by Peter Watson
Some critics, such as the archaeologist Paul Bahn, have argued that we should be careful in reading too much sex into these figures, that it tells us more about modern palaeontologists than it does about ancient humans. His point is well made. Nevertheless, other early artworks do suggest sexual themes. There is a natural cavity in the Cougnac cave at Quercy in the Cahors region of France which suggests (to the modern eye) the shape of a vulva, a similarity which appears to have been apparent also to ancient people, for they stained the cave with red ochre ‘to symbolise the menstrual flow’. Among the images found in 1980 in the Ignateva cave in the southern Urals of Russia is a female figure with twenty-eight red dots between her legs, very possibly a reference to the menstrual cycle. At Mal’ta, in Siberia, Soviet archaeologists discovered houses divided into two halves. In one half only objects of masculine use were found, in the other half female statuettes were located. Does this mean the homes were ritually divided according to gender?5
Whether some of these early ‘sexual images’ have been over-interpreted, it nonetheless remains true that sex is one of the main images in early art, and that the depiction of female sex organs is far more widespread than the depiction of male organs. In fact, there are no depictions of males in the Gravettian period and this would therefore seem to support the claims of the distinguished Lithuanian archaeologist, Marija Gimbutas, that early humans worshipped a ‘Great Goddess’, rather than a male god. The development of such beliefs possibly had something to do with what at that time would have been the great mystery of birth, the wonder of breast-feeding, and the disturbing occurrence of menstruation. Randall White, professor of anthropology at New York University, adds the intriguing thought that these figures date from a time (and such a time must surely have existed) when early man had yet to make the link between sexual intercourse and birth. At that time, birth would have been truly miraculous, and early man may have thought that, in order to give birth, women received some spirit, say from animals. Until the link was made between sexual intercourse and birth, women would have seemed mysterious and miraculous creatures, far more so than men. Is this why there are no images of males, or of the male function, in Gravettian art?
Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, in their book, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, describe these early figurines as the Palaeolithic Mother Goddess and this goes straight to the heart of the matter, so far as The Great Divide is concerned.6 For a number of things need to be explained about these figurines and the principles/ideas they represent. First, why do they occur when and where they do? Second, what is their meaning? Third, why do they not occur in the New World? Enrique Florescano, in his book, The Myth of Quetzalcoatl, records two images of a buxom fertility goddess in the New World but this is the only evidence for such a deity in the Americas that I have been able to find.7
Randall White is surely correct in his argument that there must have been a time when ancient humans had not made the link between sexual intercourse and birth, 280 days of human pregnancy (on average, from the end of menstruation to parturition) being just too long a delay for such a link to be observed. This delay in understanding would help explain why the Venus figurines were only ever carved – in ivory or stone – and hardly ever painted on cave walls; and why, often, they lacked heads and feet, or these features were highly stylised. The figurines were carved because they had to be portable: the clan or tribe took the statuettes with them as they followed the herds, and the figurines were carved in such a way that only the important, practical features were included. Haim Ofek has shown how such figurines as have been found are spread in a broad east-west sweep stretching between the glaciers of northern Europe and those of the more south-erly range of mountains running from the Pyrenees and the Alps to the Taurus, Caucasus and Zagros uplifts, and on to the Pamirs and the northern edges of the Himalayas, in general the space between these two ranges being the habitat of migrating deer. The southern band of ice-covered mountains, he says, would have deterred or barred lion and other predators from warmer latitudes. The figurines were carried by the hunter-gatherers as they followed the herds.
Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul Barber, in their book, When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth, have convincingly shown how many common myths are based on fairly accurate observations by ancient peoples of phenomena they thought important and yet used mental devices still familiar to us to remember these phenomena and warn their descendants.8 The Barbers show how giants are to be understood as volcanoes, or the remains of mammoth bones, how volcanic eruptions may be understood as gigantic ‘pillars of stone’, how their eruptions are impressive evidence of an underworld with powerful forces, how storm gods became winged horses and tsunamis ‘bulls from the sea’. On this basis, we may infer that ancient people were perfectly well aware of the miraculous nature of birth but they were no less aware, too, that it could be a sensitive, even perilous time, and so they recorded on the figurines the elaborate and detailed configurations of the female body which indicated that birth was imminent. Without being aware of the link between sexual union and birth, and given that not all women swell up equally during pregnancy, they could have had no conception of the biological rhythms governing gestation and so the bodily signs that birth was imminent would have been the only practical way they could know when to organise their lives so that the chances of a danger-free birth were minimised, perhaps by secluding the soon-to-be-mother in a favourite or familiar cave where predators could be kept at bay.
The discovery of a small Venus statuette, carved from mammoth ivory, was announced in May 2009, having been excavated in the Hohler Fels caves in Germany and dated to 35,000 years ago. Nicholas Conard, part of the excavating team at the University of Tübingen, noted that the figure had exaggerated sexual features and a small loop where the head would be.9 He thought the statuette was ‘hung on a string and worn as a pendant’. This fits the general picture but tends to confirm that the statuettes were carried around, supporting the interpretation offered here.
The earliest Venus figurines are recorded at 40,000–35,000 years ago, and they die out (the Venus of Monruz, Switzerland) about 11,000 years ago. This dating is suggestive too, being close to the time when mammals were first domesticated. The gestation period of cows is much the same as for humans (285 days) and the horse is even longer (340–342 days), but the dog is a mere 63 days, barely two months, so it may have been through observation of the (newly) domesticated dog’s behaviour that early peoples first spotted the all-important link between coitus and gestation. Findings reported only in March 2010, by Bridgett M. Von Holdt and Robert K. Wayne, of the University of California at Los Angeles, using DNA evidence, put the domestication of dogs somewhere in the Middle East at 12,000 years ago.10
Intuitively, this seems very late for humankind to have made the discovery of the link between sexual union and birth. And yet, according to Malcolm Potts and Roger Short, Australian aborigines did not associate sexual intercourse with pregnancy until they domesticated the dingo – a form of dog with a similarly short gestation period (64 days).11 Nor is the idea inconsistent with the fact that male gods do not appear to have evolved until the seventh millennium BC, unless we include the (predominantly male) shaman himself, as was suggested in an earlier chapter. If we do allow the shaman, then this would mean that humankind’s earliest ideology would have involved the worship of two principles: the Great Goddess and the mystery of fertility, and the drama of the hunt, highlighting the problem of survival. An image of a wounded bear at Les Trois Frères cave in France shows it covered in darts and spears, with blood pouring from its mouth and nostrils. Anyone who has been to a bullfight will recognise this configuration.
As we shall see, this theme of the Great Goddess was to become the dominant ideological motif in the Old World, in contrast to the New, where different images prevailed. We need therefore to ask ourselves why this image, this motif, occurred where it did, when it did, and why its range was limited.
This is not a question that can be answered totally satisfactorily but we can go some way towards an understanding of the phenomenon. The first thing to say is that, as the Ice Age came to an end, between 40000 and 20000 BC, say, when the glaciers and permafrost retreated, and as grassland spread, the woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros and reindeer gave way to great herds of bison, horse and cattle.12 Later still, the grassland itself gave way to thick forests and so the herds moved east, with the hunters following them. A third of cave paintings are of horses, while bison and wild ox make up another third. Reindeer and mammoth hardly appear, though many bones of such animals have been found.13
We saw in an earlier chapter that shamanism was the ideology of hunters, especially in relation to the reindeer, which is more at home in cold and frozen conditions than other large mammals. Are we seeing here then, in cave art, a sort of half-way stage between what we might call ‘raw shamanism’ and man’s first close encounters with mammals other than reindeer – horses, cows, sheep and goats – who are relatively new as prey, less well understood and whose habits, therefore, need to be recorded? While many animals were painted in profile, so far as their bodies were concerned, their hooves were painted full on, which suggests that the profiles and the shapes of the hooves were being memorised for later, or being used for the instruction of children.
If the ‘new’ animals were being followed across the ‘new’ grassland habitat, between the two glaciated ranges, as identified by Haim Ofek, by people carrying the figurines with them, the distribution of the steppe would also explain the spread of Venus statuettes, which end where the steppe ends, around Lake Baikal. Lake Baikal and the Lena River, to the north, mark a kind of natural boundary, beyond which the horse and cattle would not have gone. This is confirmed by the maps of the distribution of cows and sheep as also shown on map 3.
Therefore, if, as was outlined in a previous chapter, early humans reached the New World via the Bering Strait from Mongolia and/or beachcombed their way north from South East Asia, deriving their protein chiefly from fish, they would not have incorporated the Eurasian post-glacial ideology – essentially large-mammal hunting – into their psychological make-up. They would have presumably discovered independently the link between coitus and birth but, for one reason or another – perhaps the relative absence of herding mammals – did not elevate it into a general principle to be worshipped. Maritime peoples and beachcombers are unlikely to have had any conception of reproduction among fish or sea mammals. Similarly, rainforest inhabitants, sharing their habitat with only wild animals, would have had much less opportunity to observe mating and almost no opportunity to witness births, since the process is so dangerous in the wild. This is all speculative, of course, but plausible and intellectually consistent.
Once the link between sexual union and birth was understood, and that it applied generally, in regard to other mammals that might serve as food, the idea of controlling fertility – a crucial aspect of domesticating animals – would have become a possibility. This too is therefore consistent with the discovery of the link between coitus and birth at around only 12,000 years ago.
SHRINKING LAND AND WILD GARDENS
The domestication of plants and animals took place across the Old World some time between 14,000 and 6,500 years ago and it is one of the most heavily studied topics in prehistory. It is safe to say that while we are now fairly clear about where agriculture began, how it began, and with what plants and animals, there is no general agreement, even today, about why this momentous change occurred. The theories, as we shall see, fall into two types. On the one hand, there are the environmental/economic theories, of which there are several; and there are the religious theories, of which at the moment there is only one.
The domestication of plants and animals (in that order) occurred independently in two areas of the world that we can be certain about, and perhaps in seven. These areas are: first, south-west Asia – the Middle East – in particular the ‘Fertile Crescent’ that stretches from the Jordan Valley in Israel, up into Lebanon and Syria, taking in a corner of south-east Turkey, and round via the Zagros mountains into modern Iraq and Iran, the area known in antiquity as Mesopotamia. The second area of undoubted independent domestication lies in Mesoamerica, between what is now Panama and the northern reaches of Mexico. In addition, there are five other areas of the world where domestication also occurred but where we cannot be certain if it was independent, or derived from earlier developments in the Middle East and Mesoamerica. These areas are the highlands of New Guinea, China, where the domestication of rice seems to have had its own history, a narrow band of sub-Saharan Africa running from what is now the Ivory Coast, Ghana and Nigeria across to the Sudan and Ethiopia, the Andes/Amazon region, where the unusual geography may have prompted domestication independently, and the eastern United States, where it very likely derived from Mesoamerica.
One reason for the distribution about the globe of these areas has been provided by Andrew Sherratt. His theory is that three of these areas – the Middle East, Mesoamerica and the South East Asian island chain – are what he calls ‘hot spots’: geologically and geographically they have been regions of constant change, where incredible pressures generated by tectonic plates moving over the surface of the Earth created in these three places narrow isthmuses, producing a conjunction of special characteristics that are not seen elsewhere on Earth. These special characteristics were, first, a sharp juxtaposition of hills, desert and alluvium (deposits of sand or mud formed by flowing water) and, second, narrow strips of land which caused a build-up of population so that the isthmus could not support traditional hunter-gathering. These ‘hot spots’ therefore became ‘nuclear areas’ where the prevailing conditions made it more urgent for early man in those regions to develop adifferent mode of subsistence.14
Whatever the truth of this attractively simple theory, or in regard to the number of times agriculture was ‘invented’, there is little doubt that the very first time, chronologically speaking, that plants and animals were domesticated, was in the ‘Fertile Crescent’ of South West Asia. First, there were three cereals which formed the principal ‘founder crops’ of neolithic agriculture. In order of importance, these were: emmer wheat (Triticum turgidum, subspecies dicoccum), barley (Hordeum vulgare) and einkorn wheat (Triticum monococcum). They first appeared in the tenth and ninth millennia BP. Second, the domestication of these fast-growing, high-yielding cereals was accompanied by the cultivation of several ‘companion plants’, in particular the pea (Pisum sativum), the lentil (Lens culaniris), the chickpea (Cicer arietinum), Bitter vetch (Vicia ervilia) and Flax (Linum usitatissimum). In each case, the original wild variety, from which the domestic crop evolved, has now been identified; this enables us to see what advantages the domestic variants had over their wild cousins. In the case of einkorn wheat, for example, the main distinguishing trait between wild and cultivated varieties lies in the biology of seed dispersal. Wild einkorn has brittle ears, and the individual spikelets break up at maturity to disperse the seed. In the cultivated wheat, on the other hand, the mature ear is less brittle, stays intact, and will only break when threshed. In other words, to survive it needs to be reaped, and then sown. The same is true for the other crops: the domesticated varieties were less brittle than the wild types, so that the seeds are only spread once the plant has been reaped, thereby putting it under man’s control. Comparison of the DNA of the various wheats all over the Fertile Crescent shows that they are fundamentally identical, much less varied than the DNA of wild wheats. This suggests that in each case domestication occurred only once. A number of specific sites have been identified where domestication may have first occurred. Among these are Tell Abu Hureyra and Tell Aswad in Syria, which date back to 10,000 years ago, Karacadağ in Turkey, Netiv Hagdud, Gilgal and Jericho, in the Jordan Valley, and Aswan in the Damascus Basin also in Syria, which date back even further, to 12000–10500 BP.15
In the case of animal domestication the type of e
vidence is somewhat different. In the first place we should note that the general history of the Earth helped somewhat: after the last Ice Age most species of mammal were smaller than hitherto. One or more of three criteria are generally taken as evidence of domestication: a change in species abundance – a sudden increase in the proportion of a species within the sequence of one site; a change in size – most wild species are larger than their domestic relatives, because humans found it easier to control smaller animals; and a change in population structure – in a domestic herd or flock, the age and sex structure is manipulated by its owners to maximise outputs, usually by the conservation of females and the selection of sub-adult males. Using these criteria, the chronology of animal domestication appears to begin shortly after 9000 BP – that is, about 1,000 years after plant domestication. The sites where these processes occurred are all in the Middle East, indeed in the Fertile Crescent, at locations which are not identical to, but overlap with those for plant domestication. In most cases, the sequence of domestication is generally taken to be: goats then sheep, to be closely followed by pigs and cattle (i.e., the smaller species before the bigger ones). There was no radical break; for many years people simply tended ‘wild gardens’ rather than neat smallholdings or farms as we would recognise them. Pigs do not adjust to the nomadic way of life, so their domestication implies sedentism.16 Animals required fodder so the plants they preferred would also have been cultivated.
