gobekli tepe - genesis of the gods (27 page)

TANGED POINT CULTURES

This is true; there is absolutely nothing to compare with Göbekli Tepe anywhere in Europe or, indeed, anywhere else in the ancient world until much later, when megalithic architecture begins in earnest at places such as Malta, Sardinia, Brittany, Ireland, and, of course, Britain. Yet that doesn’t rule out the tantalizing possibility that the Göbekli builders came in contact with peoples from Europe, and from what Dr. Roberts and Klaus Schmidt were both implying, perhaps we should be looking toward the “tanged point cultures” and “reindeer hunters of the North” for some answers.

In the late Upper Paleolithic age reindeer hunters who occupied the forests and plains of Northern Europe, often operating on the sandy terrains of loess left behind by the melting glaciers, started different hunting strategies because their perennial prize, the reindeer herds, were abandoning their old territories and moving ever northward and northeastward. The animals undertook these continual migrations so that they could remain within the forests and tundra (land with small trees and plants) essential for their continued survival. Even with the onset of the Younger Dryas mini ice age, ca. 10,900 BC, the reindeer kept moving, even though the worsening weather conditions were forcing human populations to migrate ever southward.

As part of their change in strategy, the reindeer hunters at the termination of the Upper Paleolithic age, which in Europe quickly transformed into the Mesolithic age, adopted the use of a very specific type of weapon, usually made of flint and known as the tanged point. This is a type of arrowhead, either shaped like a willow leaf or geometric (that is, triangular) in form. These points have distinctive “shoulders,” or “tangs,” delicately chipped away from the base so that they could more easily be hafted onto an arrow shaft. Sometimes the points have only one tang, or shoulder, while at other times they have two. Clearly, the use of the bow and arrow gave Paleolithic hunters the advantage not only during the chase but also over human enemies.

THE CASE OF MARY SETTEGAST

So could there have been some kind of contact between these reindeer hunters of the North European Plain and the Epipaleolithic peoples of southeast Anatolia in the lead up to the construction of the first large enclosures at Göbekli Tepe? The answer is almost certainly yes. In 1987 a fascinating book entitled
Plato Prehistorian,
by archaeological writer Mary Settegast, attempted to paint a picture of the turmoil that might have existed in Europe in the aftermath of a global catastrophe at the end of the last ice age. Settegast linked this event with the account given by the Greek philosopher Plato in his works
Timaeus
and
Critias,
written around 350 BC. He, of course, describes the destruction of a mythical island empire called Atlantis that was said to have existed beyond the Pillars of Hercules, out in the Atlantic Ocean.

According to Plato the main island of Atlantis sank beneath the waves around 9500 BC following a day and night of earthquakes and floods, sent by the sky god Zeus to punish the Atlanteans for having become too haughty and arrogant. Prior to this time they had made incursions into the Mediterranean and attacked major city-ports as far east as Italy’s Tyrrhenian Sea, then under the control of the Athenians.

Plato’s account of Atlantis might well be based on some kind of historical reality, although the wars between the Atlanteans and the Athenians are much more difficult to prove, especially given that Athens and its inhabitants, the Athenians, did not exist in 9500 BC. For this reason, some of Settegast’s proposals are quite obviously biased toward accepting the validity of Plato’s account. That said, the evidence she presents for bloodshed and turmoil in Europe at the end of the Ice Age is stunning.
⁵

THE SWIDERIAN CULTURE

Crucially, Settegast recognized that during the Younger Dryas period, ca. 10,900–9600 BC, major migrations were taking place all over Europe, seemingly in the aftermath of the proposed cataclysm. Among those on the move was a specific group of reindeer hunters known as the Swiderians. They began pushing farther and farther eastward and southward until they were quite literally knocking on Anatolia’s door.

Mary Settegast realized that as they moved across Europe at the onset of the Younger Dryas cold spell, the Swiderians left behind a noticeable trail of finely carved tanged points. It stretched all the way from the Carpathian Mountains of Central Europe right across to the Crimean Mountains, located on a peninsula immediately west of the Sea of Azov, a northerly extension of the Black Sea, in what is today Ukraine. She noted also that around this same time strikingly similar tanged points started to appear at Epipaleolithic and proto-Neolithic sites in the Near East, something that is unlikely to be a simple coincidence.
⁶

Figure 19.1. Map showing the eastern migration of tanged, or shouldered, points, most likely arrowheads, belonging to the Swiderian culture, which emerged ca. 11,000 BC.

To better argue her case, Settegast included in her book a map that shows the trail of Swiderian points across Europe,
⁷
a version of which is included here (see figure 19.1). Her compelling evidence prompted the question of what exactly these Paleolithic hunters were doing crossing Eastern Europe so boldly, with the standard explanation being that they were following the flight of the reindeer herds, but as Settegast herself noted, many of their campsites show very little evidence of the spoils of the chase,
⁸
so clearly something else was going on in their lives. So who exactly were the Swiderians, and how do they fit into the gradually emerging picture painted so far in this book?

THE SWIDERIAN LANDSCAPE

The Swiderians take their name from an occupational “type” site where their unique style of stone tool technology was first recognized. This is Świdry Wielkie in Otwock, near Warsaw in Poland, which now forms one of the thousands of campsites, work stations, and settlement sites that the culture created across a vast territory, stretching from Poland in the west across to Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Moldova, and Ukraine. They make their presence known for the first time at the beginning of the Younger Dryas period, occupying the forests, steppes, and glacial loess of the East European Plain, and settling on major rivers including the Vistula, Oder, and Warta in the west, and the Dnieper, Volga, Oka, and Don in the east.
⁹
In addition to this, they are known to have occupied the northern and eastern foothills of the Carpathian Mountains,
¹⁰
which embrace Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, and Romania (which is made up of the former kingdoms of Transylvania, Wallachia, and western Moldavia).

The culture’s principal calling cards, so to speak, were their distinctive tanged points, along with their exquisitely finished leaf-shaped points. Prehistorians propose that the Swiderians were an offshoot of one of the preexisting reindeer-hunting traditions of Northern Europe, either the Hamburgian-Ahrenburgian cultures of North Germany or, more likely, the Brommian-Lyngby cultures of Denmark and the Scandinavia Peninsula (together they form what is known as the Tanged Point Technocomplex). Yet as we see next, the Swiderians had ancient roots that mark them out as more successful than their contemporaries. They would seem also to have had a great motivation and drive that has allowed them to be credited with the foundation of various subgroups that were instrumental in the establishment of European culture and language on a number of different levels. It is a long road from Central Europe to Anatolia, but it is one we must now take to create a better picture of why exactly the Swiderians are so crucial to the story of Göbekli Tepe and the rise of civilization in the ancient world.

20

SWIDERIAN DAWN

T
he effect the Younger Dryas Boundary impact event of 10,900 BC might have had on Europe remains unclear. Yet evidence of its aftermath can be found at sites across the continent as the Usselo horizon, the 8-inch (20-centimeter) charcoal-rich layer lying between soils signifying the termination of the Allerød interstadial and the commencement of the Younger Dryas mini ice age, ca. 10,900 BC.
¹
Listed among the countries in Europe where this black layer has been found are the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Belgium, as well as known Swiderian territories such as Belarus and, as we shall see now, Poland.

THE WITÓW PEOPLE

At the beginning of the 1960s, archaeologists working on a site at Witów, near Łęczyca, in the Polish province of Łódź, were puzzled to find “a charcoal layer in late-glacial dune, comparable to [the] Usselo-layer.”
²
This layer was found to contain flint artifacts “forming a hitherto unknown assemblage,”
³
while in the sand immediately above this black mat, archaeologists came across stone implements belonging to the “middle Swiderian industry,”
⁴
showing that the Swiderian reindeer hunters were here at this time.

In addition to the flint implements, archaeologists found at Witów four large ovoid “huts,” all aligned east-west. Each one contained various finds, including a noticeable amount of hematite, which is a highly magnetic, iron-based mineral, usually rust red in color. It is crushed to make a pigment called ochre, used in rock art and human decoration, such as tattoos and body paint.

Radiocarbon analyses for the charcoal layer provided dates in the region of 10,820±160 BP, or 8820 BC. However, when these tests took place it was not realized that recalibration is necessary to bring raw radiocarbon dates in line with the true trend of carbon-14 release from organic materials, so when this is applied the charcoal layer offers dates in the range of 11,000–10,500 BC, well within the proposed time frame of the Younger Dryas Boundary impact event of ca. 10,900 BC.

SWIDERIANS IN CRIMEA

The stone tools found inside the huts at Witów in Poland were initially quite a mystery to archaeologists, leading them to announce the discovery of a previously unknown culture.
⁵
What they did notice, however, were similarities between the assemblage’s curved-back knives and blade segments with examples found over 850 miles (1,400 kilometers) away in the Shan Koba cave in Crimea.
⁶
These are now recognized as belonging to a Crimean Swiderian culture, responsible also for the manufacture of Swiderian points found at other sites in the Crimean Highlands, immediately north of the Black Sea.
⁷

Here in a rock shelter known as Syuren 2, tanged blades have been unearthed “with direct analogies to the Polish Swiderian.”
⁸
In other words, they are more or less identical to those found at the culture’s mostly open air sites in their original heartland of Poland and the Carpathian Mountains. More crucially, the examples found in the Syuren 2 rock shelter are so similar to the real thing that two Russian prehistorians were led to conclude that a “direct migration of a group of Swiderian population in the Crimea is not excluded.”
⁹
In other words, the Swiderian peoples who inhabited these caves might well have been the immediate descendants of reindeer hunters who had arrived in this region from Poland.

If these migrations really did take place, then it is unbelievable evidence of the sheer endurance and willpower of these people, who crossed the entire length of Eastern Europe to end up on the Black Sea. What is more, there is tentative evidence that they did not stop their journey there. In 1959 Russian prehistorian Aleksandr Formozov saw evidence of stone tools of the Swiderian-European style as far east as the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia,
¹⁰
which stretch between the Black Sea in the west and the Caspian Sea in the east. If correct, then this brings the reindeer hunters within striking distance of the Armenian Highlands, just a couple of hundred miles away from Göbekli Tepe.

TANGED POINTS IN THE NEAR EAST

Supporting the idea that the Swiderians reached even beyond the Caucasus Mountains is, as Mary Settegast realized, the fact that a great many tanged points strikingly similar to those manufactured in Europe have been found at Epipaleolithic and early Neolithic sites across the Near East. Indeed, if they had been found on European soil, archaeologists would have had no qualms in identifying them as belonging to one or another of the North European reindeer-hunting traditions.