by Bryan Sykes
They were strange creatures, whom the band preferred to avoid and who preferred to avoid them. They could certainly hunt, for the evidence was all around. Horse and bison bones littered their old caves, and in one spot, further north, there was a ravine full of the bones of wild animals that looked as though they had been deliberately stampeded off the cliff edge, then butchered where they fell. Occasionally, hunting parties still came across a small group of Neanderthals in the forests or on the remoter slopes. They were very shy and would melt into the trees rather than confront the hunters. For their part, the hunters never attacked the Neanderthals. A few were tempted to hunt them down for food, but there was a great aversion, almost a taboo, to hunting something that was so nearly human.
By the time Ursula was born, Neanderthals were a rare sight. Her ancestors had moved very slowly, over the generations, from the Near East through Turkey. They had crossed the Bosphorus which separated the enormous freshwater lake to the north, now the Black Sea, from the Aegean to the south. In the past, whenever the climate cycles turned and it became colder, there would be a slow retreat towards the Middle East and the Neanderthals would reclaim their lost territory. But this time Ursula and her band had penetrated much further into Europe than any of her kind before her; and unlike her distant ancestors, this time they did not retreat when it turned colder.
Ursula and her band certainly looked quite different from the Neanderthals. They were only slightly taller, but with a much slimmer build, betraying their adaptation to the warmer climates of the Middle East and Africa, where the ability to disperse heat rather than conserve it was the overriding requirement. More than a quarter of a million years of adaptation to the colder European climate had evolved the Neanderthal body shape to a stout and compact form so as to reduce surface area and heat loss. Their faces looked different, too, with a receding forehead, no chin to speak of and bony ridges just above the eyebrows. Whereas Ursula’s band had small and inconspicuous noses, the Neanderthal nose was distinctly large and protruding, so as to warm up the cold air before it reached the lungs.
These physical characteristics were not in themselves enough to explain why the Neanderthals slowly began to withdraw as Ursula’s band and other modern humans began their slow infiltration of the European mainland. The gradual Neanderthal extinction would take another fifteen thousand years of retreat until the last one died in southern Spain. There were no pitched battles, no deliberate suppression of the ‘first nation’ Neanderthals to rival the European colonizations of recent centuries. For one thing, the level of political organization required to achieve this was entirely lacking in Ursula’s people. They were not a state, with territorial ambitions and weaponry at their disposal; they were just bands of people, living on the edge and just trying to survive. Nor was it their skill with the flints that made the difference. It was the higher levels of communication and social organization that made Ursula’s people the better survivors.
Ursula spent her first year being carried by her mother on the daily round of food gathering. A lot of this took place in the woods close to the spring camp. Spring itself was a lean time, for there were no fruits on the trees yet; the band relied on the men to kill at least a few deer or even a bison. It was Ursula’s job, as soon as she could walk, to help her mother in the woods. There were frogs to collect by the sides of streams, birds’ eggs in the bushes, roots and tubers to dig up with a stick or a piece of red deer antler. Autumn was the best season in the woods: there were hazel and beech nuts to gather in, berries hung from the bushes and there were mushrooms and toadstools on the ground. The band were often on the move from one camp to another as the seasons changed. Summer would be spent up in the mountains hunting hares and deer, autumn in the oak woods and camped by the gorge to ambush the returning herds. Then in winter it was down to the plains before moving up once again to the spring camp. This pattern was repeated year after year after year. Some years were good, the game was abundant and more children survived. Others were less so, and children and old people starved to death in the long winters. Life was very, very hard, and survival depended on a strong constitution and a great deal of luck.
Ursula was one of the lucky ones and did survive. Her mother died at the age of twenty-nine when Ursula was twelve. By then she had lost some of her teeth and her leg had been badly broken in a fall. The wound became infected and she died of blood poisoning six weeks later. Her comparatively early death did not have a great effect on Ursula’s life. She was almost fully grown and was immediately adopted by one of her aunts, who appreciated an extra pair of hands to help with the daily tasks, which had become increasingly exhausting with her own two young children in tow. It wasn’t long before Ursula’s dark good looks and obviously developing body caught the attention of the young men. They would try to show off, racing or fighting each other to gain her attention. One presented her with a necklace of polished bone cut from the antlers of a roe deer and threaded on to some strands of horsehair. Another gave her a beautifully fashioned flint knife, far too elaborately manufactured to be anything but ornamental. Yet another would visit her whenever he had been out hunting and give her first choice of what he had caught that day. In their own way they were vying with each other to impress Ursula as a good provider, a man who could support her and her future children. Forced to choose between her suitors, she decided on the young man who brought her the ornaments – against a strong recommendation to accept the hunter from her aunt, who had grown accustomed to sharing in the prime cuts he brought home.
The following spring, when she was fifteen, Ursula gave birth to her daughter. Just like her mother had done, Ursula nursed the baby and carried it on her back while she foraged in the forest. Four years later, she had another child, another girl. Both grew up strong and healthy, and Ursula lived long enough to see each of them give her a grand-daughter. She died a few years later, at the ripe old age of thirty-seven. As she lost her teeth she became weaker and weaker as she was unable to chew the tough food that was the staple diet between animal kills. As the band set out once again from the hills to their winter camp she knew she could not make the journey and asked to be left to die in the cave where she and her children were born. Her family was reluctant to leave her, but they also knew the band couldn’t afford passengers on its long trek to the coast. So they made her as comfortable as they could and wrapped her in a bearskin to keep her warm. With a last kiss, and with eyes full of tears, her two daughters left her and joined the band on its way down the gorge. As Ursula lay in the cave entrance, looking out over the vast plain towards the distant sea, she thought she could just pick out the small dots that were the band. Or perhaps she just imagined it as she fell asleep. In the morning she was gone. Just the skin, torn and red with blood, remained as a witness to her swift and violent end. The bear had returned.
Ursula had no idea, of course, that both her daughters would give rise, through their children and grandchildren, to a continuous maternal line stretching to the present day. She had no idea she was to become the clan mother, the only woman of that time who could make that claim. Every single member of her clan can trace a direct and unbroken line back to Ursula. Her clan were the first modern humans successfully to colonize Europe. Within a comparatively short space of time they had spread across the whole continent, edging the Neanderthals into extinction. Today about 11 per cent of modern Europeans are the direct maternal descendants of Ursula. They come from all parts of Europe, but the clan is particularly well represented in western Britain and Scandinavia. Cheddar Man is perhaps the most celebrated of its former members.
16
XENIA
Twenty thousand years had elapsed since Ursula’s death. It was now twenty-five thousand years before the present and the world was even colder. The Neanderthals were gone, and modern humans had Europe to themselves. The great plains which stretched from lowland Britain in the west to Kazakhstan in the east were bare of trees save for a few patches of birch and willow scrub on their
southern margins. This was a bleak and windy place, with vicious blasts from the expanded polar ice caps sending the winter temperatures down to twenty degrees below zero for days or weeks at a time. Cold and inhospitable it may have been; but the European tundra was also teeming with life and good things to eat. Massive herds of bison and reindeer moved slowly over the plains, feeding on the rich growth of grass and mosses. Smaller herds of wild horse and wild ass were also there to be hunted. But the dominant animal, with no enemies to fear, was the gigantic woolly mammoth. No natural enemies, that is, until the humans arrived.
Xenia was born in the wind and snow of late spring. Even though it was already April, the snow that covered the land in winter was still on all but the lowest ground and lay in a thick and filthy slush around the camp site. Xenia herself was born in a round hut, about three metres in diameter, whose frame was constructed almost entirely of mammoth bones. Two gigantic tusks formed the door, which was covered by three layers of bison skins to screen the interior from the cold. The gaps between the bones were filled in with moss and soil, and the roof was made of turfs laid across a lattice of willow twigs. In a small hearth in the centre of the hut the red glow from the fire dimly illuminated the inner walls. There was no wood on the fire; all the trees in the vicinity had been used for firewood months ago. What burned in Xenia’s hut, and the first thing she ever smelled, was the sickly, unforgettable stench of scorched bone. The tundra was littered with the bleached skeletons of mammoth and bison. They made a reluctant and distasteful fuel, but suffering that foul aroma was better than freezing to death.
The camp was built on a slight rise within a mile of a large, sluggish river. Generations of bison had passed across this river, on the way to and from their summer feeding grounds. Just as Ursula’s spring camp had been close to a migration route, so Xenia’s was placed to take advantage of this predictable and dependable source of food. Since Ursula’s time there had been some technological advances. Flint-tipped spears had been improved, and their accuracy and range increased with the aid of spear-throwers, short pieces of bone or wood that cupped the butt of the spear at one end and acted like an extension to the throwing arm. Novelties and inventions like these were soon disseminated as separate bands congregated at river crossings, or met up while stalking in the tundra later in the summer.
Every year the bison crossed at the same point, where the river curved away, sending the current digging into a steep earth and gravel bank. The migrating herds had gouged a pathway through the collapsing bank, but it was getting steeper every year, making it harder for them to get out of the river. If rationality had entered into it, they would have looked for another, safer crossing; but the same route had been used for centuries, and was not going to change. This blind obstinacy and refusal to adapt, quite the opposite of human virtues, suited Xenia’s band very well. As the animals struggled out of the river, exhausted by the crossing and unsteady on the collapsing soil of the earth bank, the spearmen would find an easy target. To avoid being seen and panicking the herd too soon, they had built a hide from mammoth bones with skins to conceal them.
As well as heading for the same place, the herds always came at the same time each year. The band could sense when their arrival was imminent by the lengthening days and the arrival of the geese from the south. The hunting party set off for the river to take up position behind the barricade. When the bison came, they would come quickly. It was no use waiting till they were already crossing the river. You had to be in position first. The first signal of their approach was a faint low sound to the south-east, blown in by the wind like the continuous rumble of distant thunder. As the sound swelled, the adrenaline started to flow and the hunters checked their spears to see that the slivers of flint were securely hafted to their wooden shafts. The drumming of a thousand hooves grew louder and louder. Then the sound of splashing water announced that the lead animals had entered the shallows on the opposite bank of the river, still out of sight. The hunters waited, crouching below the screen for what seemed like an eternity but was in reality only two or three minutes at most, as the animals swam across the river.
At last the first animals, soaking wet but intent on moving ever onwards, came stumbling up the bank and into view. As they struggled to get a foothold in the unstable earth, the animals pushing up hard from behind only increased their panic; but at last the huge red-brown beasts found their footing and began to stream up the bank only four feet from the crouching hunters. Still they waited, until the crush to escape the river had slowed the herd down. Then, from between the hanging skins on their hide overlooking the path, the hunters launched their spears at point blank range into the sides of the animals. They aimed for the neck and chest. The razor-sharp flint tips sank deep into the bisons’ flanks. The wounded animals rolled their great eyes and bellowed in pain. They were hardly ever killed outright; the only hope the hunters had of that was if the flints had sliced an artery or punctured the lungs. As the stricken animals charged out once more on to the tundra, the hunters abandoned their hide and followed. With luck the wounded animals would soon collapse and could be safely despatched with a spear through the heart. If they were less seriously wounded they would travel on for miles and die days later out on the tundra.
As each beast succumbed to loss of blood or lack of oxygen, the hunters crowded in for the kill, striking with their spears deep in and out of the chest until the eyes glazed over, the tongue rolled out and the creature was dead. Working quickly with their flint knives, the hunters skinned and butchered the animals where they lay and carried the meat back to camp, sometimes several miles away. At a time of plenty like this there was no need to use every scrap of meat on the carcass, and they took only the best steaks from the flanks and shoulder as well as the liver, heart and kidneys. The rest they left behind on the tundra, only the flint spear-tip still embedded in the great neck leaving any clue for archaeologists millennia afterwards as to how the beast had met its death.
The meat from the bison kills lasted for several weeks as the final snows melted from the tundra and the days lengthened. Geese, ducks and curlew that had migrated from wintering grounds further south to breed on the tundra began to build up their nests among the coarse grass and moss. For a few weeks life was easy; but before long the band would have to strike north to follow the herds. Moving from one temporary camp to another had always been the way of life for Xenia and her band. The most urgent need was to make sure there was enough food over the summer for the band’s members to build up enough fat to last through the lean winter months. Xenia’s band relied completely on the migrating herds and followed them throughout the summer. There was no wheeled transport, not even sleds, so everything had to be carried. The mammoth bone frames could be left where they were and used again next year, but the skin coverings never lasted more than one winter. There was very little spare capacity, and anyone who was unable to walk on these long marches – the sick, the old, the weak – was left to die. Only when children were old enough to keep up with the band and no longer had to be carried would their mothers conceive again.
Xenia, a precocious girl, had inherited the fair hair and blue-grey eyes of her father. She ran with the other children in the band, helping her mother to organize the camp. Just occasionally she was allowed to join her father in the summer as he went out alone to hunt wild ass. On the rare occasions when he was successful, she helped him to skin and joint the meat. From time to time on these enjoyable forays they would meet up with people from other bands who patrolled the adjoining territories. These were usually friendly encounters, and members of different bands came to recognize and remember one another from previous meetings. They would exchange news, mainly about the weather and the hunting, but also about their families. Their language was not elaborate, but quite sufficiently developed to impart this basic information. Sometimes a young man would go back to another’s camp and even stay there for a season. In these small ways, information and people ebbed and flowed across the v
astness of the frozen wilderness.
In time Xenia became pregnant. It was a difficult pregnancy and towards the end she could barely move. Though she was a strong girl, even she could scarcely walk as the bulge in her abdomen got bigger and bigger. First her mother and then the other women in the band began to be concerned. Fortunately, they were in their summer camp, the game had been plentiful and they would not need to move again for several weeks. It was not shifting camp that worried the women, but the fact that Xenia was about to give birth to not just one child but two. This was a terrible thing to happen. A mother could never nurse and carry two children at once. That was the whole point of delayed conception, so that until the first child was fully weaned a mother could not conceive another. The hormonal adaptation just simply would not allow it, precisely to prevent this eventuality. And yet, every hundred or so births, a mother produced twins, just as Xenia was about to do. It had happened before, and there was a strict rule in the band that the smaller of the two twins must be killed at once. The only exception was in the rare event that another woman in the band had lost her own child but was still producing milk. But the other babies born that year had all survived.
