Consequences

If the causes of migration remain doubtful, some of its consequences are easier to specify. Migration changed people's relationships with each other, the size and organization of their groups, the way they saw the world, and the way they interacted with other species - including those they competed with, preyed on, and outlasted.

Sexual specialization is one of the most conspicuous consequences, and is consistent with the notion that migration and warfare may have been causally linked. In societies of increasing violence, men have enhanced roles, because, among all primates, including humans, greater competitiveness in mating makes males, on average, bigger and stronger than females. In consequence, alpha males rule, or at least boss, most ape societies. Human males usually seem to bond more closely with each other, or form more or stronger alliances, than females. This, too, is useful in competitive circum­stances, such as those of war and politics. Yet women are, in at least one respect, more valuable in most societies than men. A society can dispense with most of its men - risking them, for instance, in war - and still reproduce. Women, moreover, are more easily mistaken as sacred because of the obvious correspondences between the cycles of their bodies and the rhythms of the heavens.

So how did male domination come to be normal in human societies? One theory ascribes it to a deliberate, collective power-seeking strategy by males, inspired by dislike of women or resentment or envy or a desire to get control of the most elementary of resources - the means of reproducing the species. By analogy with chimpanzees, a rival theory suggests that male dominance is a consequence of hunting, which, in the few chimpanzee groups known to practise it, is an almost exclusively male activity. Hunting increases male dominance in chimpanzee society because the hunters distribute the meat, in almost ritual fashion.

Still, migrating groups must have developed ways of liberating more women for childbirth, or increasing the fertile period of women's lives. Improved nutrition may have helped. Was there also some redistribution of economic activities, with men taking on more food-supplying roles? Some scholars have speculated that in the earliest kind of sexual economic special­ization, men did most of the hunting, while women did most of the gathering.^[395] But we do not know when this specialization started or how rigid or widespread it was. In any case, the balance between hunted and gathered foods in the diets of the migrants varied according to the environ­ment. Gathering seems to have been more productive in terms of calorific value per unit of energy expended, for, in known cases, hunting supplied about a third of the nutrition. It is probably fair to assert that the migrations, and the accompanying demographic changes, would not have been possible without both hunting and gathering.

Within those broad categories, however, food-gathering strategies were also subject to change. The Ice Age suited some people, at least. For the hunters who inhabited the vast tundra that covered much of Eurasia, the edge of the ice was the best place to be, where a lot of mammals had adapted by efficiently storing their own body fat. Dietary fat has a bad reputation today, but for most of history, most people have eagerly sought it.

Abundant game guaranteed Ice-Age affluence. The remains of Ice-Age people encourage a proposition supported by anthropological data: on aver­age, they were better nourished than most later populations.^[397] Only modern industrialized societies surpass their intake of perhaps 3,000 calories a day. In some Ice-Age communities, people ate about five pounds of food a day. The nature of the plant foods they gathered - few starchy grains, relatively large amounts of fruit and plants that grow underground - and the high ascorbic acid content of animal organ meats provided five times the average intake of vitamin C of an American today. High levels of nutrition and long days of leisure, unequalled in most subsequent societies, meant people had time to observe nature and think about what they saw.

Food preferences had consequences, or, at least, correspondences in aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual life. For Ice-Age artists, fat was beauti­ful. One of the oldest artworks in the world is the Venus of Willendorf - a plump little carving of a fat female, 30,000 years old and named for the place in Germany where she was found. Critics have interpreted her as a goddess, ruler, or, since she could be pregnant, a means of conjuring fertility. How­ever, her slightly more recent lookalike, the Venus of Laussel, carved on a cave wall in France, evidently got fat the way most of us do: by enjoyment and indulgence.

In the depths of the Ice Age, a stunningly resourceful way of life took shape. We know most about the period in Europe, where extensive art has survived because it was made in deep caves evidently chosen because they were inaccessible.³⁴ Only now are the effects of tourism - too many respira­tory systems, too many camera flashes - damaging these works in their once- secret caverns. Most prehistoric art has been found in northern Spain and southwest France. About fifty cave complexes contain thousands of paint­ings, mostly of animals, and hundreds of smaller works. Examples of sculp­tures, carvings, and other art objects are also scattered across Europe, from Britain and the Atlantic in the west, to the Oder and Carpathians in the east, and, more sporadically, beyond to Ukraine and the Urals. Rarer finds have occurred all over the range of human habitats, suggesting that, in general terms, some conclusions valid for the places of greatest concentration of evidence are applicable over a wider area.

What was the art for? It surely told stories and had magical, ritual uses. Some animal images are slashed or punctured many times over, as if in

William C. Aird (ed.), Endothelial Biomedicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 129-34.

33 Paul G. Bahn and Jean Vertut, Journey through the Ice Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

34 Andrew J. Lawson, Painted Caves: Palaeolithic Rock Art in Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). symbolic sacrifice. Where early artists used stencilling (tracing around a pattern), it seems believable that footprints and handprints inspired it. A good case has been made for seeing the cave paintings as aids to track prey. The shapes of hooves, the tracks, dung, seasonal habits, and favourite foods of the beasts are among the artists' standard stock of images. By analogy with the rock paintings of hunter-gatherers of later periods, Ice-Age art depicts an imagined world, full of the spirits of the animals people needed and admired: a magical world, accessed in mystical trances.^[398]

The technology that made the cave art was simple: a palette mixed from three different colours of the mineral ochre - red, brown, yellow - and animal fat, applied with wood, bone, and animal hair.

Outside Europe, what little we know of the peoples of the time suggests that they created equally skilful work.^[400] Four painted rock slabs from Namibia in southwest Africa are about 26,000 years old, almost as old as any art in Europe, and bear similar animal images.^[401] The earliest paintings that decorate the rocks of Arnhem Land in northernmost Australia show faint traces of long-extinct giant kangaroos and scary snakes. A clue to the very idea of representing life in art fades today from a rock face in Kenniff, Australia, where stencils of human hands and tools were made 20,000 years ago. But most of the evidence has been lost, weathered away on exposed rock faces, perished with the bodies or hides on which it was painted, or scattered by wind from the earth where it was scratched.^[402]

The discovery of so much comparable art, of comparable age, in such widely separated parts of the world suggests an important and often over­looked fact. The Ice Age was the last great era of what we would now call a kind of globalization. That is, key elements of culture were similar all over the inhabited world. Though languages and the structures of political and social life were probably already highly various, people practised hunter­gatherer economies with similar kinds of technology, ate similar kinds of food, enjoyed similar levels of material culture, and - as far as we can tell - had similar religious practices.

The material culture - concrete objects people create - that many arch­aeological digs yield offers clues to what goes on in the mind. A simple test establishes that fact. We can make informed inferences about people's religion, or politics, or their attitudes towards nature and society, or their values in general, by looking at what they eat, how they dress, and how they decorate their homes. For instance, the people who hunted mammoths to extinction 20,000 years ago on the Ice-Age steppes of what is now southern Russia built dome-shaped dwellings of mammoth bones on a circular plan twelve or fifteen feet in diameter that seem sublime triumphs of the imagin- ation.^[403] They are reconstructions of mammoth nature, humanly reimagined, perhaps to acquire the beast's strength or to magically assume power over the species. Yet ordinary, everyday activities went on inside these extraordin­ary dwellings - sleeping, eating, and all the routines of family life - in communities, on average, of fewer than a hundred people. But no dwelling is purely practical. Your house reflects your ideas about your place in the world.

Thanks to the clues material culture yields, we can make some confident assertions about other aspects of Ice-Age people's lives: their symbolic

systems, their magic, and the kind of social and political units they lived in. Although Ice-Age people had nothing we recognize as writing, they did have highly expressive symbols, which we can only struggle to translate. Realistic drawings made 20,000 to 30,000 years ago show recurring gestures and postures. Moreover, they often include what seem to be numbers, signified by dots and notches. Other marks, which we can no longer interpret, are undeniably systematic. One widely occurring mark that looks like a ‘p' may be a symbol for female because it resembles the curves of a woman's body. What looks as if it might be a calendar was made 30,000 years ago in the Dordogne region in France. It is a flat bone inscribed with crescents and circles that may record phases of the moon.^[404]

Clues to Ice-Age spiritual life appear in traces of red ochre, the earliest substance that seems to have had a role in ritual. At Blombos Cave in South Africa, ochre objects apparently engraved with patterns form part of an assemblage 75,000 years old. The oldest known ochre mine in the world, about 42,000 years old, is at Lion Cave in what is now Lesotho. The vivid, lurid colour was applied in burials, perhaps as a precious offering, perhaps to imitate blood and reinvest the dead with life. The speculation that people might also have used ochre to paint their living bodies is hard to resist.

Ice-Age people also used symbols and substances such as ochre in rites that conferred power. In paintings and carvings, we can glimpse the Ice-Age elite, people considered special and set apart from the group. In figures wearing animal masks - antlered or lionlike - the wearer is transformed. From anthropological studies of the recent past, we know such disguises are normally efforts to communicate with the dead or with the gods. The shaman may seek a state of ecstasy induced by drugs or dancing or drum­ming, to see and hear realms normally inaccessible to the senses. Shamanism can replace the strong with the seer and the sage. By choosing elites who had the gift of communicating with spirits, Ice-Age societies could escape the oppression of the physically powerful or those privileged by birth, effecting what might be called the first political revolutions.

Although we cannot be sure about the nature of the Ice-Age power class, we know it existed because of glaring inequalities in the way Ice-Age people were buried. In a cemetery at Sunghir, near Moscow, dated about 28,000 years ago, the highest-status person seems, at first glance, to have been an elderly man. His burial goods include a cap sewn with fox's teeth and about twenty ivory bracelets. Nearby, however, two boys of about eight or ten years old have even more spectacular ornaments. As well as ivory bracelets and necklaces and fox-tooth buttons, the boys have animal carvings and beautifully wrought weapons, including spears of mammoth ivory, each over six feet long. About 3,500 finely worked ivory beads had been drizzled over the head, torso, and limbs of each boy.^[405] Here was evidence of a further revolution - the inception of a society that marked leaders for greatness from boyhood and therefore, perhaps, from birth.

In our attempt to understand where power lay in Ice-Age societies, the final bits of evidence are crumbs from rich people's tables, fragments of feasts. Archaeologists have found ashes from large-scale cooking and the calcified debris of food at sites in northern Spain, perhaps from as long as 23,000 years ago. The tally sticks that survive from the same region in the same period may also have been records of expenditure on feasts. What were such feasts for? By analogy with modern hunting peoples, the most likely reason was alliance-making between communities. They were probably not male-bonding occasions, as some scholars think, because they are close to major dwelling sites where women and children would be present. Instead, from the moment of its emergence, the idea of the feast had practical consequences: to build and strengthen societies and enhance the power of those who organized the feasts and controlled the food.^[406]

As the ice cap retreated and the great herds shifted with it, many human communities opted to follow them. Archaeology has unearthed traces of their routes. Along the way, in what is now northern Germany, about 12,000 years ago, people sacrificed reindeer by deliberately weighting them with stones sewn into their stomachs and drowning them in a lake. About 1,000 years later, hunters as far north as Yorkshire in England, who left a well- preserved camp at Star Carr, found an environment as abundant as the cave artists' had been. Not only was it filled with tundra-loving species such as red deer, elk, and aurochs but also with wild boar in surroundings that were becoming patchily wooded.

At Skateholm in Sweden, about 8,000 years ago, hunters founded the largest known settlement of the era. It was a winter camp in an area where roamed eighty-seven different animal species that the inhabitants ate:

FBLiPB Fbrn_jLndbz-Armbsto trapping river-fish, netting sea-birds, harpooning seals and dolphin, sticking pigs, and driving deer into pits or ponds. In summer, the people must have moved farther north. They lie today in graves decorated with beads and ochre and filled with the spoils of their careers, including antlers and boar's tusks. Their dogs are buried nearby. These burly, wolflike companions are sometimes interred with more signs of honour than humans were given. Dogs were full members of societies where hunting prowess and skill in war determined status. Many of the human dead bear wounds from man-made weapons. Here, too, is evidence of sexual specialization. Women have only a third as many wounds as the men.^[407]