Archaeological sites of the Paleolithic. Archaeological cultures of the late Paleolithic Composite tools

general characteristics

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 decorations made from drilled shells, covered by thick layers of sediment. 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 Laugerie-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.

Natural conditions and human settlement

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.

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.

Tools

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.

Stone tools and techniques for their production

For this era, the most important and characteristic features can be considered the widespread prismatic technology splitting, masterly processing of bone and tusk, a diverse set of tools - about 200 different types.

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

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,
scraper,
pointed,
scrapers,
incisors.

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 before the Iron Age, this tool was used for processing hides and leather.

One of the main operations was carried out with scrapers - 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 a 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. For sewing leather and fur products, small points And punctures And bone needles. 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.

Composite tools

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 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 from dense bone and polished, the eye was either slotted 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.

Living conditions and farming

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.

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 of 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 living areas, with an area of more than a hundred square meters, with a number of hearths located along their long axis. Along the perimeter, such sites were surrounded by 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 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.

Jewelry: 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 (Avdeevo).

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 eaten. 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 tend to belong to either young or old animals, and the volume of hunting kill 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 hunting methods have been reconstructed:

with the help of trapping pits,
corrals or raids,
ambushes at watering holes,
using various traps, etc.

Hunting required clear organization of all team actions. 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 a very important raw material 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.

Spiritual life

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.

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.

Reconstruction of the burial of a boy (12-14 years old) and a girl (9-10 years old) from the burials of Sungir-2 and Sungir-3.

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 paintings 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- 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).

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 thousand BC, figurines of women and animals made of baked clay, obtained as a result of very high-quality firing, were discovered. 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.

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 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.

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 of removing thin flakes from the surface of the product using a bone squeezer; 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 Gravettian 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.

Eastern Europe, Siberia and Asian regions

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.

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. 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.

Studying the diversity of Upper Paleolithic cultures makes it possible to solve questions about the relationships and migrations of ancient populations and possible ways of settling certain territories.

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.

The relationship between the main cultural areas of the Upper Paleolithic in Western and Central Europe

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 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 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.

Major Upper Paleolithic cultures of Eastern Europe

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.

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.

The Upper Paleolithic period of its existence is much shorter and is determined by archaeologists to be between the 40th and 10th millennia BC. e. Until recently, the Upper Paleolithic was divided into more subdivided periods: Aurignac, Solutre and Madeleine, according to which further stages of the development of human society were classified. But although human culture at this time develops in similar ways, certain territorial differences are already emerging. Therefore, it is more correct to abandon the division of the Upper Paleolithic into cultures that has been in existence for a long time, which received their names from monuments found in France, and is now used in Western Europe. For all of humanity, it would be more correct to divide it into the early, middle and late periods of the Upper Paleolithic.

The time of the Upper Paleolithic was primarily marked by the appearance of the modern type of Homo sapiens, that is, Homo sapiens. Having replaced the Neanderthals, he completed the transition from animal to human, which lasted about two million years.

The differences between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens consisted not so much in the disappearance of many features of external structure inherited from animals, but in large changes in higher nervous activity. The man of modern times thought more, and therefore acted much more successfully than his predecessors. The reason that caused the emergence of a new type of person must first of all be sought in the formation of a matriarchal clan community. The Neanderthal, who lived in his own group, not only did not seek rapprochement with his own kind from other groups, but, most likely, avoided it, and in the event of a collision with his own kind, he behaved hostilely. Exogamy arose within the clan, that is, a custom prohibiting marriage relations between members of the clan, which forced a person to build interclan connections.

The Upper Paleolithic era coincided in time with the last stage of glaciation, which pushed humanity (especially in those areas where the cooling was felt especially strongly) to the further development of labor activity. First of all, this development affected the production of tools and the method of processing them. The technique for producing blank plates remains the same. They are obtained by cleaving from a prismatic core. But due to the improvement of retouching, the tools became more advanced, and their efficiency in work increased. For retouching, they began to use bone sticks fixed in a wooden handle. Pressing the compound wringer, the master did not chip off the elastic bone tip, but rather whittled flint flakes from the tool blank one after another. This “sharpening” of the working part of the weapon was carried out not on one side, as was the case in previous eras, but on both sides, which increased the quality of the weapon.

Retouching was used not only to process the working edge of a tool; it was often used to process the entire surface of the product. The retouching technique was complex and required maximum attention from the master. It was enough not to calculate the pressure when pressing, and the flint could be split. This apparently happened often, as evidenced by numerous finds of tools damaged by the master during the manufacturing process. Retouching covered parts of the tool that did not play a significant role in the labor process. Such a passion for retouching indicates the emergence of an aesthetic perception of things in a person. Man sought to make not only a convenient, but also a beautiful tool.

The time of the Upper Paleolithic was marked by the widespread use of, along with stone tools, tools made of bone: spear tips, darts (throwing spears) and harpoons, i.e. tips with jagged edges, were mainly made from this material. The expansion of hunting equipment speaks quite clearly about the intensity of hunting.

To throw a spear, a person invents a spear thrower. The materials for its manufacture were wood and bone. Modern peoples who use spear throwers currently make them primarily from wood. Perhaps in those days they were made more often from wood, but this is how it is poorly preserved, archaeologists more often find bone spear throwers or those made from reindeer antler. The latter include finds at Paleolithic sites in France: Bruniquel, Logerie Bass, Gourdan. The spear thrower allowed the hunter to increase the length of the spear's flight.

The role of hunting especially increased in areas close to the glacier, where there were fewer edible plants for human consumption. In these areas, herds of reindeer and musk ox grazed; a little to the south was the kingdom of the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, and bison; Even further south, herds of wild horses, deer, antelope, etc. grazed. The possibility of rich prey attracted man, and he intensively moved north, exploring more and more new territories.

In areas where the influence of the next cold snap was not felt, the hunter of the Upper Paleolithic time hunted zebra, antelope, and elephant, but gathering, which in the northern regions came to almost nothing, plays a large role in human economic life.

In addition to bone tools intended for hunting and fishing, it is necessary to note the appearance of bone needles with a hole (eye) located in their thickest part, into which a tendon was pulled, acting as a thread. Bone needles were stored in special cases made from the tubular bones of birds. The appearance of needles indicates the existence of tailoring in the Upper Paleolithic era. True, a person could sew together individual parts of skins using simple punctures (bone and flint), but the presence of an eye simplified this process and undoubtedly contributed to more advanced production of various types of clothing. For a long time, scientists had no information about the presence of clothing among Paleolithic people. However, a bone figurine of a woman wearing clothes with a hood on her head was discovered in Buryatia. Today, science has sufficient material to completely reconstruct the various types of clothing, hats, and shoes that make up the complete set of clothing of a person from the Upper Paleolithic era.

Based on climatic conditions, and therefore differences in the economic life of man during the Upper Paleolithic period, it is more appropriate to consider the cultural development of five territorial regions.

The first area is periglacial. This includes the middle zone of Western and Eastern Europe. By the time of the Upper Paleolithic, the vast territory of this region, thanks to climate warming, was quickly covered with forests. At first, spruce and pine trees grew in place of the retreating glacier, then, when the glacier retreated further, they were replaced by oak, hornbeam, linden, beech, i.e., broad-leaved trees.

The most striking monument here is the Sungir site in Siberia. The most striking finds, in particular burials, were discovered here. The bones were stretched along a line from southwest to northeast. The children are aged seven and twelve years. The position of the corpse was unusual. Both children lay on their backs with their heads facing each other. Before this, this situation was known from a number of figurines. It is possible that this is a brother and sister who died of some disease at the same time. The young Sungir people were equipped with an amazing set of weapons in the amount of 16 items, among which were a club carved from mammoth bone (this kind of weapon was discovered for the first time), two spears - 2 m 42 cm and 1 m 66 cm, made from mammoth ivory. In addition to the listed items, there were also two sharp bone stiletto daggers measuring 42 and 28 cm. Bone darts also lay next to the buried people. Among the accompanying objects was the thigh of a cave lion (bones of this animal were also found in other sites at the site; they may have been used as decoration). A lot of jewelry was also made from bone. The graves in which the buried were placed were dug using hoes, also made of bone.

The Sungir people, who lived on the plain, had already created artificial dwellings. A thorough study of a large accumulation of mammoth bones and other animals in one of the areas of the Sungir site and a fire pit located inside the observed accumulation made it possible to restore the appearance of one of the buildings. The dimensions of this building were small; its diameter was no more than 3 m. Its frame was made up of wooden poles and bones of large animals. The frame was covered on top with animal skins. A fire burned in the center of the room, warming people on long autumn and winter evenings. In addition to this kind of dwellings, the Sungir people also had other buildings that looked like a hut made of poles and branches.

The sites were usually located in places where there were many animals. The duration of the existence of these sites suggests that at that time ownership of hunting grounds had already arisen for each group, clan, etc., which made it possible to establish stronger connections between neighboring groups. Such connections were also strengthened through marriage alliances between members of neighboring groups.

For a long time it was believed that Upper Paleolithic man led a wandering lifestyle. The work carried out in the village of Kostenki on the Don (near Voronezh) marked the beginning of research into the Upper Paleolithic settlement. The people who lived in this area were amazing mammoth hunters and serious builders. The area of one of the dwellings excavated here reached almost 600 sq.m. Its length was 35 m, and its width was 15-16 m. Along its central axis there were 9 hearths, the diameter of which reached 1 m. The hearths were located at a distance of up to 2 m from each other. This huge dwelling was the main one for the members of society who lived on the site. Analysis of the ashes and burnt bone remains suggests that the fuel was mainly animal bones.

Not all lesions performed the same functions. So, in one, pieces of brown iron ore and spherosiderite were fired and mineral paint - ocher - was obtained. Apparently, it was widely used, since traces of it were found on the entire surface of the floor. Near other hearths, archaeologists discovered tubular bones of a mammoth stuck into the ground. The characteristic notches and serifs on them suggest that they served as a kind of workbenches for the craftsmen working on them. In addition to this simple dwelling, there were three more. Two of them were dugouts located on the left and right sides of the main room. Both had fires. The frame of their roofs was constructed from mammoth tusks. The third room - a dugout - was located at the far end of the parking lot. The absence of a fireplace and any household items in it makes one think that this is a storage facility for food supplies and the most valuable products. Sculptural images of women and animals were hidden in special storage pits. Here the wife had jewelry made from the fangs of predators. Other pits contained finished tools, such as well-processed spearheads. It is not without interest that the figurines of women were deliberately broken. Archaeologists, comparing the available materials, came to the following conclusion: the settlement of Kostenki was abandoned by the owners shortly before the arrival of the enemies. The invaders, having discovered the figurines, smashed them, thereby destroying, according to their belief, the possibility of procreation of their enemies.

Similar dwellings were later discovered in Dolni Vestovica (Czechoslovakia). The dwelling there, too, was slightly recessed into the ground, oval in plan, its length was 19 m, width 9 m. There were five hearths inside. Among the finds there are many flint tools, there are also tools made of bone, but the bone here was used mainly for jewelry. In Switzerland, similar structures were discovered in Schussenried. Everywhere, bones and skulls of large animals, mainly mammoths, served as building material for dwellings. In Gontsy (Ukraine), 27 skulls and 30 mammoth scapular bones were needed to build a dwelling. The frame of this house was formed by 30 tusks. But not all houses were built only from bones. There are traces of dwellings with a supporting structure of a series of wooden posts. They had a gable roof, and its frame was made using wooden slats.

In Czechoslovakia, at the sites of Tibava and Barka, archaeologists discovered traces of a number of pillars and supports, with the help of which, apparently, the sloping roof was supported. The walls of some dwellings of the noted era were sometimes made of rods and had the appearance of wattle fence. It is possible that their walls were covered with animal skins. The walls were supported by stone slabs, mammoth bones, and sometimes earth rollers.

To the south of the periglacial zone of Europe there was a second zone, which included the southern regions of Europe, North Africa, i.e. Mediterranean. During the Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic era, the so-called Capsian culture, named after the discovered monument of this culture near the city of Gafsa (Kapsa) in Tunisia, was widespread in this area.

Along with hunting, gathering played an important role in the life of people in this zone. The main objects for this type of activity were edible shellfish and plants. The scale of consumption of mollusks, both river and sea, is eloquently indicated by accumulations of shells, often covering an area of several hundred square meters. The thickness of the layer of shells reaches two to three meters, and in some places reaches five. The areas filled with animal bones (the result of hunting) and mollusk shells (the result of gathering) sometimes exceed 10 thousand square meters.

Unlike the population of the periglacial regions, who lived sedentary lives and knew how to build houses, the southerners led a nomadic lifestyle. Climatic conditions did not require them to build houses, and if necessary, they quickly built light shelter huts to shelter them from the sun, wind and rain. The presence of natural shelters such as caves and grottoes made it possible to temporarily use them. Tools were made mainly of stone; bone was almost never used. Only awls of the simplest type were made from it. In stone processing, the population of this second region lagged significantly behind the inhabitants of the periglacial regions. Thus, the carriers of the Capsian culture did not know the method of pressing retouching, did not know how to make points using double-sided processing, and they did not have laurel tips. But they knew how to produce small flint plates - microliths, which served as dart tips. Some scientists believe that microliths also served as arrowheads, which means that the bow as a weapon was known to the Capsians. Other composite tools were also created using microliths. The base of such tools was wooden or bone. Small flint plates that made up the blade were inserted into a specially made slot in the base.

Pieces of ostrich egg shells were used as material for jewelry. They were given a certain shape, a hole was drilled for stringing on a core, and the surface was covered with thin carved lines. There are known examples of such plates with geometric patterns or with realistic images of gazelles, ostriches and other animals. Stringed on sinew, these pieces made necklaces and bracelets. Drilled sea shells and animal vertebrae also served as decoration.

It is difficult to talk about the clothing of the inhabitants of Africa and the Middle East of those times, and it is unlikely that there was any, except for loincloths. We know much more about the clothing of the inhabitants of the southern regions of Europe. In grottoes located in the vicinity of Menton (Italy), archaeologists discovered burials of the Upper Paleolithic era. People were buried in clothes made of leather and decorated with sea shells sewn onto it; they wore bracelets made of the same shells on their hands, and necklaces on their chests. As in the Sungir burial ground, the corpses were sprinkled with red mineral paint. The position of the corpse is not always elongated; it can also be crouched. In the Grimaldi caves (Italy) two skeletons were discovered: one of a man and the other of an old woman. Both skeletons were placed on the site of the extinguished fire in a crouched position, and with them inventory in the form of tools, weapons, and jewelry.

The main features of the Capsian culture are found in the Late Paleolithic layers of settlements in Palestine, Iraq, Asia Minor, Transcaucasia, Crimea and parts of Central Asia. Some sites in Georgia, such as Mgvimevi and Devis Khvrel, are especially close to the Capsian culture. Everywhere in these areas, the basis of the economy was hunting and gathering. The Capsians did not build permanent artificial dwellings.

The third region includes the central and southern parts of the African continent. This area has been poorly studied to this day. One of the features of the development of cultures in this area is their almost complete absence of features similar to those of the neighboring Capsian culture. This is all the more interesting because there are no significant natural barriers between both areas. It should be noted that the cultures of the first region (the periglacial region of Central Europe) and South Africa had common features. These common features were that the people who lived in the south of the African continent had flint laurel-leaf tips processed using squeezing retouching, which are completely absent from the people of the Capsian culture

The most significant and studied culture of the third region is the Bambat culture. It got its name from the Bambat Cave in Southern Rhodesia. In addition to flint, the Bambat culture also used quartz crystals. When struck at a certain angle, this stone can produce flake plates that are not inferior in quality to flint ones. In economic life, hunting here played a greater role than gathering. Analysis of fire pits indicates a person’s prolonged stay in one place.

The fourth region includes the territories of Eastern Siberia, the central part of the Asian continent and China. Archaeological research in the basin of the Angara and Yenisei rivers showed that in the Upper Paleolithic era a person penetrated here who had significant cultural skills and was in many ways close to the culture of the population of the Russian Plain. This can be traced on the basis of archaeological materials obtained from a settlement discovered near the city of Irkutsk (this is the earliest period), as well as from the Buret site on the river. Hangar and the settlement of Malta on the river. Belaya (tributary of the Angara). The population living in these places hunted mammoth, reindeer, bull, and wild horse. Although gathering existed, it provided a small amount of food. Climatic conditions allowed for gathering only at certain times of the year, so it was seasonal. The inhabitants of Bureti, like the hunters of settlements in the periglacial regions of Europe, led a sedentary lifestyle and knew how to build dwellings. In plan, these dwellings looked like a rectangle with slightly rounded corners. The floor of the room is somewhat recessed into the ground. Along the edge of this depression, the femur and shoulder blade bones of the mammoth were buried in a vertical position. For better fastening, their lower part was wedged with smaller bones and limestone slabs. The supports supporting the roof were large mammoth bones and tree trunks. The roof covering was assembled from reindeer antlers. The entrance to the dwelling was a long narrow corridor, lined along the edges with symmetrically located mammoth femurs. The corridor had no ceiling. This entrance device protected the room from the cold. Inside the dwelling there were fireplaces from which accumulations of ash remained. Exactly the same dwellings were discovered at the Malta site.

The tools used by the people who lived in this area during the Upper Paleolithic era are reminiscent of Western European tools from the Mousterian era. here, a disc-shaped core and massive triangular-shaped plates, as well as pointed points of an archaic appearance, were widely used. The processing technique uses impact retouching. Along with this, the population of Central Asia also knew prismatic cores and a method for obtaining long knife-like plates with regular parallel edges from them. They also used miniature scrapers. The pointed tips of spears and darts had a shape similar to European laurel leaves.

In Europe during this period, composite tools had not yet been used, but archaeologists discovered them at the Siberian sites of Afontova Gora and Oshchurkovskaya. Unlike the tribes living in Europe, the tribes of the Asian continent, along with flint, gray and black stone, used quartzite, jasper slate, deposits of which are found on the banks of the Lena, Angara, and Yenisei rivers; in addition, bone was widely used to make tools. Harpoons, piercing awls, and needles for sewing clothes were made from it, and the shape and size of the needles remained almost unchanged. The bone was also used to make jewelry - necklaces, plates with ornaments made of solid holes, figurines of humans, animals, and birds. Examples of the jewelry art of the peoples of Siberia from the Upper Paleolithic era can be found in the objects discovered in the complex of a child’s burial discovered in Malta. This burial testifies to the complexity of the worldview of man of that time, which was expressed in the emergence of a funeral cult. The child's body was buried in a slot-shaped hole dug in the floor of the dwelling. The skeleton was sprinkled with red ocher. Around the neck of the deceased was worn a necklace of approximately 120 large flat beads and seven pendants. All pendants - six middle ones and one central one - are decorated with drills. Pendants in the form of birds, shaped like a flying swan or goose, and one square with rounded corners were also placed in the grave. All jewelry is made from mammoth ivory. In the grave pit there were weapons made of bone and stone. A small tombstone made of stone slabs was built over the grave.

The finds of human figurines made it possible to restore the type of clothing of that time. A.P. Okladnikov, based on archaeological data - figurines like the remarkable female image from the Buret site, made from mammoth ivory, believes that the clothing of that time was a warm suit made of fur, the length of which reached the ankles. On the head they wore a headdress in the form of a fur hood that folded back. The clothes were put on over the head, since there were no marks from longitudinal cuts on it, but for the harsh climate it was very comfortable. This clothing has survived almost unchanged among many peoples living in the Arctic regions to this day.

It should be noted that figurines of a man in clothing dating back to the Upper Paleolithic are very rare. More often there are images of a naked person. Some researchers believe that people of those times obviously stayed naked or semi-naked in their homes. Clothes were used outside the home.

At the end of the Upper Paleolithic era, another warming occurred, which in turn led to changes in flora and fauna. The mammoth and woolly rhinoceros disappear, the deer becomes the main object of hunting, and since it is a nomadic animal, the nature of human settlements also changes. From a sedentary resident, he again becomes a nomad. Permanent housing was replaced by a lightweight, quickly assembled and disassembled round tent. Its frame is made of light wooden poles, covered on the outside with animal skins; in the center there is a fireplace. This type of housing has existed to this day among peoples living in the north and engaged in reindeer herding.

The above examples indicate the uniqueness of the cultural development of people who lived in North and Central Asia during the Upper Paleolithic. To the mentioned settlements you can add settlements on the river. Chusovoy (Ural), in Altai, in Northern Kazakhstan, in the area of the upper reaches of the river. Irtysh, in the basins of the Toly and Orkhon rivers (Mongolia), Zhoutunku sites, located in a large bend of the river. Yellow River (China), etc. In terms of their material, they are close to those listed above.

The fifth area of cultural development in the Upper Paleolithic era is the region of Southeast Asia. The inhabitants of this part of the Asian continent, like their northern brethren, knew chopping tools. The technique for making them is exactly the same as that used by the population of Malta, Bureti, etc. Many stone tools of this era are made of broken pebbles and roughly sharpened. These tools are original prototypes of axes and adzes of later times. Bone artifacts are found, but in small quantities.

The source of life was hunting and gathering. The latter could be even more important, since the tropical forest could supply humans with plant food all year round. This is what forced a person to lead a wandering lifestyle. On the other hand, an impenetrable tropical forest with a mass of strong predators and poisonous snakes limited the area of nomads, which were located mainly on the edges, banks of rivers, lakes and on the seaside, which also had an impact on human economic activity. Although there is evidence of human hunting for elephants, rhinoceros and other smaller animals, his main food was edible plants, shellfish, turtles, and fish.

For housing, in addition to huts - temporary shelters, people also used numerous caves, which they often left, but invariably returned to. It is possible that he used the caves during the tropical rainy season. Such cave settlements include the sites of Bak Son and Hoa Bin. The first is located in the north, and the second in the south of Vietnam.

The inhabitants of the Zhoukoudian grotto (a region of Beijing, China) are close in lifestyle to the people of Southeast Asia. Natural conditions allowed the people of this area to engage in gathering, for which all they needed was a stick sharpened by fire, a stone chopper, and rough stone chips. The lack of development of hunting is evidenced by the minimal number of bones of small animals such as gophers found in settlements. The favorable climatic conditions of this area did not contribute to the development of people's skills in the construction of artificial dwellings, and the availability of food products obtained through gathering delayed the development of hunting.

The Upper Paleolithic era was marked by the penetration of man into the American continent. The issues surrounding the initial settlement of a new continent have long been controversial. Of these, the most controversial questions were when and how this happened. Man entered America through a passage located at the narrowest point of the Bering Strait. The width of the latter in the narrowest test is now just over 80 km. It should be noted that almost in the middle between the Chukotka Peninsula and Alaska there is a chain of islands of the Big and Little Diomedes, St. Lawrence and Ratmanov. It is also important that the depth of the ocean does not exceed 58 m (this is the deepest place, and on average it is 45 m), so scientists believe that when, due to the onset of glaciations on the globe, the level of the World Ocean dropped, between Asia and America formed an isthmus of considerable size, the so-called Beringia.

The oldest finds in the United States date back to about 12 thousand years ago. These are arrowheads that have one common characteristic feature: along both sides of their blades there is a deep longitudinal groove running from the base almost to the tip of the point. One of the first tips of this type was found in 1926 near Folsom in New Mexico.

In 1937, in one of the caves in the Sandia Mountains, archaeologist Frank Hibben found spearheads that were more crudely made, with a notch made only on one side - this tool was more ancient than the Folsom tips.

In the cave, as well as at other sites belonging to this culture, fragments of flint, burnt bones and roughly sharpened pieces of animal bones are found near hearths lined with stone.

Based on geological and stratigraphic data and radiocarbon analysis, it can be assumed that the tribes that created this culture lived about 22-25 thousand years ago. The basis of the economy was hunting, and these tribes led a wandering lifestyle. Mostly, the bearers of the Sandia culture lived in the western part of the United States (individual finds of stone tools are also found in more northern areas). The descendants of hunters gradually mastered the entire territory of North America and created a number of new cultures: Clovis, Stolsom, Elanview, etc. Hunting continued to be the basis of the economy of the bearers of these cultures, although in more southern regions gathering was already a significant help in people's lives. In terms of changes in the shape of hunting tools, it should perhaps only be noted that in the Folsom type tips, the petiole base had two protrusions and a notch, shaped like a fish tail.

Following the herds of animals, man gradually begins to explore new territories: first in North America, and then in South America. The complete development of these vast territories required the effort of almost 600 generations of people, i.e. about 18 thousand years (we take 30 years for the average human life expectancy). If the most ancient human sites in North America date back to 23 thousand years BC. e., then in Patagonia, located almost 13 thousand km to the south, the most ancient monuments of human presence there date back to 5 thousand years BC. e.

Finds of spearheads and darts in the lower layers of the Paglia Atke and Fell caves in Patagonia, made according to the Clovis and Folsom type, indicate that these areas were developed by people from North America, and not by peoples who arrived there from other areas, for example from the islands Indian Ocean, as some ethnographers claim (it is possible that later some representatives of the Pacific Islands moved to America).

Moving along this path, a person crossed areas with different geographical and climatic conditions and, settling in place, adapted to them, in some places engaging in hunting and fishing, in others using the abundance of wild cereals, fruits, vegetables, root crops, moving on to gathering, and later - to agriculture.

Man found the most favorable conditions for existence in the regions of Central America, and especially in the central part of Mexico, where a mild climate, vast spaces occupied by grasses, comfortable pastures in mountain valleys, many lakes and rivers - all contributed to the development of hunting and fishing. The largest representatives of the fauna here were mammoths. The abundance of plants contributed first to the development of gathering, and subsequently to the emergence of agriculture. Man mastered the regions of Central America around the 15th-12th millennium BC. e. In the town of Santa Isabel Istapan, a complete skeleton of a mammoth and a set of hunting weapons in the form of flint spearheads and darts, similar in type to the tools of the Clovis and Folsom cultures, were discovered.

Approximately until the 8th millennium BC. e. On the territory of the American continent, people were engaged in hunting and gathering. At the end of the VII millennium BC. e. Quite dramatic changes in climate are occurring around the globe. In Africa, in the Sahara region, at this time the rivers dry up and vegetation disappears; the same thing happens in the regions of Central America. The climate is becoming drier and warmer. Lush vegetation and lush meadows disappear, and savannas turn into arid steppes and semi-deserts. The lack of moisture-loving vegetation leads to the death of mammoth, mastodon, bison, and wild horse. Some animals go north. Hunting is losing its exceptional importance. Gatherers also experience no less difficulty, but the skills and knowledge acquired during gathering made it possible to begin primitive agriculture on the ocean coast and on the banks of preserved rivers and lakes, and, as an aid to agriculture, to maintain hunting for small animals (since there were no longer large ones) ) and poultry, fishing and collecting river and sea shellfish. It was in the regions of Central America, based on agriculture, that the greatest cultures of the peoples of the American continent later arose.

The tribes that inhabited North America, with the exception of the southern states, were engaged in hunting before the arrival of Europeans there. In the Arctic regions, it was carried out mainly on sea animals: seal, walrus, whale, as well as bear and arctic fox. The main type of hunting weapon was a dart thrown with a spear thrower and a harpoon with a movable tip. Fish were caught using bone hooks. For hunting sea animals and fishing, a boat has long been used, the wooden frame of which was covered with walrus or seal skin. Stone and bone served as materials for the production of tools and weapons. Animals, both sea and land, provided the people of this region with everything necessary for life: fat, meat, bones for the frame of dwellings and skins for covering it and for clothing. The meat was consumed raw, which was probably caused by purely practical considerations - to prevent vitamin deficiency - scurvy.

Tribes lived on the northwestern coast of North America, mainly engaged in fishing, as well as collecting wild berries and fruits. In the forest zone of Canada lived tribes of hunters armed with bows and arrows and spears (all types of weapons and tools - axes, knives, etc. - were made of stone and bone). They hunted mainly deer, elk, bear, and wild boar. In addition to hunting, the population collected wild seeds, fruits, nuts, etc. and led a nomadic lifestyle.

It should be noted that North and South America, from the point of view of archaeology, are still far from being studied, but based on the archaeological data available today, one can judge that the basis of the economy was hunting and fishing, only in some places did it flourish gathering.

Questions for self-control:

What human species appears in the Upper Paleolithic era?
What are the main zones of Upper Paleolithic cultures?
What type of economy and related activities predominated in the Upper Paleolithic?
What are the reasons for the differences in the economic and tool complex in various Upper Paleolithic cultures?
Why did clothing begin to be used everywhere in the Upper Paleolithic era?

Lecture 8 Mesolithic

Climate warming, which caused rapid melting of the glacier, marked the end of the Paleolithic, which lasted hundreds of thousands of years. A new era has begun - the Mesolithic, which was inferior to the previous period in terms of duration of existence, but in terms of the pace of development in economic and other areas of human life, it marked a new, more significant step forward.
The beginning of the Mesolithic is characterized by the almost universal distribution of microliths, bows and arrows. F. Engels in his work “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” notes this event as follows: “a bow, a bowstring and an arrow constitute a very complex weapon, the invention of which requires long-term accumulated experience and more developed mental abilities, therefore, simultaneous acquaintance with many other inventions."

A bow as a hunter's weapon is more effective than a spear with a throwing board; it could be used to hunt any animal. The presence of a bow allowed man to hunt alone. Drive hunting, which required a large group of people, although it continued to be used, gradually lost its role, which was so significant in the Paleolithic era. The invention of the onion and its widespread use was caused by a number of circumstances. Thus, warming and a fairly rapid retreat of the glacier (in the area of the Karelian Isthmus, this speed was approximately 160 m per year) led to another change in the fauna and flora. During the Mesolithic era, there were no longer mammoths or woolly rhinoceros, and the numbers of many game animals had decreased so much that they could be considered extinct. This happened, for example, with the musk ox. The fauna has become impoverished as a result of the disappearance of the largest representatives of the animal world. Much of Europe was covered with dense forests. The remaining animals and those that came from more southern regions were smaller in size, fleet-footed, and cautious. Many species of animals were not gregarious (for example, moose), other animals (deer, roe deer) live in small groups, and when danger approaches, they scatter in all directions. Hunting for them is possible only with the help of a bow, which allows you to achieve the greatest accuracy and speed in shooting. The use of the bow, the beginnings of which can be traced back to the Capsian culture (Upper Paleolithic), not only contributed to the further development and facilitation of hunting, but also made it possible for a person to provide himself and the members of his clan group with the necessary daily amount of meat food, and from the surplus to prepare food supplies for himself in in the form of meat smoked in the smoke of a fire and dried in the sun.

With the help of the bow, man was able to move on to a new type of preservation of meat food, that is, keeping lightly wounded animals in pens, which were killed if the hunt was unsuccessful. Such keeping of animals was convenient and did not require much time and labor; in addition, it was the impetus for a new type of farming - cattle breeding. It will still be a long time before man learns to raise livestock, but the beginnings of cattle breeding were laid in the Mesolithic. At this time, the first pet appears - a dog. In the Upper Paleolithic era, its traces are found only in some areas of China, and in the Mesolithic, bone remains of a dog are found at the sites of many Mesolithic sites. The domestication of the dog apparently occurred both for the purpose of using it for food, as some scientists believe, and for the purpose of obtaining an assistant in hunting (for example, waterfowl).

Simultaneously with the appearance of the first signs of cattle breeding, the Mesolithic time was also marked by signs of the emergence of another no less important form of farming - agriculture, the starting point for which was gathering. It was possible to collect not only edible shellfish, tree fruits, mushrooms, berries, edible root vegetables, but also grains of wild cereals. Grain collection in the Mesolithic era probably reached a large scale, otherwise it is difficult to explain the appearance of special harvesting knives at this time. Such a knife: found at a Mesolithic site in Kabardino-Balkaria (Caucasus). Composite tools were also used to collect cereals, which later served as the prototype of the sickle. The processing of grain is also evidenced by numerous grain grinders discovered in the Nebit-Daga cave (Central Asia). Fishing played no less importance in the life of people of Mesolithic times. Thus, the Mesolithic is characterized by the initial stages of completely new forms of farming.

For a long time, the Mesolithic was not identified by scientists as an independent era. It was believed that the Paleolithic gave way directly to the Neolithic. Only at the end of the 19th century, when the first Mesolithic sites were discovered, was the previously existing gap in the study of human history filled. Currently, this era is most fully studied from the monuments of Europe.

A common feature remains the abundance of small stone microlithic tools found at all Mesolithic sites. Some microliths were used as arrowheads, which had the shape of a triangle and a bay leaf; some arrowheads were made like a handle, i.e. they were close to the classical shape of an arrow. Microliths were also used as inserts, i.e. they were the cutting part of composite tools. The abundance of microliths at all Mesolithic sites indicates their dominance over all other tools used by man of that time. The method of obtaining microlithic tools was to split off plates 1-2 cm in size from the core using a bone squeezer. Their shape is strictly geometric - these are triangles, rhombuses, segments, the latter were used mainly as inserts. Composite tools with inserts are a big step forward in the history of technology development. The experience accumulated over many tens of thousands of years in the processing of stone tools allowed the master to make a fairly large and sharp tool such as a knife, but this tool required very skillful handling, because the slightest careless movement of the maker or the person working with it led to breakage, which was impossible to fix. A different matter is a weapon with microlith inserts. The base of such tools was made of wood and bone. This base could be given any shape. Individual microlithic plates, constituting the working blade of the tool, were inserted into a specially made slotted recess with their pointed part facing outward. Microlithic inserts made of flint or other types of stone during the Mesolithic era have been identified throughout Europe, Central Asia, India, Australia and Africa, where they were found during the Capsian culture.

In addition to microliths, Mesolithic people also used large stone tools - macroliths. These include adzes (tools for working wood) and numerous axes made of both stone and bone. These chopping tools were often secured in special couplings made of bone or horn. An ax of the lyngby type was made from the antlers of deer and elk. Its handle served as the trunk of the horn, and one, rarely two processes served as clinics. The appearance of two new types of military hunting weapons also dates back to the Mesolithic era. Thus, in North Africa, especially in the region of Egypt, as well as in the southern part of India, Mexico and Australia, the boomerang, one of the types of so-called throwing clubs, was used relatively widely, and in Europe and Central Asia to a much lesser extent. The flight range of non-returning boomerangs, depending on the force of the throw and the weight of the gun, reaches 130-180 m. Returning boomerangs are known as a hunting weapon only to Australians.

A boomerang is a curved wooden plate about 1 cm thick. One surface is flat, and the other (the lower one when thrown) is convex. In tropical areas, people also used the so-called blowgun, with the help of which they hunted mainly birds; it was rarely used as a military weapon. The blowgun is a long (1.5 to 3 m) tube made from a reed-type plant. Miniature arrows, most often wooden, but always poisoned with plant poison, are blown from a tube. As ethnographers testify, an experienced hunter can send an arrow 30-40 m in this way. According to some information, some peoples of Western Siberia and the Urals knew this gun. Blowguns were widely used by the Iroquois (North America). Currently, it is used on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo; this weapon is also known on the Malacca Peninsula and in the tropical regions of South America.

The retreating glacier gradually left more and more parts of the land, where various kinds of animals rushed, and after them came man. Thus, the Mesolithic also marked the re-population of new territories by humans. It was possible to reconstruct not only the time of glacier retreat from one or another area, but also the time of human appearance there. Thus, the territory of the Karelian Isthmus was freed from the glacier 12,400 years ago, and after 400 years, traces of human habitation appeared there.

200 years after the glacier left the area of the present city of Hamburg (Germany), when its remains still lay in the ravines, man had already established his camp there near the modern village of Meyendorf. The people who inhabited the lands freed from the glacier were hunting. The main game animals were deer, wild horse, wild bull aurochs and smaller animals - hare, fox, badger. On many rivers, lakes, and swamps left by the glacier, people hunted birds using a bow and arrow and a harpoon, the tips of which were found by archaeologists among the bones of a deer. Hunting for it was so important for the Meyendorf inhabitants that in the visual arts this animal was the only character. Another Mesolithic site, Shtelmoor, was discovered 600 m from the Meyendorf site. Its inhabitants lived a little later - between the 10th and 8th millennia BC. e. By this time, the Hamburg region had transformed from forest-tundra into an area of mixed birch-pine forest, and now the main game animal here, in addition to the remaining reindeer, was the elk, and the fur-bearing animal was the beaver. There were apparently still a lot of reindeer at that time, because up to 1,300 antlers were found at one site. The oldest fragments of a bow and arrow in Europe were found at the Shtelmoor site.

On the territory of modern Poland, the Mesolithic is better traced at the site, which is located on the river. Swidere (20 km southeast of Warsaw). The inhabitants of this settlement were hunting. Thousands of arrows, cutters, and piercings were made from flint, reminiscent in appearance of Paleolithic products, but the technology for their processing was much higher than in the previous era. The arrowheads are symmetrical and resemble a willow leaf in appearance. The Swider culture (the Mesolithic culture of Poland) brought to us in addition to a series of sites, of which the most famous are the sites near the villages of Velishevo, Stavinoch, Wistka Shlyakhetska, and burials of the Mesolithic era. In 1937, K. Yazhdzhevsky near the village. Jani Slavica of the Skierniewice region discovered the burial. Flint tools and other objects, more than 40 in total, made of bone and horn were found near the skeleton. Of greatest interest are stiletto points made from the shoulder blades of a wild aurochs, knife-scrapers made from boar tusks, pendant-decorations made from deer teeth, and a small hoe made from elk antler.

Mesolithic sites in southern and middle Scandinavia and northern England are characterized by the Maglemose culture. The most famous are the sites on the island. Zealand: Kholmogora, Sverdborg, some sites in Denmark and Southern Sweden. Some sites in Estonia are close to this culture, for example, the Kunda site.

The life of the carriers of the Maglemoz culture was based on hunting and fishing. All known human settlements of this culture are located along the banks of rivers and lakes. When hunting with a bow, they caught bison, elk, red deer, brown bear, wild boar, roe deer and other smaller forest animals. Of no less importance was hunting for waterfowl, for which darts and nets were used. The dead bird was most likely retrieved from the water by a dog, whose abilities had already been assessed by man. Fishing was also important. They hit the fish with a harpoon, a three-pronged spear, and, undoubtedly, they also used a bow and arrows. Fishermen of the Mesolithic era knew pins, tops and nets. The tops were woven from willow and willow twigs. The shape and structure of the top have not changed and have survived to this day. Some fragments of it for catching medium and small fish are found at Mesolithic sites in Scandinavia. The nets were woven from willow bark fibers; dried nettle fibers could also be used for the same purpose. The floats were made of bark, and the sinkers were made of stone. A fragment of such a network was discovered in one of the peat bogs near the city of Vyborg.

Waterfowl hunting and fishing created an urgent need for the invention of a means of transportation on water. In Perth (Scotland), in the sediment of one of the lakes, archaeologists found a boat burned out of Scottish spruce. Its stern and bow parts were slightly pointed. On such boats, people had not yet ventured far from the shore and were unlikely to use the boat at sea. In one of the peat bogs on the island. Zealand, oars were discovered in the Mesolithic layer. On the territory of the Baltic States, sites culturally close to Maglemosis sufficiently indicate that fishing and waterfowl hunting significantly prevailed over animal hunting. Thus, at the Kunda site (Estonia), the number of bones of waterfowl sharply exceeds those of land animals. The people of Kunda established a settlement on the island. Boats were used for crossing. The most common find during the study of the settlement was a bone harpoon, which indicates a developed fishing industry.

The art of Maglemose culture is unique. At this time, an ornament appears on some types of tools, which consists of dimples and scratched wavy lines. Images of animals are less common; sculptural images also appear, most often of fish, snakes, frogs, and very rarely of deer and people. Images of humans are also rare and highly stylized. Amber was used for jewelry in the form of oval plates and beads.

The Mesolithic of the southern regions of Europe differs from the northern ones. A significant role in this was played by the fact that the southern regions did not experience such sharp temperature fluctuations as the northern ones. Therefore, the nature of the southern regions has not undergone drastic changes.

The most significant culture of the early Mesolithic era of southern Europe was the Azilian. It got its name from finds in the Mas d'Azil cave in the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains in France. The Azilians, like their predecessors in the Paleolithic, continued to live in caves. The basis of their life was hunting red deer, wild boar, beaver, and ram. a less important role was played by gathering, especially of edible mollusks, among which the forest snail occupied the first place. In the production of stone tools, the Azilians followed the path common to the Mesolithic era, that is, along the path of increasing the assortment of small tools. They were used, but to a lesser extent, macrolithic tools. In the manufacture of bone tools among the Azilians, there is a noticeable shift towards increasing their size, massiveness and roughness in processing technology. This is explained by the following: the strength of the red deer antler is significantly inferior to the antler of the reindeer, which does not have a loose spongy core, and can be processed to any depth, while red deer antler can be processed shallowly, only within the thickness of the outer crust (no more than 4-5 mm). This forced the craftsman to subject the deer antler to only minor processing.

One of the interesting features of the Azilian culture is the obligatory presence of piles of painted pebbles at cave sites. Painting, most often in the form of an ornament, was applied to the surface of the stones with red paint mixed with fat. Pebbles of a grayish or whitish color were chosen for coloring. In addition to the ornamental design, there are figures of people and animals, made in schematic form. The French scientist E. Piette sees signs of ancient writing in Azilian painted pebbles. Domestic scientist S.A. Tokarev, speaking about these pebbles, makes the following assumption: “The analogy of the Azil pebbles is much more likely not with written signs, but with the so-called churingas of modern Australians, stone and wooden sacred tablets, totemic emblems, which are covered with symbolic drawings , in part they are very reminiscent of the drawings on Azilian pebbles. This comparison suggests the presence of totemic beliefs in the Azilian era." The hypothesis put forward by S.A. Tokarev can also be confirmed by the fact that part of the pebbles was deliberately split. The aborigines of Australia, seeking revenge on the enemy, destroy his churinga; something similar was noted when describing the female figurines in Kostenki-1. Archaeologists encountered painted pebbles at Azilian sites in France, in the Rista Cave in Spain, at the Mesolithic sites of Crimean Yalta (plateau of the Crimean Mountains), in Bierseck (Switzerland). In Birzeke, out of 225 pebbles discovered, 120 have preserved signs. Painted pebbles lay in piles (nests), many of the pebbles were broken.

The different forms of burials also indicate that the Azilians have beliefs. Thus, in the Gross Offnet cave in Bavaria, in two pits, archaeologists found 33 skulls, of which 20 were children’s, 9 women’s and 4 men’s. All the skulls were arranged in order: those placed in the center were more ancient than the skulls located on the edge. This indicates burial at different times. Women's and children's skulls were decorated with deer tusks and drilled shells. A similar burial was found in the Zamil-Koba grotto (Crimea), the skull found there was decorated with the teeth of predatory fish. Another burial was found in the Cold Grotto in Abkhazia, where the skulls were thickly sprinkled with red ocher. Group burials in the Mesolithic are found in North Africa and Portugal. Traces of Azilian culture are found in Central Asia and the British Isles.

The Azilian culture was replaced by the Tardenoise culture, named after the site of Fère-en-Tardenois (France), where its traces were first found. These cultures have many common features, so some scientists consider them to be one - Azilian-Tardenoise. But, despite the similarities between them, there are still differences. The first is that the flint products of this culture became smaller in size, in addition, the Tardenoise hunters and fishermen led a more sedentary life than their Azilian predecessors.

The most striking expression of the signs of the Tardenoise culture are found in the Mugem region (a suburb of Lisbon). This area is located on the banks of the river. Temu (Tahoe) 25 km from its confluence with the Atlantic Ocean. The staple food of the inhabitants of this area was edible shellfish, the accumulation of shells of which is unparalleled. The hill formed from shells, known as Cabezo d'Arruda, has a length of 100 m, a width of -60 m, and in places reaches a height of 7 m. It is interesting to note that the shells do not belong to river mollusks, but to sea mollusks. Consequently, people used food resources of the ocean. In addition to collecting sea shellfish, the population of this area was intensively engaged in hunting, as evidenced by the finds of bones of red deer, bull, wild boar, birds, as well as fishing. A significant layer of ash and ash in the hearths of the dwellings suggests a predominantly sedentary lifestyle. built in the form of semi-dugouts. In non-coastal areas, the dwellings of the Tardenoisians had the form of semi-dugouts, having an oval shape in plan. The depth of the semi-dugouts was from 50 to 75 cm. The edges were lined with sandstone slabs.

This type of dwelling was built in the Tardenoise settlement near the village. Ansbach (district: Nuremberg). The tools found in this area are mainly made of stone; very few items made of bone are found.

A comparison of monuments of Tardenoise culture found in England, Portugal, Crimea and other places made it possible to derive the following pattern: if these monuments were located on the ocean or sea coast, then the inhabitants of these places led a seasonal lifestyle. In summer they went to the coastal mountains, and in winter they went down to the sea. The reason for this change of residence, apparently, was that in the summer, when the mountain pastures and forests were covered with lush vegetation, the animals went there, and people followed them. In winter, to escape the cold and possible lack of food, animals descended from the mountains to the coastal strip, heated by warm sea currents.

The Tardenoise burials resemble those of the Upper Paleolithic in appearance. Dead relatives were often buried at the clan's habitat - in a cave, grotto. The corpse was placed in a special recess and covered with red ocher (bloodstone). Such are the burials in the Crimean caves of Fatma-Koba, Murzak-Koba, etc. There are group burials, but not in a common pit, like among the Azilians, but in separate graves, which indicates the appearance of burial grounds, i.e., one place where burial takes place a member of a clan, and possibly a tribe. Necropolises of that time numbered from several dozen to several hundred graves. The bones in the grave pits lie in a crouched or extended position. In some burial grounds there are mainly female and children's burials, in others the overwhelming majority are male. These include the burial ground of Fr. Tevyeka (France). The bones of the buried are crumpled and thickly sprinkled with red ochre. Each bone was placed in a separate burial pit. One of the burials is of particular interest. Archaeologists discovered two deer antlers above the head of the buried man. This is probably the burial of a sorcerer (in the cave of the Three Brothers (Spain) there is an image of a dancing man with a headdress made of deer antlers).

Another type of Mesolithic burial ground was discovered by archaeologists near the village. Vasilyevka, Dnepropetrovsk region. D. A. Avdusin gives the following description of it: “The burials were made without grave pits on the site of a specially dug recess common to the entire burial ground. A small mound was erected over each deceased. The dead were buried with their heads at sunrise. The bones are so twisted that one might think that the dead were tied up. A heavy stone was placed on one of these burials. All this, apparently, was caused by fear of the dead. The flint implements are very poor - a few typically Mesolithic arrows and scrapers, in addition, river shells - perhaps the remains of food given to the dead. There are few female burials in these burial grounds (near the village of Vasilyevka, three burial grounds have been explored; two of them date back to the Neolithic era). Scientists think that the environment of the tribe that left these burial grounds was hostile, and armed clashes were frequent. Arrowheads were found on one of the buried people, which were probably used to kill him.”

The increase in the growth of members of clans and tribes led to the separation from them of groups of people who went to new, less populated areas or areas completely undeveloped by humans. This kind of relocation in Europe and Asia took place in the northern and northeastern regions, and in Africa, on the contrary, - from North to South. For the American continent, the Mesolithic period is the time of human exploration of the territory of North America; the islands of Oceania and Australia were also developed.

Questions for self-control:

What is the progressive role of the bow and arrow?
What did the retreat of the glacier mean for the development of the economy?
Why did it become possible to develop the entire territory of the earth?
Main characteristics of the era.

The Late Magdalenian cultures of Northwestern Europe, transitional from the Magdalenian to the Mesolithic, include the Creswell culture in England and the Remouchamps culture in Belgium. The Creswell culture is named for a series of caves (Creswell Crags) on the border of Derbshire and Nottinghamshire. The layers of the Late Paleolithic time are close to the Late Magdalenian monuments of Germany and the Netherlands (Arensburg and Federmesser cultures). Bone figurines and an image of a horse's head engraved on bone were found. In the Mesolithic layers of the Krezvel localities, microlithic tools were already found.

The Remouchamp culture (named after the Remouchamp grotto near Liege) contains points with an obliquely truncated blade in the form of knives, incisors with a handle and some bone products. All the inventory is close to that of the Arensburg culture. The main occupation of the population was hunting deer and other animals. There are bones decorated with geometric patterns, sometimes in the form of a star with a rectangle or triangle in the center. The ornament is made by drilling dots. Hunting was the main source of food resources for Magdalenian man, since in the harsh climate it was impossible to count on collecting any fruits other than berries. It has been suggested that the Magdalenian people may have domesticated and kept deer and horses as pets, but there is no evidence of this yet.

Major shifts in the development of productive forces during the Upper Paleolithic era should have entailed changes in the organization of society. The primitive human herd was replaced by a maternal clan community. The assumption of the existence of such a form of social organization is based on indirect archaeological evidence, such as the existence of large communal dwellings (similar to the long houses of the Iroquois), numerous finds of female figurines, and on the following logical reasoning: given the low level of human development at that time, the only real basis for strengthening social ties could be ties of consanguinity.

Given the disorder of sexual intercourse, kinship relationships could only be established between the descendants of the same mother. Women were responsible for caring for children, maintaining the fire, and running the household. Therefore, they constituted the most stable part of the teams of that time. The defining feature of a related group was the custom of exogamy, that is, the prohibition of sexual intercourse within the clan. Probably at the same time a dual organization arose - a combination of two exogamous groups into one intermarital association, the embryo of an endogamous tribe.

There is, however, another point of view, according to which the main and comprehensive social organism of primitive society was not the clan, but the community. Paleolithic villages supposedly represent such a community. The community carried out the daily life of people in all its manifestations. This is a production cooperation, and a household, and a religious group. The existence of such a community from the very beginning is associated with the existence of a paired family within the community, while the clan does not consist of families. This point of view is substantiated mainly by ethnographic parallels, and we have almost no archaeological evidence in its favor, except for the finds of dwellings with separate hearths.

G.P. Grigoriev believes that the tribal system arose in Mousterian times, and perhaps even in the Acheulean. The main form of organization of the Mousterians was the “pre-tribe”, which united a number of communities. In the Upper Paleolithic, the place of “pre-tribes” was taken by tribes.

The basis of this concept is the assertion that differences in tool making techniques and shapes reflect tribal divisions.

This statement in itself is controversial, but even if we accepted it, many unresolved questions would remain that would prevent us from recognizing the existence of tribes in such a distant past. As for the Upper Paleolithic cultures, they hardly correspond to tribes. Rather, these are some groups of related tribes, the cultural elements of which became similar as a result of diffusion. The tribes, as far as we know them from ethnographic data, could not occupy such significant territories as those in which monuments of even the smallest of the Upper Paleolithic cultures are distributed.

Concluding the review of the archeology of Europe in the Paleolithic era, it is necessary to make the following remarks.

At the beginning of the development of Stone Age archeology, when Mortilier’s scheme was created (later somewhat supplemented and corrected), scientists considered the archaeological cultures - Chelle, Acheul, Mousterian, Aurignacian, Solutre and Madeleine - as certain stages in the development of technology, directly resulting from one another and marking technical and cultural evolution of humanity. True, even then the idea arose of some kind of contradiction between the logic of the historical process and archaeological facts. In the most ancient period of human history, when one can only assume the existence of separate, scattered, unconnected human groups, they turn out to have similar, almost identical technology. As humanity spreads and contacts develop, more and more local variants of the same culture appear. Most often, this contradiction was explained by the fact that in the initial stages the culture is so primitive that it is impossible to detect any significant differences. However, as archeology developed, more and more new discoveries showed that the Mortilier “cultures” were not universal even for the periglacial zone of Europe. In Western European archeology, more and more different archaeological cultures were introduced into the scientific literature and it became difficult to connect them with each other and consider them in the process of evolution of autochthonous cultures. Then they began to look for a way out in the assumption that these cultures appeared as a result of migrations of population groups from non-European territories. The assumption of migrations could explain, from the point of view of its supporters, the extraordinary leap in cultural development between the Middle and Upper Paleolithic. However, it is not always possible to find a place from which such a group could migrate. It is argued, for example, that Upper Paleolithic technology came to Europe from the east, from areas lying east of the Urals and the Caspian Sea. When asked why we do not know the corresponding source cultures from these areas, supporters of migrations answer: because they have not yet been discovered due to poor knowledge of these areas. This answer is hardly entirely convincing.

Many migration theories, including such a widespread one at one time as the theory about the arrival of carriers of the Aurignacian culture from Western Asia, turned out to be destroyed by new discoveries. But even if the migration of a certain population group is scientifically confirmed, this cannot in any way explain the multiplicity of Upper Paleolithic cultures. Yes, we don’t even know what these cultures ultimately represent. Differences in the shape of tools, observed simultaneously in different territories, may be associated with the traditions of the population groups (tribes?) living there, but may be caused by some local economic, environmental and other conditions. The shape of the tool was determined by its function and the achieved level of stone processing, but also by the material found in the area, the conditions of hunting and production (at the place of long-term or temporary residence), etc. Therefore, to attribute differences in the form of functionally unambiguous tools only to the traditions of this group population is incorrect. Archaeological cultures of the Upper Paleolithic may reflect tribal divisions, but this is not the only possible way to interpret them. Traditionality was characteristic of primitive production, but the absolutization of the idea of traditionality, as well as the idea of the sharp isolation of the tribe, contradicts data on the wide spread of similar cultural phenomena, which could only occur as a result of the adoption of alien traditions by certain groups of the population.

The problems of the origin of cultures are very complex and at the current stage of development of archeology are still often insoluble. Therefore, in characterizing individual European Paleolithic cultures, I tried to speak very carefully about their origin and mutual connections.

It is very difficult to get an idea of the size of the population of Western Europe in the Lower and Middle Paleolithic. It is clear that it was very small. Mousterian sites are rare and indicate that the composition of individual population groups did not exceed 30-40 people. In the Upper Paleolithic there is a gradual increase in population with a large jump at the end of the Magdalenian. The sites of the end of the Madeleine are numerous, and, apparently, the increase in population was associated with new means of obtaining food - fishing, perhaps the invention of onions or methods of storing food - preserving meat by smoking. In one of the few demographic works, the author of which tries to calculate the size of the Paleolithic population in the entire ecumene, he honestly has to admit that there is almost no basis for a scientific discussion of such an issue.

The cultural history of man is usually divided into two large eras: the culture of primitive society and the culture of the era of civilization. The era of primitive society covers most of human history. The most ancient civilizations arose only 5 thousand years ago. The primitive era mainly occurs in stone Age- the period when the main tools were made of stone . Therefore, the cultural history of primitive society is most easily divided into periods based on an analysis of changes in the technology of making stone tools. The Stone Age is divided into:

●Paleolithic (ancient stone) – from 2 million years to 10 thousand years BC. e.

●Mesolithic (Middle Stone) – from 10 thousand to 6 thousand years BC. e.

●Neolithic (new stone) – from 6 thousand to 2 thousand years BC. e.

In the second millennium BC, metals replaced stone and put an end to the Stone Age.

General characteristics of the Stone Age

The first period of the Stone Age is the Paleolithic, within which there are early, middle and late periods.

Early Paleolithic ( until the turn of 100 thousand years BC. BC) is the era of the archanthropes. Material culture developed very slowly. It took more than a million years to move from roughly hewn pebbles to axes with smooth edges on both sides. Approximately 700 thousand years ago, the process of mastering fire began: people support fire obtained naturally (as a result of lightning strikes, fires). The main types of activity are hunting and gathering, the main type of weapon is a club and a spear. Archanthropes master natural shelters (caves), build huts from twigs that cover stone boulders (southern France, 400 thousand years).

Middle Paleolithic– covers the period from 100 thousand to 40 thousand years BC. e. This is the era of the paleoanthropus-Neanderthal. Harsh time. Icing of large parts of Europe, North America and Asia. Many heat-loving animals became extinct. Difficulties stimulated cultural progress. Hunting means and techniques are being improved (round-up hunting, drives). A wide variety of axes are created, and thin plates chipped from the core and processed - scrapers - are also used. With the help of scrapers, people began to make warm clothes from animal skins. Learned how to make fire by drilling. Intentional burials date back to this era. Often the deceased was buried in the form of a sleeping person: arms bent at the elbow, near the face, legs bent. Household items appear in graves. This means that some ideas about life after death have appeared.

Late (Upper) Paleolithic– covers the period from 40 thousand to 10 thousand years BC. e. This is the era of the Cro-Magnon man. Cro-Magnons lived in large groups. Stone processing technology has grown: stone plates are sawed and drilled. Bone tips are widely used. A spear thrower appeared - a board with a hook on which a dart was placed. Many bone needles have been found for sewing clothes. The houses are half-dugouts with a frame made of branches and even animal bones. The norm became the burial of the dead, who were given a supply of food, clothing and tools, which spoke of clear ideas about the afterlife. During the Late Paleolithic period, art and religion- two important forms of social life, closely related to each other.

Mesolithic, Middle Stone Age (10th – 6th millennium BC). In the Mesolithic, bows and arrows, microlithic tools appeared, and the dog was domesticated. The periodization of the Mesolithic is conditional, because in different areas of the world development processes occur at different speeds. Thus, in the Middle East, already from 8 thousand, the transition to agriculture and cattle breeding began, which constitutes the essence of the new stage - the Neolithic.

Neolithic, New Stone Age (6–2 thousand BC). There is a transition from an appropriating economy (gathering, hunting) to a producing economy (farming, cattle breeding). In the Neolithic era, stone tools were polished, drilled, pottery, spinning, and weaving appeared. In the 4th–3rd millennia, the first civilizations emerged in a number of areas of the world.

Primitive art: functions and forms

Art in the original meaning of the word means a high degree of skill in any activity. In the 19th century the term "art" came to be used to refer only to creative activity aimed at creating artistic images, i.e. images that can make a strong aesthetic impression on people. The term “aesthetics” comes from the Greek aisthetikos - “sensual” and is associated with the feeling of beauty, beauty.

Ancient philosophers associated beauty with usefulness and expediency, with good. This is how the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates called beautiful a shield well adapted for protection, a spear adapted for an accurate throw, etc. However, beauty cannot be explained only by adaptability and usefulness. This was understood by Aristotle, who explained beauty and how harmony in device and forms. Aristotle was sure that “nature strives for beauty,” for purposeful harmony.

Every person’s sense of beauty is born from observing nature and its creations: a beautiful landscape, sunrise or sunset, a beautiful flower, etc. These impressions formed the concept of beauty as such a harmonious combination of sounds, colors, shapes, proportions that evoked strong positive emotions in a person. Thus, first man saw beauty in nature, and then sought to create it himself.

About art of primitive society we can judge from the visual arts (sculpture and painting), since almost no traces remain of music and dance, although they existed and played an important role.

For primitive man, the creation of beauty was not the main task. He created vivid images to explore the world around him. And in the future, the tasks of art were never reduced only to creating beauty. Its functions are much wider: art is a way of understanding the world through artistic images.

Among the works of primitive fine art, two images dominate. The first and main one is the image of an animal, mainly a large one, associated with the theme of getting food. The second is the image of a woman-mother, associated with the theme of procreation.

The primacy of the image of a large animal is clear. Hunting large animals and defending against large predators were the most emotionally powerful acts of human activity. And man sought to master these emotions and adapt to them. Therefore, art developed primarily as an element of hunting of magic. Hunters created images for rituals aimed at subjugating the objects of the hunt. The image (model) of the animal was made of clay or stones, and its outline was also drawn on the wall. At first the outline was very general. For example, animals in profile were most often depicted with only two legs. Then the drawing became more and more accurate. Clay models and paintings in the open air could not exist for a long time. Only what was in the caves has reached us.

The most perfect drawings were found in caves in the foothills of the Pyrenees, separating France and Spain. In 40 caves, paintings made with paint or scratched with stone 20–10 thousand years ago were found. The most famous cave in Lascaux (France) is called the prehistoric Sistine Chapel. It contains a hall of giant bulls painted in red, black and yellow ochre. In the axial passage there is a picturesque group of cows and horses painted in red paint. A mysterious composition: a bison wounded by a man with a bird's beak, and a rhinoceros leaving the scene of the tragedy.

A number of caves with drawings from the Upper Paleolithic era were found in Italy, Georgia, Mongolia, and the Urals (Kapovaya Cave). The presence of fundamentally similar forms of art in Europe and Asia shows that the process of development of artistic creativity of mankind was basically the same.

In addition to large rock paintings, people during this period created small sculptures (figures of animals carved from bone, wood, stone), and small drawings scratched on stone and bone. The widespread practice of making animal figurines indicated that people wanted to have their images regardless of practical activities. A small figurine of a deer is not an object for hunting magic. She is a memory and a symbol of the big real world. The man wanted to have this image at hand. This means that it gave him emotional satisfaction and, therefore, had aesthetic significance.

Animal images also predominate in small forms. But in small sculpture there is a lot anthropomorphic images These are predominantly female figurines, emphasizing the forms associated with childbirth and feeding. They also played an obvious applied function: they were associated with demographic magic aimed at preserving and procreating the race. The most famous is a figurine made of soft limestone 6 cm high, found in Austria in the town of Willendorf. She was named the Venus of Willendorf. Characteristically, there is no attempt to convey the woman’s face, since the artist created a generalized image, not an individual one.

decorative arts. Cro-Magnons widely used pendants, beads, and bracelets. Some of them had magical significance. For example, a hunter has a necklace made from the teeth of killed animals. But a woman’s string of white shells was also a decoration, because it emphasized the oval shape of her face, the darkness of her skin, etc. The first jewelry can also be considered the first purely aesthetic works of art.

From the Late Paleolithic there is evidence that man mastered and song and dance art. They are also associated with production magic, with rituals of preparation and completion of the hunt. For example, after a hunt, the main function of song and dance was to throw out excess emotions that arose during the dangerous hunt. It is easy to imagine the following picture: a large animal is killed, the danger has passed, people rejoice, jump around the animal, and scream. Gradually, the screams and jumps begin to coordinate and follow a certain rhythm. The rhythm is fixed by shock and noise effects. Screams acquire a common tonality: low tones for men and high tones for women. People understand that these actions provide emotional release and cultivate them. The development of intonation - the alternation of sounds of different tones - was facilitated by the imitation of the sounds of nature, especially birds and animals. Mastery of rhythm and intonation leads to the emergence of music, singing, and dancing. At Paleolithic sites, hollow bones were found - the first pipes and pipes. Gradually people realized that certain melodies and movements gave the greatest emotional satisfaction. This is how the natural selection of the best samples took place and the idea of the canon of beauty was formed.

To summarize the above, let us draw some conclusions about the essence and functions of primitive art. Art was an element of industrial and demographic magic, and in this regard played an important role as a way of regulating and expressing people's emotions. It also had a decorative function, manifested in a person’s decoration of himself, household items and tools. Gradually, in the process of selecting the best examples, the aesthetic function of art as a way of creating beauty is strengthened.

Paleolithic

Early Paleolithic

About 2.588 million years ago, the Pleistocene began - the longest section of the Quaternary period of the geological history of the Earth, or rather its earliest part - the Gelazian stage. At this time, significant changes occurred both in the Earth's climate and in its biosphere. Another decrease in temperature led to a decrease in the evaporation of water from the ocean surface, as a result of which the forests of East Africa began to be replaced by savannas. Faced with a lack of traditional plant foods (fruits), the ancestors of modern humans began to look for more accessible food sources in the dry savannah.

It is believed that around the same time (2.5-2.6 million)

years ago) are the earliest, crudest and most primitive stone tools currently found, made by the ancestors of modern man. Although more recently, in May 2015, the journal Nature published the results of research and excavations in Lomekwi, where tools made by an as yet unidentified hominid were found, whose age is estimated at 3.3 million.

years. This is how the lower or early paleolithic– the most ancient part of the Paleolithic ( ancient stone age). In other regions of the planet, the production of stone tools (and, accordingly, the onset of the Paleolithic) began later. In western Asia it happened around 1.9 million.

years ago, in the Middle East - about 1.6 million years ago, in Southern Europe - about 1.2 million years ago, in Central Europe - less than a million years ago.

One of the species of australopithecus, Australopithecus garhi, was probably one of the first to make stone tools. His remains are approximately 2.6 million years old.

years were discovered only relatively recently, in 1996. Along with them, the most ancient stone tools were found, as well as animal bones with traces of processing with these tools.

About 2.33 million years ago, Homo habilis (lat. Homo habilis) appeared, possibly descended from Australopithecus gari.

MHC test (grade 10)

Adapting to the savannah climate, he included roots, tubers and animal meat in his diet in addition to traditional fruits. At the same time, the first people were content with the role of scavengers, scraping off the remains of meat from the skeletons of animals killed by predators with stone scrapers, and extracting bone marrow from bones split by stones. It was Habilis who created, developed and spread the Olduvai culture in Africa, which flourished between 2.4 and 1.7 million years ago.

years ago. At the same time as Homo habilis, there was another species - Rudolf man (lat. Homo rudolfensis), however, due to the extremely small number of finds, very little is known about him.

About 1.806 million

years ago, the next - Calabrian - stage of the Pleistocene began, and around the same time two new species of people appeared: the working man (Latin: Homo ergaster) and the upright man (Latin: Homo erectus). The most important change in the morphology of these species was a significant increase in brain size.

Homo erectus soon migrated from Africa and spread widely throughout Europe and Asia, moving from a scavenger role to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle that dominated the rest of the Paleolithic.

Along with erectus, the Olduvai culture also spread (in Europe, before Leakey’s discoveries, it was known as Chelles and Abbeville).

A man working in Africa soon created a more advanced Acheulian culture of stone processing, but it spread to Europe and the Middle East only after hundreds of thousands of years, and did not reach Southeast Asia at all. At the same time, in Europe, in parallel with the Acheulean, another culture arose - the Klektonian.

According to various estimates, it existed in a period of time from 300 to 600 thousand years ago and was named after the city of Clacton-on-Sea in Essex (Great Britain), near which corresponding stone tools were found in 1911. Similar instruments were later found in Kent and Suffolk.

The creator of these instruments was Homo erectus.

Approximately 781 thousand years ago, the Ionian stage of the Pleistocene began. At the beginning of this period, another new species appeared in Europe - Heidelberg man (lat. Homo heidelbergensis). He continued to lead a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and used stone tools belonging to the Acheulean culture, but somewhat more advanced.

Some time later - according to various estimates, from 600 to 350 thousand.

years ago - the first people appeared, with the features of a Neanderthal or proto-anderthal.

The first attempts by man to use fire date back to the Early Paleolithic. However, fairly reliable evidence of fire control dates back to the very end of this period - a time about 400 thousand years ago.

Middle Paleolithic

The Middle Paleolithic replaced the Early Paleolithic about 300 thousand years ago and lasted until about 30 thousand.

years ago (in different regions the time boundaries of the period may differ significantly). During this time, significant changes occurred in all spheres of life of primitive humanity, coinciding with the emergence of new species of people.

From the protoanderthals that arose at the end of the Early Paleolithic to the second half of the Middle Paleolithic (approximately 100-130 thousand)

years ago) the classic Neanderthal (lat. Homo neanderthalensis) was formed.

Neanderthals, who lived in small related groups, were able to perfectly adapt to the cold climate during the last ice age and populated large areas of Europe and Asia that were not covered with ice. Survival in harsh climates was made possible by a number of changes in the lives of these ancient people. They created and developed the Mousterian culture, which used Levallois techniques for stone processing and was the most progressive throughout most of the Middle Paleolithic.

The improvement of hunting weapons (spears with stone tips) and a high level of interaction with their fellow tribesmen allowed Neanderthals to successfully hunt the largest land mammals (mammoths, bison, etc.), whose meat formed the basis of their diet.

The invention of the harpoon made it possible to successfully catch fish, which became an important source of food in coastal areas. To protect themselves from the cold and predators, Neanderthals used shelter in caves and fire, and they also cooked food on fire.

To preserve meat for future use, they began to smoke and dry it. An exchange with other groups of valuable raw materials (ochre, rare high-quality stone for making tools, etc.) that were unavailable in the area in which one or another group lived was developed.

Archaeological evidence and comparative ethnography studies indicate that Middle Paleolithic people lived in egalitarian (egalitarian) societies.

Equal distribution of food resources avoided starvation and increased the community's chances of survival. Members of the group took care of injured, sick and old fellow tribesmen, as evidenced by remains with traces of healed injuries and at a considerable age (of course, by Paleolithic standards - about 50 years).

Neanderthals often buried their dead, leading some scientists to conclude that they developed religious beliefs and concepts, such as belief in life after death. This can be evidenced, among other things, by the orientation of the graves, the characteristic poses of those who died in them, and the burial of utensils with them. However, other scientists believe that the burials were carried out for rational reasons. The development of thinking was manifested in the appearance of the first examples of art: rock paintings, decorative items made of stone, bone, etc.

About 195 thousand

years ago, anatomically modern Homo sapiens appeared in Africa. According to the currently dominant hypothesis of the African origin of man, after several tens of millennia, anatomically modern people began to gradually spread beyond Africa.

There is some evidence that about 125 thousand years ago, having crossed the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, they appeared on the Arabian Peninsula (the territory of modern UAE), a little later - about 106 thousand.

years ago - on the territory of modern Oman, and about 75 thousand years ago - possibly on the territory of modern India. Although no human remains have been found in those places dating back to this time, the obvious similarities between stone tools found there and in Africa suggest that they were created by modern man.

Another group of people, passing through the Nile Valley, reached the territory of modern Israel about 100-120 thousand years ago. The settlers moving south and east gradually populated southeast Asia, and then, taking advantage of the reduced sea level due to glaciation, reached Australia and New Guinea about 50 thousand years ago, and a little later, about 30 thousand years ago.

years ago - and numerous islands east of Australia.

The first anatomically modern humans (Cro-Magnons) entered Europe through the Arabian Peninsula about 60 thousand years ago. About 43 thousand years ago, large-scale colonization of Europe began, during which Cro-Magnons actively competed with Neanderthals. In terms of physical strength and adaptability to the climate of Europe during the glaciation period, the Cro-Magnons were inferior to the Neanderthals, but were ahead of them in technological development.

And after 13-15 thousand years, by the end of the Middle Paleolithic, the Neanderthals were completely forced out of their habitat and became extinct.

Along with the Mousterian culture itself, in the Middle Paleolithic era its local variants also existed in some regions. Very interesting in this regard is the Aterian culture in Africa, which was discovered at the beginning of the 20th century near the city of Bir el-Ather in eastern Algeria, after which it was named.

Initially, it was believed that it first appeared about 40 thousand years ago, then this boundary was pushed back to 90-110 thousand years. In 2010, the Ministry of Culture of Morocco published a press release in which it was reported that objects of Aterian culture dating back up to 175 thousand years had been discovered in the prehistoric caves of Ifri n'Amman.

years. In addition to stone tools, drilled mollusk shells were also found at Aterian sites, presumably serving as decorations, which indicates the development of aesthetic feelings in humans.

In Europe, there were such early and transitional varieties of Mousterian as the Teylac and Micoq industries. In the Middle East, the Emirian culture developed from Mousterian.

During the same period, there were also independent cultures in Africa, formed from the earlier Acheulean, such as Sangoi and Stilbeian. Very interesting is the Howiesons-Port culture, which arose (possibly from the Stilbeian) in South Africa around 64.8 thousand years ago.

years ago. In terms of the level of production of stone tools, it corresponds rather to the cultures of the beginning of the Late Paleolithic, which appeared 25 thousand years later. We can say that in terms of its level it was significantly ahead of its time.

However, having existed for just over 5 thousand years, it disappeared approximately 59.5 thousand years ago, and tools from more primitive cultures reappeared in the region of its distribution.

Late Paleolithic

The Late Paleolithic - the third and final stage of the Paleolithic - began around 40-50 thousand years ago.

years ago and ended about 10-12 thousand years ago. It was during this period that modern man became first the dominant and then the only representative of his own species. The changes in the life of mankind during this period are so significant that they are called the Late Paleolithic revolution.

During the Late Paleolithic, significant climate changes occurred in areas inhabited by humans.

Since the vast majority of the period occurred during the last ice age, the overall climate of Eurasia varied from cold to temperate. Along with climate changes, the area of the ice sheet changed, and, accordingly, the area of human distribution. Moreover, if in the northern regions the territory suitable for habitation decreased, then in the more southern regions it increased due to a significant decrease in the level of the World Ocean, the waters of which were concentrated in glaciers.

So, during the maximum of the Ice Age, which occurred 19-26.5 thousand years ago, sea level fell by about 100-125 m. Therefore, many archaeological evidence of human life who lived on the coast in those days is now hidden by the waters of the seas and is located at a considerable distance from the modern coastline.

On the other hand, glaciation and low sea levels allowed man to move across the Bering Isthmus that existed at that time to North America.

Since the beginning of the Late Paleolithic, the variety of artifacts left by people has increased significantly. Manufactured instruments are becoming more specialized, and their manufacturing technologies are becoming more complex.

Important achievements are the invention of various types of tools and weapons. In particular, about 30 thousand years ago a spear thrower and a boomerang were invented, 25-30 thousand years ago - a bow and arrow, 22-29 thousand years ago - a fishing net. Also at this time, a sewing needle with an eye, a fishing hook, a rope, an oil lamp, etc. were invented. One of the most important achievements of the Late Paleolithic can be called the taming and domestication of the dog, which, according to various estimates, occurred 15-35 thousand years ago.

years ago (and possibly earlier). A dog has much better developed hearing and sense of smell than a human, which makes it an indispensable assistant in protecting against predators and hunting.

More advanced tools and weapons, methods of hunting, building housing and making clothing allowed people to significantly increase their numbers and populate previously undeveloped territories. The earliest evidence of organized human settlements dates back to the Late Paleolithic.

Some were used year-round, although more often people moved from one settlement to another depending on the season, following food sources.

Instead of a single dominant culture, various regional cultures with numerous local varieties arise in different places, existing partly simultaneously and partly replacing each other. In Europe, these are the Chatelperonian, Seletian, Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solutrean, Badegulian and Magdalenian cultures.

In Asia and the Middle East - Baradostian, Zarzian and Kebarian.

In addition, during this period the flourishing of fine and decorative arts began: Late Paleolithic man left many rock paintings and petroglyphs, as well as artistic products made of ceramics, bone and horn.

One of the ubiquitous varieties is female figurines, the so-called Paleolithic Venus.

MIDDLE PALEOLITHIC: material culture of people. Main parking areas.

The Middle Paleolithic, or Middle Old Stone Age, is an era that lasted from 150,000 to 30,000 years ago.

Upper Paleolithic cultures

More precise dating is difficult using existing methods. The Middle Paleolithic of Europe is called the Mousterian era after a famous archaeological site in France. The Middle Paleolithic has been well studied.

It is characterized by widespread human settlement, as a result of which paleoanthropus (Middle Paleolithic man) settled throughout almost the entire glacier-free territory of Europe. The number of archaeological sites has increased significantly. The territory in Europe is populated up to the Volga.

Mousterian sites appear in the Desna basin, the upper reaches of the Oka, and the Middle Volga region. In Central and Eastern Europe there are 70 times more Middle Paleolithic sites than Early Paleolithic sites. At the same time, local groups and cultures emerge, which becomes the basis for the birth of new races and peoples.

Tools The production of stone tools has improved. The stone industry of that time is called "Levallois". It is characterized by the chipping of flakes and blades from a specially prepared disc-shaped “core”. They are distinguished by their durability.

Double-sided tools in some regions were also used in the Middle Paleolithic, but they changed significantly. Hand axes are reduced in size and are often made from flakes.

Leaf-like points and points of various types appear, which were used in complex tools and weapons, such as throwing spears. A typical Mousterian tool - a scraper - has multi-bladed forms. Mousterian tools are multifunctional: they were used for processing wood and hides, for planing, cutting and even drilling. It is believed that European Mousterian developed in two main zones - in Western Europe and the Caucasus - and from there spread throughout Europe.

A direct connection between the Middle and Early Paleolithic has been established in rare cases. Archaeological cultures are divided into early Mousterian (existed in the Riess-Würm period) and late Mousterian (Würm I and Würm II; absolute period - 75/70-40/35 thousand BC).

years ago). Archaeological sites Mousterian sites are quite clearly divided into base camps (the remains of which are often found in large and well-closed caves, where thick cultural layers with a fairly diverse fauna were formed), and temporary hunting camps (poor industry).

There are also workshops for the extraction and primary processing of stone. Base camps and temporary hunting camps were located both in caves and in the open air. Mousterian flint mining sites were found in the canton of Bern (Switzerland) in the form of vertical pits 60 cm deep, dug with horn tools. The primary processing of flint took place here. In Balatenlovas (Hungary) there were mines for the extraction of dyes. In southwestern France, Mousterian sites were found under rock overhangs and in small caves, which rarely exceed 20-25 m in width and depth.

Caves in Combes Grenada and Le Peyrard (Southern France) were deepened. Dwellings made of mammoth bones with the remains of open-air fire pits in the middle were found at the site of Molodova I on the Dniester. Until the end of Würm I, large dwellings with several fire pits were built, found in France (Le Peyrard, Vaux-de-l'Obezier, Eskicho-Grano).

Remains of ten small dwellings found in the lower reaches of the Durand River (France) Archaeological cultures F. Borda's research revealed different cultures that were not tied to territory. At the same time, different cultures could coexist in the same area. The paths of development are determined by the limitations of the raw materials used, the level of technological development, and a certain set of tools.

There are Levallois, jagged, typical Mousterian, Charente, Pontic and other development paths. Bord's conclusions about the existence of “Mousterian cultural communities” were criticized by L. Binford. Settlement increased, which was supposed to contribute to the consolidation of human groups that lived sedentary.

High level of tribal social relations. For example, a person who lost an arm lived for a long time after losing his ability to work; the team could give him such an opportunity.

Archaeological periodization of history. The oldest period of human history (prehistory) - from the appearance of the first people to the emergence of the first states - was called the primitive communal system, or primitive society.

At this time, there was a change not only in the physical type of a person, but also in tools, housing, forms of organization of groups, family, worldview, etc.

Taking these components into account, scientists have put forward a number of systems for the periodization of primitive history. The most developed is archaeological periodization, which is based on a comparison of human-made tools, their materials, forms of dwellings, burials, etc.

According to this principle, the history of human civilization is divided into centuries - stone, bronze and iron. In the Stone Age, which is usually identified with the primitive communal system, three eras are distinguished: Paleolithic (Greek - ancient stone) - up to 12 thousand.

years ago, Mesolithic (middle stone) - up to 9 thousand years ago, Neolithic (new stone) - up to 6 thousand years ago. Epochs are divided into periods - early (lower), middle and late (upper), as well as into cultures characterized by a uniform complex of artifacts. The culture is named according to the place of its modern location (“Chelles” - near the city of Chelles in Northern France, “Kostenki” - from the name of a village in Ukraine) or according to other characteristics, for example: “culture of battle axes”, “culture of log burials”, etc. The creator of Lower Paleolithic cultures was a man of the Pithecanthropus or Sinanthropus type, the Middle Paleolithic was a Neanderthal, and the Upper Paleolithic was a Cro-Magnon.

This definition is based on archaeological research in Western Europe and cannot be fully extended to other regions. On the territory of the former USSR, about 70 sites of the Lower and Middle Paleolithic and about 300 sites of the Upper Paleolithic have been studied - from the Prut River in the west to Chukotka in the east. During the Paleolithic period, people initially made rough hand axes from flint, which were standardized tools.

Then the production of specialized tools begins - these are knives, piercings, scrapers, composite tools, such as a stone axe.

The Mesolithic is dominated by microliths - tools made of thin stone plates, which were inserted into a bone or wooden frame. It was then that the bow and arrows were invented. The Neolithic is characterized by the production of polished tools from soft stones - jade, slate, slate. The technique of sawing and drilling holes in stone is mastered. The Stone Age is replaced by a short period of the Eneolithic, i.e. the existence of cultures with copper-stone implements. The Bronze Age (Latin – Chalcolithic; Greek – Chalcolithic) began in Europe in the 3rd millennium.

BC. At this time, in many regions of the planet, the first states emerged, civilizations developed - Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Mediterranean (Early Minoan, Early Helladic), Mexican and Peruvian in America. On the Lower Don, settlements of this time were studied in Kobyakovo, Gnilovskaya, Safyanovo, on the shores of the Manych lakes. The first iron products appeared on the territory of Russia in the 10th–7th centuries.

BC – among the tribes that lived in the North Caucasus (Scythians, Cimmerians), in the Volga region (Dyakovo culture), Siberia and other regions. Note that frequent and massive migrations of various peoples from the east, passing through the territory of Central Russia and the Don steppes, destroyed the settlements of the sedentary population, destroyed entire cultures that could, under favorable conditions, develop into civilizations and states. Another periodization system based on a complex characteristic material and spiritual cultures, proposed in the 70s of the XIX century.

L. Morgan. In this case, the scientist was based on a comparison of ancient cultures with modern cultures of the American Indians. According to this system, primitive society is divided into three periods: savagery, barbarism and civilization. The period of savagery is the time of the early tribal system (Paleolithic and Mesolithic), it ends with the invention of the bow and arrow. During the period of barbarism, ceramic products appeared, agriculture and animal husbandry appeared.

Civilization is characterized by the emergence of bronze metallurgy, writing and states. In the 40s of the 20th century. Soviet scientists P.P. Efimenko, M.O. Kosven, A.I. Pershits et al. proposed systems for the periodization of primitive society, the criteria of which were the evolution of forms of ownership, the degree of division of labor, family relationships, etc.

In a generalized form, such periodization can be represented as follows: the era of the primitive herd; the era of the tribal system; the era of the decomposition of the communal-tribal system (the emergence of cattle breeding, plow farming and metal processing, the emergence of elements of exploitation and private property). All of these periodization systems are imperfect in their own way.

There are many examples when stone tools of Paleolithic or Mesolithic form were used by the peoples of the Far East in the 16th-17th centuries, while they had a tribal society and developed forms of religion and family.

Therefore, the optimal periodization system should take into account the largest number of indicators of social development.

LATE PALEOLITHIC: art and religious ideas. In the Late Paleolithic, major shifts occurred in the development of productive forces and human society as a whole. The most striking expression of the maturity of human societies in the Late Paleolithic is the emergence of art and the composition of all the basic elements of primitive religion.

Cave paintings, sculptural images of people and animals, engravings on bones, and various decorations appeared; deliberate burials of people with tools, weapons and jewelry. Most of the Upper Paleolithic monuments are definitely of a religious nature. Describing and systematizing them requires time, which we do not have, but we must not forget that, according to the correct remark of the modern American philosopher Huston Smith, “Religion is not primarily a collection of facts, but a collection of meanings.

One can endlessly enumerate gods, customs and beliefs, but if this activity does not give us the opportunity to see how with their help people overcame loneliness, grief and death, then no matter how impeccably accurate this enumeration is made, it has not the slightest relation to religion "

Let's try to see behind the facts of the Upper Paleolithic finds their significance in the spiritual quest of the Cro-Magnon man. The first ordered forms of social organization arise - the clan and the clan community. The main features of primitive society are formed: consistent collectivism in production and consumption, common property and equal distribution in groups. 35 - 12 thousand.

years ago - the most severe phase of the last Würm glaciation, when modern people settled throughout the Earth. After the appearance of the first modern people in Europe (the Cro-Magnons), there was a relatively rapid growth of their cultures, the most famous of which are the Chatelperonian, Aurignacian, Solutrean, Gravettian and Magdalenian archaeological cultures. North and South America were colonized by humans through the ancient Bering Isthmus, which was later flooded by rising sea levels and became the Bering Strait.

The ancient people of America, the Paleo-Indians most likely formed into an independent culture about 13.5 thousand years ago. Overall, the planet became dominated by hunter-gatherer societies that used different types of stone tools depending on the region. Numerous changes in human lifestyle are associated with climate changes of this era, which is characterized by the beginning of a new ice age.

The first examples of Paleolithic art were found in caves in France in the 40s of the 19th century, when many, under the influence of biblical views on the past of man, did not believe in the very existence of Stone Age people - contemporaries of the mammoth.

In 1864, in the La Madeleine cave (France), an image of a mammoth on a bone plate was discovered, which showed that people of that distant time not only lived with the mammoth, but also reproduced this animal in their drawings.

11 years later, in 1875, the cave paintings of Altamira (Spain) that amazed researchers were unexpectedly discovered, followed by many others. In the Upper Paleolithic, as we see, hunting techniques became more complex. House-building is emerging, a new way of life is taking shape. As the clan system matures, the primitive community becomes stronger and more complex in its structure. Thinking and speech develop. A person’s mental horizons expand immeasurably and his spiritual world is enriched.

Along with these general achievements in the development of culture, the specifically important circumstance that Upper Paleolithic man now began to widely use the bright colors of natural mineral paints was of great importance for the emergence and further growth of art. He also mastered new methods of processing soft stone and bone, which opened up previously unknown possibilities for him to convey phenomena of the surrounding reality in plastic form - in sculpture and carving.

Without these preconditions, without these technical achievements, born of direct labor practice in the manufacture of tools, neither painting nor the artistic processing of bones, which mainly represent the Paleolithic art known to us, could have arisen. The most remarkable and most important thing in the history of primitive art lies in that from its first steps it followed mainly the path of truthful transmission of reality. The art of the Upper Paleolithic, taken in its best examples, is distinguished by amazing fidelity to nature and accuracy in conveying vital, most significant features.

Already in the early days of the Upper Paleolithic, in the Aurignacian monuments of Europe, examples of truthful drawing and sculpture, as well as cave paintings identical in spirit, are found. Their appearance, of course, was preceded by a certain preparatory period. Paleolithic art had a huge positive significance in the history of ancient mankind. By consolidating his working life experience in living images of art, primitive man deepened and expanded his ideas about reality and gained a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of it, and at the same time enriched his spiritual world.

The emergence of art, which meant a huge step forward in human cognitive activity, at the same time greatly contributed to the strengthening of social ties.

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STONE AGE ART

its first small forms were found by E. Larte during the excavation of a cave in the 60s of the 19th century, shortly after the recognition of the discoveries of Boucher de Perth (see prehistoric art). At the turn of the Mesolithic, animalism (depictions of animals) dried up, being replaced mostly by schematic and ornamental works.

Only in small regions - the Spanish Levant, Kobystan in Azerbaijan, Zarautsay in Central Asia and Neolithic rock paintings (petroglyphs of Karelia, rock paintings of the Urals) did the monumental-story tradition of the Paleolithic continue.

For a long time, caves with Paleolithic paintings were found only in Spain, France and Italy.

In 1959, zoologist A.V.

Paleolithic culture

Ryumin discovered Paleolithic drawings in the Kapova Cave in the Urals. The drawings were located mainly in the depths of the cave on the second, hard-to-reach tier.

Initially, 11 drawings were discovered: 7 mammoths, 2 horses, 2 rhinoceroses.

All of them were made with ocher - a mineral paint that was ingrained into the rock so that when a piece of the stone in the drawing broke off, it turned out that it was completely saturated with paint.

In some places the drawings were poorly differentiated, so it was difficult to make out who they depicted. Some squares, cubes, and triangles were visible here. Some images resembled a hut, others - a vessel, etc.

Archaeologists had to work hard to “read” these drawings.

There has been much debate about what time they belong to. A convincing argument in favor of their antiquity is their very content. After all, the animals depicted on the walls of the cave became extinct long ago. Carbon dating has shown that the earliest examples of cave painting known today number over 30 thousand.

years, the latest - approx. 12 thousand years.

In the Late Paleolithic, sculptural depictions of naked (less often clothed) women became widespread.

The sizes of the figurines are small: only 5 - 10 cm and, as a rule, no more than 12 - 15 cm in height. They are carved from soft stone, limestone or marl, less often from soapstone or ivory. Such figurines - they are called Paleolithic Venus - were found in France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, but especially many of them were found in Russia.

It is generally accepted that figurines of naked women depict the ancestral goddess, since they emphatically express the idea of motherhood and fertility. Numerous figurines represent mature, full-breasted women with large bellies (probably pregnant).

Among the female figurines there are also clothed figures: only the face is naked, everything else is covered in a kind of fur “overall.” Sewn with the wool facing out, it fits tightly to the body from head to toe. The costume of an Old Stone Age man is especially clearly visible on the figurine found in 1963.

in Bureti.

The fur of the clothing is marked by semicircular pits and notches arranged in a certain rhythmic order. These pits are not present only on the face.

The fur is sharply separated from the convex face by deep narrow grooves that form a roll - a thick fluffy border of the hood. The wide and flat hood points towards the top.

Very similar clothes are still worn by Arctic sea game hunters and tundra reindeer herders. This is not surprising: 25 thousand years ago there was also tundra on the shores of Lake Baikal.

Cold, piercing winter winds forced Paleolithic people, like modern inhabitants of the Arctic, to wrap themselves in fur clothing.

Very warm, such clothes at the same time do not restrict movement and allow you to move very quickly.

Interesting works of Paleolithic art found at the Mezin Paleolithic site in Ukraine. Bracelets, all kinds of figurines and figures carved from mammoth tusk are covered with geometric patterns. Along with stone and bone tools, eyed needles, jewelry, remains of dwellings and other finds, bone items with a metrical pattern were found in Mezin.

This design consists mainly of many zigzag lines. In recent years, such a strange zigzag pattern has been found at other Paleolithic sites in V.

Central Europe. What does this “abstract” pattern mean and how did it come about? The geometric style really doesn’t fit in with the brilliantly realistic drawings of cave art. Where did “abstract art” come from? And how abstract is this ornament?

Having studied the structures of sections of mammoth tusks using magnifying instruments, the researchers noticed that they also consist of zigzag patterns, very similar to the zigzag ornamental motifs of Mezin products. Thus, the basis of the Mezin geometric ornament was a pattern drawn by nature itself.

But ancient artists did not only copy nature. They introduced new combinations and elements into the original ornament, overcoming the dead monotony of the design.

During the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras, art continued to develop. Interesting are the monuments of ancient art of Central Asia and the Black Sea region, the origins of which lie in the Near and Middle East. The favorable combination of natural conditions of the Near and Middle East allowed man to move from hunting and gathering to agriculture in the Mesolithic.

Both architecture and art developed rapidly here (see prehistoric art).