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In search of the missing Stone Age tribes http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026811.800-in-search-of-the-missing-stone-age-tribes.html?full=true&print=true 08 November 2008 by Laura Spinney HUMAN adaptability was really put to the test during the last major episode of global warming. It was the Mesolithic era, or Middle Stone Age, and Europe was inhabited throughout, yet evidence of the people who lived there is thin on the ground, and nowhere more so than in what is now Britain. Just a single burial site, containing two dozen bodies, has been found there from the period that began around 15,000 years ago and lasted nearly 10,000 years--five times as long the period that separates us from the birth of Christ. It is one of the enduring mysteries of archaeology. Without graves, archaeologists can say very little about how these people confronted some of the most taxing environmental changes in history, which saw them cut off from mainland Europe by rising sea levels. Burials would provide clues about what they were eating, how their diets changed as the climate warmed, what diseases beset them and whether desperation led to violence--as well as shedding light on their cultural practices and spiritual beliefs. So where are the missing graves? The mystery has deepened over the past two decades as Mesolithic cemeteries have turned up in the rest of Europe, revealing a breathtaking variety and complexity in burial practices. One theory is that, cut adrift from mainland Europe, the people living in what is now Britain developed different burial practices from their continental counterparts. Another is that archaeologists have been looking in the wrong places. Now there are indications that both theories may be correct. What's more, a new map showing details of a forgotten region of Mesolithic Europe may finally allow archaeologists to test their ideas about how these people lived and died. With scant evidence to go on, researchers have tended to portray the lives of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers as nasty, brutish and short. Yet cemeteries in mainland Europe tell a different story. The best studied are in Scandinavia, where people were often buried on platforms. At Vedbæk Bøgebakken, for example, a Danish cemetery just north of Copenhagen, a newborn baby was buried on a swan's wing, next to a woman who is presumed to have died in childbirth. Corpses have been found laid out on deer antlers. Others were interred with grave goods, including food, amber beads and dogs. Liv Nilsson Stutz of Lund University in Sweden says that people were buried soon after death, often wrapped as if to hide decomposition. They were posed in lifelike positions, lying on their sides, sitting or kneeling, and if two people shared a grave they were often arranged to face or even hold each other. Overall, she says, Mesolithic people do not seem to have treated death as radically different from life. "The integrity of the body seems to have been very important," she adds. These burials do not fit with the image of Mesolithic people as drifters trapped in the present, barely surviving in a harsh environment. Some of the cemeteries were used by successive generations--one at Skateholm in Sweden was in use for a good 500 years--which suggests that people attached significance to place and to kinship. Clearly they also understood past and future and the value of different plants and animals, and believed in the existence of worlds beyond this one. In Britain, however, evidence for such Mesolithic cultural sophistication is missing. While there is no shortage of burials from the subsequent Neolithic period--in the form of the stone chambers knows as megaliths, and earth mounds called "barrows"--the only known Mesolithic burial site is Aveline's Hole, a cave in the Mendip hills of Somerset, in south-west England. Discovered in 1797, it was said to contain the remains of 50 individuals lying side by side together with deposits of red ochre, animal teeth and fossilised ammonites, suggesting a ceremonial burial. Unfortunately, by the time a more scientific excavation was undertaken in 1914 the site had been tampered with and the original description could not be verified. It was, however, dated to around 10,000 years ago--2000 years before Britain became separated from the rest of Europe. Unceremonious death Why only a single burial site? In fact, evidence of burial from this early in the Mesolithic is sparse throughout continental Europe. The Scandinavian cemeteries all date from after the time Britain became an island. Local cultural differences start to emerge at this time, as evidenced by distinct stone tool-making techniques, and some experts believe that the Scandinavian burial practices may have been a regional speciality. Perhaps most early Mesolithic people just left the dead where they fell, and perhaps the British simply carried on in this vein after they became isolated from the rest of Europe. However, a spectacular find in the early 1990s at Møllegabet, on the Danish Baltic island of Ærø, raises another possibility. Archaeologist Jørgen Skaarup, then director of the Langelands Museum in Rudkøbing, Denmark, and his colleague Ole Grøn were diving in shallow waters when they came across a dugout canoe containing the 7000-year-old remains of a young man. Their discovery hinted that there might be more Mesolithic burials awaiting discovery--just not on land. The boat was surrounded by stakes cut from hazel wood which might have been used to prevent it floating away. The corpse itself had been wrapped in bark. Between the boat and what would have been the shore lay some stone tools and the prongs of a type of spear that Mesolithic people are known to have used for eel-fishing. Nearby someone had laid the antler of a roe deer, a small bow--perhaps a toy, or a tool for making fire--and two paddles. "Were these left for the deceased to row himself to the afterlife?" Grøn and Skaarup speculated at the time (Journal of Danish Archaeology, vol 10, p 38). If such watery burials were common among early Mesolithic Europeans, and if similar practices continued throughout the period in Britain, that might explain the lack of graves. It's a neat idea--except that Grøn, who is now director of the Langelands Museum, has since made discoveries that have persuaded him to change his interpretation of the burial at Møllegabet. Working with anthropologist Michail Turov of Irkutsk State University in Russia, Grøn has been studying the way of life of a group of modern Siberian hunter-gatherers called the Evenk, which he believes provides a window on the Mesolithic mind. The Evenk inhabit an area to the north of Lake Baikal in Siberia, where traditionally they live in teepees, travel by reindeer and hunt deer and elk. As with many hunter-gatherer societies, they do not recognise individual ownership of territory, though they are highly territorial and protect rights of access to land. "The territories are owned by the spirits, and you gain the right to use them by negotiating with the spirits," says Grøn. The territories so gained must be protected from rival clans, and one way that is done is by marking out the perimeter with burials: people are terrified of deceased members of other clans, who they believe can drag their souls down to the underworld. In Siberia, the main traffic corridors are rivers, so the Evenk leave their graves - air burials, involving the dead being placed in coffins on felled trees--along riverbanks, where rivals cannot fail to see them. Watery graves When he first saw an air burial, Grøn began to rethink his conclusions about the Møllegabet boat burial. Perhaps rather than being wedged in place in the water by the hazel-wood posts, the boat was placed on top of them, above the water, as a warning to passers-by. In the Mesolithic era, Møllegabet was at the mouth of a river and the burial "would have been a strong sign at the entrance to this economically quite important inlet that here our clan is in control", Grøn says. Could something similar have been happening in Mesolithic Britain and, if so, where should archaeologists look for evidence? Vince Gaffney from the University of Birmingham in the UK thinks he has the answer. As the Mesolithic dawned, what is now Britain was connected to the rest of Europe by a vast plain known as Doggerland, which became submerged beneath the North Sea around 8000 years ago as sea levels rose following the ending of the last ice age (see map). Doggerland has long been regarded as a featureless land bridge across which Stone Age nomads drifted, but Gaffney suspected it might actually have been a fertile paradise in which people would have lingered. Gaffney's hunch was that Doggerland was the key to understanding the Mesolithic. At that moment, however, nobody knew what Doggerland looked like and so in 2002, with colleagues Simon Fitch and the late Ken Thomson, he set out to map it. Using seismic data collected by a Norwegian oil company which had been prospecting in the North Sea, they analysed sediment layers beneath the modern seabed to determine what the terrain would have looked like 10,000 years ago. They then used a computer model to reconstruct 23,000 square kilometres of the drowned world (British Archaeological Reports, number 31, Archaeopress, 2007). "Doggerland has got to be the best preserved, and most extensive, prehistoric landscape in northern Europe," Gaffney says. What's more, this land of marshes, rivers and lakes looks not unlike the homelands of the Evenk, and exactly like the kind of place that water-loving Mesolithic people would have chosen to live. Historian Kristian Pedersen from the University of Edinburgh in the UK believes Gaffney's map could lead archaeologists to the missing graves. He points out that trawlers have been fishing Mesolithic material, including human remains, out of the North Sea for over a century, but because the bones come stripped of all context there is no way of telling how they were disposed of. That will require slow, costly underwater excavation, but armed with the new map, archaeologists will at least be able to identify likely settlement sites to dive down to. Such targeted excavations are now being planned. As well as trying to solve the mystery of the missing graves, archaeologists hope this exploration will help them build a coherent picture of what happened to the people as the sea rose. Already the Scandinavian graves give some indication that these were desperate times. Mesolithic people were supposed to have coexisted peacefully since, on paper at least, they had fewer reasons to brawl than Neolithic farmers, who had a greater sense of ownership of the land. The evidence, however, suggests otherwise. At Vedbæk, one woman has an arrowhead embedded in her spine, and similar finds have been made at cemeteries in north-west France. The young man buried at Møllegabet had a healed axe wound to his skull. Such injuries are typical, indicating "a very striking and straightforward way of arguing", says archaeologist Anders Fischer of the Heritage Agency of Denmark in Copenhagen. Fischer is compiling statistics on violence in both the Mesolithic and Neolithic and has identified some telling patterns. In the former, the victims appear to have been predominantly adult males; later, they were more likely to be women or children. This suggests that Neolithic violence was much more ritualised--perhaps a way of keeping social order--whereas in the Mesolithic people were fighting for survival, Fischer says. Rapidly rising sea levels may have led to strife over dwindling resources, he adds. For the inhabitants of Doggerland, this struggle would have been particularly bitter. As the waters rose, the plain-dwellers would have been forced up onto higher ground. Some probably headed into the French and Scandinavian hills or to the Netherlands. Others would have made for the escarpments that now form the cliffs of the English coast. As land became increasingly precious, whoever got there first would have felt the need to protect their gains, says Clive Waddington of Archaeological Research Services in Derbyshire, UK. In 2000, Waddington led a team that excavated a 10,000-year-old Mesolithic hut on cliffs at Howick, Northumberland, UK. They found three huts, each built on the ruins of its predecessor, that together had been occupied for 150 years, suggesting that people returned to the site again and again. Waddington argues in the 2007 book Mesolithic Settlement in the North Sea Basin that the territoriality and sedentariness that are apparent at Howick were a direct result of the drowning of Doggerland. Assuming there was a mass migration from Doggerland to what is now Britain, the question of the lack of burials arises again. Two recent finds hint at possible explanations as to what became of the dead. On the Scottish island of Oronsay in the Inner Hebrides, human bones dating from around 5000 years ago have been found in shell middens, or food rubbish dumps. These bones show signs of exposure, suggesting they were tossed aside rather than ritually disposed of (Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, vol 71, p 85). In Ireland there is some evidence of cremation dating from around 9000 years ago, around the time it became cut off from Britain. Grøn thinks these will turn out to be the exception rather than the rule, and that burials resembling those of the Evenk and the ones found in Scandinavia remain to be found in Britain. The reason they have not turned up yet has nothing to do with cultural differences in Mesolithic burial practice, he suggests, but arise from modern cultural differences in archaeological interpretation. In Denmark, shallow pits containing concentrations of worked flints are regarded as evidence of prehistoric dwellings, whereas in the UK they are not. The British logic, that barefoot people would not have lived in huts whose floors were littered with sharp stones, is countered by Grøn. He says it is now clear that the floors of Mesolithic dwellings were packed with twigs that would have cushioned against any sharp edges. "If you don't accept the indicators of settlement areas, you don't start excavating them, and then you don't find burials either," he says. Others suspect that the apparent dearth of burials simply reflects the magnitude of the search effort required. Archaeologists may simply not have cast their nets widely enough around the hundreds of known sites of Mesolithic activity, Pedersen says. Alternatively, absence of evidence may on this occasion turn out to be evidence of absence: an indication that the Mesolithic people of far north-western Europe did not bury their dead. Despite a recent expansion in the areas opened up for archaeology in Britain, "Mesolithic burial simply does not feature", Waddington says. Of course, that may all be about to change. Which is why all eyes are now turned to Doggerland. Laura Spinney is a writer based in London and Paris _______________________________________________ tt mailing list t...@postbiota.org http://postbiota.org/mailman/listinfo/tt --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Cosmology, Mathematics and Philosophy" group. To post to this group, send email to cosmology-mathematics-and-philosophy@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to cosmology-mathematics-and-philosophy+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cosmology-mathematics-and-philosophy?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
