The Incredible Human Journey (27 page)

The date of Yana places it just on the transition between a ‘warmer’ period, when larch and birch forests would have covered
northern Siberia, and a cold phase, when the landscape became treeless tundra. The average temperature would have been colder
than today.
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The date and location of Yana are significant: modern humans were in the Arctic well before the LGM. And the stone tools
and ivory foreshafts preshadow some of the earliest implements found in the Bering land bridge region – and the Americas.
¹

Pitulko was returning to dig at Yana that summer, and I made arrangements to fly out and meet him there. But it wasn’t to
happen. In the end, the vagaries of Russian airline schedules thwarted my plans, and my chance of seeing the evidence for
the Ice Age inhabitants of the far north was to be cruelly denied.

Between 26,000 and 19,000 years ago, the world was cooling towards the Last Glacial Maximum (or ‘LGM’). In northern Europe
this meant the advance of ice sheets. In Siberia, the drying climate created a vast, almost unimaginably arid plain: the ‘mammoth
steppe’.
³
The steppe was
so
dry that many plants and animals were driven to local extinction in the north. Flora and fauna that survive today in the Arctic
tundra, including humans, gradually retreated thousands of miles to the south, or to the far north-east, to the land exposed
between Asia and North America: Beringia.
³
Although the Upper Palaeolithic people of Siberia had become experts in surviving in extreme conditions, colonising the Arctic,
they were now put under immense pressure. The number of archaeological sites dwindles as the Ice Age was reaching its climax
around 19,000 years ago.
⁴

Most of Siberia would have been locked in permafrost, but areas of southern Siberia, around the Transbaikal and Yenisei rivers,
would have been slightly milder. Human and animal populations may have survived in these refugia while most of Siberia was
an Arctic waste. The Siberian environment around the LGM is hard for us to imagine: it was very different from anything in
existence now. There were combinations of plants and animals living on the mammoth steppe that we just don’t see today. Imagine
this vast, treeless plain. All the vegetation was low-level, mostly grasses and sedges, no trees. And in it there were some
animals which we recognise as cold-loving creatures such as reindeer and Arctic foxes, but alongside them were others that
we’d associate with much warmer environments today, like cheetahs, hyenas and leopards. Ice Age Siberia was a place of extremes,
with colder winters but warmer summers than today.
³

Around this time there was also a change in culture in Siberia, typified by a site called Mal’ta, about 80km north of Irkutsk.
⁵
The site was discovered in 1928, by local peasants, who found some bones along the road to Moscow. When archaeologists arrived
to dig the site, they uncovered the remains of a Palaeolithic camp with substantial, semi-subterranean houses. They retrieved
more than 44,000 stone tools, and over five hundred artefacts made from bone, ivory and antler. Among these were spectacular
pieces of art, including some thirty human figurines and fifty carvings of birds, in mammoth ivory.
⁶
New radiocarbon dates from Mal’ta place the site at around 21,000 years ago – practically right on the LGM.
⁵

The artefacts from Ice Age Mal’ta are now kept in the Hermitage in St Petersburg and this was another reason for my visit
to that beautiful city in European Russia. I entered the magnificent building on the banks of the Neva through a back door,
then navigated my way through galleries full of much more recent, spectacular artwork. At the end of a long corridor I approached
a large wooden door and waited to be admitted. I was met by a curator, an extremely smart and petite Russian woman named Svetlana
Demeshchenko.

Behind the first door was another door. I followed Svetlana through it, and then up a spiral staircase until we reached the
upper level and the door into the archaeological offices and stores. This was a different world from the grand state rooms
of the Hermitage, with their polished floors, neoclassical sculptures and gilded pillars. There were corridors flanking by
tall wooden cupboards, faded posters of archaeological exhibitions, and I caught glimpses of offices, in one of which were
archaeologists poring over papers, surrounded by piles of dusty books and a jungle of houseplants.

Svetlana led me into a room lined with shallow wooden drawers and cupboards, and she started unpacking artefacts. She took
a velvet-covered board and laid out a beautiful bone necklace that had been found with a child’s skeleton. There was an
oblong of mammoth ivory inscribed with a stippled spiral pattern on one side, and with three snake-like lines on the other.
Svetlana said that it had been proposed to be some kind of shamanic map, with the central hole in it representing a connection
between worlds above and below the physical realm of existence. It was certainly a mysterious object, but it is surely impossible
to know whether the design was anything more than decoration.
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Nestling in tissue paper in boxes were miniature figurines, like small ivory dolls. Some were thin and rangy, whereas a couple
were a bit more buxom, and reminiscent of the European ‘Venus’ figures. Some were naked, with carved breasts, but others appeared
to be clothed. One was clearly wearing a hat, and her body was scratched, textured, suggesting fur clothes perhaps. Bone awls
and needles have been found at several sites from this period, indications that the technology to make clothes was in place.
In fact, there are eyed needles dating to about 30,000–35,000 years old from Kostenki, in Ukraine, and Tolbaga, to the south
of Lake Baikal. A needle from Denisova Cave in the Altai has been reported as being even older, perhaps as much as 40,000 years old, although
this may be an overestimate.
⁸
But even without any of this material evidence (forgive the pun), the technology to make clothes
could have been inferred: it would have been impossible for the Ice Age Siberians to have survived without substantial fur
clothing.

The feet of several figurines were pierced through, as if they had been intended to be worn as pendants – though they would hang upside-down. And then there were two ivory, bird-like figures,
only about 6cm long, with outstretched necks and stubby wings. Were they geese? Or swans? I imagined those ancient Siberians,
huddled in tents against the growing cold of the Ice Age, carving these objects by the firelight. Was it just something to
do on those long, cold evenings, or did these female figures and birds hold some meaning for those people? Could they have been mythological or shamanic emblems? Some anthropologists, arguing from analogy with recent ethnographic studies, have suggested that the pierced figurines and
birds represented spirit helpers that were designed to be attached to a shaman’s costume.
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Their meaning has long since been lost, but they are very beautiful objects.

Mal’ta and the other sites from Siberia between 30,000 and 20,000 years ago show us that the hunter-gatherers in this region
were surviving, and, given the artistic outpouring in Mal’ta, even flourishing, as glacial conditions set in. And the similarity between tools and art produced in Siberia and
Europe at this time suggests that there were communication networks linking communities across a vast area. People seem to
have been moving around the landscape, using large base camps, with smaller hunting camps like satellites around them. The base camps were often a long way from any outcrops of rock ideally suited to making tools – presumably their location
was determined more by the proximity of animals to hunt. But this meant that stone tools either had to be made from less than
ideal, coarse rocks, or that finer stone had to be carried long distances. Many of the stone tools at Mal’ta were small blades,
or ‘bladelets’, made from correspondingly miniature cores. Perhaps it was a need to economise, to make the most of scarce
supplies of decent stone, that drove the toolmakers to make smaller and smaller blades?
⁴

The animal bones from Mal’ta show that these Ice Age Siberians were hunting a wide range of animals: woolly rhinoceros, mammoth,
bison, reindeer, horse and red deer, as well as hares, Arctic foxes and wolverine, and geese, gulls, grouse and ptarmigan.
There were a great many reindeer antlers at Mal’ta, but these might have been scavenged for use in house-building, as reindeer
naturally lose their antlers each year. At numerous places on the Russian plain, around and immediately following the LGM,
and including the famous site of Mezhirich, mammoth tusks were used in the construction of huts.

Leaving the Hermitage, I crossed over the River Neva and made my way to the back door of the Zoological Institute of the Russian
Academy of Sciences. Another museum, another back door, and another corridor with store rooms full of bones. The Institute
is famous for its mammoths. In the exhibition hall upstairs there were stuffed mammoths, towering over dioramas of more reasonably
sized mammals. There were even mummified mammoths, which had survived, frozen in permafrost, to the present day. Downstairs
in the store rooms there were stacks of enormous bones, huge skulls, and piles and piles of tusks. I stood next to a femur,
and the mammoth thigh bone reached up to my chest. The animal it came from would have dwarfed me. Mammoths would have been
formidable prey for those ancient hunters on the steppe.

Mammoth remains, from the Pleistocene, have been found all over Central Asia, from the Arctic Ocean in the north to Mongolia
in the south. Collections of mammoth bones often turn up in riverbanks, from animals or skeletons that have been swept up
by rivers and redeposited. But mammoth bones and tusks have also been found at archaeological sites, alongside evidence of human activity and occupation.
⁹

The interaction between humans and mammoths on the plains of Siberia, in Europe and in North America, has been widely debated. Certainly in Siberia it seems that humans were using mammoths, presumably eating their meat, and using their bones and tusks
to build houses, carve tools and make art.
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In western Siberia, there are a few sites with evidence of ‘mammoth processing’, where practically complete skeletons have
been found along with stone tools and traces of fire. But it is impossible to tell if these mammoths had been hunted or had
been collected as frozen carcasses. Other sites suggest that the ancient Siberians were choosing to camp near collections
of old bones and tusks, which they could then gather to use. Such collections in the banks of lakes and rivers represented
mammoths which may have died hundreds or thousands of years earlier, maybe by falling through the ice.
⁹

The last mammoths appear to have inhabited the far north of Siberia up until around 10,000 years ago. So what finished them
off? For some researchers, the answer is obvious: humans. But this really does depend on humans having actively hunted mammoths
in Siberia. From research that has tried to assess fluctuations in mammoth and human populations, it seems that people made
very little impact on mammoth populations, at least until well after the LGM. During the Pleistocene, human population sizes
were small, and were concentrated south of the main ranges of the mammoths. Mammoth populations actually appear to have expanded
after the LGM, during the cold snap called the Younger Dryas, but at around 13,000 years ago their numbers started to dwindle,
and by 11,500 years ago they had all disappeared. Now, this does coincide with the continued expansion of human populations;
perhaps, for an already shrinking and stressed mammoth population, a modest amount of hunting by humans might have been enough
to tip the balance towards extinction.
¹⁰

There were major changes in the climate and environment at this time: the world was warming up and the mammoth steppe was disappearing, and for some researchers this is enough to explain the extinction
of woolly mammoths and other Pleistocene megafauna.
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As far as archaeological evidence from Siberian middle Upper Palaeolithic sites is concerned, there is often no way to
tell if mammoth remains have come from hunted or scavenged animals.
⁵
In fact, there is no definite evidence of mammoth-hunting in Siberia, but there is plenty of evidence of humans collecting
bones and tusks from already ancient mammoth ‘death sites’.

The idea of those Ice Age hunters as big game specialists, or exclusive ‘mammoth hunters’, does not stand up to scrutiny.
The hunters appear to have been generalists; large mammals like woolly rhino, mammoth and bison are actually rare in archaeological
sites. Medium-sized animals such as reindeer, red deer and horse are much more common. And the hunters were also bringing
back small game like fox and wolverine, as well as birds like geese, gulls, grouse and ptarmigan.
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Wolf bones are also common – but this may be domestication rather than predation: perhaps first evidence of man’s best friend.
¹²