by Paul Jordan
The evidence of the cores suggests strongly that the Last Glaciation came on not quickly, as the previous one had gone out with a rapid thaw, but rather gradually with a sequence of shortish cold spells of varying intensity over a period of about thirty thousand years, until things got really harsh again at about 80,000 BP. The many interactive factors that can reduce the strength of solar radiation at the Earth’s surface produced during those years a basic fluctuation of two cold and two warmish phases: the warm times probably not much colder than today, but perhaps wetter, and the cold spells some 10 °C lower in temperature, with stronger winds (evidenced by sand in Atlantic cores taken near North Africa). The cold periods were not as severe as the fully glacial times to come, but even so the glaciers must have extended somewhat, and climatic zones were shifted everywhere so that the conditions previously seen further north in Europe (or higher up the mountain slopes) were brought south and down the valleys. In Europe, during these early cold phases of the Last Glaciation, patches of pine, birch and willow survived against a background of steppe-like conditions, or even tundra, with more woodland conditions in the south.
Even in the warmer interstadials, the glaciers made their presence felt with colder winds and icy waters in the North Atlantic, producing in northern Europe an environment of pine and birch woods in place of the open or shrub tundra of the cold phases, and in south-west Europe, at best, of elm, oak, hazel and hornbeam, until pine and spruce reasserted themselves with the next cold phase. So the interstadials were not so much worse than today in southern Europe, while they were a bit colder in the north. Even so, there could be shocks: there appears to have been a very cold, if brief (one to two thousand years) episode within the first interstadial.
Even away from the ice sheets, in Africa, temperatures were cooler during the opening phases of the last ice age than they had been, and more significantly they were drier, with shrinking areas of forest and woodland shading into patchily wooded grassy plain. Deserts spread in Africa like glaciers in Europe. These were circumstances, both in Africa and Eurasia, that could lead to a degree of geographical isolation, for humans as well as animals, with real possibilities of quite rapid evolutionary change in small populations that had ceased to be a regular part of larger breeding groups. The Neanderthal people look like one such evolutionary tendency in Europe, while some scholars believe that Africa was the scene of the debut of modern Homo sapiens, out of a stage of humanity roughly equivalent to the Neanderthal people but not distinctly of the Neanderthal type. The Levantine region at the eastern end of the Mediterranean could well have offered refuge from both the cold of northern Eurasia and the aridity of North Africa, so it is not surprising that we find a coming and going, perhaps a meeting, even a mating of Neanderthal and more modern types at sites in this region: some would say it was simply the scene of one big, if variable, family of evolving humanity.
After 80,000 BP it became too cold to live north of the Alps, except during further interstadial warmings, down to about 60,000 BP. Temperature evidence from the cores makes it clear that the glaciers would have extended beyond anything seen since the onset of the Last Glaciation. It has been suggested that an unparalleled explosion of a volcano in Sumatra, the worst in 450 million years, was the last straw that brought on the full rigours of the Last Glaciation after 80,000 BP, blocking the already diminished sunlight with ash and sulphur fumes. Pollen records demonstrate that the area of Holland, Denmark and North Germany became at this time just treeless tundra, even polar desert in places, with temperatures well below freezing for much of the year. The Scandinavian and Alpine ice sheets spread to perhaps within 500 km of each other in Germany. In Central and Eastern Europe the loess storms made occupation impossible outside of any warmer interstadials when the deposited loess could weather. The Neanderthal people of Western Europe could only adapt their way of life, and perhaps (under pressure of natural selection) their own physical type too, and try to hang on where they could in a world that for the time being no one from anywhere else would want to come and share with them.
The exact limits of the ice sheets of this first fiercely cold phase of the Last Glaciation are not known since they were subsequently overridden by the final extension of about 18,000 BP. All the same they brought much of the character of the frozen north today to what in our times are the temperate regions of northern and not so northern Europe, but with some important differences. The tundra in the proximity of the ice sheets, though utterly barren in places, still received the hours of sunlight through the seasons of northern Europe today, not the limited periods of daylight seen in the Arctic winter, and the sunlight’s angle was the same as it is now in these latitudes, however diluted it was in strength. Air temperature was low and winds were strong, but the summers could still be long and warm, if drier than today’s, and sheltered spots would have supported stands of trees. South of the tundra-like conditions there was something like steppe, with a dry ‘continental’ character in south-west Europe whose coasts were now extended out into the Atlantic by the lowering of the sea level. Hardy trees like pine and birch were commoner here and sheltered valleys might be quite wooded. All in all, even in the severest times, circumstances were set fair for a rich wildlife on which the European Neanderthalers could prey. And after about 60,000 BP conditions on the whole improved, with fluctuating but generally slightly milder times. There were some short but other quite long interstadials, up to perhaps 4000 years in duration, but they were evidently not as mild as the interstadials of the earlier part of the Last Glaciation. Whether these interstadials resulted from subtle details of the combined astronomical cycles or perhaps from shifting patterns of the Atlantic currents as icebergs were shed into the sea, decreasing salinity, is difficult to determine now. By 45,000 BP it was pretty cold again all round, and then there quickly followed another 15,000 years of fluctuation with an overall improvement towards warmer conditions, with oak-mixed forest replacing more open conditions. It was during this time that the Crô-Magnon people and the superior technology of the Upper Palaeolithic put in their appearances in Europe, and the Neanderthalers and the Mousterian tool traditions bowed out. By 30,000 years ago it was colder again and 18,000 BP saw the very worst of the ice age, and the biggest challenge to human beings who lived – and thrived – through it. By then, the Neanderthal people were long gone, but they too had managed to prosper well enough through the harsh conditions of the middle reaches of the Last Glaciation.
Harsh though the Neanderthalers’ ice age may have been in weather conditions, it was a time of ample wildlife and opportunities for good hunting, or at least good scavenging. The tundra conditions close to the ice sheets were a particularly rich area for animal life, as was the taiga with more, if stunted, trees that it sometimes incorporated. Here there were reindeer, musk ox, wolf, arctic fox, glutton, ermine, stoat, many rodents and breeding birds. There were the warm-coated elephants, too, that we call mammoths, and woolly rhinos, which like most of the birds and the reindeer, followed by the wolves, would have migrated further south in winter – to the fringes of the forests, with subarctic species like pine and spruce, that were the world of red deer, brown bear, lynx, marten, mice, voles, lemmings, beaver, hyena, bison and aurochs. The forest fringe was not, in fact, so well stocked a world as the teeming tundra and it was more difficult to hunt and scavenge in. The windy, dusty world of the loess-steppe was worse still in glacial times, with nothing like it in the world today, but in the summers of the interstadials its parched grass cover could support many rodents and some large fauna, too, including horses, hyenas, even reindeer, mammoths and predatory lions. Away from the loess deposits into Eastern Europe, steppeland with horses, carnivores, rodents, maybe seasonally mammoth and rhino, extended into Asia.
Though earlier human forms had spread into northern Europe during previous interglacials, the Neanderthalers were the first people to inhabit the periglacial regions of full ice age times, living relatively close to the ice sheets in the bare world of
harsh-wintered tundra and taiga that predominated even in France and northern Spain in their time, as well as across Germany into Central Europe. They shared that world with a range of animals which would be regarded as quite exotic if encountered outside of a zoo in the same places today, and in some cases inside the zoo as well. The woolly rhino, the mammoth, the cave-bear and the cave lion are no longer with us at all, and it may be that men – later than the Neanderthalers – had a hand in their demise. The lion may seem an unlikely component of the ice age fauna, though lions are living through our winters in northern zoos and safari parks today. The cave lion version, at least 25 per cent bigger than the African lion today, was probably the biggest cat that has ever lived on earth and must have been both a serious competitor and a real threat to the Neanderthal folk. The cave-bear was commoner, and, at about 2.7 m long, bigger than a grizzly bear. While the lions used caves as their lairs, the bears also hibernated in them and probably more frequently disputed occupation of them with man, with victory going either way. One Austrian cave contained the remains of 30,000 bears, representing long and secure tenancy. The cave-bears were primarily herbivores but probably ate more meat than bears do today, just as the Neanderthalers almost certainly depended more on meat in their diet to keep them fed through the seasons of their harsh world than people do in milder times and places. Bears might on occasion have been a source of meat for humans, or at least their skins and fat may have carpeted or heated and lit the Neanderthalers’ cave homes and camps. How far we can believe in some bear cult on the part of the Neanderthalers we shall consider later on. The cave-hyena was another numerous animal of the last ice age, if more interstadial than glacial in preference, and found on the steppe during the cold. It too was bigger than its modern counterpart and its dens show that it scavenged widely, putting its teethmarks on bones in a way that provides evidence in discussions for and against cannibalism and big game hunting as we shall see.
The woolly rhino and the mammoth were both cold-adapted species of genera from warmer climes. The 3.6 m high mammoth was not to survive the end of the ice age, at about 13,000 years ago, making its last home in the grazing grounds of Siberia and North America. The woolly rhino went out with the ice age too and its presence on an archaeological site or in a geological context is a sure indicator of cold; it is thought that it used its ‘horn’ as a snow shovel as it grazed the stubby vegetation of the tundra near the glaciers’ edge, and its teeth were well adapted for a tough vegetable diet. The European bison went the same way as the mammoth and the woolly rhino, in Europe at least, disappearing as woodlands spread north again with the great thaw. The reindeer went north in Europe in the same situation, not into extinction but into the new lands to which they are presently confined: they require a tundra lichen to stay healthy. Red deer were denizens of the more southerly and sheltered temperate woods and parkland found well away to the south of the tundra of ice age Europe, and only came into more northern territory in interstadial times, as did the giant aurochs, ancestors of domesticated cattle, formidable horned creatures 3.5 m long. Horses roamed the dry grasslands of the steppe regions in the warmer interstadials.
The often cold and sunless world of the Neanderthal people of the last ice age was a harsh place to live in. Their remains bear witness to the hardness of their lives and to the stress and ever-present threat of injury and disease to which they were subject. They were not as well equipped technologically, or most probably mentally either, as the people who came after them, but they pioneered the habitation of these cold and forbidding regions, extending the range of human occupation significantly beyond that of their predecessors, but not penetrating as far as we can tell into the fastnesses of Siberia, or on into the Americas. Their range runs from Gibraltar in the south-west to southern Britain in the north-west, across northern and central Europe and down into Italy and Greece, north of the Black Sea and just north of the Caspian into present-day Uzbekistan and south of those seas across Western Asia into the Middle East, with that important southerly outpost in the Levant. Some of these places were quite warm even in the ice age and certainly so in the preceding interglacial, but life looks to have been always hard for the Neanderthalers. Fire they possessed and the shelter of caves where there were any and, we have evidence to suggest, of some sort of tents and huts on occasions. They surely wore clothes, though physical evidence for such is naturally lacking. Even in the later times of the Crô-Magnons, direct evidence for clothing is encountered only in the form of patterns of bone toggles and beads that the Neanderthalers did not sport. They probably went in for wraps of animal skins held together with rawhide strings and thongs to be more or less airtight. Some of their flint scrapers fit the bill for hide preparation and, as we have seen, they used their teeth to work on skins and sinews too. In the relatively unsunny world they lived in, their own skins may well have been pale as are those of indigenous Europeans today, to maximize the value of ultraviolet radiation in producing Vitamin D. There is at the same time no reason to think that, with the blessing of warm clothing and fire, the Neanderthalers need have followed the lead of the mammoths and woolly rhinos in developing very hairy skins of their own, though many reconstruction drawings and models have shown them so – we simply do not know about this.
The range of the Neanderthalers, with some of the principal sites mentioned in this book.
We do know that their lives were hard, perhaps the hardest ever lived by human beings outside the forced labour camps of the ancient empires and the modern tyrannies, when their living conditions are considered alongside their technological, social and mental resources. Their world was one of abundant animal life, if perhaps less well endowed with plant foods, but it was a harsh regime that permitted them to survive in it. And the demands upon the Neanderthal people were quite changeable, too, requiring periods of major adjustment: first from interglacial to ice age conditions and then to the ups and downs of the interstadials. They were to meet all these requirements with a technology vastly inferior to that of the Eskimos in recent times. Many if not most Neanderthal remains show signs of stressful living. We have already seen that their skeletons all over show a robusticity suited to hard labour with pronounced ridging for muscle attachment; we have seen that their leg bones attest to a life of scrambling over rough terrain while their shoulders, arms and hands are suited to grasping and lifting heavy burdens. Judging the ages at death of the known Neanderthal individuals (by microscopic examination of the fossilized cells in their long bones, by noting the closure of sutures and symphyses, by study of their teeth), we can see that infant mortality was higher than it was among their Crô-Magnon successors and among foraging peoples today and that fewer than 20 per cent of adults reached the age of thirty-five, against a figure of 50 per cent for modern hunter-gatherers. It has been said that in general Neanderthal skeletons show patterns and degrees of stress comparable with those of rodeo riders.
Degenerative disease and injury are plain on many Neanderthal remains. The original Neanderthal skeleton shows a deformed elbow joint, probably resulting from a badly healed fracture. The old man of la Chapelle (not much over forty, remember) suffered from degenerative joint disease that showed its effects on skull, jaw, spine, hips and feet. Serious arm injuries are in evidence on some of the Krapina and Shanidar material. Shanidar, as we have seen, reveals an appalling history of injury to several individuals. Shanidar 1 had been blinded in the left eye, among other head injuries, and suffered crushing of the right side of the body during life, with evidence of post-traumatic infections, and yet he lived on, to be laid low in the end by a rock fall from the roof of the cave (in an earthquake zone) where he and his fellows lived. Shanidar 3 had probably died of a stab wound (delivered, apparently, by a right-handed assailant) which badly damaged a rib. Shanidar 5, like Shanidar 1 and one of the Krapina people, survived severe head wounds. Life was fraught with perils, one can conclude, but it is also apparent that some individuals like the la Chapelle and Shanidar wounded could s
urvive with the tolerance, at least, of their relatives and very likely their active care too. Of course, injuries occur in all walks of life and the Crô-Magnons who came after the Neanderthalers also show signs of often similar wounds and diseases, but not so frequently – as though they may have been better at avoiding trouble and making the best of ice age life. Certainly the Crô-Magnons of Europe lived in larger numbers than their Neanderthal predecessors. It is hard to estimate population sizes for these remote times, but it is certain that there are many more sites of Crô-Magnon Man and his Upper Palaeolithic tool traditions than of Neanderthal Man and his Mousterian tools.
A recent medical discovery about an old archaeological find has shown that some things have sadly not changed in the long history of disease. The male from la Ferrassie, excavated between the world wars, has now been revealed to exhibit signs of lung cancer. Lesions in the lower ends of the thigh and shin bones, where new surface bone has formed in response to inflammation below, constitute a pattern of affliction specifically associated with cancer centred in the lungs. Certain cancers may have increased in frequency in the human population with the invention of ways of life that Neanderthal Man can never have followed (there was no tobacco in the last ice age of Europe, for example), but our predecessors could on occasion suffer in ways that, perversely, seem to bring them closer to us than fights with cave-bears ever could.
