35,000 years ago Europe looked extremely different
how it does today. Virtually all of northern Europe was covered in glaciers, huge beasts roamed
the land from mammoths with four meter tusks, to the shaggiest of shaggy rhinos, and prides
of cave-dwelling lions that stalked them both, and as i'm sure you can guess it was bloody
cold too. About three to four thousand years prior to this, colossal pieces of ice had broken
away from the arctic. Known as a heinrich event, this dramatically cooled the climate.
Forests shrank, step and tundra expanded. Perhaps connected to this, the Neanderthals who
had lived in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years were by this point no more. They had been
replaced or entirely assimilated into groups of homo sapiens who had arrived in the continent
about 10,000 years earlier. It's these early groups of humans that i want to talk about today,
these pioneers that spread across the landscape. We know them as the Aurignation culture or
proto-Aurignacian culture after the Aurignac cave in France where they were first discovered. Mon
Dieu! Sacre blue! Forgive the French vibes today. What can archaeology tell us about the lives
of these people who lived in a landscape so unfamiliar to us who led a life so different to
ours? i mean a Europe with no British tourists. Must be heaven, so peaceful! Before we get too deep into the weeds, it's
important to note that this Aurignacian culture was almost certainly not the
very first arrival of homo sapiens into the continent. At Apadema cave in modern-day
Greece, a possible homo sapien cranium was found and dates to an astonishingly old 210,000
years ago. This skull may well represent our species earliest attempts at migrating out of
Africa. Another early example of humans entering Europe was found at Bacho Kiro cave in Bulgaria,
which is possibly as old as 47 000 years ago but belongs to a technological tradition called
the Initial Upper Paleolithic not the Aurignacian. The point is, humans may have been periodically
tinkering around the edges of the continent for a long time but it seems that none of these earlier
expansions were permanent. It wasn't until around 45 000 years ago that proto-Aurignacian groups
start to appear in the archaeological record. Just as i'm editing this absolute
emotional rollercoaster of a video another paper is released talking about
the arrival of Aurignacian people in Europe and it basically pushes back the date of the
arrival of Aurignacian people in Portugal in the far west of Europe by 5,000 years. So keep
in mind when we're talking about pre-history, things can change very quickly, at a lot of these
Aurignacian sites umm there aren't human remains, we're just going off tools. It can be kind of
hard to find those and interpret them. You know, it's entirely possible that not only were other
techno complexes, other cultures arriving in Europe at a very early date like the Initial Upper
Paleolithic at Bacho Kiro cave, but that also the Aurignacian might have arrived in Europe earlier
than we currently realize. So things always change i try my best to keep up but that's what
makes archaeology so interesting, isn't it? Back to the studio. As for where these Aurignacian
people came from we're not 100% sure. They probably expanded out from the Levant where we
find similar tools dated to the same time period, but it's also possible this culture developed in
what are now Iran's Zagros mountains. It's hard to say for sure because we're linking sites based on
similarities in the stone tools that these people left behind. Differences can be subtle and it's
hard to draw definitive conclusions, basically. As for how many people lived in Europe during
this time it's also very hard to say and again is far from an exact science. One study of sites
in Western and Central Europe estimates there may have only been around 1500 people spread across
this vast area. These 1500 were highly mobile though. Raw materials for stone tools were
transported for several hundred kilometers. Different groups would have been in contact
with each other at least periodically. Perhaps meeting at special times of year for friendship,
feasting and of course fishing. The environment that they'd have lived in would probably be much
more similar to where i am today. Even though this is the sort of high desert, not tundra.
Even though this is North America not Europe, the landscape would have lacked a lot of tree
cover. It really would have been very dry, very arid and features in the landscape like this,
river valleys, valleys of all sorts, anything that channeled game into one focused location would
have been a very popular place to live for these people who entirely depended upon hunting herds
of animals, following herds of animals. These people that lived in it all year round would have
been intimately familiar with all the plants, all the huge animals that roamed this
landscape, every turn of the river, every rock, well maybe not every
rock there's probably a lot of rocks. But you get what i'm trying to say it
really is hard for us in our modern uh world to imagine how intimately familiar
they were with just living out in nature. Incroyable! Petit Provence! Tools, tools, tools we have to mention them
because so often in prehistory is literally all we have to go by. One of the tools that really
defines this period of European history are these small bladelets about five centimeters or so in
length. Archaeologists believe they formed part of composite weapons. This highly adaptable toolkit
was a new invention at the time. These bladelets really were cutting edge stuff, if you'll
forgive the pun, and is in contrast to the levallois points which are common from earlier in
prehistory and from neanderthal sites. Speaking of innovations, again one of the biggest
differences between humans and neanderthals is the ubiquitous use of bone and antler tools.
Not that neanderthals never used them, but for homo sapiens, for us humans, it was
an extremely common item. This actually increased in frequency after the heinrich event
at 40,000 years ago which has led to a lot of head scratching as to why. Were humans following
herds more? Did they find it easier to access bone than flint? We don't have a good answer
to that question at the moment. Each part of the animal was generally used for different
purposes. Antler, particularly reindeer antler, was made into weapons. Points with a split base
for hafting are common for the era. These points are not thought to have been arrowheads though,
more likely they were attached to throwing spears. Just as i'm about to release this video
everyone. Dr James Dilley here, an absolute expert on prehistoric tools, maker of
a brilliant youtube series called Knap time, the founder of ancientcraft.co.uk
where you can find beasts like this, like this mesolithic axe he made
for me. At the most reasonable rate in town! Dr. Dilley here had finished some uh research
on these Aurignacian split base points and he's willing to uh hop on and share his his
knowledge with us. So thank you very much for that Dr. Dilley. [Dr.Dilley] That's quite alright.
I feel like this is going to be the uh viva exam no two uh contextualize the Aurignacian for us,
tell us about your research.Be kind, Be kind. [Stefan] oh no this is it's super easy. I only
have one question. It just strikes me as someone who isn't uh familiar with prehistoric tools that
making something from antler would not be that sharp and it would be quite a difficult weapon
to use and not as good as a stone tool perhaps. [Dr.Dilley] well that's exactly why the uh
phd thesis came to be. Why would you use a piece of antler when during the Mousterian
beforehand Neanderthals were using uh levallois stone points and after the Aurignacian in the
Gravettian they were using stone points again. They do use osseous points again made of bone and
antler here and there but in your Aurignacian, they like their antler points. To set the scene
i guess of the Aurignacian, my phd mainly focused on North West Europe but looked at a much broader
landscape as well because there isn't a great deal of Aurignacian archaeology from the North West.
So you know had to look at a broader picture of things, but it would have been really cold.
We think of central France today, certainly Europeans think of central France uhh well i'll
narrow that down a bit more, Brits think of central France for a holiday destination thinking
oh yeah nice, warm, wine, you know perfect. During the um Aurignacian the average July
temperature would have been five degrees celsius. So cold. In July! So, January, December, that
would have been really cold. So it pretty much would have been either boreal or arctic tundra,
lots of grassland very very few trees um and that is the key really, few trees. If you've got very
few trees um that can either be burnt, or used for timber for shelters, or for spear shafts. You
certainly wouldn't have had things like hazel or ash that you think of those classic uh spear shaft
wood species, that are really nice and light, they're flexible, perfect. Wouldn't have grown in
those environments. It was too cold, there wasn't a long enough growing season, wasn't enough soil,
too much permafrost, you wouldn't have got those species. What you would have had is things like
pine, larch and silver birch, that's about it really. So, is there a connection between the
spearhead and the spear shaft? Why have antler? Well let's look at the antler tips I suppose, and
for those early Aurignacian spear tips they're not just a simple spear tip that you fit into a notch
or a split in the wood. The split or notch is actually in the point, it's a split based antler
point and that's the interesting thing, because you don't see anything like that apart from these
early Aurignacian points. So the weakness changes position because classically you'd have your spear
shaft with the notch to fit the stone point or the antler point but in this case the split is in
the spear tip, whereas the piece of wood your shaft is just beveled. So the weakness is in the
spear tip and as they were hunting reindeer and reindeer would be dropping their antlers, the
raw material is all around. But by changing the split and actually putting the, what we would
consider later as a socket like a socketed spear, um is actually in the spear head so that the
spear shaft doesn't have that weakness. It's got a much greater chance of not splitting,
not breaking because it's the valuable part. [Stefan] hmm so really you think it's a technique
for just preserving wood. Almost like you know the point would split off in the
animal and the spear would be perfectly okay to use as another weapon as that
was so hard to obtain as opposed to the antler. [Dr.Dilley] Yeah definitely. And you
could use that in a variety of hunting scenarios as well. You can either just be
throwing these spears going for pot shots, or if you're corralling reindeer into an
enclosure, you could just be ramming those points in as deep as they go pulling the spear shaft
out the point is still in there and just easily attaching another one going to hit another animal.
There are various ways you can go about it. [Stefan] Well, i almost want to say a
semi-automatic spear as a result of that. [Dr.Dilley] Lethal weapon. The suggestion,
the margin for a fatal wound is, for a large herbivores is around 20 centimeters or so um [Stefan] Quite deep. [Dr.Dilley] That's pretty deep i mean yeah that's for for people who are still working
in imperial and that that's what. [Stefan] Don't even get me
started on that I live in America. [Dr. Dilley] Yeah it's eight inches, eight inches.
That is a a really deep wound. The really weird thing was that for a couple of the videos is
that once the hammer had dropped, which was the holding device um for these short spears
is that they punch through the ballistics gel and quite frequently the hammer would then
be drawn up for the next shot and the spear shaft would still be in place, but the antler
spear tip was still wedged in the ballistics gel and with that very tough split base point it was
keeping the wound channel open like a splint. So the blood loss would have been massively
increased because you know if you put a projectile um that's got a shaft in it
it would just plug the wound behind it. Only when you know you pull it out that uh it
starts to um cause uh blood loss trauma. But if you've got this thing wedged deeply with it
splinted open, hit a vital or you know graze an artery or something you know this animal is
going to be going down in a matter of seconds. [Stefan] Fascinating stuff. You really have uh put
the icing on my cake to this video. It couldn't have been more perfectly timed. Everyone, as i
said should follow Dr. James Dilley on twitter, visit his youtube channel and more importantly buy
these brilliant replicas at ancientcraft.co.uk. All of this information is going to be pinned
down below and uh yeah thank you so much! [Dr. Dilley] That's quite alright. Ivory was most commonly used for decorative items
like beads or incredibly detailed figurines, which we'll come to later. Spoiler alert! The
art from this period is incroyable! Lastly, bone was ordinarily used for more domestic
tools like needles. It's entirely possible that these tools were simply picked for these
jobs based on their fundamental physical characteristics. Antler is the most resistant to
impact so of course would make the best weapons. Now, I know everyone always laughs at
archaeologists for over-emphasizing ritual buuuut we can't rule out that these choices
may have had a symbolic aspect to them as well. For example, was it significant to these
hunters that they were using antler which reindeers use in combat as a weapon to
kill reindeer? It's certainly possible, entirely possible. Humans are fantastic at
creating symbolic connections like that. One tool that has generated more debate
than others though are the enigmatic perforated batons. The typical baton consists
of one sometimes two holes drilled through an antler with edges and grooves often scratched
along a shaft, sometimes around the hole as well. They can also occasionally be richly decorated.
When they were first reported on in 1867, it was believed they were some sort of badge
of office perhaps like a bishop's staff and we're given the name batons de commandement but
that interpretation has fallen out of favour. To be perfectly honest we don't know what
they were used for. Interpretations range from spear straighteners to atlatls and loads
more besides. But in researching this video i did read a very interesting paper. The authors
of the paper analyzed perforated batons from Gough's cave in Britain's Somerset and wondered
if the design features we see on perforated batons are connected in some way to their use with ropes.
As evidence for this they showed that the batons have a lot of wear around the perforation,
likely caused by an elongated object passing through it. Double fractures on the antler suggest
that they were put under substantial force, probably much more force than could have been
sustained by holding it in the hand. It would have just been yanked out of the hand before it
snapped like that. And the bands of incisions made along the shaft may have been connected
to the coiling of rope or improving the grip. They hypothesized that it could have been used
as some form of peg perhaps to support shelters or maybe suspend meat away from predators,
who knows maybe even as part of a harness or in some way like a sledge guide. As i said
we we don't know what they were used for. If like me you're a wizard of the arts of
bushcraft, an absolute bushcraft master, then you can probably think of a thousand
reasons why someone would want a peg and rope. The possibilities are endless. Whatever it
was used for it clearly was extremely important to Paleolithic people in Europe because they're
found at the start of the Upper Paleolithic and the Aurignacian period all the way through
to the Mesolithic period, which is a span of at least 15,000 years. Ummmm for me personally,
that totally rules out any uh ritual significance in this object. Not that they, they probably
didn't have a clear separation of day-to-day use and ritual use but the primary function
of this object could not have been ritual. No ritual survives fifteen thousand years, except
the ritual of bushcraft. Omelette Du Fromage! When we think of the ice age, we think of
mammoths. That's, that's the first animal that springs to mind usually i'm sure. So, you
might think that the Aurignacian people were chomping on mammoth stakes every single night
but evidence suggests that this was not the case. In western and central Europe it seems
that you would have had a diet that was absolutely dominated by reindeer. Reindeer
make up 91 to 99 of the faunal remains in 17% of French Aurignacian sites. Sorry
Rudolph but you were on the menu in a big way, these early Europeans bloody loved
eating you. What we don't know is why they became such reindeer hunting specialists. On
the one hand it could have been a deliberate strategy to hunt an animal that lived in large
herds. You could probably kill many in one go and they not only provided food of course
but the materials needed for tools, clothing, shelter batons du command. On the other hand, as
Europe lurched towards the last glacial maximum, arctic environments were expanding and temperate
forests where animals like red deer lived, they were receding. So reindeer might have just
been the most abundant animal for them to eat. Who knows maybe a combination of both factors. As for
eastern Europe the picture is a little different. The Aurignacian is harder to pin down
once we start heading further east, especially once we start getting into Russia.
The open landscape means that there are less obvious natural shelters less caves and
therefore we probably don't see people returning to the exact same habitation spots
year after year, generation after generation, millennia after millennia, like we do in the
west. Still there are sites in Crimea and also 20 sites dated to the upper Paleolithic that have
been found so far along the Don river. In contrast to western europeans taste for reindeer, these
prehistoric people seem to have preferred horse. Several sites show evidence for the mass
butchering of entire bands of horses. At kostenki 14, around 2,000 horse bones were
recovered from a layer dated to between 34 and 32,000 years ago. This probably
represents 11 to 16 individual horses.
Now, you know it, i know it, we all know it,
people do like to be beside the seaside. So what was life like at the coast? Short answer
is we don't know. I feel like i'm saying that a lot in this video. But we don't know that
much because as you can tell from the map sea levels have risen substantially since then.
In a few locations though we do get a glimpse of how life might have been. Mollusks may have made
up a significant part of people's diets. Probably not too surprising, after all they are very
easy to collect, it doesn't require any fishing ability. At El Cuco rock shelter in Cantabria,
860 shells were recovered most of them limpets. We see this pattern repeated at other
Aurignacian sites too. We don't have any great evidence for hunting of sea mammals or
fish but at El Pendo cave, also in Cantabria, one single sperm whale tooth was recovered from
Aurignacian levels. There are no human marks on it at all so it's difficult to say how it got
there. Somebody could have just found it walking along the beach and thought, "by jove that's jolly
interesting i'm gonna take it back to my cave". If we were to get a tad more speculative though, we
know whales occasionally beach themselves and a group of hunter-gatherers would i imagine not turn
down such a bonanza. Who knows, fun to speculate though. Despite their lack of evidence for
mammoths and rhinos and things being on the menu, intriguingly they do make up a very large part
of the art from the time period. Sacre Blue! My words cannot do justice to the beauty
of the cave paintings at Chauvet, France. Buried for 30,000 years due to the cave
entrance collapsing, this almost perfectly preserved gallery of 420 individual motifs gives
us an unparalleled window into the world of these Aurignacian people. There's really nothing else
like it. Lions, deer, mammoths, rhinos, hyenas, theirs was a wild world absolutely teeming with
magnificent animals. At Chauvet the images are made using three different colours. Red hematite,
white limestone and black charcoal. The charcoal is the only one that can be directly dated and
gives us a range of between 39 and 33,000 years old. The white images are made by simply removing
the clay deposits that have built up on the wall to reveal the white limestone underneath.
My personal favourite is this little owl. [terrible owl impression] "hoo hoo" Sometimes whole walls are scratched clean of clay
to help the drawings of clay and hematite stand out. The red hematite is the favourite colour for
hand prints and abstract shapes, though animals are also painted in red. The hematite was applied
in a few different ways. Spat on using some sort of pipe or maybe just their gob, drawn on with a
finger, and intriguingly maybe even brushed on. As you can see from a zoomed in section of this
rhino it looks like it was applied with a brush of some sort it has those linear lines across it.
The black charcoal images are probably the most famous though. Not only are they just beautiful
illustrations of ice age animals but together they form large dramatic hunting scenes, and
you know we probably shouldn't be surprised at all that the artists were so focused on
depicting hunting. This was their life. [The Histocrat] "if we believed the parietal
depictions, cave lions, the largest predator of the epoch, practiced coordinated hunts and
attacked large preys such as step bison and even wooly rhinoceroses. This beast of prey must
have been simultaneously feared and admired by the humans who shared their territories.
It is conceivable that this combination of fear and admiration inspired in these artists,
themselves hunters, a certain fascination and that they symbolically stage themselves in
these scenes in the form of these big cats" A few hundred miles to the east lies the Swabian
Jura mountain ranges of southern Germany. Here we haven't found much cave art yet but
instead intricately carved ivory figurines. Lions, horses, water birds, the first venus
figurine, a pendant, with a tiny mammoth, even a little hedgehog. But more famous and more
incredible than all of these is definitely the lion man. I should say lion human really. Many
would argue that it's a guy but i don't think that anyone can honestly say that it's not a
woman. There's no identifiable zizi or zezette. So i think it's fair to to leave its gender as an
open question. Why was it made? Again impossible to say for sure but a reasonable guess is that it
represents some sort of shaman maybe. Clearly the Aurignacian people had a fascination and respect
of the lion. If they admired them as hunters, as illustrated by Chauvet, It's entirely reasonable
to think some element of their religion or spirituality revolved around the lion too. You can
so clearly imagine hunters sitting around a fire trying to summon the spirit of a lion to
bring them good fortune in an upcoming hunt. Or maybe even they feared them, maybe the lion was
a vengeful god, maybe they were warding off the lions. These cave lions were absolute beasts after
all, noticeably bigger than modern African lions. No doubt these Aurignacian folks occasionally
became a meal for a pride of lions, especially if European lions hunted at night like modern African
lions do. A lonely human out at night would be easy prey indeed. Terrifying stuff! They must have
had mythology and folklore around lions i can't believe that they could not have. Ethnographically
we can see that modern humans that live alongside lions such as the Maasai of east Africa have
complicated and profound relationships with them. [The Histocrat again] "the lion hunt, or
olomaiyo, on the other hand is also a social cultural practice. A means to constantly
negotiate the human lion relationship that is accompanied with strong
and respectful sentiments". The Maasai only feel this love and respect for
the lion, hyenas and other predators are regarded simply with disgust. Whatever rituals were being
practiced whatever they thought of lions we can get an idea of the kind of music that the lion
man would have listened to. So far eight flutes have been recovered from the Swabian Jura.
Incredible stuff! This is the reason for the flutey vibes going on in today's video. This sort
of music may have been familiar to Aurignacian people. It's incredible, i love it, we don't
often get such detailed glimpses into the lives of prehistoric people especially
in the Paleolithic. It's incredible! Okay, quickly whilst i'm on the subject of
expression. Obviously another way humans express themselves is through their clothing. We all know
that you can tell a lot about someone's class or ethnicity or religion or how much
weed they smoked when they are a teenager from how they dress and how they present
themselves. So knowing that, can we look for patterns in jewellery of Aurignacian people
to get a sense of how they divided themselves ethnically and maybe even linguistically?
Well the answer to that is a resounding maybe. Marian Vanhaeren and Francesco d'Errico, whose
names are probably pronounced very differently to that, analyzed the different bead types
found at 98 different Aurignacian sites spanning the continent. They believe that they
have identified three distinct groups of people. Groups at either end of Europe do not use
the same animal teeth and bones to produce jewellery but both groups share overlap with
those in between. This is despite the fact that sites span the same time frames and
had the same animals available to them. It's sort of hard to explain so let me give you an
example. Fox teeth were used as beads in Germany, Belgium and south west France but not in Italy,
Greece, Spain or Austria. Despite the fact that foxes lived in all of these environments.
Therefore, to use or not use fox teeth as decoration was a deliberate choice that may
illustrate different ethnic or linguistic groups. Is this study of jewellery an exact science?
Definitely not, and no one is saying it is either, but when we're looking so far into the past
35,000 years into the past, we have to get a little creative. Humans differentiate themselves
by the clothes that they wear, by the jewellery that they wear and we can see a pattern in
the jewellery from the Aurignacian period. At least three groups. Umm but probably their idea
of ethnicity was much more complicated than that, probably they had much more than three groups in
their sort of ideas, their conceptualization. You know you could look at me, how i'm dressed
today, i look like a typical American but i certainly don't consider myself one. Likewise,
an Irish person would leave behind a similar material culture to me, similar clothing, similar
jewellery, similar bourbon biscuits but they probably do not consider themselves ethnically the
same as me either. So this is really complicated it's not an exact science but it's the best
we can do without being able to ask them. Unfortunately life isn't all reindeer
burgers and flute solos. At some point these people must have come into conflict with
each other. We don't have much evidence of it, the population being so small and spread out
does not leave archaeologists much to go with and probably resulted in less conflict than
later periods like the neolithic. The only example i could find from the Aurignacian period
comes from Cioclovina in Romania. This individual most likely received two blows to the head with
a club from a left-handed individual. Merde! Another stumbling block to our understanding is
that Aurignacian people seemingly did not practice burial. From 33,000 years ago, during the
Gravettian period, burial becomes a lot more common and we have all sorts of incredible
evidence associated with that culture. During the Aurignacian though between 45 and 33,000 years ago
we have none. Whatever happened to you, however you died, it seems your friends and family would
have disposed of you in a way that has left little archaeological trace. Presumably excarnation was
practiced, your body would have been placed on the steppe to be eaten by a lion perhaps, who knows,
your journey to becoming a lion man completed Now many of you might be thinking, why did i
choose to present these Aurignacian people as having dark skin and how do you, if you are
a European, relate to them? Well the answer to both those questions lie within our dna. I
am not even close to being an expert in that or being able to present that information
in a good way. Fortunately for us a real expert an expert who has actually studied the
genetics of ice age europeans, Dr. Cosimo Posth, was willing to hop on the channel and share
his expertise with us, so that video is released the same time as this one should be
in the pinned comment, in the description, you know where to look for these things. Mon Dieu! Well that's the end of the video. I
hope you learned a little bit about the lives of our french named, lion loving,
flute playing, reindeer eating, ancestors. In honour of them i would uh like to play a
little tune for the outro, a little song i wrote. Thanks for watching, thanks to my
patrons for the support as always! let's start that again oh that was [ __ ] awful
