gobekli tepe - genesis of the gods (28 page)

Clearly, there are certain differences in style. Sometimes the tang is trapezoid in shape, or with a slight barb. Alternatively, notches are made on either side of the blade, making it easier to haft onto an arrow shaft. Despite these variations, there are enough similarities to suggest that the Swiderian reindeer hunters were somewhere in the background. Indeed, leaf-shaped tanged points that easily compare with those created as part of the Swiderian tradition have been found at Göbekli Tepe (see figure 20.1 on p. 174).
¹¹
This opens up the possibility that the European reindeer hunters, or at least their direct descendants, really were present in southeast Anatolia and might well have influenced the development of its earliest Neolithic cultures, something they certainly did in other parts of the ancient world.

POST-SWIDERIAN CULTURES

Having established many hundreds of settlement sites as far east as the Don and Upper Volga rivers of Central Russia, Swiderian groups spread into new territories, where they created post-Swiderian cultures, such as the Kunda and Butovo, which thrived between the middle of the tenth millennium and the end of the seventh millennium BC in Estonia, Belarus, Latvia, and northwest Russia.
¹²
Here they adopted an advanced toolmaking technique known as surface pressure flaking, a process so unique that when discovered at a Mesolithic site in north or northeast Europe it is seen as clear evidence of a Swiderian presence there.

Pressure flaking is a process whereby a bone tool or antler is used to trim a biface (an implement shaped on both faces) by very carefully applying pressure to its edges in order to prize off rows of tiny flakes. This produces equally spaced, concave troughs, each one generally overlapping the next in line, which can reach as far as the center of the implement, giving it a perfect geometric finish.

Figure 20.1. Comparison of tanged points found in the fill at Göbekli Tepe (A and C) against two examples (B and D) from the Swiderian culture.

Although stone tools dating back seventy-five thousand years found at the Blombos Cave in South Africa show evidence of having been finished using pressure flaking, it is a technique not usually associated with European cultures at the end of the Paleolithic age. This said, pressure flaking was being used in eastern Anatolia to process obsidian (see chapter 22) during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period, ca. 8700 BC and 6000 BC, and was present at the Neolithic city of Çatal Höyük by 7000 BC.
¹³

FINNO-UGRIC PEOPLES

There is firm evidence also that post-Swiderian groups entered Finland and established key settlements during the ninth millennium BC. Here their traditions are associated with the country’s Finno-Ugric speaking peoples, including the Sámi, a shamanic-based, reindeer-herding culture that exists to this day.
¹⁴
Additionally, newly discovered settlement sites in Norway, dating to roughly the same age as those in neighboring Finland, have revealed evidence of a blade technology identified as post-Swiderian in nature.
¹⁵
Similar tools have been found at a Mesolithic site in Lapland, northern Sweden, dated to ca. 6600 BC.
¹⁶
What is more, extraordinarily accomplished stone tools finished using pressure flaking techniques were manufactured during the late Neolithic/early Bronze Age, ca. 3000–2500 BC, in parts of Scandinavia (Denmark in particular), and this can be put down to the presence of technologically advanced cultures deriving from the post-Swiderian tradition.

All this implies that some of the earliest influences on Finnish, Scandinavian, and Baltic ethnicity, culture, stone technology, and, very likely, mythology might well have originated with the Swiderian reindeer hunters, whose original homeland was the forests, steppes, and river valleys of Central and Eastern Europe. Yet who exactly were the Swiderians? Where did they come from, and what did they look like?

HUMAN HYBRIDS

Anatomically speaking, the Swiderians have been described as “tall . . . long-headed, [and] thin faced.”
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It is something confirmed by noted Lithuanian anthropologist Marija Gimbutas (1921–1994), who in 1956 detailed the discovery eight years earlier, in 1948, of a partial cranium, minus its lower jaw, at Kebeliai, near Priekulė in Lithuania. Dating to the end of the Paleolithic age, when Swiderian settlements occupied the area, it is said to have been “massive, dolichocephalic [that is, long headed], with strong proclivity [inclination] of the forehead, prominent and massive brow ridges and a narrow forehead.” In her opinion the strange skull “was
sapiens,
but had Neanderthaloid elements, in other words, [it] was a Neanderthal-
sapiens
hybrid.”
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Gimbutas spoke also of a “closely related” cranium dating again to the end of the last glacial age, this one discovered on the Skhodnia River, northwest of Moscow,
¹⁹
where Swiderian groups are known to have existed at this time.

A third skull of interest, attributed to the post-Swiderian Kunda culture and found in a pit paved with stones at Kirsna in the district of Marijampolė in southern Lithuania, Gimbutas describes as “hyperdolichocephic [that is, extremely long headed] . . . narrow faced, high-orbited,” and resembling the “Brünn skull of central Europe.”
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The “Brünn skull” mentioned refers to one of a number of examples, all very similar, unearthed in 1891 at Brünn (modern Brno), the capital of Moravia in what is today the Czech Republic. Here human remains dating back as much as twenty-five thousand years were found that had a slightly different physiognomy to the pre-existing Cro-Magnon population that had entered Europe from Africa around forty-three thousand years ago.
²¹
Whereas the Cro-Magnon were broad-faced, large-headed individuals, the Brünn skulls displayed “extreme elongation and dolichocephaly,”
²²
that is, their craniums were long and narrow. They also had strong chins, high cheekbones, low, wide-set eye orbits, and, like the Kebeliai example, prominent brow ridges.
²³

Similar skulls from the same human population were unearthed three years later in 1894 at PÅ™edmost (modernly spelt Predmostí), also in the Czech Republic. Fourteen complete skeletons and the remains of six others had been placed in a tight circle within a pit, their bodies contracted into a squatting position and surrounded by a bank of stones. The size of the limbs of these individuals indicated that they were of “large stature.”
²⁴
The finds at PÅ™edmost led anthropologists of the period to start referring to this unknown human type as “Brünn-PÅ™edmost man” and even
Homo předmostensis.
²⁵

Speculation mounted in the early twentieth century that the Brünn population of the Upper Paleolithic age were in fact “Neanderthaloids,” either Neanderthal-human hybrids and/or the remnants of an intermediary stage between the two species,
²⁶
ideas that almost certainly influenced the observations made by Marija Gimbutas in 1956 regarding the strange physiognomy of the Kebeliai skull.

It is thus possible that the Swiderians of Central and Eastern Europe were directly related to the Brünn population and that both either evolved from or contained within their communities Neanderthal-human hybrids of quite striking appearance, having elongated heads, long faces, high foreheads, prominent brow ridges (a specific Neanderthal trait), high cheekbones, large jaws (a Cro-Magnon trait), and an increased height. It was a physiognomy inherited by post-Swiderian cultures, such as the Kunda, who are elsewhere described as tall with elongated skulls and narrow faces.
²⁷

That the Swiderians might have been related to the Brünn population that appeared in Central Europe sometime around twenty-five thousand years ago is an extraordinary realization. Yet it is a conclusion strengthened in the knowledge that the Swiderians might well have inherited one of the most accomplished and mysterious traditions of the Upper Paleolithic age—that of the Solutrean, a matter we explore next.

Plate 1
. The fig-mulberry tree that stands on the summit of Göbekli Tepe in southeast Turkey. This place has long been sacred to the native Kurds of the region, as seen from the presence here of a small cemetery.

Plate 2
. View of Göbekli Tepe from the northwest, showing the main group of sanctuaries built more than eleven thousand years ago. The two giant monoliths in the foreground belong to Enclosure D, the most sophisticated structure uncovered to date.

Plate 3
. Archaeologists survey the bedrock impression left by the former presence there of the Felsentempel (German for “rock temple”), otherwise known as Enclosure E.