by Karin Bojs
There are a number of simple millstones in the yard. In each case there is a fairly sizeable stone with a dip in it and an upper stone that you have to move back and forth over the lower one. There are also a few tiny fields surrounded by wooden palisades, where the visitor can try hoeing weeds and clearing ground with only a hand-held flint tool. I can confirm this is pretty hard on the back and shoulders. It is easy to understand how oxen became a welcome addition, once people had properly understood how to harness their strength for farming.
The limestone-based soils in the Falbygden region have some of the best conditions for growing crops anywhere in Sweden. Sweden’s first farmers must have noticed this early on. They probably came to the region roughly 6,000 years ago, immediately after making landfall on the shores of Skåne and Halland. They may have followed the River Ätran from the coast and later struck out northwards. It is very hard to discern any signs of the first centuries of agriculture in the Falbygden area. Archaeologists have found some pollen from ribwort plantain (Plantago lanceolata), suggesting that the deciduous forests shrank and were replaced by a more open landscape.
But then, some 5,500 years ago, the people of the Falbygden area began building passage graves. Even today, you can hardly fail to notice these burial places, composed of huge stones or megaliths erected here and there in the countryside. In the course of a few hundred years, nearly 300 of these structures were built in the Falbygden area – more than anywhere else in Sweden.
Linnaeus, who travelled through the area in 1747, was among those who described the passage graves. In his book Västgötaresa (‘Travels in Västgötaland’), he writes of what he calls ‘ancestral sites’ as ‘hillocks raised above ground level, ringed in by stones, covered with earth and grass’.
Similar collections of megaliths have been found from Portugal all the way along the Atlantic coast, in Denmark, Germany and at many places in farming areas of southern Sweden. They are generally regarded as mysterious. However, the US archaeologist David Anthony has an explanation that seems reasonable to me. In his view, the societies that built these barrows were quite simply celebrating their own ability to move heavy objects. Being able to move things was so important for life in an early farming society. Lengths of timber for building houses needed to be moved; grain had to be moved from the fields.
Initially, the only way to move heavy objects was to get large numbers of people to heave on ropes. That called for a great deal of organisation and cooperation. It would also doubtless have required good food and drink – beer, perhaps – to motivate those who contributed their labour. This is what a number of archaeologists believe about Göbekli Tepe, the place of worship in Turkey used by groups of hunters at the dawn of agriculture.
Gathering together megaliths was a way of demonstrating how well organised and powerful you were as a group. Since people had begun to use oxen as draught animals, even relatively small groups of farmers – individual families, indeed – had had the capacity to erect stone structures that would impress anyone who came anywhere near them. A family tomb built of megaliths was the ultimate status symbol. In my opinion, David Antony – and Bernd Zich from Halle – are on the right track here.
While in the Falbygden area, I meet the archaeologist Karl-Göran Sjögren, Sweden’s foremost expert on passage graves. It was he who discovered the Gökhem skeletons whose DNA has since been analysed.
Sjögren is a helpful, affable man in his sixties. He picks me up from the station by car and is happy to recount details of his own and others’ excavations. However, he is more reserved when it comes to interpreting the finds. His personal interest is in how people in the Falbygden area lived for a specific, limited period. Broad-brush descriptions of Europe as a whole, and surveying several millennia, are not his thing.
He is cautious about drawing conclusions from new DNA results, even though he is listed among the co-authors of one of the groundbreaking publications about the Gökhem farmers that appeared in Science. He uses the term ‘migrationism’, which implies a pejorative view of the idea that inward migration has played a key role in history. Yet he cannot deny the findings set out in the Science article of which he is a co-signatory: that the Gökhem farmers whose DNA was analysed were largely descended from people from the Middle East, and that they were clearly genetically different from contemporary groups of hunters living on Gotland. ‘Yes, a pattern is beginning to emerge,’ he concedes, almost reluctantly.
Despite his sceptical attitude, Sjögren seems to approve of Bernd Zich’s ideas that the wooden plough, draught oxen, the wheel and the cart may have developed as the Funnel Beaker people left the loess soils of central Europe and migrated northwards towards the tougher soils of Denmark and Sweden. ‘That would explain a great deal if it were true,’ he says. He also agrees that oxen must have played an important role in enabling the farmers in the Falbygden area to assemble the stones for their megalithic tombs.
Even with the help of oxen, building the passage graves must have been a demanding task calling for a good deal of time and resources. Calculations show that 10 men working with a team of oxen needed about a month to build such a grave. Firstly, they had to drag quantities of large stones to the site and raise them to form the chamber itself, which could be up to 17 metres (56 feet) in length. The narrow passageway, which usually faces eastward in the Falbygden area, also had walls formed of large stones. Then an even larger stone, known as the keystone, had to be laid on top to close the whole structure. It could weigh up to 20 tonnes (44,000 pounds).
To enable the oxen to pull the keystone and the other stones forming the roof into position, extensive earthworks first had to be built around the whole structure. The final result was a large, round tumulus with a flat roof. This provided sound protection for the grave chamber. From the outside, the tumulus resembled a smaller version of the nearby plateau mountains, such as Mösseberg and Billingen. Some archaeologists believe the whole point was to create a strong link between the landscape and the passage graves.
Sjögren believes there was probably a degree of social differentiation between farming families in the Falbygden area. Clearly, some families were able to scrape together enough resources to build large, impressive passage graves.
At the time of my visit, Sjögren is leading a major excavation in Karleby, a few kilometres west of Falköping. Some of the very largest passage graves are to be found here, as well as traces of farmers who lived at the same time as the Gökhem people. A large group of students and volunteers are working on the dig, accompanied by a few professional archaeologists from Gothenburg University. They scoop out earth trowelful by trowelful from precisely demarcated squares.
Sjögren shows me the summer’s most significant finds, mostly fragments of animal bone, flint tools and pottery. The most notable discovery is a set of holes that once held posts, probably belonging to two houses. He is rather taken aback by the fact that they seem to have been circular; round houses – or, more probably, huts – tend to be associated with groups of hunters. But the people who were laid to rest 5,000 years ago in the Karleby passage grave were definitely farmers. Isotopes show that they lived chiefly on plants, probably mainly wheat and barley. When they ate meat, it was mostly pork from domestic pigs, with some beef and mutton. This is known from bones found at the site. The people who lived here seem not to have eaten very much game, and they ate hardly any fish.
In fact, there are several examples of villages built by Sweden’s earliest farmers that feature both round and rectangular buildings; one example is the site excavated at the ESS nuclear research facility under construction near Lund. Round and rectangular buildings may have fulfilled different functions in early farming settlements. The round buildings may have served as granaries, as in Jordan and Cyprus at the dawn of agriculture several thousand years previously.
Isotopes also show that most of the individuals examined from the graves in the Falbygden area were born locally. However, about a quarter of them came from out
side the region, possibly from Skåne or from other parts of Västergötland. This applies equally to men and women. Many of their cattle also seem to have been brought in from elsewhere. This implies that there were networks of farmers extending for many dozens of kilometres.
One of the focuses of Sjögren’s research has been the objects found around the passage graves. The grave chambers themselves often contain amber beads, animals’ teeth and small axes. Shards of pottery are usually to be found a few metres in front of the entrance to the chamber. They are a delicate, attractively patterned variant of Funnel Beaker vessels, far more meticulously crafted than the everyday pottery found in the settlements. These attractive vessels next to the passage graves appear to have been smashed on purpose. It is common for archaeologists to find the burnt bones of oxen, pigs, sheep or dogs and burnt fragments of flint in the same place. Curiously enough, however, there is no sign of any fire. The objects seem to have been burned somewhere else and later placed in front of the entrance to the grave chambers.
This pattern, involving the same type of objects, recurs at one tomb after another. It looks as if special ceremonies were held that involved breaking pottery and burning flint axes and animal bones. Other rituals involved dropping axes and amber beads into lakes as votive offerings – and sacrificing living people.
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There are about 30 known cases in the early farming cultures of northern Europe where people appear to have been sacrificed in lakes. They are generally known as bog bodies or bog people, as the shallow lakes gradually filled up with plant life and developed into peat bogs. Both men and women have been found in such bogs; those who died in the Neolithic period were mostly in their late teens.
The oldest of Sweden’s known bog people is the Raspberry Girl, who lived at the same time as the Gökhem farmers and was found a few dozen kilometres further south, in a bog in the parish of Luttra. Today she is an exhibit in the Falbygden Museum.
Visitors to the museum can view her brown skeleton in a display cabinet. It is quite small. The Raspberry Girl was about 19 years old when she died, but only 1.45 metres (4¾ feet) tall – that is, some 10 centimetres (four inches) shorter than the average height of women at that time. She also appears to have been of unusually light build, and her face seems to have been fine-featured. Her teeth were even, complete and well formed, although the chewing surfaces were rather worn.
Immediately before her death, she ate a large quantity of raspberries. Her stomach contents, including the yellow raspberry seeds, are clearly visible alongside the skeleton in the display case. This shows she died in late summer when the raspberries were ripe, in July or August.
Researchers believe she was killed, rather than drowning in the lake by accident, because of the appearance of the skeleton when she was found. The position of her legs reveals that they were bent right back and bound, so that her feet were next to her buttocks. It also looks as if her wrists were bound together. In that position, she was thrown – dead or alive – into a shallow lake. Little by little, the lake filled up with vegetation and turned into a bog.
She was found there in 1943, some 5,000 years later, by a man who was digging up peat for fuel. As soon as it had been established that she was a prehistoric individual, she was sent in a large block of peat to Stockholm’s History Museum, where she was examined and presented in a scientific report. After a few decades on display in the History Museum, she was put into storage. It was only in the 1990s that she returned to the Falbygden area, where she is now one of the main attractions at the local museum.
In addition to the actual skeleton, the Raspberry Girl is displayed as a life-size silicone model, a model-maker’s impression of how she may have looked. It depicts a short, fine-boned young woman, just like the skeleton itself. Her features have been carefully built up on the basis of her cranial bones, in accordance with standard techniques. That is all just as it should be.
Yet I have some doubts about the Raspberry Girl’s hair and skin, and the colour of her eyes. Firstly, I imagine that a 19-year-old woman – even one living in the Neolithic period – would have been more particular about keeping her hair nice-looking and attractively styled. The model’s hair, however, is rather straggly and unkempt. It is quite fair, close to honey-blonde, and she has a very pale complexion. She may well have looked like that, of course, but we cannot be sure. If she was one of the farmers, she is more likely to have resembled the people of modern Sardinia and Corsica, with brown eyes and dark hair.
Her fair skin may be an accurate representation – if she came from a farming family. But if they sacrificed a girl from outside their community, from a group of hunters, it is equally probable that her complexion was considerably darker.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Hunters’ and Farmers’ Genes
There are those who believe agriculture to have been the most disastrous invention in history. The American author and physiologist Jared Diamond, for example, once described it as the ‘worst mistake in the history of the human race’. It is a common view that diseases, class divisions, war and misery of every other kind befell us when we abandoned our lives as hunters and made the transition to farming-based societies.
Sometimes I am inclined to agree that things were better during the age of the hunters, before we started to farm the land. That would be my view on comparing the Raspberry Girl and the Österöd woman, for instance, two of the most important finds of female individuals from prehistoric Sweden.
On the one hand, we have a 19-year-old slip of a girl who, for the sake of some murky beliefs, was bound and thrown into a lake to drown. Although the nature of these beliefs is obscure, they may have been linked in some way with the harvest and supernatural forces. The Österöd woman, on the other hand, was a well-nourished, athletic 80-year-old with teeth in better condition than those of most Swedish pensioners today, who died in the archipelago off Bohuslän after a long and active life as a hunter.
If I were to swap places with one of them, there’s no doubt who I’d choose to be – the Österöd woman. However, we need to bear in mind that she represents a unique stage in Sweden’s early history. She and the group she belonged to came to a virginal land, where nature provided more than they could ever need. They had no competitors; they could fish, hunt dolphins and elk, and gather shellfish, berries and nuts to their hearts’ content. When the population expanded during the Mesolithic period, life became much harder.
I also ponder the fates of other individuals I have heard about during my journey to prehistoric Europe – such as the young Ice Age woman at Abri Pataud who died with her newborn baby 30,000 years ago. She may have lost her life through giving birth. However, her teeth were so inflamed and so badly damaged that that alone would have been enough to cause a protracted and agonising death.
It is simply not true that we humans first encountered lifestyle diseases through agriculture, nor does there seem to be any decisive difference in infectious diseases before and after the advent of farming. Tuberculosis, for instance, seems to have been with us at least since some of us left Africa over 55,000 years ago. When DNA researchers compare the immune defence of early European hunters with that of farmers several millennia later, they cannot discern any definite signs of an increase in the incidence of disease.
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One variant of the low-carbohydrate diets so trendy these days is known as the ‘Paleo diet’ and is supposedly inspired by the Palaeolithic, or Old Stone Age. It involves eating a high proportion of meat and fish and avoiding dairy products and cereals, which only became common with the emergence of farming. Although a Paleo diet includes some sweet berries, there is very little place for starch.
Such a diet may well have some advantages in terms of both flavour and health properties, compared to today’s hyper-processed food with its high sugar content and fast carbohydrates. But the advocates of Paleo diets often give an extremely simplified – indeed, mistaken – account of what people ate in Palaeolithic tim
es.
Firstly, people like us, anatomically modern Homo sapiens, lived through the Old Stone Age for at least 100,000 years, on all the continents except Antarctica – a long period, in many different locations with disparate conditions. We lived in tropical, temperate, Arctic, dry and wet climates. Our living conditions varied enormously. Some Palaeolithic peoples ate mainly reindeer meat, others almost exclusively seal meat and fish, while still others lived largely on starchy roots. Insects and other small creatures were often an essential part of the diet. Everyone who had access to honey consumed it. Ethnological studies of today’s hunter-gatherer peoples show the importance of honey to people everywhere that wild bees are to be found – which is in most places apart from those at Arctic latitudes. Traditional groups such as the peoples of the rainforest and the Hadza of East Africa obtain a considerable proportion of their nutrients from honey, which they collect from several species of bees.
So far, archaeology has given a distorted picture of what people ate in the past, as the remains of large mammals and shellfish are preserved so much better than those of plants. Bones and oyster shells are visible evidence, even after several millennia. However, new technology is now emerging that can reveal the part played by plants in the diet. For instance, it is now possible to examine microscopic deposits in the tartar on human teeth. One of the leaders in this field is Amanda Henry, a colleague of Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.
She examines the surfaces of ancient teeth for microscopic traces of starch and minute traces of silica from different types of plant, which differ in appearance according to species. Analyses carried out by Henry and her collaborators show clearly that people have been eating plant material for a very long time. People in the caves at Blombos in South Africa and Skhūl in Israel were already eating different types of grass seed 100,000 years ago. The people of Skhūl also had traces of dates on their teeth. During the Ice Age in Europe, people ate grass seeds and the starchy roots of plants including water lilies and bulrushes. This has been shown by analysing teeth from sites such as Cro-Magnon, Abri Pataud, Dolní Věstonice and La Madeleine.
