about 1 per cent of the population worldwide, in all the countries that have been studied. They can be very disabling. Relatives of people affected by schizophrenia are often successful as artists and musicians. Unfortunately, that does not apply to the individuals suffering from the condition, as it limits their capabilities to such an extent. People with bipolar disorder more often succeed in creative occupations themselves, and the same is true of close family members.

  One of the first people to observe this correlation was an Icelandic researcher called Jon Love Karlsson who published a groundbreaking study back in 1970. His methods leave something to be desired by contemporary scientific standards. He based his research on Iceland’s well-documented genea­logical information, which – as mentioned in the previous chapter – is probably more comprehensive than anywhere else in the world. This information was compared with the records of patients at Reykjavik’s mental hospital and the Icelandic version of Who’s Who.

  Karlsson believed that the risk of schizophrenia was governed by just two genes. Today’s DNA research has shown that it actually depends on hundreds of genes, in conjunction with unknown environmental factors. But the link between creativity and psychotic disorders has been confirmed, and that applies to the most recent, largest and best conducted studies.

  Many of the gene variants involved emerge as entirely new mutations when a new life comes into being. This is cutting-edge knowledge that has revolutionised research into schizophrenia and a number of other psychotic disorders. The same calculations of new mutations also play a decisive role when DNA is used in genealogy and research into the history of humankind. If you know how many mutations accompany each new baby, you can work out the speed of human evolution. You can set the stopwatch – and time the rate of evolution.

  The first major breakthrough in this area again came from Iceland. Thanks to the new technology for DNA analysis, a team of Icelandic researchers were able in 2012 to compare parents and children in 78 families. Their comparisons enabled them to confirm a theory that the children of fathers who were older at the time of conception have a higher risk of schizophrenia. The reason for this is that sperm from older fathers contain more mutations. An equally groundbreaking aspect was that the Icelanders were able to quantify the number of new mutations each baby is born with. They average about 30 on the mother’s side and about 30 on the father’s side if he is in his thirties. If he is in his sixties, the number of mutations on his side rises to about 60.

  Svante Pääbo’s team of researchers in Leipzig has attempted to calculate the rate of mutation using a completely different method. They have compared DNA from ancient skeletons with DNA from people alive today. In the past, it was difficult to reconcile the findings from Iceland with estimates of how DNA changes in the course of evolution. The different methods resulted in totally different figures. You could say that the researchers’ watches seemed to be ticking at different speeds. But in the autumn of 2014, Pääbo’s team published analyses of the DNA of a 45,000-year-old man from a place called Ust’-Ishim in western Siberia. He was the oldest modern human ever subjected to DNA analysis and therefore provided the best benchmark for calibrating the DNA watch.

  A degree of uncertainty remains, partly because we do not know exactly how old our forefathers and foremothers were when they had their children. But now the results of the two methods are far better matched. We can assume that each new individual born inherits about 30 new mutations from each parent. If that individual is unlucky, these new mutations can end up in unfavourable locations, where they may be partly responsible for disorders such as schizophrenia and manic depression.

  Completely new mutations thus account for part of the risk of contracting one of these psychotic disorders. But there are also many gene variants that are clearly congenital, inherited from parents, maternal and paternal grandparents, and previous generations and lineages. Such gene variants have attached themselves to the human race, even though psychotic disorders bring such huge disadvantages with them. They reduce the chances of survival, and schizophrenia, at any rate, reduces the likelihood of having children of one’s own.

  The only possible explanation for the continued existence of this inherited trait is that it also confers some advantages. For those who have mental illness in their family, it may be a comfort to reflect that a predisposition to psychosis is a double-edged thing. Such disorders are undoubtedly disabling; they often place a heavy burden on both the sufferer and on his or her loved ones. Yet they also represent a gift – in the form of creativity and extra energy. These characteristics have been tremendous assets in the course of human history. Indeed, they have actually proven to be indispensable to our development.

  That’s how I tend to look at it.

  Chapter Four

  First on the Scene in Europe

  Over 42,000 years ago, the Aurignacians were already migrating across large areas of Europe. Some of the oldest and best finds come from an archaeological site in Russia, Kostenki, which lies 400 kilometres (250 miles) south of Moscow, on the River Don. Researchers have analysed DNA from the skeleton of a young man found here. Known as Kostenki-14, he lived about 38,000 years ago. He died in his twenties and was buried in a foetal position, with generous amounts of red ochre scattered over his body.

  His mitochondrial DNA belongs to group U2, which is closely related to my own haplogroup, U5. Although U2 is very unusual today, it still crops up throughout Europe, as well as in central Asia and India. More exhaustive analysis of his mitochondrial DNA shows he was related to contemporary Europeans. He confirms the view that a group of people from Africa arrived in the Middle East about 55,000 years ago. They intermingled with a small number of Neanderthals, and shortly after this interbreeding the group split up. Some of them went further east, becoming South-east Asians and Australians in the fullness of time. Some remained in the Middle East and the Caucasus, while others began to migrate towards Europe. The man from Kostenki clearly belonged to the European group.

  His grave, containing a well-preserved skeleton, was discovered back in the 1950s. Russian researchers tried to reconstruct his appearance on the basis of his bones. There are several copies of the reconstruction at museums in Moscow, Saint Petersburg and the rural locality of Kostenki.

  These models show a slender young man with a broad but straight nose, unusually pronounced eyebrow arches and full lips. He was just 1.6 metres (5¼ feet) in height, with a strikingly small cranium. His teeth are broad and somewhat worn, though otherwise healthy and in good condition, with a narrow gap between the front teeth in his upper jaw. The models depict him as dark-skinned, with dark, curly hair. Although that is certainly a reasonable assumption, researchers have not yet published any such details in the DNA analyses that are publicly available.

  Nearby finds from the same period show that wild horses were the most common prey of the Kostenki man and his contemporaries. Archaeologists also found some hare and mammoth bones in his grave. At that time, clumps of trees, mainly willows, were beginning to grow in the steppes again, as the climate had recently become warmer after one of the Ice Age’s colder periods. Life had become easier again after the worst catastrophe that Europe had experienced in 100,000 years.

  The waxing and waning of ice ages is mainly the result of cyclical changes in the earth’s orbit around the sun. The earth’s axis can be tilted to a greater or lesser degree, it can be tilted in different directions, and the elliptical shape of the earth’s orbit can vary. In certain positions, when the northern latitudes receive particularly little sunlight, a new global ice age can be triggered. These shifts are known as Milankovitch cycles, after the Serbian physicist who first described the pattern.

  But there are other factors that can affect the climate at both global and regional level. Volcanoes, for instance, can discharge ash that filters out the sun’s rays, thereby causing the earth to cool down.

  Some 39,000 years ago there was a really ‘Big Bang’ –
a volcanic eruption in the area around Naples, Italy. Magma poured out in quantities about 80 times greater than at the better-known eruption that buried the Roman town of Pompeii in AD 79. The plume from the magma rose 40 kilometres (25 miles) into the atmosphere. The ash spread mainly eastwards, over Greece and Bulgaria, the Black Sea and Russia. In Kostenki, archaeologists can clearly distinguish a thick layer composed mainly of dust, which helps them to date their finds. It seems likely that the sky was darkened for a number of years, that the climate grew considerably colder, and that the ground was covered in decimetre-thick layers of ash – so thick in many places that it was impossible for animals to graze.

  Some researchers believe that this volcanic eruption sounded the death knell for the Neanderthals. The Neanderthals left many traces that go back beyond 39,000 years, but there are scarcely any more recent ones that can definitely be attributed to them. The hypothesis is that at least some of us modern humans, unlike the Neanderthals, managed to adapt to the newer, harsher conditions after the ‘Big Bang’. Some researchers believe, for instance, that we began to use bone needles in this very period. This revolu­tionary new technology, the claim goes, enabled us to make warm, weatherproof clothes out of animal hides, and thereby to survive the most bitterly cold years.

  The oldest known finds of eyed needles come from Kostenki and two other archaeological sites in Russia: Mezmaiskaya, in the northern Caucasus, and a location in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia. They are estimated to be between 35,000 and 40,000 years old.

  Clearly, needles and warm, well-made clothes may have helped us to survive. But they are probably not the whole explanation for why we survived while the Neanderthals died out. We need to remember that the Neanderthals had lived through many harsh periods of cold in the course of several ice ages. They recovered each time. It was not until we modern humans came on the scene that they were doomed to perish. The pattern is recognisable in many places in the Middle East, the Caucasus, Siberia and Europe. The Neanderthals lived there for thousands of years, then we arrived and the Neanderthals disappeared. In some places they had already vanished before our arrival. That can be seen, for instance, in the layers excavated at Hohle Fels. Excavations at other sites bear witness to an overlap of several thousand years, during which both groups may have coincided – albeit at a decent distance from each other. There are also sites where all traces of Neanderthals stop abruptly, followed immediately by remains left by modern humans.