Tools of labor in the Paleolithic era. The Late Paleolithic era - the first way of life of modern people
The Paleolithic is the longest stage of the Stone Age; it covers the time from the Upper Pliocene to the Holocene, i.e. the entire Pleistocene (Anthropogen, Glacial or Quaternary) geological period. Traditionally, the Paleolithic is divided into early, or lower, including the following eras: Olduvai (about 3 million - 800 thousand years ago), Mousterian (120-100 thousand - 40 thousand years ago) and upper, or late, Paleolithic (40 thousand - 12 thousand years ago).
It should, however, be emphasized that the chronological framework given above is rather arbitrary, since many issues have not been studied fully enough. This is especially true of the boundaries between the Mousterian and the Upper Paleolithic, the Upper Paleolithic and the Mesolithic. In the first case, the difficulties in identifying a chronological boundary are associated with the duration of the process of settlement of modern people, who brought new techniques for processing stone raw materials, and their long coexistence with Neanderthals. Accurately identifying the boundary between the Paleolithic and Mesolithic is even more difficult, since sudden changes in natural conditions, which led to significant changes in material culture, occurred extremely unevenly and had a different character in different geographical zones. However, modern science has adopted a conventional boundary - 10 thousand years BC. e. or 12 thousand years ago, which is accepted by most scientists.
All Paleolithic eras differ significantly from each other both in anthropological characteristics and in the methods of manufacturing the main tools and their forms. Throughout the Paleolithic, the physical type of man was formed. In the Early Paleolithic there were various groups of representatives of the genus Homo ( N. habilis, N. ergaster, N. erectus, N. antesesst, H. Heidelbergensis, N. neardentalensis- according to the traditional scheme: archanthropes, paleoanthropes and Neanderthals), the Upper Paleolithic corresponded to the neoanthropus - Homo sapiens, this species includes all modern humanity (see section “Anthropogenesis”).
Due to the vast distance in time, many materials that were used by people, especially organic ones, are not preserved. Therefore, as mentioned above, for studying the lifestyle of ancient people, one of the most important sources is stone tools. From all the variety of rocks, man chose those that give a sharp cutting edge when split. Due to its wide distribution in nature and its inherent physical qualities, flint and other siliceous rocks became such materials.
No matter how primitive the ancient stone tools were, it is quite obvious that their production required abstract thinking and the ability to perform a complex chain of sequential actions. Various types of activities are recorded in the shapes of the working blades of tools, in the form of traces on them, and make it possible to judge the labor operations that ancient people performed.
To make the necessary things from stone, auxiliary tools were required: chippers, mediators, squeezers, retouchers, anvils, which were also made from bone, stone, and wood.
Another equally important source that allows us to obtain a variety of information and reconstruct the life of ancient human groups is the cultural layer of monuments, which is formed as a result of the life activities of people in a certain place. It includes the remains of hearths and residential structures, traces of labor activity in the form of accumulations of split stone and bone. Remains of animal bones provide evidence of human hunting activity.
The Paleolithic is the time of the formation of man and society; during this period, the first social formation took shape - the primitive communal system. The entire era was characterized by an appropriating economy: people obtained their means of subsistence by hunting and gathering.
The Paleolithic corresponds to the end of the geological period of the Pliocene and the entire geological period of the Pleistocene, which began about two million years ago and ended around the turn of the 10th millennium BC. e. Its early stage is called the Eiopleistocene, it ends about 800 thousand years ago. Already the Eiopleistocene, and especially the middle and late Pleistocene, is characterized by a series of sharp cold snaps and the development of cover glaciations, occupying a significant part of the land. For this reason, the Pleistocene is called the Ice Age; its other names, often used in specialized literature, are Quaternary or Anthropocene. The table shows the relationship between the main stages of archaeological periodization and the stages of the Ice Age, in which 5 main glaciations are distinguished (according to the Alpine scheme, adopted as an international standard) and the intervals between them, usually called interglacials. The terms are often used in the literature glacial(glaciation) and interglacial(interglacial). Within each glaciation (glacial) there are colder periods called stadials and warmer ones called interstadials. The name of the interglacial (interglacial) consists of the names of two glaciations,
and its duration is determined by their time boundaries, for example, the Riess-Würm interglacial lasts from 120 to 80 thousand years ago.
Glaciation eras were characterized by significant cooling and the development of ice cover over large areas of land, which led to a sharp drying of the climate and changes in the flora and fauna. On the contrary, during the interglacial era there was a significant warming and humidification of the climate, which also caused corresponding changes in the environment. Ancient man depended to a huge extent on the natural conditions surrounding him, so their significant changes required fairly rapid adaptation, i.e. flexible change of methods and means of life support.
At the beginning of the Pleistocene, despite the onset of global cooling, a fairly warm climate remained - not only in Africa and the equatorial belt, but even in the southern and central regions of Europe, Siberia and the Far East, broad-leaved forests grew. These forests were home to such heat-loving animals as the hippopotamus, southern elephant, rhinoceros and saber-toothed tiger (mahairod).
Günz was separated from the Mindel, the first very serious glaciation for Europe, by a large interglacial, which was relatively warm. The ice of the Mindel glaciation reached the mountain ranges in southern Germany, and in Russia - to the upper reaches of the Oka and the middle reaches of the Volga. On the territory of Russia this glaciation is called Oka. There were some changes in the composition of the animal world: heat-loving species began to die out, and in areas located closer to the glacier, cold-loving animals appeared - the musk ox and the reindeer.
This was followed by a warm interglacial era - the Mindelris interglacial - which preceded the Ris (Dnieper for Russia) glaciation, which was the maximum. On the territory of European Russia, the ice of the Dnieper glaciation, having divided into two tongues, reached the area of the Dnieper rapids and approximately to the area of the modern Volga-Don Canal. The climate has cooled significantly, cold-loving animals have spread: mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, wild horses, bison, aurochs and cave predators: cave bear, cave lion, cave hyena. Reindeer, musk ox, and arctic fox lived in the periglacial areas.
The Riess-Würm interglacial - a time of very favorable climatic conditions - was replaced by the last great glaciation of Europe - the Würm or Valdai glaciation.
The last - Würm (Valdai) glaciation (80-12 thousand years ago) was shorter than the previous ones, but much more severe. Although the ice covered a much smaller area, covering the Valdai Hills in Eastern Europe, the climate was much drier and colder. A feature of the animal world of the Würm period was the mixing in the same territories of animals characteristic of different landscape zones in our time. The mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, and musk ox existed alongside the bison, red deer, horse, and saiga. Common predators were cave and brown bears, lions, wolves, arctic foxes, and wolverines. This phenomenon can be explained by the fact that the boundaries of landscape zones, compared to modern ones, were greatly shifted to the south.
By the end of the Ice Age, the development of the culture of ancient people had reached a level that allowed them to adapt to new, much more harsh living conditions. Recent geological and archaeological studies have shown that the first stages of human development of the lowland territories of the Arctic fox, lemming, and cave bear in the European part of Russia belong specifically to the cold eras of the late Pleistocene. The nature of the settlement of primitive man on the territory of Northern Eurasia was determined not so much by climatic conditions as by the nature of the landscape. Most often, Paleolithic hunters settled in the open spaces of the tundra-steppes in the permafrost zone, and in the southern steppes-forest-steppes - outside it. Even during the maximum cold period (28-20 thousand years ago), people did not leave their traditional habitats. The fight against the harsh nature of the glacial period had a great influence on the cultural development of Paleolithic man.
The final cessation of glacial phenomena dates back to the 10th-9th millennia BC. With the retreat of the glacier, the Pleistocene era ends, followed by the Holocene - the modern geological period. Along with the retreat of the glacier to the extreme northern borders of Eurasia, natural conditions characteristic of the modern era began to form.
Let us turn to the direct characteristics of archaeological eras.
OLDUWAI ERA (3 million - 800 thousand years ago)
This era got its name from the monuments of the Olduvai Gorge in Kenya (East Africa), discovered and studied by archaeologists Mary and Louis Leakey in the 60s. XX century Monuments of the early stage of this era, dating back to the Eopleistocene, are still few in number and discovered mainly in Africa. Only one such monument has been discovered in Europe - the Vallone Grotto in France, but its Early Pleistocene age is not indisputable. In the Caucasus, in southern Georgia, the Dmanisi site, 1.6 million years old, is being investigated, where, in addition to a series of stone artifacts, a Homo erectus jaw was found.
Monuments dating back to the late Olduvai period are more widespread - they are known in South and Southeast Asia and in Europe. The Vertescelles site was discovered in Hungary, where the bone remains of an archanthropus were found along with Olduvai tools. In western Ukraine there is a multi-layered Korolevo site, the lower layers of which can be dated back to the Olduvai period. The distribution of Olduvai monuments allows us to judge the process of settlement of the most ancient people from their original center of origin in Africa across the territory of Eurasia (see figure on p. 36).
Stone
Sometimes the Olduvai stone industry is called the pebble culture, or pebble culture, but this is not entirely correct, because In addition to pebbles, other stone raw materials were also used. It should be noted that traditions of making products by rough pebbling exist in some regions, such as South and Southeast Asia, throughout the Paleolithic era.
Chipping is the technique of chopping off a number of fairly large fragments from the original core, or blank. Chips, as a rule, are located along its perimeter and directed towards the center, thereby forming an edge. If one side of an object is covered with upholstery, then the upholstery is called one-sided, and the object is called monoface, if the upholstery extends to both surfaces, it is called double-sided, and the item is called biface. The technique of single-sided and double-sided padding is particularly characteristic of early archaeological eras, although it is present throughout the Stone Age. The upholstery technique was widely used in the manufacture cores, choppers, hand choppers.
The Olduvian era is characterized by three main groups of tools: polyhedrons, choppers, and flake tools.
1. Polyhedra- These are roughly processed, rounded stones with many edges obtained as a result of beating. Among the polyhedra, discoids, spheroids, and cuboids stand out. It is assumed that they were impact tools and served for processing plant and animal food.
Olduvai era guns:
1 - chopper; 2, 3 - shopping; 4, 5, 8 - tools on flakes; 6, 7 - disc-shaped cores
2. Choppers and choppers- the most characteristic tools of the era. These are massive tools, made, as a rule, from pebbles, the end or edge of which is hewn and sharpened by several successive blows, forming a blade. When the blade is processed on one side, the product is called chopper; in cases where the blade is chipped on both sides, it is called chopping.
The rest of the surface of the tool is untreated and is comfortable to hold in the hand; the blade is massive and uneven, has cutting and chopping functions. These tools could be used for cutting up animal carcasses and processing plant materials.
3. Tools on flakes were produced in several stages. Initially, a natural piece of rock was given a certain specific shape, i.e. a nucleus, or kernel, was made. From such cores, short and massive chips, called flakes, were obtained by directed blows.
The flakes were then subjected to special processing, the purpose of which was to form blades and working edges. One of the common types of such secondary processing of stone is called retouching in archeology: this is a system of small and minute chips that give the product the desired shape and working qualities.
Flake tools are represented by side scrapers, flakes with jagged and notched edges, and rough points. In addition, scrapers and incisors are extremely rare, but these types became widespread only in the Upper Paleolithic. All Olduvian tools are characterized by instability of shape. Tools made from flakes could be used in various labor operations - cutting, scraping, piercing, etc.
It is worth noting that already at the initial stage of making tools they are represented by a whole set of products capable of providing people with a variety of plant and animal food, simple clothing and satisfying other needs, including the production of other tools. The main technique in their production is upholstery, and retouching is used only to decorate some details. The size of the products usually does not exceed 8-10 cm, but larger ones are occasionally found.
Often the tools themselves have a seemingly random shape, but the methods of processing the blades and working edges are quite stable and make it possible to identify certain groups of products presented at different sites. Their artificial origin is beyond doubt among experts. Numerous tools are found in the cultural layers of Olduvai sites, as well as tools from later Stone Age eras, which indicates their deliberate manufacture.
Monuments of the developed Olduvai indicate that the oldest and longest (at least 1.5 million years) era of human history was characterized by very slow progress in tool making technology. By the end of Olduvai, no major changes in the shape of the products and their composition are observed; only their slight enlargement can be noted.
Character of the monuments
The natural environment of the Olduvai era in the areas where the monuments were distributed was very favorable; it was characterized by a warm climate and mixed landscapes (savannas interspersed with forests) with a large number of reservoirs.
Monuments with preserved cultural layers make it possible to reconstruct the character of these hunter-gatherer camps. The cultural layers of the sites contain tools, waste from their production, fragments of animal bones, on which cuts made with stone knives are often visible. One of the most ancient sites today is Koobi Fora in East Africa, its absolute age is 2.8-2.6 million years.
Sites of the Olduvai era are represented by different types, but mainly these are habitats of a group consisting of several families, where hunting prey and the fruits of gathering were brought. Many of these camps were short-lived, but we can say that they were visited more than once. It is possible that even then there were primitive structures such as wind barriers and huts. Thus, at one of the sites in the Olduvai Gorge, a circular structure made of pieces of basalt was discovered, 4.3 and 3.7 m in diameter and dating back to 1.75 million years ago. The distribution of finds inside and outside the stone circle allows scientists to believe that this structure could be the remains (basement) of a primitive building, which limited the spread of cultural remains. Nearby was another area of concentration of stone tools and flakes along with an accumulation of splintered bone - perhaps this area served as a site where bone marrow was extracted for food. It is interesting to note that stone raw materials for making tools were brought to the site from a distance of several kilometers.
At the African site of Chesovanya, dating back to 1.4 million years ago, lumps of burnt clay rock were discovered, which allows us to see traces of the first development of fire here.
Another type of site is the site of slaughter and primary dressing of animal carcasses, where flakes and tools are concentrated in and near accumulations of bones. These accumulations, as a rule, are represented by bones from parts of carcasses of low nutritional value. All the bones have traces of cuts from stone knives, and the tools show signs of wear. These data were obtained using traceological analysis of archaeological materials. Despite the extremely ancient age of the sites, archaeological material allows us to speak about deliberate and planned human activity.
Judging by the degree of wear on the teeth, scientists suggest that the diet of australopithecines and early humans resembled the diet of modern primates, based on rough plant foods. However, during dry seasons, when the number of plants was greatly reduced, the proportion of meat consumption could increase sharply. Thus, the earliest people were omnivores.
The first people were undoubtedly hunters, as evidenced by the cuts on animal bones, but they could also use carrion as food. Hunting most likely took place in forested areas in river valleys, where trees could serve as hiding places and ambushes. Judging by the data from a study of the cultural layers of Olduvai sites, people lived in relatively large groups and had quite complex social behavior and the ability to communicate with each other, most likely through signs and sounds.
ACHELLE ERA (800-120 thousand years ago)
Basically, Acheulean material culture is associated with the existence Homo ergaster, Homo antecessor and Homo Heidelbergensis(see section “Anthropogenesis”).
Human settlement
Acheulean sites are much more widespread than Olduvai sites: they are known in Africa, Western Asia, South and Southeast Asia. There are many of them in Southern and Western Europe - in France, England, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain, Yugoslavia. In Central Europe there are much fewer of them. In North-Eastern Eurasia, Acheulean sites are few in number and belong to the second half of the Acheulean. They are confined to the southern regions - the Caucasus and Ciscaucasia, Moldova, Transnistria and the Azov region, Central Asia and Kazakhstan, Altai, Mongolia.
Human settlement of certain regions largely depended on the natural conditions of the Pleistocene - during periods of glaciation, advancement into the northern and temperate regions was very limited; on the contrary, during interglacial periods, when natural conditions were much milder, people could develop new spaces (see Fig. on page 49).
The wide distribution of monuments excludes the possibility of Acheulean man penetrating this vast territory from a single center. However, the paucity of material makes the reconstruction of settlement routes quite controversial. People could come from Western Asia to Transcaucasia, the Northern Caucasus, the Kuban region, and from Western and Central Europe to the Russian Plain. The territory of Northern Asia could have been populated in at least two directions - from Western and Southeast Asia, and Mongolia. Among the Acheulean monuments, the following stand out: parking, i.e. habitats of ancient people, during the study of which cultural layers are found that lie in accordance with geological stratigraphy, and location- places of finds of objects of a particular era without connection with the cultural layer and stratigraphy, very often these are the results of collections on the surface. The same names are used to designate similar monuments for all subsequent eras.
The earliest Acheulean monuments in Eastern Europe can be attributed to Korolevo (Western Ukraine), the ancient layers of which belong to the Early Acheulian. The second half and final Acheulian include the lower cultural layers of a number of caves in the Central and Northern Caucasus - Azykh in Nagorno-Karabakh, where the archanthropus jaw was found, Kudaro 1-3, Tsona (Central Caucasus), Triangular (Northern Caucasus).
Several dozen pre-Muster sites and sites are known in the valleys of the Prut, Dniester and Dnieper. In the Azov region and the lower reaches of the Don there are a number of pre-Mastery sites, the inventory of which shows differences in the types of tools and their design, which indicates the presence of bearers of different cultural traditions. At least 50 Acheulean localities are known in the Kuban basin, the most famous being Abadzekh in the valley of the river. White.
Pre-Mousterian localities are known in Central Asia and Kazakhstan. The most archaic forms of products - choppers, rough flakes, handaxes - are represented in Southern Kazakhstan and allow us to talk about the connection of these regions with Western Asia.
Findings of the last twenty years refute the prevailing idea that the spaces of Siberia were unsuitable for human habitation in the pre-Master period: in Altai, localities (Ulalinka, Kizik-Ozek) and well-stratified monuments (Ust-Karakol, Kara-Bom, Denisova Cave) were discovered, the lower layers of which may be classified as final Acheulian. The stone inventory is very diverse and indicates that the population that left the Altai monuments could have come from the territories of Central Asia, Kazakhstan and Mongolia.
Tools and techniques for their manufacture
The beginning of the Acheulean era was marked by the appearance and wide distribution of new types of tools - the hand ax and the cleaver-cleaver, which differed in shape and were larger than the tools of the Olduvai era.
Hand chopping- a large massive tool (up to 35 cm), made from a piece of stone or flake by double-sided beating. Most often it has one pointed end and two longitudinal massive blades; the general shape of the tool is oval or almond-shaped. Often the second end was left unprocessed. The chopper is the first tool that has a relatively standard shape and is easily recognized even by a non-specialist. The chopping edge and pointed end indicate that the hand chopper was a universal tool - primarily a percussion one, but could also be used for digging roots out of the ground, catching small animals, dismembering the carcasses of killed animals, processing wood and bones.
Cleaver or jib, is another type of double-sided processed large tool, which has an unretouched transverse blade and symmetrically processed edges.
Early Acheulean tools are characterized by a small number of processing chips; The edges of the products are usually uneven. It was experimentally proven that such chips were removed by hitting the stone with a stone chipper. In the Middle Acheulean, this processing technique was replaced by a more advanced one: a chipper made of softer materials was used - bone, horn, wood. It allows you to level the surface of the implement with thin removals. The tools themselves become thinner, more elegant and more symmetrical, the longitudinal edges become smoother and thinner, cutting rather than chopping.
In the Acheulean complexes, choppers, side scrapers, and tools with jagged and notched edges, characteristic of the Olduvai era, are preserved.
The main tools of the Acheulean era:
1-4 - chopped; 5 - making a chopper; 6 - use of a chopper; 7, 8 - jibs (cleavers)
The number of tools made on flakes, which become thinner and more regular, increases significantly. Blade blanks appear; they are thinner and longer than flakes and have more regular rectangular or triangular outlines. The tool set of Acheulian monuments is very diverse: these are numerous scrapers and scrapers intended for processing hides and leather, various points that were used both as hunting weapons (spear and dart tips) and for performing various piercing operations (piercings, awls, points), as well as various groups of denticulate forms.
The splitting technique in the early Acheulean era is in many ways similar to the Olduvai one. However, with further development, various technological traditions can be distinguished. One of them was named Claktonian at the Clacton site in England, it is characterized by the splitting of amorphous cores and the production of flake blanks of irregular (rough) shapes; The final shape of the product was given mainly through secondary processing - retouching.
In the Late Acheulian, important changes occurred in stone processing techniques. Along with the clecton technique and the double-sided upholstery technique, a new technique appears - Levallois. The name of this technique was given by the Levallois-Perret site near Paris. It is characterized by careful preliminary preparation and design of the core, which made it possible to obtain a large number of blanks of fairly regular oval or triangular shape, which did not require lengthy secondary processing for the manufacture of tools. Levallois cores were shaped like a tortoise shell and are often called tortoiseshells.
Remains of wooden tools have been found at several Acheulean sites: at Clacton (England), Loringen (Germany), Torralba (Spain) and Calambo (Africa). Most often these are fragments of wooden spears, which, as researchers suggest, were not thrown, but impacted.
Levallois technique:
1 - stages of manufacturing a Levallois core; 2, 3 - Levallois flakes;
4- Levallois core
Currently, a lot of Acheulean materials have accumulated, which make it possible to trace the local features of the inventory. The reason for the occurrence of these variants is not yet entirely clear. Some researchers explain them by differences in environmental conditions, others by the peculiarities of the economy, others by the nature of the raw materials used for the tools, and, finally, by a reflection of cultural traditions embedded in the manufacturing technique and shape of the tools.
Character of the monuments
Acheulean sites often have a fairly thick cultural layer and represent camps of hunter-gatherers who undoubtedly knew fire. At the Zhoukoutian cave site in China, many-meter thick layers of ash and coal were found - evidence of constantly burning fires there.
Judging by the thickness of the cultural layer, people lived in one place for a long time or returned to it several times. When analyzing sites, it is possible to identify sites that differ in economic affiliation: short-term hunting camps; workshops for the extraction and primary processing of stone raw materials, located at its outcrops; long-term base camps, where most of the team lived and numerous and varied labor operations were carried out.
Acheulean man settled both in the open air and in caves. In some cases, traces of artificial dwellings have been preserved; particularly interesting data were obtained at the sites of Ambrone in Spain, Terra Amata and the Lazare Grotto in France.
Terra Amata is an early Acheulian settlement with several cultural layers indicating that man returned to this site several times. Here, oval-shaped clusters of cultural remains were discovered, along the boundaries of which pillar holes and stone blocks were traced. There were pockets within the clusters. These monuments are reconstructed as the remains of huts built from thick poles and branches. In the Lazar grotto, an oval living area was discovered near one of the walls, which was fenced off from the rest of the grotto by a masonry of stones. Inside the site there were two hearths, surrounded by an accumulation of cultural remains. Perhaps it was an extension to the wall of a grotto with vertical walls and a sloping roof made of poles and skins.
Cultural layers in the Kudaro 1-3 and Tsona caves (Central Caucasus) contain the remains of several camps belonging to different economic types. Kudaro 1 is the base site where the main part of the collective lived; it is characterized by a thick (0.7 m) cultural layer, an abundance of stone tools, various bone remains of hunting prey, and the presence of hearths. Kudaro 3, Tsona - hunting camps, i.e. short-term stops, where only the initial processing of hunting prey, represented by more than 40 species of various animals and fish, mainly salmon, took place.
Archaeological materials, despite their fragmentation, make it possible to some extent to reconstruct the picture of the social and economic life of Acheulean people. He knew how to build houses, lived for a long time in one place or returned there many times. Stone tools are represented by a whole set of items that were used to perform various household tasks or were used as hunting weapons. Hunting large animals required close teamwork. Sites for various economic purposes - hunting camps, base sites, workshops for the extraction of stone raw materials - indicate such a complex form of social behavior as the division of labor.
MOUSTIERS ERA (120-100 thousand - 40 thousand years ago)
Currently, there is a tendency to revise the chronological framework of this era, which is explained by the emergence of new data on the origin of “Homo sapiens” (see section “Anthropogenesis”) and the accumulation of new extensive archaeological material. The most controversial issue is the transition from the Mousterian to the Upper Paleolithic. However, since many questions are very far from being resolved, the characteristics of the Mousterian era are presented in accordance with the most widely accepted views today.
Natural conditions
The archaeological era of Mousterian coincides with two periods of the Pleistocene: the warm and humid Riess-Würm (Mikulin for Eastern Europe) interglacial and the first half of the Würm (Valdai) glaciation. The most likely date for this interglacial is from 120-110 thousand to 75-70 thousand years ago. The main features of the relief of that time were close to modern ones, however, the areas and coastlines of the seas, especially inland ones, had significant differences, since the seas experienced a phase of transgression (level rise) and flooded previously dry areas. The warmest phase of the interglacial was characterized by perhaps the greatest degree of development of tree vegetation for the entire Pleistocene period; there was no tundra zone on the Russian Plain. Average annual temperatures were 4-6 degrees higher than today, mainly due to relatively warm winters. For Siberia, this interglacial period is also the warm and least continental in climate of the Pleistocene era. Paleobotanical data indicate a wide distribution of forest, especially dark-coniferous, landscapes.
The second half of the Mousterian (75-70 thousand - 40 thousand years ago) corresponds to the first half of the Würm (Early Valdai, for Eastern Europe - Kalinin, for Siberia - Zyryan) glaciation. As the weather gets colder and the ice cover increases, forest vegetation degrades; in the north, the landscapes are represented by forest-tundra, and to the south - by fairly cold, sparsely grassed steppes. The climate becomes harsh, permafrost develops, reaching 50 degrees north. latitude. Mammals of the Early Valdai period are known mainly from materials from Mousterian sites; these are animals of the tundra, forest and steppe landscape zones. Typical species are mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, cave bear, cave hyena, tiger lion, reindeer, wild horse, bison, donkey, saiga, musk ox, arctic fox (see figure on p. 43).
Human settlement
This era is represented by a large number of diverse monuments, much more widespread than in the Acheulean time; Mousterian sites are known throughout the Old World, and the northernmost ones cross the border of the Arctic Circle.
More than 150 Mousterian monuments are known in Russia and adjacent territories. Most of them are represented by materials that do not have a clear stratigraphic position and are therefore called redeposited. However, there are sites with well-stratified rich cultural layers, for example, the Crimean grottoes of Kiik-Koba, Staroselye, Zaskalnoe 1-5, Molodova sites 1-7 on the Dniester, Rozhok in the Azov region, Kudaro caves 1-3, Tsona in the Caucasus, Mezmayskaya, Triangular caves , Matuzka, Myshtulagty-lagat and Monasheskaya, the Ilskaya site in the North Caucasus, Sukhaya Mechetka on the Volga, Denisov, Strashnaya, Ust-Kanskaya, Kara-Bom caves and others in Altai. The most northern monuments, such as Khotylevo on the Desna, Peshterny Log and other sites in the Kama basin, Byzovaya and Krutaya Gora on Pechora, show the increased capabilities of people in adapting to new natural conditions. The widespread settlement of people in Mousterians is due to the development of the stone industry and house construction.
In the most studied areas, scientists have identified Mousterian archaeological cultures: for example, Stinkovskaya and Molodovskaya on the Dniester, Kudarskaya, Khostinskaya in the Caucasus.
Mousterian monuments are known in almost all countries of the Old World. Their stone inventory is very diverse. Mousterian material culture is heterogeneous. On the one hand, it identifies so-called options, or development paths, which reflect the general patterns of development of various stone processing technologies and are not associated with a specific territory. Examples include such options as jagged Mousterian, whose inventory is characterized by the presence of a large number of tools of irregular shape with a jagged-notched edge, Mousterian-Levallois, characterized by the Levallois splitting technique, classic Mousterian, represented by numerous scrapers and points of various types with predominantly one-sided processing and etc. On the other hand, within these variants there are small local groups of similar monuments - archaeological cultures. Within archaeological cultures, the differences in the composition of the inventory and the nature of the cultural layer can be used to trace monuments of different economic types.
A direct connection between Acheulian and Mousterian monuments, which allows us to talk about their genetic continuity, can be traced only in rare cases: for example, in France, a Mousterian variant with an angelic tradition stands out.
Tools and techniques for their manufacture
The era as a whole is characterized by the improvement of stone splitting techniques: Mousterian cores are very diverse. The most common types of cores are disc-shaped or tortoiseshell-shaped (Levallois), amorphous, protoprismatic. The main types of blanks obtained by splitting cores are flakes and blades.
Improvements in splitting techniques led to the emergence of new and further development of already existing forms of tools. Moustier is distinguished by significantly greater consistency and stability of tool forms, and a large number of tools on flakes and blades. Hand axes either disappear, or their more miniature and graceful forms appear. Secondary processing, with the help of which blanks were turned into products, is represented by upholstery and various types of retouching.
Mousterian tools:
1 - subprismatic core; 2 - disc-shaped (Levallois) core; 3 - scraper; 4, 5 - pointed points; 6 - biface; 7 - use of a pointed tip; 8 - scraper;
9 - cutter; 10 - tip
The range of stone products is expanding; there are now about 100 types. Quite a wide use of bone began as a raw material for the manufacture of tools. The main groups of products of the Mousterian era are various scrapers, pointed points, scrapers, knives, piercings, drills, hexes, various points, retouchers, etc. Retouchers, awls, and points were made from bone. Analysis of traces of wear on Mousterian tools allows us to speak about their multifunctionality and the existence of such labor operations as cutting, planing, drilling, processing wood and hides.
Pointed points And scraped- the most numerous and diverse categories of tools in the Mousterian inventory.
Pointed points are massive almond- or triangular-shaped stone objects with straight or slightly convex retouched edges. They could serve as part of composite tools - heavy hunting spears with a wooden shaft, with which they hunted mammoths, elephants, rhinoceroses, bison, bears and other large animals, and could also be used for other economic purposes.
The same items of hunting weapons were probably leaf-shaped points. They had the shape of a wood sheet and were treated with upholstery on one or both surfaces, and additionally with retouching on the edges. Leaf-shaped points could serve as spear and dart tips.
A scraper is a fairly large product, often asymmetrical in plan, with one or several working edges. Scrapers are very diverse; their number, shape and arrangement of working blades vary widely. Scrapers could be used for processing hides, leather, and wood.
A variety of products on flakes and plates, such as scrapes, denticulated tools, flakes and plates with retouching, were intended for processing wood and bone, dressing animal skins and for other economic needs.
Dwellings
Mousterian sites are located both in caves and grottoes, and in open spaces. These are either long-term settlements (base sites - Molodovo 1-5), or short-term ones (hunting camps - Kudaro Cave 1, 3, Mousterian layers). Often, workshops for the extraction and primary processing of stone raw materials are located at its outcrops to the surface.
The most typical form of dwellings at open-air sites were round or oval above-ground buildings with internal fireplaces. The main building material for their frame was large animal bones and wood; on top it could be covered with skins, reeds, turf, tree bark, etc. Dwellings are most clearly represented at the Molodovo 1-5 sites, which belong to the Molodovo Mousterian culture in the Dniester region. The area of each of them is approx. 50 sq. m, inside there were several fireplaces, which housed various production centers.
Hunting
The main means of obtaining food was hunting. People hunted a variety of animals: judging by the bone remains found at sites, both the largest (mammoth, cave bear, woolly rhinoceros) and relatively small ones (saiga, wild ass, ram) could become prey. In the southern regions, for example in the Caucasus, there was fishing. Sometimes some specialization in the production of a particular animal can be traced: at sites located close to each other and existing at approximately the same time, bones of different animals predominate. For example, in Staroselye (Crimea) wild donkey bones predominate (98%), and in Zaskalnaya 4-5 (Crimea) saiga bones predominate. In the caves of the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus there are most of the cave bear bones, and at the Ilskaya site (North Caucasus) there are up to 87% of bison bones.
Hunting different animals required special skills and weapons. For the Paleolithic, as a rule, collective round-up hunts on rough terrain are reconstructed, but trapping pits and other traps could undoubtedly have been used. Undoubtedly, hunting was supplemented by gathering, as evidenced by the finds of grating stones used for grinding fruits and roots.
Worldviews, burials
The first evidence of the presence of ideological ideas has also been preserved from the Mousterian era: this is the appearance of burials, the beginnings of art and zoolatry (the cult of animals). Burials of the Mousterian period are known in Western and Southern Europe, Crimea, the Middle East, and Central Asia. On the territory of modern Russia, one burial of a child is known in the Meizmaiskaya cave in the North Caucasus.
The first human burials in human history were discovered in Mousterian open sites and in inhabited caves and grottoes. They are characterized by all the features that make it possible to characterize burials as a phenomenon of material and spiritual culture: the creation of a funeral structure, giving the deceased a certain pose, the presence of accompanying grave goods. Funeral structures had various forms. Rectangular pits are known, specially cut into the rocky bottom of residential caves and grottoes. Such objects have been traced in the Kiik-Koba cave (Crimea), La Chapelle-aux-Saints cave, Le Moustier grotto (France), La Ferrassie grotto (Italy). The pits have a significant depth (up to 70 cm), traces of grinding tools are visible on their walls, and after the burial they were covered with stone slabs. All this allows us to say with complete confidence that such structures were created deliberately. In some cases, burial pits were dug in the ground, which is known from materials from the Teshik-Tash grottoes in Central Asia and Shanidar in Iraq, as well as a number of Mousterian monuments in the Near East. In some cases, artificial mounds were created over burials (the grottoes of Le Moustier, La Ferrassie, Regurdou in France, the Triangular Cave in the North Caucasus) or stone boxes made of individual slabs (the Regurdou grotto). There are known special fences around the burial (Teshik-Tash grotto).
The poses of the buried also vary - from elongated to crouched and sitting. The accompanying inventory is not rich, but varied: stone tools and flakes, lumps of ocher, animal bones, which can be interpreted as parting food or as some kind of ritually significant objects. In addition, there are also exotic objects, such as, for example, an ostrich egg, which was “pressed” to the chest by one of those sitting buried in the Skhul cave (Iraq).
Various features of the funeral rite are observed. Thus, in the burial of a teenager from Shanidar (Iraq), a huge amount of pollen from aquatic flowers and plants that did not grow nearby was discovered; the burial fence of a boy from Teshik-Tash (Uzbekistan) consisted of seven pairs
still horns of a bezoar goat; The burial of a young woman in Regourdou (France) in a stone box was accompanied by the burial of the limbs of a bear in another smaller stone box standing on top of the first.
The age of those buried ranged from 10 (or less) to 70 years, which seriously contradicts generally accepted ideas about the unusually short life expectancy of Stone Age people. Paleoanthropological materials indicate that representatives of almost all gender and age groups were buried (children, adolescents, young and elderly people), but the forms and rites of the funeral ritual apparently varied greatly. Almost all the burials of the Mousterian period that are now known were discovered at sites, but some groups of people could have been buried outside residential areas. Apparently, this is why disproportionately few burials are known in relation to the number of primitive groups. In addition, it should be taken into account that the degree of preservation of such objects depends on many reasons and most of them are simply destroyed by time.
It is possible that in addition to the presence of ideas of a general worldview, such as “life is death”, “death is a new life”, etc., the burials also testify to the awareness of the ancient collective of their community. Thus, in one of the burials in the Shanidar cave in Iraq, the skeleton of a crippled Neanderthal was discovered, who lost his arm long before his death and lived after that, apparently only thanks to the care of those around him. At the same time, one cannot help but say that at Mousterian sites there are also traces of cannibalism, possibly ritual (Krapina Cave, Yugoslavia).
Increasingly, objects are being found at Mousterian monuments that suggest the emergence of activities not related to any utilitarian needs, i.e. about the emergence of the beginnings of fine art.
Burial plans:
1 - La Chapelle-aux-Saints (France);
2 - Kiik-Koba (Crimea, Ukraine)
These are fragments of bone or stone plates with ornamental cuts. In addition, at sites and in caves there are remains of red ocher mineral paint - in the form of red spots, lumps or rods, sharpened like pencils. Very rarely are there objects that can be called small sculptures: despite the rough archaism of execution, these are quite recognizable anthropomorphic and zoomorphic images. In addition, a number of finds of jewelry in the form of beads or pendants are known.
The Mousterian era also marks the birth of zoolatry - the cult of animals, most clearly represented in the so-called “bear caves”. In these caves, special complexes of bones from the skulls and limbs of cave bears were found, having a non-utilitarian, i.e. character not related to human economic activities. “Bear caves” are distributed from Spain to the Caucasus. The most famous are the Swiss caves of Drachenloch and Petersgele, where stone boxes were discovered containing limb bones and skulls of bears. A number of such caves are also known in the Caucasus, for example, the Upper Cave of the Tsutskhvat cave complex in Georgia. Often, the ritual complexes of “bear caves” contain bones of other animals, most often ungulates. And although the bear occupied an exceptional place in the worldview of ancient man as the largest land predator and the main rival in the struggle for caves, it cannot be said that other animals were not revered. These finds probably show the emergence of early animistic and totemistic ideas.
Thus, in the era of Mousterian, material culture further developed, ideological ideas were formed, expressed in the creation of funerary and ritual complexes, and the first examples of fine art appeared. All this together indicates a further complication of the social organization of ancient human groups, and an increase in the thickness of cultural layers and a large number of remains of hunting kills at the monuments indicate the development of economic activity and increasing sedentism. A number of researchers suggest that already in this era the formation of a tribal society was taking place. The diversity of Mousterian flint implements reflects the existence of certain traditions in the manufacture of stone and bone tools inherent in individual groups of people.
UPPER PALEOLITHIC (40-10 thousand years BC)
The Upper Paleolithic, with all the diversity in the manifestation of cultural characteristics, is a single archaeological era associated with the activities of modern humans - Homo sapiens. Throughout its entire length, people continue to rely on hunting and gathering for their livelihood. From a sociological point of view, in this era there was a further development of the primitive communal and, according to most researchers, the tribal system.
The material culture in the Upper Paleolithic was different than in the previous era, due to the improvement of stone processing techniques, the widespread use of bone as technical raw materials, the development of house construction, the complication of life support systems, and the emergence of various forms of art.
Upper Paleolithic people are most often called Cro-Magnons based on finds in the Cro-Magnon grotto in France, where in 1868 E. Larte discovered five human skeletons along with stone tools and jewelry
from drilled shells covered by thick layers of sediments. Since then, quite a lot of anthropological remains have been found that make it possible to characterize Cro-Magnon man as a pronounced representative of the species Homo sapiens. Currently, more than 80 finds of bone remains of Upper Paleolithic man are known in Eurasia, mostly all these finds come from funerary monuments. The most important of them were discovered: in France - the grottoes of Grimaldi, Combe-Capelle, La Madeleine and Logerie Bas, Le Placard, Solutre, etc.; in England - Paviland and Galley Hill caves; in Germany - Oberkassel; in the Czech Republic - Brno, Przedmost, Mladeč, Dolni Vestonice, Pavlov; in Russia - Kostenkovsko-Borshevsky district, at the Sungir sites, Malta.
Human settlement
The Upper Paleolithic was an era of significant expansion of the ecumene. Sites of this time are known in the Old and New Worlds, Australia. The settlement of North America most likely occurred due to the existence of a powerful ice “bridge” across the modern Bering Strait, which connected Alaska, Kamchatka and Chukotka. Due to the harsh climatic conditions of Würm, this “bridge” existed for many millennia; vegetation even appeared on its surface, covered with sediment, from time to time. In scientific literature, this area is usually called Beringia. The settlement of North America through Beringia occurred about 30-26 thousand years ago from the territory of Eastern Siberia. The incoming population quite quickly mastered the entire American continent - Upper Paleolithic sites in Chile date back to 14-12 thousand years BC.
Man is actively exploring the northern regions of the Earth - sites of this time are known far beyond the Arctic Circle: in the middle Pechora, in the lower reaches of the Aldan and Lena rivers, in the basins of the Indigirka and Kolyma rivers, in Chukotka, Kamchatka, and Alaska. Evidence that people are exploring a wide variety of natural and climatic zones are sites discovered high in the mountains in the Caucasus and Pamirs, in Central Asia and the Middle East; locations are known in now arid and desert areas. Upper Paleolithic sites occur in a variety of geological and geomorphological conditions: in river valleys and watersheds, in lowland and mountainous areas.
Many monuments contain rich cultural layers with the remains of residential structures, numerous accumulations of stone products and industrial waste, mammal bones, etc. More than 1,200 sites and localities of the Upper Paleolithic are known in Russia and adjacent territories, many of them are multi-layered. For example, in the Kostenkovsko-Borshevsky region in the Middle Don, more than 20 monuments are known, which represent more than 60 cultural layers. Based on their study by the famous Russian archaeologist A.N. Rogachev convincingly refuted those generally accepted until the middle of the 20th century. ideas about the unified stage-by-stage development of human society and its material culture.
The Upper Paleolithic era is separated from modern times by a relatively short period of time; it ended 12 thousand years ago, but, nevertheless, it cannot be said that it has been well studied - many, not only specific, but also general problems need to be resolved.
Natural conditions
The beginning of the Upper Paleolithic corresponds to the second half of the Middle Wurm ( Valdai for Eastern Europe) - 50-24 thousand years ago. This is an interglacial ( Mologosheksninskoe), or megainterstadial, was characterized by a fairly warm climate, at times similar to the modern one, and the absence of ice cover throughout the entire Russian Plain. In the Middle Valdai megainterstadial, at least three periods with favorable conditions (three climatic optima) are distinguished, separated by colder phases. The last of these optima was apparently the warmest and longest lasting: it lasted from the 30th to the 22nd millennium BC.
Beginning of the Late Valdai ( Ostashkov time) - 24-20 thousand years ago - was characterized by gradual cooling, the advance of a glacier, which reached its maximum distribution about 20-18 thousand years ago. This is the coldest period during the whole of Wurm. The end of the Wurm, the Late Glacial period (15-13.5-12 thousand years ago), was a time of some improvement in climate, a retreat of the glacier, which did not occur smoothly, but as if in pulsations: short-term periods of warming alternated with periods of cooling.
Depending on climate fluctuations, the composition of animals in a given region sometimes changed very dramatically. During the era of the last glaciation (20-10 thousand years ago), cold-loving animals (reindeer, arctic fox) penetrated as far south as southwest France and the northern regions of Spain. This is associated with the largest cooling of the entire Pleistocene and the resulting wide distribution of periglacial landscapes (see figure on p. 43).
The main reason for the disappearance and decline in the number of different animal species is a significant change in climate and landscapes. Recently, opinions have also been expressed that changes in the Earth’s magnetic field are “to blame” for these interrelated phenomena; the last pole reversal took place approximately 12-10 thousand years ago. Whatever the prerequisites predetermined certain changes in the organic world (including fauna), the main reasons for these changes were undoubtedly changes in the entire natural environment, and not human hunting activity.
About 12-10 thousand years ago, extensive glaciations, gradually retreating, disappeared and the modern geological era began - the Holocene.
Compared to previous eras, information about the Upper Paleolithic is much more diverse and complete. We draw knowledge about the life of Paleolithic man from the study of the cultural layers of settlements, which preserve the remains of residential structures, stone and bone tools and places of their production, bones of animals that served as hunting prey, small utensils and household items.
For this era, the most important and characteristic features can be considered the widespread use of prismatic splitting techniques, masterly processing of bone and tusk, and a diverse set of tools - about 200 different types.
Significant changes have occurred in the technique of splitting stone raw materials: the experience of many millennia has led man to the creation prismatic core, from which blanks of a relatively regular shape, close to rectangular, with parallel edges, were chipped. Such a workpiece is called, depending on its size, plate or record, it allowed the most economical use of material and served as a convenient basis for the manufacture of various tools. Irregularly shaped flake blanks were still widespread, but when chipped from prismatic cores they became thinner and very different from flakes from earlier eras. Technique retouching in the Upper Paleolithic it was high and very diverse, which made it possible to create working edges and blades of varying degrees of sharpening, to design various contours and surfaces of products.
Upper Paleolithic tools change their appearance compared to earlier eras: they become smaller and more elegant due to changes in the shapes and sizes of blanks and more advanced retouching techniques. The diversity of stone tools is combined with significantly greater stability of the shapes of the products.
Among the variety of tools, there are groups known from previous eras, but new ones appear and become widespread. In the Upper Paleolithic there are such previously known categories as denticulate tools, side-scrapers, pointed points, scrapers, and burins. The specific weight of some tools increases (incisors, scrapers), others, on the contrary, sharply decreases (scrapers, pointed points), and some disappear completely. Upper Paleolithic tools are more narrowly functional compared to previous eras.
One of the most important and most widespread tools of the Upper Paleolithic was cutter. It was designed for cutting hard materials such as bone, mammoth ivory, wood, and thick leather. Traces of work with a chisel in the form of conical grooves are clearly visible on numerous products and blanks made of horn, tusk and bone from sites in Western and Eastern Europe. However, in the inventory of some archaeological cultures of Siberia and Asia, incisors are absent; apparently, their functions were performed by other tools.
Scrapers in the Upper Paleolithic they were one of the most widespread categories of tools. They were usually made from plates and flakes and had a convex blade processed with a special scraper retouch. The sizes of the tools and the sharpening angle of their blades are very diverse, which is determined by their functional purpose. For many millennia from the Mousterian to the Iron Age, this tool was used for processing hides and leather.
Upper Paleolithic stone tools:
1-3 - microplates with retouching; 4, 5 - scrapers; 6,7 - tips; 8, 9 - points;
10 - prismatic core with a plate chipped from it; 11-13 - incisors;
14, 15 - denticulate tools; 16 - puncture
Scrapers were used to perform one of the main operations - fleshing, i.e. cleaning of hides and skins, without which they could not be used either for sewing clothes and shoes, or for roofing houses and making various containers (bags, sacks, cauldrons, etc.). The wide variety of furs and skins required a corresponding number of necessary tools, which is clearly evident from archaeological materials.
In the Paleolithic, the scraper was most often worked without a handle, with movements “towards oneself”, stretching the skin on the ground and securing it with pegs or spreading it on the knee.
Production and use of Upper Paleolithic flint tools:
1 - splitting of the prismatic core; 2, 3 - work with a cutter;
4-6 - use of end scraper
The working edge of the scrapers quickly wore out, but the length of its workpiece provided the possibility of repeated adjustments. After fleshing and treatment with ash, which contained a lot of potash, the skins and skins were dried, and then kneaded using bone spatulas and polishes, and cut with knives and chisels. Small points and piercings and bone needles were used for sewing leather and fur products. Small points were used to make holes in the leather, and then the cut fragments were sewn together using plant fibers, sinews, thin straps, etc.
Points do not represent a single category; these various tools are united by one common feature - the presence of a sharp, retouched end. Large specimens could be used for hunting weapons as spearheads, darts and arrows, but they could also be used to work with coarse and thick skins of animals such as bison, rhinoceros, bear, wild horse, necessary for the construction of dwellings and for other economic purposes. . Piercings were tools with a distinct retouch, a relatively long and sharp sting or several stings. The stings of these tools were used to pierce the skin, and the holes were then widened using screws or bone awls.
In the second half of the Upper Paleolithic appear composite, or in-ear, guns that were undoubtedly a very important new technological advance. Based on the prismatic splitting technique, man learned to make regular miniature plates, very thin and with cutting edges. This technique is called microlithic. Products whose width did not exceed one centimeter and length - five centimeters are called microplates. A significant number of tools were made from them, mainly micropoints and quadrangular microblades with a blunted edge by retouching. They served inserts- components of the blade of the future product. By inserting retouched microplates into a base of wood, bone or antler, cutting blades of considerable length and varied shapes could be obtained. The base of a complex shape could be cut using cutters from organic materials, which was much more convenient and easier than making such an object entirely from stone. In addition, the stone is quite fragile and with a strong impact the weapon could break. If a composite product breaks down, it was possible to replace only the damaged part of the blade, rather than making it entirely anew; this route was much more economical. This technique was especially widely used in the manufacture of large spearheads with convex edges, daggers, as well as knives with concave blades, which were used by residents of the southern regions when collecting wild cereals.
A characteristic feature of Upper Paleolithic tool sets is a large number of combined tools - i.e. those where two or three working blades were located on one workpiece (flake or plate). It is possible that this was done for convenience and to speed up the work. The most common combinations are scraper and cutter, scraper, cutter and piercing.
In the Upper Paleolithic era, fundamentally new techniques for processing solid materials appeared - drilling, sawing and grinding, however, only drilling was used quite widely.
Drilling it was necessary to obtain a variety of holes in tools, jewelry and other household items. It was made using a bow drill, well known from ethnographic materials: a hollow bone was inserted into the bowstring, under which sand was constantly poured, and when the bone was rotated, a hole was drilled. When drilling smaller holes, such as the eye of a needle or holes in beads or shells, flint drills were used - small stone tools with a sting highlighted by retouching.
Sawing used mainly for processing soft stones such as marl or slate. The figurines made from these materials show traces of sawing. Stone saws are insert tools; they were made from plates with a retouched jagged edge inserted into a solid base.
Grinding And polishing most often used in bone processing, but occasionally tools are found, mostly massive and apparently related to wood processing, in which the blades are processed by grinding. This technique became more widely used in the Mesolithic and Neolithic.
Bone tools and bone processing techniques
What is new in the Upper Paleolithic is the very widespread use of bone, horn and tusks for the manufacture of tools, utensils and decorations, and small plastic items. Occasionally, bone tools were made in earlier eras, but at that time people did not have sufficient knowledge of the technique of processing this material. In the Upper Paleolithic, when processing bone, complex techniques were already used - chopping, cutting with a knife or chisel, drilling, surface treatment with abrasives. The bone processing process involved a number of operations, each of which required special tools made of flint or soft stone. Heating, soaking, etc. were probably used to process the bone.
The tools made of bone are varied - these are points that may have served as spearheads, harpoons made from deer antler, various awls, piercings, needles, pins, polishes, adzes, hoes, the so-called spear straighteners or “rulers’ rods.” Bone needles are practically no different in size from modern ones, except perhaps a little thicker. They were cut out of dense bone and polished, the ear was either cut or drilled. The needles are found together with needle cases - small cylindrical boxes made from the tubular bones of birds. Often bone tools are very carefully processed and decorated with ornaments.
Dwellings
If very few remains of residential structures have reached us from previous eras, then quite a lot of them have been preserved for the Upper Paleolithic. People still used natural shelters - grottos, shelters and caves, but also built artificial structures in open-air sites. Dwellings vary in size, shape, design features and materials. In some cases, a large number of mammoth bones or other large animals were used to build a dwelling; in others, other materials were used. Thus, at the Siberian sites of Malta and Buret, such building materials were stone and reindeer antlers, in some other cases large stones of various shapes were used. All these solid materials served to create the base of the residential structure and strengthen its frame, which probably consisted of wooden poles. The frame was covered with skins, which could be secured on top with large flat bones or other available materials. The closest analogues to the dwellings of the Upper Paleolithic can be the dwellings of northern peoples such as chums and yarangs or the light ground dwellings of hunter-gatherers of the southern regions.
Upper Paleolithic items made of bone, horn and tusk:
1 - spear tip with flint inserts; 2 - spear tip made of mammoth ivory; 3,4 - harpoons; 5,6- rectifiers (rods); 7 - needle case; 8 - piercing with zoomorphic pommel; 9 - bead; 10-12 - needles; 13 - bone craft with ornament; 14, 15 - polished
The most common were round or oval-shaped dwellings with one or several hearths inside. Their remains are discovered during excavations at sites in the form of accumulations of large bones of a mammoth or other large animals. Such a cluster has clear boundaries and represents the remains of collapsed walls and roofs of a dwelling. Often it lies in a depression. The bottom of the recess is the floor of the dwelling, on which, during excavations, one can find various traces of habitation - hearths, storage pits, ash or ocher stains, fragments of flint and bone, stone and bone products, coals. The location of the finds allows us to judge how the area of the dwelling was used, where working or sleeping places were located, entrances and exits, etc.
More than 30 Upper Paleolithic dwellings of various types are known on the territory of Russia. The most well studied dwellings in the Kostenkovsko-Borshevsky district and at the Gagarino site on the Don; at the sites of the Desna basin - Eliseevichi, Yudinovo; in the Middle Dnieper region - at the sites Gontsy, Mezin, Dobranichevka, Mezhirichi. Often, as the foundation of a dwelling, a plinth was built from the skulls and large bones of a mammoth, which provided reliable support for the walls. In Yudinov, such a base consisted of 20 mammoth skulls, and in Mezhirichi, the bones of 149 mammoth individuals were used in the building structure.
In the Late Paleolithic there were also elongated dwellings with several hearths. The remains of such a structure, 12 m long and 4 m wide, with three hearths, were examined at the Pushkari site. Similar dwellings are known at the Kostenki 4 site. The elongated dwellings may have had a gable roof, which could have been made of bark, grass or animal skins.
The most difficult to reconstruct is another type of Late Paleolithic residential objects - these are complexly organized oval residential areas, with an area of more than a hundred square meters, with a number of hearths located along their long axis. The perimeter of such sites was surrounded
storage pits and sleeping (?) dugout pits. The storage pits probably served for storing meat reserves, since large hunting catches could not be used for food immediately. Large bones and tusks of mammoths were widely used to cover storerooms and dugouts. Such residential sites are characteristic of the Kostenki-Avdeevka culture and were found at the sites of Kostenki 1 on the Middle Don, Avdeevo near Kursk, and Zaraiskaya near Zaraysk near Moscow.
In more southern regions, where natural conditions were much milder, light ground dwellings such as huts or canopies and wind barriers around fireplaces are known. A number of such light ground structures are known at monuments in France (Pinsevan, Etiol), in the Balkans and in the south of Russia (Muralovka, Kamennye Balki, Osokorevka, etc.). The only traces of such structures are pits from post frame structures, hearths and clusters of finds with clear boundaries.
Several dwellings could form a small settlement, as evidenced by the material from the Dobranichevka, Mezhirichi, Kostenki 4, Malta, and Buret sites. At some sites there are complexes consisting of dwellings and associated workshops, where flint and bone tools were made, there were also open-air fireplaces and various utility pits. The population of such villages probably formed a close-knit group - a clan or a community.
To determine the duration of human habitation at a particular site, in addition to archaeological sources, various data on paleoecology, paleodemography and, with extreme caution, ethnography are used. Despite the fact that much of this issue is not entirely clear, researchers usually talk about the predominance of relative - seasonal - sedentary behavior among Paleolithic hunter-gatherers.
Jewelry and clothing
In the Upper Paleolithic, decorations made from animal bones and drilled fangs, teeth, and shells were widespread. These are bead necklaces made from mammoth ivory, animal teeth and mollusk shells, often including larger pendants or plaques. Ornamented hoops (tiaras) made of mammoth ivory were worn on the head to fasten the hair, and on the arms were various bracelets cut from ivory or made of stringed beads. Beads and shells decorated headdresses or hairstyles and clothing, which is clearly visible from the burial materials and details of anthropomorphic figurines.
The cut and nature of the sewn clothing is evidenced by both images of people and the remains of decorations sewn onto them, found in burials. These data allow us to reconstruct several clothing options. Thus, based on the study of a female figurine from the Siberian site of Buret, we can talk about the existence of fur clothing such as overalls, sewn with the wool facing out, tightly fitting the body from head to toe. A more complex costume is being reconstructed based on materials from burials at the Sungir site. The costume consisted of a shirt, pants, shoes and a cloak, pinned with a large pin (fibula). The clothes of the buried were richly embroidered at the seams with beads cut from tusk, which formed decorative borders. In general, the presence of rather complex clothing is indicated by the finds of a large number of buckles, buttons and various plaques-stripes made of bone and often ornamented.
Research over the last decade suggests that weaving, knitting and, in some areas, weaving were widespread in the Upper Paleolithic. Samples of the first textiles are 26 thousand years old and were discovered at a number of sites in Moravia (Central Europe). The plant raw materials for it were nettle and hemp fibers.
Hunting
Finds at sites of a large number of bones of various animals indicate that hunting was one of the main occupations of the population. Based on the bone remains of animals, we can determine the set of commercial species. Such animals were mammoth, wild horse, reindeer and red deer, bison, saiga, and among predators - wolf, brown and cave bear, fox, arctic fox, among rodents - hare, bobak. Bones of birds and fish are found much less frequently.
Sometimes entire skeletons of arctic foxes and other predators are found at sites - therefore, these animals were not consumed as food. This suggests that in some cases hunting was carried out solely for fur. Based on the nature of the bone materials, one can trace a certain selectivity in hunting for one or another type of animal depending on the season, gender and age. Thus, the above-mentioned skeletons of fur-bearing animals refer to sites where they lived in the autumn-winter seasons, i.e. at a time when the fur is most durable. Animal bones found at sites usually belong to either young or old animals, and the volume of hunting prey at the sites is not very large. Thus, hunting did not disturb the ecological balance of the area. All this suggests that the idea of Paleolithic man as a mindless predator is clearly outdated.
Leaf-shaped and other points, tips with a side notch, probably served as the tops of hunting weapons - spears and darts. In addition, bone tips for tools such as spears and harpoons were discovered at a number of sites. Inset tips were often made: sharp flint plates were fixed into the grooves of the bone tip. At some sites in France, spear throwers were found that increased the range of throwing weapons and the force of impact. The bow and arrow were apparently invented in the Upper Paleolithic. A number of researchers suggest that the domestication of the wolf began at this time (Avdeevo site).
For the Upper Paleolithic, various methods of hunting are reconstructed: using trapping pits, pens or roundups, ambushes at watering holes, using various traps, etc. Hunting required a clear organization of all the actions of the team. A hunting horn was found at one of the French sites, which, as is known, serves to transmit signals to groups of hunters at various stages of the hunt.
Hunting provided people with food, material for clothing and building houses, and provided very important raw materials for the manufacture of various products - bone (which, in addition, served as fuel). At the same time, hunting could not satisfy all human needs and was significantly supplemented by a variety of gathering, the role of which was great, especially in the southern regions.
Religious ideas. Burials
The spiritual life of Paleolithic man developed in direct connection with the further exploration of the world and the development of material culture. Primitive beliefs are a reflection of certain conclusions, ideas and concepts that arose as a result of long-term observations of natural phenomena and accumulated life experience. Already in the Mousterian era, a person began to develop a complex of ideas that explained the most important foundations of the universe. Without separating their existence from the surrounding world and observing various natural phenomena, primitive people attributed to themselves the ability to cause or create the same phenomena and, on the other hand, attributed to the forces of nature, animals and inanimate objects various abilities and capabilities inherent only to humans. This set of ideas is called animism. The belief in the existence of a human connection with any animal or plant led to the emergence of another direction of primitive beliefs - totemism. Totemism arises along with the emergence of clan society. Its basis is the idea that all members of one clan group come from a specific animal, plant, or even an inanimate object - a totem.
The main reason for the emergence of funeral practice, as mentioned above, was the further development of social organization and the complication of ideological ideas. To date, about 70 Upper Paleolithic burials are known, so far discovered only in Eurasia. In this era, despite the relatively few finds of burials, we can talk about some stable features of burial practice. Deceased people were placed in grave pits, often surrounded or covered with stones and bones; grave goods included jewelry, stone and bone items, and red ocher was often used. Burials are located, as a rule, in parking lots or in inhabited caves. The poses of the buried are very varied. Burials can be single or collective. For example, at the Pržedmost site (Czech Republic), a collective burial was found that contained the remains of at least 20 people: 8 skeletons belonged to adults, the rest to children. The skeletons lay mostly crouched on their sides, sometimes covered with mammoth shoulder blades or covered with stones. Paired and triple burials were discovered in the Grimaldi grottoes in the south of France, in Moravia, at the Sungir site near Vladimir, and at the Malta site on the Angara.
Double burial of children at the Sungir site and art objects found in the burial and at the site:
1,2 - carved disks; 3 - bone disk with dotted ornament; 4 - tusk rod; 5 - tusk ring; 6 - pendants made of arctic fox fangs; 7 - bone beads; 8 - horse with dotted ornament (from the cultural layer)
The male and paired children's burials of Sungir are of particular interest due to their excellent preservation and rich inventory. The male burial contained more than three thousand beads from mammoth ivory and arctic fox teeth. Their location on the skeleton allows us to reconstruct a costume consisting of a shirt without a slit in the front and pants connected to shoes. On the head of the buried person was a headdress decorated with sewn carved beads, and on his hands were bracelets made of bone. At the bottom of the grave lay a flint knife and a scraper. The buried person lay in an extended position on his back and was densely covered with ocher. Almost next to this burial, another one was discovered, which stood out among the others due to the unusualness of the ritual and the richness of the grave goods. In a grave pit 3 meters long, two skeletons lay in an extended position, their heads facing each other. They belonged to teenagers - a boy and a girl, buried at the same time. The clothes of the buried were richly decorated with sewn carved beads and other bone decorations. Next to the children were placed unique hunting weapons - spears exceeding 2 meters in length, made from a single straightened mammoth tusk, long and short bone daggers. On the boy's chest lay an amulet - a figurine of a bone horse. It is interesting to note that the same figurine, decorated with a spiral ornament made by a series of pits, was found in the cultural layer of the site.
Rich material for the study of funeral rites is provided by the sites of the Kostenkovsko-Borshevsky region. Four burials were discovered there. The burial at the Kostenki 2 site was discovered next to the dwelling in a specially attached oval chamber made of mammoth bones. The position of the skeleton suggests that the deceased was placed in the burial chamber in a sitting position with his legs bound. The burial from the Markina Gora site (Kostenki XIV) contains a fully preserved skeleton of a man about 25 years old, lying in a simple soil pit, the floor of which was densely covered with ocher. The buried person was laid on his side in a strongly crouched position; three flint flakes, a mammoth phalanx and hare bones were found next to him. The design and ritual of burial at the Kostenki XV site are unique. In an oval grave pit located under the floor of the dwelling, a 6-7 year old boy was buried in a sitting position on an artificially constructed seat. The inventory found in the burial was a rich set of 70 various bone and stone tools. On the head of the buried person was a headdress decorated with more than 150 drilled arctic fox teeth. The bottom of the grave was thickly painted with yellow and red ocher.
Paleolithic art
Late Paleolithic art revealed the richness of the spiritual world of ancient hunters and gatherers. Although the beginning of visual activity can be dated back to the late Acheulian and Mousterian eras, its heyday dates back to the Upper Paleolithic. Opened at the end of the 19th century. examples of Upper Paleolithic painting were so perfect that contemporaries at first refused to believe in their ancient age, and only as a result of a long and heated discussion were they recognized as authentic.
Currently, the phenomenon of Paleolithic art is generally recognized and is the subject of comprehensive study. In Paleolithic art, there are three main groups of monuments (three main genres): monumental - cave painting and reliefs; art of small forms - small plastic art (figurines, small bone plates with engravings); applied - jewelry, artistically designed household items, etc.
The origin and flowering of Upper Paleolithic art indicates the completion of the formation of consciousness, the emergence of a new, completely specific human activity aimed at creating the first model of the world.
The main visual motifs of cave painting and small sculpture were images of animals and humans. Some drawings and sculptures are made so realistically that paleontologists are able to determine from them the species of animals that are now extinct. Mammoth, bison, horse, and predators are especially common among images.
It is believed that zoomorphic images appear somewhat earlier than anthropomorphic ones. The earliest monument cave painting(28 thousand years ago) is now the Chauvet Cave in France, where beautiful compositions of images of horses, lions and other animals are presented. Monumental paintings are most fully represented in caves in the south and southwest of France, northern Spain, Italy, as well as Serbia and Croatia. About 120 such objects are known there. Such monuments as the caves of Altamira, Lascaux, Pech-Merle, Nio, and the Three Brothers provide striking examples of polychrome pictorial compositions. According to one of the largest archaeologists of the 20th century. A. Leroy-Gourhan and many other scientists, cave paintings were not just an unsystematic series of images, but could serve as “records-illustrations” of ancient myths. Thus, the bison in cave painting personified the feminine, the horse - the masculine, and various combinations of their images could reflect some mythological subjects.
Images of humans are quite rare in monumental art and, unlike images of animals, are more conventional. There are known images that combine human and animal features. As a rule, they are interpreted as participants in rituals associated with hunting magic.
Such are, for example, the figure of a “shaman” from the Three Brothers Cave or the scene of the ritual eating of a bison from the Raimonden Cave, etc. It should be noted that several such images are also presented in small plastic - the most famous is the figurine of a standing man with a lion's head from Hohlenstein-Stadel (Germany). Apparently, they are all associated with a similar range of ideas based on totemism.
In Russia, cave paintings were discovered in the Kapova and Ignatievskaya caves in the Urals. The age of the cultural layer in these caves is about 14 thousand years. On the walls of the caves there are images of mammoths, rhinoceroses, horses and geometric figures.
Primitive artists used mineral paints: chalk, charcoal and yellow, red or cherry ocher. In dark caves, a person painted by the light of a fire, torch or lamp. Fragments of such a clay lamp were discovered during excavations in Kapova Cave.
In addition to examples of wall paintings, usually polychrome, monumental cave art includes relief images made using the techniques of engraving and picketage. Picketage is a technique for creating an image by knocking out dotted depressions. The most famous are the high relief of a woman with a horn from the Lossel cave and the paired group of bison from the Tuc de Odubert cave, made as a high relief in 3/4 of the natural volume.
Items small art- figurines of people and animals and plates with their engraved images are very widespread. There are much more such finds in Central and Eastern Europe and Northern Asia than in Western Europe. Animal figurines are distinguished by high craftsmanship and great expressiveness. Figurines of a mammoth, rhinoceros, bison, horse, bear, cave lion and other animals may have been intended for use in magical rituals and could have been kept in special places. For example, at many sites figurines made of mammoth ivory were found in small storage pits under the floor of dwellings; sometimes they are found in burials (a horse from the Sungir site).
Small plastics of the Upper Paleolithic:
1, 2, 7, 9 - “Paleolithic Venus” (Avdeevo, Gagarin, Kostenki, Buret); 3 - mammoth (Avdee-vo); 4 - pommel in the form of the head of a “cat predator” (Avdeevo); 5 - bison (Zaraisk site), 6 - waterfowl (Malta), 8 - head of a lioness (Kostenki)
In addition to mammals, birds, fish and snakes were depicted. A whole series of sculptural images of waterfowl comes from the Siberian site of Malta: the birds are depicted in motion - they swim or fly with their wings outstretched. Wriggling snakes are also engraved in motion on a large plate of mammoth ivory found at the same site. Images of fish and snakes are known on engraved plates from sites in Western and Eastern Europe. Numerous images of birds, snakes and fish may be associated with the development of early mythological ideas about the elements of nature - air, earth, water.
Among anthropomorphic sculptures, images of women predominate - the so-called “Paleolithic Venuses”; now about 200 of them are known. Male images are few in number. Most of the figurines depicted women in full growth, although images of female heads and individual parts of the body are also known. Many figurines were found inside or near dwellings. They are often found near fires or in specially dug holes.
European figurines usually depict nude women with emphasized female forms, often decorated with ornamented belts and ribbons, bracelets and even rings, sometimes with complex hairstyles or headdresses. The slender type "Venus" is found mainly in Siberian sites. The famous female figurines from the Malta and Buret sites are more schematic and flattened, but their facial features are detailed. A special feature of some figurines is the continuous ornament covering them, depicting fur clothing with a hood.
In the plastics of the Upper Paleolithic, in addition to realistic female images, there are figurines characterized by a high degree of generalization in the creation of a female image - these are the famous “birds” from the Mezin site and a number of Western European figurines from various sites in France and Italy.
The realism of female images, on the one hand, and on the other, the emphasis on sexual characteristics and the display of signs of pregnancy allow us to talk about the importance of expressing the maternal principle. It is believed that the wide distribution of female figurines indicates the formation in the Upper Paleolithic era of the cult of a woman as a mother and guardian of the hearth.
Female images could serve as talismans, amulets and be used to perform various magical rituals.
For the manufacture of small plastic objects, mainly mammoth ivory, bone, amber, and soft stone - marl were used. However, at the sites of the Pavlovian culture (Czech Republic, Moravia), which date back to 26-24 millennia BC, figurines of women and
animals made of fired clay, obtained as a result of very high-quality firing. There, at the Dolni Vestonice site, the remains of a primitive furnace for firing ceramics and many of its fragments were found. These finds date back to approximately the same time. That is, this is the first evidence of the invention of ceramics by man. Another ceramic anthropomorphic figurine was found at the Siberian site of Maina (upper Yenisei). It is interesting that their creators, while making high-quality ceramic plastic, and therefore mastering high-temperature firing, did not try to make ceramic tableware.
A special type of Paleolithic art is ornament. It is found on female figurines, jewelry, tusk and bone plates, and even on tools. Ancient ornamental motifs are extremely diverse - from the simplest figures (dots, dashes, crosses and their combinations) to a complex, skillfully executed meander ornament from Mezin, a hexagonal grid from Eliseevich and a double spiral from Malta. Some of the ornaments - lines of triangles, an oblique cross and their combinations - are considered “feminine”, since they decorate female figurines and a number of bone tools, traditionally associated with women’s labor in making clothes.
Upper Paleolithic ornament:
1 - bracelet (Mezin); 2, 6 - image of a bird (Mezin)’, 3 - ornamented mammoth shoulder blade (Mezin); 4 - plate made of mammoth ivory, ornamented on both sides (Malta); 5 - mammoth skull, decorated with red ocher (Mezhirini); 7, 8 - fragments of tiaras with ornaments (Avdevo)
Often, on ornamented objects or tusks with notches, groups of elements are distinguished, repeating in certain numerical intervals - the most common are groups of 2, 5, 7 and multiples of them. The presence of an ornament constructed in this way allowed scientists to put forward a hypothesis about the origin of counting (pentary and septenary systems) and the lunar calendar in the Paleolithic era.
Finds of objects of Paleolithic art on the territory of Russia and Ukraine are distributed unevenly; the largest number of them were found at sites in the Middle Don, Dnieper, Desna and Eastern Siberia.
There is no doubt that in addition to the visual arts, other forms of art existed in the Upper Paleolithic, such as music and dance. This is evidenced by the finds at Upper Paleolithic sites of flutes and pipes, which are practically no different from modern ones and can still be played. At the Mezin site, the remains of a dwelling were examined, in which, near one of the walls, there was a group of large mammoth bones, decorated with red ocher painting. According to the researchers, these objects could serve as percussion musical instruments.
Cultural areas and archaeological cultures
In the Upper Paleolithic, the pace of development of human society increased, new discoveries and improvements spread faster and faster, and, at the same time, local differences in the development of material culture became more noticeable.
Archaeological material does not provide grounds for identifying a single or only center in which the Upper Paleolithic industry arose. Most researchers suggest that many Upper Paleolithic archaeological cultures developed in a number of areas on the basis of local Mousterian traditions. This process occurred in different areas, probably about 40-36 thousand years ago.
Archaeological cultures (see Introduction) in the Stone Age are distinguished on the basis of a typological analysis of flint and bone implements and the technology of their manufacture. Archaeological culture for this era is characterized by a certain set of specific types of tools made in the same technological tradition, as well as similar forms (types) of dwellings and features in the fine arts (if the latter is available) /
It is assumed that the differences between archaeological cultures reflect certain differences in the socio-cultural traditions characteristic of various human groups.
For a long time, most researchers recognized the stages of development of the Upper Paleolithic for the entire ecumene, with three general stages (epochs) identified: Aurignac, Solutre and Madeleine. Subsequently, another very long stage was added to them - perigordien.
Currently, thanks to the materials of many years of research, it is generally accepted that these are not general stages of the development of material culture, but rather large cultural areas, which in some cases and in some territories of Western and Central Europe replace each other, and in other cases coexist. Within these areas, as well as throughout the Upper Paleolithic ecumene, distinctive cultures developed. It turned out that in a fairly limited area, different archaeological cultures can coexist and develop at the same time.
Western and Central Europe. It is generally accepted that in the initial stages of the Upper Paleolithic, two main cultural areas coexisted - Perigordienian and Aurignacian, the absolute age of which is determined to be 34-22 thousand years.
The origin of the material culture of the Perigordien is traditionally associated with the further development of the Mousterian variant with the Acheulean tradition, since the role of Mousterian elements in the stone industry at its initial stage was great, although over time it significantly decreased. The main area of distribution is Southwestern France.
Aurignacian culture is known in Spain, France, Belgium, and England. The most characteristic feature of the Aurignacian stone industry can be considered a special “Aurignacian” retouch, with the help of which various types of tools were designed. Flat or spindle-shaped bone points are widespread - this is the first stable type of bone tools. The monuments of Central Europe are somewhat different from Western European ones; these differences are mainly manifested in art: Western European drawings of animals are usually done in profile, and female figurines are more realistic and plastic.
Within the framework of the Early Upper Paleolithic of Central Europe, the Seletian culture is distinguished, which is characterized by a combination of Upper Paleolithic and Mousterian types of products. On some Seletian monuments there are even points, plates and cores made in a very archaic Levallois technique. The most recognizable shape can be considered a large triangular tip.
Somewhat later than the Aurignacian culture, the Gravettian culture arose and continued to coexist simultaneously with it, possibly inheriting the Perigordienian tradition. Gravettian sites in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Austria and France date back to 26-20 millennia BC. Gravettian is characterized by a rich set of tools; various points can be considered specific types, among which asymmetrical points with a side notch and knives with a back stand out. Microliths and composite tools appear. There are a variety of bone products: points, awls, spatulas, decorations. Gravettian monuments are characterized by the presence of numerous examples of small plastic art - figurines of women and animals made of tusk and bone, stone or clay.
The Gravettian culture is represented by a large number of monuments, which are divided into two groups, eastern and western, the question of their relationship is debatable.
The Solutrean culture is widespread in Central and Southern France; in addition, an independent center for the spread of a similar culture existed in Eastern and Northern Spain and Portugal. In the north of Western Europe, Solutrean monuments, especially late ones, are extremely rare.
The Solutrean culture refers to the period between the existence of the Gravettian and Magdalenian cultures, but is not genetically related to them. Radiocarbon dates indicate a relatively short period of its existence (21-19/18 thousand years ago). A feature of this culture is the wide distribution of spear tips and knife blades. The predominant forms are laurel or willow arrowheads, arrowheads with a handle and with a side notch, made with great perfection by processing the flint on both sides with press retouch. This method of processing flint consisted in using
using a bone squeezer, thin scales were removed from the surface of the product; This type of retouching is called streaky or “solutrean”.
The Magdalenian culture dates back to the period 18-12/11 thousand years ago. The Magdalenian culture itself is typical only for France, Belgium, Northern Spain, Switzerland and southern Germany, but its characteristic features - widespread bone processing and specific types of bone tools, peculiar features in small plastics - are represented to varying degrees in the Late Paleolithic cultures of the entire European periglacial regions from France to the Urals. In Central Europe, the development of industries occurs mainly on a Gravetian basis, but Magdalenian impulses (influences) also penetrate here from the west.
The relatively favorable climatic conditions that developed in Europe at the end of the Upper Paleolithic as a result of glacier retreat and warming (13-11/9 thousand years ago) made it possible for new groups of hunters of tundra and steppe animals to move north. In Northwestern Europe they are represented by the Hamburg and Ahrensburg cultures, and in Eastern Europe by the Swider culture.
The Hamburg culture is characterized by a variety of flint tools, including arrowheads with notches and peculiar piercings. Tools made of deer antler with flint inserts were common. Fish and birds were killed with single-ended harpoons made from reindeer antler. The dwellings were round and oval tents covered with deer skins.
Numerous flint products were found at the monuments of the Arensburg culture - arrowheads, scrapers, drills, etc. The most characteristic are fairly wide and short asymmetrical arrowheads and darts with a stalk for securing the product in the shaft, as well as special hoe-shaped tools made from reindeer antler.
The Swider culture is synchronous with the Arensburg culture. The settlements were temporary camps on the banks of rivers and lakes, often on dunes. Organic materials are not preserved in sand, so the Svider inventory is represented only by flint products: willow and petiole points, scrapers on blades and flakes, burins of various shapes, etc.
Monuments similar to those of Svider and Arensburg are known in the northwestern territories adjacent to Russia; later, throughout the Mesolithic, these traditions can be traced throughout the entire forest zone of Eastern Europe.
For Eastern Europe, Siberia and many areas of Asia, and especially America, the development scheme of Western European cultural areas is not being implemented, however, due to the active movement of various population groups caused by climate change, we can observe the influence of one or another cultural tradition in very remote areas.
Eastern Europe demonstrates the diversity of Upper Paleolithic cultures, modifying various Aurignacoid, Seletoid, Gravettian, Magdalenian traditions and exhibiting great originality.
The most ancient are the Spitsyno, Streletskaya, Gorodtsovskaya cultures, studied in the Kostenkovsko-Borshevsky district in the Middle Don. The Spitsyno and Streltsy cultures belong to the same chronological group, but their inventories are strikingly different from each other. The Spitsyn culture (36-32 thousand years ago) is characterized by a prismatic splitting technique; most of the tools are made of plates of regular shape. There is no two-sided processing. The most numerous group of tools are various burins, but there are also many scrapers with parallel edges. Mousterian forms of tools are completely absent. Products made of bone were found - polishes and awls, jewelry made of belemnites and corals.
In the inventory of the Streltsy culture (35-25 thousand years ago), on the contrary, there are a lot of Mousterian types of products, which are represented by scrapers, scraper-knives and pointed points with double-sided processing. The main workpiece is a flake. There are numerous scrapers, tending to a triangular shape, almost as numerous are triangular points with a concave base, carefully processed on both sides - this is the most expressive form among the tools of the Streltsy culture. There are very few other types of weapons.
The Gorodtsovskaya culture belongs to the second chronological group of the Kostenki monuments (28-25 thousand years ago) and, although for some time it coexisted with the Streltsy culture, it is very different from the latter in the features of stone implements. Both plates and flakes serve as blanks for products. Early sites contain Mousterian forms, but over time their proportion noticeably decreases.
A brief overview of just three of these cultures shows the cultural uniqueness of each. It should be repeated once again that in the Kostenkovsko-Borshevsky archaeological region (the village of Kostenki, Voronezh region) no less than eight independent cultural formations are distinguished in a very small area.
The Molodovo culture is a good example of the long-term autochthonous development of the Upper Paleolithic industry associated with the Mousterian culture of the same name. Monuments of the Molodovo culture (30-20 thousand years ago) are located in the middle reaches of the Prut and Dniester rivers. During the long existence of this industry, the manufacture of products on elongated plate blanks and plates that became smaller and smaller was improved. The cultural inventory widely includes specific types of scrapers, various incisors and points. From the earliest stages of its existence, tools on microplates appeared, the number of which constantly increases over time.
One of the striking cultural formations of Eastern Europe is the Kostenki-Avdeevsk culture (25-20/18? thousand years ago), the monuments of which are located in the central part of the Russian Plain and are located at considerable distances from each other - Kostenki and Gagarino on the Middle Don, Avdeevo on the Seimas, Zaraiskaya site near Moscow. The stone implements are rich and varied; large points with a side notch, leaf-shaped points, and backed knives are very characteristic. There are numerous tools made of bone - points and polishes, needles and needle cases, small crafts. At the sites, many examples of small plastic and applied art made from tusk, bone and marl were found. Residential sites with complex layouts are described in the “Dwellings” section.
The monuments of this culture have the greatest similarity with materials from the Pavlovian culture in Moravia and a number of monuments in Poland, Germany, and Austria. This culture is part of the Kostenki-Willzdorf unity, Gravetgian in nature, showing a complex picture of the interconnection of cultures and monuments of Western, Central and Eastern Europe, confirmed by the similarity of implements, residential complexes and art.
The Middle Dnieper cultural community occupies a vast territory in the middle part of the Dnieper basin and its tributary - the river. Desna and is represented by a number of monuments (Mezin, Pushkari, Eliseevichi, Yudinovo, Khotylevo II, Timonovka, Dobranichevka, Mezhirichi, Gontsy), on which the remains of massive dwellings have been preserved (see section “Dwellings”). These are typical settlements of sedentary hunters; the number of game animals here undoubtedly included the mammoth. These monuments share common features in house construction, examples of small forms of art and ornament, stone and bone implements.
In the Northern Black Sea region, a number of cultures are distinguished for the late Upper Paleolithic - Kamennobalkovskaya, Akkarzhanskaya, Anetovskaya, whose bearers lived in different conditions than the inhabitants of the periglacial regions. The climate here was much warmer, the vegetation was richer, and the largest animals were the wild horse and bison. They were the main commercial species, although the overall composition of hunting prey was much wider. Other natural conditions also determined the ways in which the ancient population adapted to them - at the sites there are no traces of massive building structures or pits for storing food supplies in permafrost. The stone inventory contains a wide variety of tools made of microblades and inserts; in the Kamenno-Balkovo culture their number reaches 30%. The main set of tools is typical for the Upper Paleolithic, but is unique for each culture. For example, the inventory of the Kamennobalkovskaya culture has many similarities with the inventory of the Imeretian culture of the Caucasus, which indicates the possibility of population migration from there to the south of the Russian Plain. In Siberia, the Kokorevo, Afontovo, Malta-Buret and Dyuktai cultures have been studied; more details about them can be read in additional literature.
Currently, many Upper Paleolithic cultures have been identified in Eurasia and America. The differences between them are significant, which indicates the independent development of cultures and their different origins. In some areas, autochthonous development is observed from the beginning of the era almost to its end. In other areas, we can trace the arrival of genetically alien cultures into the territory of distribution of one culture, interrupting the development of local traditions, and, finally, sometimes we can observe the coexistence of several different cultures - as, for example, in the Kostenkovsko-Borshevsky district (where more than 60 monuments belonging to to at least eight crops).
In those cases where it is possible to trace the continuous development of an archaeological culture, it turns out that it can exist for a very long time. For example, the Aurignacian culture in France and the Imeretian culture of Georgia developed at least 10 thousand years. Kamennobalkovskaya in southern Russia existed for at least 5 thousand years. This indicates the successful adaptation of the Upper Paleolithic population to environmental conditions.
(brief background information)
Lower Paleolithic: 2.6 million - 150 thousand years BC e. Homo habilis, which existed during this period, differed little from the Treepithecus and Australopithecus; he also lived at the expense of nature, but the Pithecanthropus knew how, albeit primitively, to think and create. Stone, bone and wooden tools were used. Naturally, wooden tools did not reach us. The main occupations were hunting and gathering, and fishing appeared. Agriculture and cattle breeding did not exist. The most important achievement of this period was the beginning of the use of fire: fried food was digested much faster and easier than raw food, which stimulated the activity of the entire body, including the brain.
There are several periods of the Lower Paleolithic:
1) Olduvai period (2.6 million - 900 thousand years ago) The main monuments are located in East Africa. Sites that were deliberately cleared were discovered, apparently for the construction of housing.
2) Abbeville (900-600 thousand years ago) The emergence of universal tools, such as: a hand ax (a double-sided tool). The hand ax was used for both chopping and cutting. Pebble tools are actively used.
3) Acheulian (600-150 thousand years ago) There is a change in stone processing technology. The “Clecton” and “Levallois” techniques appear. Additional splitting tools appear, made from bone and horn. The appearance of stone knives and scrapers. Beginning to use fire.
Middle Paleolithic: 150,000 - 35,000 BC uh. Due to the advance of the glacier, the climate worsened, which intensified the struggle for survival and therefore became a powerful impetus for human development. New tools appeared - choppers, pointed points, scrapers. The emergence of the first religious ideas and fine arts.
Mousterian culture, Mousterian era- the latest era of the ancient Paleolithic, follows the Acheulean culture (epoch) and is replaced by the cultures of the late (Upper) Paleolithic. Many researchers distinguish it under the name “Middle Paleolithic”.
First defined by G. Mortilier in the late 60s. XIX century And it is named after the Le Moustier cave in southwestern France (Dordogne department). Distributed in Europe (to the south of 54° north latitude), northern Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. Geologically, it dates back to the Upper Pleistocene, the end of the Biv-Würm interglacial period and the first half of the last (Würm) glaciation of Europe.
Monuments of the late Mousterian culture in Europe are radiocarbon dated to 53-33 millennia BC. e.; its appearance probably dates back to 100-80 thousand BC. e. The Mousterian technique of stone processing is characterized by disc-shaped and single-platform cores (cores), from which fairly wide flakes were broken off, transformed by beating along the edges into various tools (scrapers, points, drills, knives, etc.). Bone processing is poorly developed. There are many varieties of Mousterian culture, which are often distributed in the same territories. The carriers of the Mousterian culture were Neanderthals. They lived in caves and in the open air, sometimes in dwellings built from large mammoth bones and skins, and were engaged in hunting mammoths, cave bears and other animals, as well as gathering. Neanderthal burials provide evidence of nascent religious beliefs.
Late Paleolithic: 35,000 - 8000 BC e. A person of the modern physical type - Homo sapiens - arose and spread. The first differences between representatives of the races are Caucasoid (Cro-Magnon), Mongoloid and Negroid (Grimaldians). More than twenty types of tools are used, including needles, which made it possible to sew clothes from animal skins, and the spear thrower, the ancestor of the bow. The primitive herd is replaced by a clan matriarchal community, kinship is conducted through the female line. The primitive institution of marriage appears. The first pagan beliefs arose: totemism, fetishism, animism, belief in magic; this is evidenced by images on the walls of caves and figurines made from mammoth ivory.
More fractional divisions of the Late Paleolithic are only local in nature; there are no units that are represented everywhere. The stated periodization of the Paleolithic is not universal. Many researchers accept not a three-membered, but a two-membered division of the Paleolithic, without distinguishing the Mousterian culture as an average
Aurignacian culture- archaeological culture of the early stage of the Late Paleolithic. Named after excavations in the Aurignac cave in the Haute-Garonne department (France). First identified at the beginning of the 20th century.
The Aurignacian culture in the narrow sense of the word is widespread in France, where it is radiocarbon dated to 33,000-19,000 BC. e., replaces the Mousterian culture, coexists with the Périgordian culture and is replaced by the Solutrean culture. There are different versions of the origin of the Aurignacian culture: 1) from Pre-Aurignacian (the Middle Eastern version of Mousterian); 2) from Mousterian La Quinn. Aurignacian culture in the broad sense of the word is represented in a number of countries in Western and Central Europe. The Aurignacian culture is characterized by flint blades with retouching and notches along the edges, scrapers, core-shaped tools, fairly developed bone processing (in particular, bone spearheads with a dissected base), remains of long-term dwellings and relatively developed fine arts. At this time, the first works of primitive art began to appear, which were schematic outline drawings of animal heads, usually performed on limestone slabs, found in the caves of La Ferrassie, France. Also interesting are the reliefs carved on limestone slabs found in the Lossel caves in France. One of these plates depicts a hunter throwing a spear, others depict women, while the rest are occupied by images of animals being hunted. The carriers of the Aurignacian culture were the Cro-Magnons. The people of the Aurignacian culture lived in a cold climate. They hunted mammoth, wild horse, reindeer, and woolly rhinoceros. During this era, permanent winter communal dwellings appeared for the first time. Their existence was proven by excavations carried out by Soviet archaeologists P. P. Efimenko and S. N. Zamyatin in the late 20s and 30s. XX century
Solutrean culture- archaeological culture of the mid-Late Paleolithic, widespread in France and Northern Spain. Replaced by the Aurignacian culture and the Périgordian culture and, in turn, was replaced by the Magdalenian culture. Dated (by radiocarbon method) 18-15 thousand years BC. e. It was first isolated by G. Mortilier in the late 60s. XIX century And it is named after the Solutre site (Solutre, Saone-et-Loire department in France). It is characterized by carefully crafted flint, so-called Solutrean, tips in the shape of a laurel or willow leaf, and also with a notch, processed with perfect pressing retouching. Some of them served as spear and dart tips, some as knives and daggers. Along with them, flint scrapers, burins, piercings, points, bone tips, needles with eyes, wands, works of art, etc. are found. In a number of Late Paleolithic sites in Central Europe and the European part of Russia, certain similarities with the Solutrean culture were discovered. There is also a version about the penetration of the Solutrean culture into North America (the so-called Solutrean hypothesis, proposed in 1998 and suggesting that it was people from Europe who were the first settlers in America).
Madeleine culture (other name - Madeleine)- Late Paleolithic culture; was distributed in France, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, and Germany. Age - 15-8 thousand years. A variety of flint burins, piercers, and scrapers predominate. Bone processing is highly developed. Characteristic are carved images on horn and bone, sculptures made of horn, bone and mammoth ivory, engraved and other images on the walls and ceilings of caves. There was a transition to microliths, that is, small tools made of stone. Madeleine hunters lived mainly in caves, as well as in dwellings made of bones and skins. The Magdalenian culture in a broad sense covers the final stage of the development of the Late Paleolithic culture of the entire European periglacial region from France to the Urals. The Magdalenian population left us magnificent cave art and bone objects.
Periodization of the Paleolithic of Eurasia (according to A.I. Martynov)
Basic concepts and terms of the topic:
Anthropogenesis - the doctrine of human origins.
Archanthropes - the most ancient ancestors of humans (the most ancient hominids - Pithecanthropus, Sinanthropus).
Pebble technique - the most ancient technique of stone processing and making tools from pebbles by beating.
Harpoon - a throwing weapon made of bone or metal, the tip has serrations on one or both sides.
Pebble guns - the earliest and most primitive type of tool. Made from pebbles using the chipping technique.
Hominids.(from Latin Homo - man) - a family of the order of primates: apes, fossils and modern people.
Industry - certain, consistently repeating techniques for processing stone and making stone tools.
Cleaver - in archeology, a tool with an oblique chip.
A spear - a piercing or throwing weapon, consisting of a shaft and a tip made of stone or metal.
Levallois - double technique of stone processing: 1) chipping of regular shaped plates (triangular, oval) from a carefully prepared disc-shaped core; 2) further processing of the plates to obtain the desired tool.
Polished- a tool for polishing products, surfaces of vessels.
Macrolites - large, rough-hewn stone tools.
Knife plates - elongated flint flakes obtained by chipping from a prismatic core. Served as universal blanks for the manufacture of tools and inserts by secondary processing with squeezing retouch; characteristic of the Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic.
Nucleus(lit. core, core) - a specially processed stone from which plates were chipped for making tools; the earliest cores are discoid (oval), then pyramidal (Mousterian era) and prismatic (Upper Paleolithic).
beating - percussion technique for processing stone tools. The oldest in the history of the stone industry.
Pointed - a stone elongated triangular tool made from a flake, attached to a shaft.
Osteological material - bone material of skeletons.
Bumper - a stone used to strike when processing stone tools.
Squeeze retouching - a stone tool processing technique in which small flakes were separated using bone or stone tools.
Push-up - a sharpened bone stick used for chipping stone flakes.
Flake - a fragment knocked off the surface of a stone during processing.
Paleoanthropes - a generalized name for the fossils of ancient people of the Mousterian era.
Petroglyphs - drawings, images on stone slabs, rocks.
Cave art - Paleolithic engravings and paintings, less often - bas-reliefs and single examples of clay modeling in caves of the late Pleistocene.
Knife-shaped plate - a long flake with parallel edges obtained from a specially prepared core. It can be a tool itself or serve as a blank for another tool (for example, a chisel or scraper). Appear at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic.
Retouching - removing small fragments and flakes from the surface of the tool being processed. Three types of retouching are known: 1) impact - the scales are beaten off with a blow; 2) counter-shock - the weapon is placed on an anvil and hit with a hammer; 3) squeezing - when small scales are separated by pressing with a sharp bone stick, a squeezer.
Chopped a universal impact-chopping weapon, processed on both sides (biface). Distributed in the Early Paleolithic.
Scraper - stone tool, most common in the Mousterian era. Could serve as a knife or scraper.
Composite weapons - tools consisting of a base (bone, wood) and inserts - stone plates that were attached in a longitudinal section of the base. This is how composite knives and daggers were made.
Parking - temporary settlement.
Stratigraphy - in archeology, the study of the occurrence of layers, strata of human activity in settlements and other archaeological sites.
Impact pad - the surface on a stone core that has been struck to produce a flake or blade. The site is prepared by removing one or more chips or flakes.
Chopper - a large oblong stone tool made of pebbles, processed with one or two blows on one side.
Chopping - a large stone tool made of pebbles, processed by several blows on both sides. The working edge looked like a broken line.
Topic 2. Neolithic.
1. General features of the Neolithic era. Neolithic revolution.
2. Formation of producing Neolithic cultures.
3. Archaeological cultures of the Neolithic of Eastern Europe.
Literature:
1. Archeology of Russia: Neolithic of Northern Eurasia. M., 1996
2. Stone Age on the territory of the USSR. M., 1970.
3. Neolithic forest belt of Eastern Europe. M., 1997.
4. Krizhevskaya T.D. The beginning of the Neolithic in the steppes of the Northern Black Sea region. L., 1985.
5. Formozov A.A. The most ancient stages of the history of European Russia. M, Nauka, 2003.
6. Formozov A.A. Monuments of primitive art. M., 1980
7. Shnirelman V.A. The emergence of a productive economy. M., 1989.
Guidelines:
The Neolithic era is one of the most important stages in the development of mankind. This era is associated with a number of important innovations in the development of material culture, the emergence of large ethnic groups of ancient people, and most importantly, during the Neolithic era, a productive economy was formed. All this gives reason to pay close attention to this topic.
The first question of the seminar session is devoted to the peculiarities of the development of ancient societies in the Neolithic era. In preparation for this issue, it is necessary to show qualitative changes in the material culture of ancient societies using materials from the Neolithic cultures of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Transcaucasia. Particular attention should be paid to such innovations in material culture as the discovery of ceramics, weaving, and the appearance of polished stone tools. A qualitatively new level of material culture allowed ancient man to make a serious leap in the development of productive forces and move to a producing economy, i.e. Neolithic revolution. When considering this problem, one should take into account the influence of climatic and natural landscape conditions in which Neolithic tribes developed. It is also necessary to determine in which regions the formation of producing Neolithic cultures begins and how this is connected.
The second question is devoted to the characteristics of the producing Neolithic cultures, such as the Dzheitun culture of Central Asia, the linear-band ceramics and Bug-Dniester cultures in Central and Eastern Europe, and the Neolithic monuments of Transcaucasia (Shomu-Tepe, Shulaveri). Within the framework of this issue, it is necessary to characterize settlements, material culture, tools, and data on the presence of a producing economy.
The third question of the seminar session is devoted to the analysis of the cultures of the appropriating Neolithic forest zone of Eastern Europe. When developing this issue, it is necessary to take into account the features of the natural landscape conditions of the forest zone of Eastern Europe in the Neolithic era, and the features of the development of cultural tribes in this region. Using the examples of monuments from the Lyalovo, Narva-Neman, Volga-Kama cultures and the culture of pit-comb ceramics, it is necessary to characterize the material culture, economy, and social structure of the Neolithic tribes of the forest zone of Eastern Europe.
Living conditions of primitive people. The process of anthropogenesis took about 3 million years. During this time, radical changes occurred in nature more than once. There were four glaciations. The glacial and warm eras had their own periods of warming and cooling.
During ice ages in northern Eurasia and North America, a layer of ice up to 2 km thick covered vast territories. The border of the glacier at the time of its greatest distribution during the last glaciation (its beginning dates from 185 to 70 thousand years ago) passed south of Volgograd, Kyiv, Berlin, and London.
The endless tundra stretched south from the glacier. In the summer it was lush here, but it took a long time for the grass to grow and the bushes to turn green.
People populated the periglacial areas quite densely. Animals lived there, which for many millennia became the main object of hunting for humans, since they provided abundant food, as well as skins and bones. These are mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses and cave bears. Herds of wild horses, deer, bison, etc. grazed here.
Glaciation periods became a severe test for primitive people. The need to confront unfavorable conditions contributed to the progressive development of mankind. Hunting for large animals was possible only with the participation of a significant number of people. It is assumed that the hunt was driven: animals were driven either to cliffs or to specially dug holes. However, a person could survive only in a group of his own kind.
Tribal community. It is very difficult to judge social relations during the Paleolithic period. Even the most backward tribes studied by ethnographers (Bushmen, Australian aborigines), according to archaeological periodization, were at the Mesolithic stage.
It is assumed that the first people (Homo habilis, Homo erectus), like modern monkeys, lived in small groups (the term “human herd” is now not used by most researchers). In groups of modern apes, the leader and several males close to him dominate over all other males and females. Some peoples studied by ethnographers who were at the primitive stage also observed a system of dominance of leaders and their associates over the rest of the team. Perhaps it was also the case with the first people.
At the same time, there is another opinion, which is also confirmed by ethnographic research. In the collectives of the majority of backward peoples, relations were recorded that in the scientific literature were called “primitive communism”. It is worth saying that they are characterized by equality of team members, mutual assistance and mutual assistance. Most likely, it was precisely such social relations that allowed people to survive the extreme conditions of the Ice Ages. The study of settlements of the Late Paleolithic, data from ethnography and folkloristics allowed scientists to come to the conclusion that the basis of the social organization of the Cro-Magnons was the clan community (clan) - a group of blood relatives leading its descent from a common ancestor.
Judging by the excavations, the ancient tribal community consisted of 100 - 150 people. All relatives jointly engaged in hunting, gathering, making tools and processing prey. Dwellings, food supplies, animal skins, and tools were considered common property. At the head of the clan were the most respected and experienced people, usually the eldest in age (elders). All the most important issues in the life of the community were decided at a meeting of all its adult members (people's assembly).
The problem of sexual relations is closely related to the problem of the social structure of primitive peoples. Apes have harem families: only the leader and his associates participate in reproduction, using all the females. Scientists suggest that under the conditions of the elimination of the leader's dominance system, sexual relations took the form of promiscuity - every man in the group was considered the husband of every woman. Later appeared exogamy- a ban on marriage within the clan community. A dual-clan group marriage developed, in which members of one clan could only marry members of another clan. This custom, recorded among many peoples by ethnographers, contributed to the biological progress of mankind.
A separate genus could not exist in isolation. Clan communities united into tribes. Initially there were two clans in the tribe, and then there were more and more of them. Over time, restrictions also appeared in group marriage. Members of the clan were divided into classes according to age (marriages were allowed only between classes corresponding to each other). Then a couple marriage developed, which was initially very fragile.
For a long time, the prevailing idea in science was that the clan organization went through two stages in its development - matriarchy And patriarchy. Under matriarchy, kinship was counted along the maternal line, and husbands went to live in their wife’s clan. Under patriarchy, the main unit of society becomes the large patriarchal family. Today, opinions are expressed that these stages were not universal for all primitive peoples, and elements of matriarchy could arise at later stages of the development of primitive tribes.
Achievements of people during the Late Paleolithic period. The Late Paleolithic is archaeologically characterized primarily by the presence of a wide variety of stone tools. The material used was flint, as well as obsidian, jasper and other types of hard but easily split stone. Along with the universal hand ax, specialized tools appeared for different purposes. The skins were processed with a stone scraper, holes were pierced in them with a pierce, a sharp point, cut with a knife, chisel, etc. They made composite tools: a sharp stone was tied to a wooden handle, and the result was a spear or an ax.
The technique of stone processing has changed. By pressing, thin and light plates were broken off from a specially prepared stone - the core (core). The cutting edges of the weapon were sharpened using pressure and light blows (retouching).
A spear thrower was invented - a plank with a stop that allows you to throw a spear at high speed. This was the first mechanical device in human history.
The cold climate led to the development of clothing and improved housing. The skin of the animal was cut into pieces, holes were pierced along the edges with stone needles and sewn together with the sinews of the animals. Caves were widely used as dwellings in Western Europe and a number of other places. It was once believed that primitive people usually lived in caves. These people were called troglodytes (cave people). At the same time, in Eastern Europe, even where there were caves (for example, in the Urals), people did not settle in them. Here they usually dug a round or oval hole, dug upright bones of mammoths or other large animals bent inward along its edges, covered them with skins, branches and covered them with earth. Up to 50 people could live in such a “house”. In the center, several hearths were made of stones. In settlements there were usually 2 - 3 similar dwellings.
The first thing happens gender and age division of labor: men went hunting, women gathered, prepared food, and sewed clothes. The children helped the women.
The transition from teenagers to adults took place during a ritual initiation. In preparation for initiation, adults taught teenagers to use weapons, hunt, and get food. During the ritual itself, they were subjected to hunger, beatings, left alone in the forest, etc. Sometimes there was a symbolic “death” of a teenager and his “rebirth” as an adult. Both boys and girls underwent initiation. After initiation, they became full members of the tribe and could marry.
During the Late Paleolithic period, people settled all the lands of Eurasia available to them. During times of warming, they moved north, and when the glacier advanced, they retreated to the south. The settlement of America began 40 thousand years ago (and maybe even earlier). It is assumed that people got there through the isthmus that connected Chukotka and Alaska, or through the ice during the glacial period. People appeared in Australia. For the Early Paleolithic, all traces of human habitation in all regions of the Earth fit into the framework of general successive archaeological cultures (Olduvai, Acheulian, Mousterian), although there are also local differences. For the Late Paleolithic, the coexistence of various archaeological cultures is recorded. This indicates the emergence of ethnic differences. At the beginning of the Late Paleolithic, three main races of humanity began to emerge.
Primitive religion and art. Primitive people knew a lot about the world. They understood the habits of animals, the properties of various plants and stones, they knew how to predict the weather, and treat wounds and bites of poisonous snakes. Even surgical operations were performed with stone tools: they cut off a damaged arm or leg, opened the skull to remove a tumor.
In many practical knowledge, ancient people were superior to modern man. At the same time, they had no idea about many things. Observations of natural phenomena and reflections on people’s lives led to the emergence of the idea of the existence of invisible forces - perfume And gods, that influence nature and human life. This is how religion was born.
Primitive religion differed significantly from the religion of subsequent times. For primitive people, gods and spirits were not some otherworldly forces that controlled the world; they were not perceived as something different from humans. The gods were embodied in very specific objects: stones, trees, animals. The ancestors of the family were also gods. These ancestors were often also considered to be some kind of animals. People felt their constant connection with the gods. For this reason, they believed that they could influence the gods and spirits: appease them, feed them (sacrifice ritual), and sometimes punish them.
Many religious rites were associated with hunting. With the help of magical actions they tried to make animals easier prey. Much attention was paid to the burial ritual, since members of the clan who were leaving for the afterlife had to be provided with everything necessary for life there.
Primitive art is associated with religion, the problem of its origin is still the subject of scientific discussion. It is assumed that art, like religion, has become one of the ways of understanding the world around us.
Art originated with the Neanderthals (incisions, ornaments). Under the Cro-Magnons, the time of its true heyday came. The most impressive monument of the Paleolithic times is cave painting. Hundreds of large color realistic images of mammoths, bison, deer, horses, and bears were found in a number of caves. Cave drawings date from 30 to 12 thousand years ago. These images were created for witchcraft hunting rituals; on some of them traces of impacts with stone tips were found. Perhaps the caves with drawings were also used during initiation as a kind of school of hunting skills.
No less interesting is the Paleolithic sculpture. These are animal figures made of stone, bone, and wood. Some of them have traces of blows that were inflicted during magical rituals.
Unlike animals, images of people were usually done abstractly. On the walls of the caves, all the people have masks on their faces. Paleolithic Venuses - small (5-15 cm) figurines of women, usually naked, occasionally clothed, also have practically no faces. Many such figurines were found in Western Europe, but most of all in Russia, in the Voronezh region, and also near Lake Baikal. Historians suggest that these are the ancestors of the clan. Such sculptures also expressed ideas of motherhood and fertility.
In addition to fine arts, songs and dances undoubtedly played a big role in people's lives.
Paleolithic sites in Russia. Some archaeologists date the first signs of human presence on the territory of modern Russia to about 1 million years ago. Thus, at the sites of Ulalinka (within the city of Gorno-Altaisk), Dering-Yuryakh near Yakutsk, and Mysovaya in the Southern Urals, primitive tools made from pebbles were discovered, similar to the most ancient products from East Africa. During the Late Paleolithic period, most of modern Russia was already inhabited.
One of the most famous places that speak of the presence of primitive people in our country is the Kapova Cave in Bashkiria in the Southern Urals. More than 40 drawings made in red ocher were found there: mammoths, bison, wild horses, rhinoceroses. The age of the drawings is 15-13 thousand years.
For archaeologists, one of the most interesting was the Kostenko-Borshchevsky district near Voronezh. Here, in a small area, 24 sites and 4 burials were excavated, a huge number of stone and bone tools, figurines, incl. a huge number of Paleolithic Venus.
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In total, traces of five archaeological cultures have been discovered in this area.
One of these cultures, which spread over a large territory, includes the famous Sungir site near Vladimir. In the 60s. XX century Two burials were excavated there, the age of which is 25 - 30 thousand years. In one of the burials lay a man 55-65 years old. It is believed that this was the leader of the tribe. All his clothes and hat were embroidered with hundreds of small beads larger than mammoth beads. His hands were decorated with more than 20 bracelets, also made from tusks. The second grave is even more interesting. A boy of 12-13 years old and a girl of 7-8 years old were lying in it with their heads facing each other. Their clothes were also richly decorated with bone items; in total, 7.5 thousand beads were collected. On the boy's chest lay a flat figurine of a horse, and at his shoulder - a mammoth. It remains a mystery why the children were given such a magnificent burial.
The beginning of the Paleolithic and Stone Ages, respectively, is extremely difficult to accurately establish. The origin of the Paleolithic is determined by the beginning of the use of stone tools by human ancestors or the first hominids. According to various estimates, this happened approximately 2.5-2.6 million years ago. Some researchers increase this figure to 2.7 and even 3 million years.
The Paleolithic is the longest period of the Stone Age and covers almost its entire history. The Paleolithic began at the end and continued throughout. Occupies 99% of human existence. Ended 10 thousand years BC. e. After the Paleolithic came the Mesolithic, then the Neolithic, the final period of the Stone Age is considered to be the Chalcolithic.
The Paleolithic is divided into several periods. The dates of the Paleolithic periods can be layered on top of each other, since in different regions of the planet humanity developed unevenly, somewhere succeeding, and somewhere lagging behind in the development of stone craft and culture as a whole.
Over two and a half million years, human culture has advanced significantly. The evolution of man can amaze the imagination, since from rather primitive hominids they turned into people who began to create tools for labor and hunting, homes, clothing, jewelry, objects of art, learned to make fire, speak, and think abstractly. The improvement of hunting tools allowed man to rise to the very top of the food chain and hunt even the most dangerous and largest animals. The Paleolithic ends with the almost final evolution of modern humans.
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According to various estimates, it began 40-35 thousand years ago and ended 12-10 thousand years ago. The Upper Paleolithic marks the last Ice Age, the coldest period of which occurred 25-17 thousand years ago, after which warming began.
The Late Paleolithic is characterized by the flourishing of the Cro-Magnon culture. Eventually the Cro-Magnons began to migrate from Africa to Europe. Since European lands were occupied by another species for a long time, a conflict occurred between them. The Cro-Magnons, who were distinguished by a higher culture and more modern tools, began to develop territories where they were met by Neanderthals, who were also highly developed. Why absolutely all Neanderthals disappeared by the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic is not known for certain, but archaeological evidence suggests that they were completely destroyed. There are also suggestions that some of the Neanderthals were not destroyed, but assimilated with the Cro-Magnons.
The growth of the culture of working stone, wood, and bone, as well as the extraordinary development of ancient man of this period, is called the “Late Paleolithic Revolution.” Since 50 thousand years ago, products made from stone, bone and horn have become significantly more complex. Tools for labor and hunting became more complex, giving rise to many different cultures. In addition, the development of abstract and creative thinking of the Cro-Magnons of the third Paleolithic period is noted. The first examples of carving on bone, horn, and mammoth and elephant tusks date back to this time. Also during this period, the Cro-Magnons began to make figures from stone, in particular, the famous “Paleolithic Venuses”. The abstract thinking of ancient people, which fundamentally distinguishes the Cro-Magnon man from other varieties of Homo erectus and other animals on Earth, is confirmed by the first cave paintings. With the help of ancient tools and dyes, people began to create works of art that are not vital for a person, but satisfy his emotional side, help open up creative thinking, promote ingenuity, and also tell us about the origin of the first cults and religious ideas.
Cro-Magnons were more advanced and more numerous than Neanderthals. They built more advanced, comfortable and safe settlements. They used pits to store food. Powerful and sophisticated tools made it possible to hunt more efficiently. Sharp knives, powerful axes, arrowheads, throwing darts, harpoons, fishhooks, needles with ivory eyes for sewing clothes - all this was already available to Upper Paleolithic people. Moreover, at this time a person invents the first mechanism in history - a mechanical device for throwing darts - a spear thrower. Also, according to historians, in the late Paleolithic the Cro-Magnon man domesticated the dog. All these advantages made it possible for humans to spread more efficiently throughout Europe and the world. In confrontation with such a strong enemy, the Neanderthals were simply doomed.
The Late Paleolithic is a time of hunter-gatherers. Agriculture and animal husbandry were not yet known.
During the Upper Paleolithic, North and South America were inhabited. The first people came to new lands through the Bering Isthmus, which was later flooded and became the Bering Strait. The ancient people who moved to America founded an independent culture here about 13.5 thousand years ago, which is known to us under the common name - Indians or American Indians.
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