Ethnographic Analogies
It is a reasonable assumption that Atlantic sailors throughout the ages have well understood the regularity of tidal flows and the direction of the prevailing winds, and would have been able to judge the weather patterns with tolerable accuracy before embarking upon a journey.
BARRY CUNLIFFE, FACING THE OCEAN: THE ATLANTIC AND ITS PEOPLES
For most modern people life on the edge of the sea ice is as alien as life on Mars, and ignorance of this frozen world prompts many misconceptions and fears. After we make presentations on this topic we are asked the same questions: Wasn’t it dangerous? How could people survive on the ice, especially primitive cavemen? How could they keep warm? What did they use for fuel? What would have been available for food, and how did they find water? Since there is no way to know how Paleolithic people adapted to this environment, we address these and other questions by illustrating key techniques used by the Inuit people of the American Arctic for hunting and surviving on the ice edge. Although the Inuit ancestors no doubt took a long time to perfect their adaptations, these techniques evolved from common sense and an acute knowledge of their environment. Here we invoke a convergence of lifeway strategies, as Inuit and Paleolithic peoples faced similar environmental issues, and we base much of the following narrative on the ways that the former have exploited the ice edge.1
To understand Solutrean lifeways we must consider reconstructions of ice age environments and model the entire ecosystem rather than just the uplands that are currently above sea level. Even though we do not have complete evidence of the ancient natural conditions, we can make assumptions based on our knowledge of the dynamics of sub-arctic marine and coastal environments, especially as to animal behavior and the seasonal influences of winds, currents, and tides. With this ecological information and comparisons to historic and more recent human adaptations to analogous environments, we can better understand this unknown portion of ice age human life.
Ignoring the fact that the Last Glacial Maximum continental shelves and coastal and oceanic resources were available for people to exploit simply because these areas now rest beneath the sea is a major mistake in reconstructing Solutrean, and possibly pre-Clovis, life. The simple proclamation that the marine environment was too harsh for Paleolithic people to exploit only compounds the error. During the thousands of years that the Solutrean people of northern Spain eked out a living from the narrow strip of land wedged between the ice age sea and ice- and snow-covered mountains, they no doubt observed and learned the many moods of their natural world. The resources of the sea and continental shelf likewise would not have escaped their attention. These early innovators would have tested and pushed their understanding of the ice edge and the sea until they could best take advantage of these environments.
Reconstructions of the LGM marine environment of the Bay of Biscay are dependent on the polar front’s changing latitude, caused by the many shifts in global cooling and warming. During colder phases the polar front extended southward into the bay or perhaps even farther, into the lower latitudes along the west coast of Portugal. During warmer phases it receded north.2 In Solutrean times these shifts occurred in various degrees many times. We are witnessing the same process today as global warming shifts the polar front northward.
The Gulf Stream, then as now, was warmed in the southern latitudes, flowed northward along the East Coast of North America, where it picked up trees and other flotsam flushed out to sea, and merged with the iceberg-laden Labrador Current off Cape Hatteras to become the eastward-arching North Atlantic Drift (figure 9.1). The North Atlantic Drift diverged into two branches, one passing south of Iceland and the other curving southeast toward the Bay of Biscay, where ice pushed southward by surface currents along the Celtic-Armorican-Aquitaine coastline further cooled the waters. In contrast to today’s notably ferocious seas, caused by winds driving water across the shallow continental shelf, the deepwater reach of LGM coastal waters would not have been so turbulent. To the west the Canary Current slid past Portugal and then western Africa before making its final leg back to the Caribbean, completing the North Atlantic Gyre.
The Subarctic Gyre and the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre are important oceanographic aspects of our studies not only for understanding how these currents affected ice floes and navigation but also because, as mentioned above, terrestrial debris flushed into the oceans is caught up in gyres and eventually washes ashore in distant lands.3 Icebergs, trees, and flotsam carried from North America were scattered along the outer continental coastlines of western Europe, where they collected on catcher beaches and in estuaries. During the LGM these resources, especially the wood, would have been highly prized by the human inhabitants of the western European tundra for tool manufacture and lodge construction and as fuel. Perhaps, as in medieval Iceland, these resources were so dear that driftwood cast up on specific beaches was considered the property of designated families.4 Woe to anyone who took wood off the wrong beach! Tree trunks and branches from North America that washed ashore along with the annual migrations of birds and sea mammals would have been clues that there were forests and lands beyond the horizon.
Winds from polar high-pressure systems that formed over the glaciated areas of western Europe would have drained into subtropical lows, creating unsettled weather patterns. During warmer seasons the more marked temperature gradient between air from the ice fields and air from over the warmer seawater would have tended to produce more offshore surface winds as they collided.5
The movement of ice is a constant battle between wind and sea currents.6 Most of a berg is below the waterline, where currents sculpt it into a keel. Bergs’ skyward surfaces resist the wind and act as sails. On calm days they drift along with the current, but strong winds can direct their movement. As with a sailboat, if the wind blows with the sea current, the ice moves rapidly; if the breezes and currents balance, the ice does not move. Westerly winds would have generally pushed ice floes north and east, where they would have piled up on the Celtic and Aquitaine coasts and built westward along the Cantabrian coast. But a strong east or south wind would have sent the ice moving back out to sea.
During colder LGM phases the pack ice was likely still out at sea in the early fall, but currents and increasing onshore storms eventually would have brought it, with the help of high tides, onto the beach, where it would have been grounded until spring. Winds that blew parallel to the shore would have carried the ice pack along it, while onshore winds would have held the ice fast to the shore and might have caused it to crush and pile. Offshore winds would have split open-water channels or leads parallel to the coast into the ice pack and shifted it seaward.
The leads could have been several yards to several miles wide and opened only briefly or up to weeks at a time. After a lead opened, new, salty ice would form an apron that built outward from its margins toward the center until the entire lead was covered. Ice aprons are thickest near the lead edge and gradually thin outward. Transitions between weak and safe ice can be observed as distinct color changes that represent different stages of ice development. When an ice apron grew thick enough to support a person it could have served as a smooth avenue for foot travel.
By winter, when the ice was thick enough that it did not break, its topography and movement would have been of concern to a hunter. In some areas winter ice might break into huge chunks piled high along pressure ridges, sometimes miles-long cracks in the ice caused by heating and cooling. In other areas older ice went through several seasons of warming that sculpted it into gently undulating surfaces and vast, flat expanses that remained unbroken all winter. Salts dissolve out of polar ice during summer thaws, so when melted this older ice would have provided freshwater for drinking and cooking.
By late spring the floes would have broken apart, creating ice islands of varying size. Large islands moved with the current, while smaller islands (called pans) were pushed by the wind. If there was no wind the ice moved together, but if a wind was contrary to the sea current the ice sizes would intermix. Some islands were so large that their movement was imperceptible, and hunters would have to be extra vigilant or face the possibility of being set adrift on an ice raft. An experienced hunter would keep an eye on the current by throwing chunks of ice in the water, watching their direction and speed of drift. If the chunks floated away, the island was likely stable, but if they stayed alongside, the island was likely moving with the current.
There are many Inuit stories of hunters who were trapped on the ocean ice and unable to reach land. Some survived for months; others were not so fortunate and drifted away, never to be heard from again. An elderly friend of Dennis’s at Point Barrow was quick to point out, however, that no one from the town had been lost on the ice for several years because GPS handheld receivers and cell phones are now part of standard hunting equipment. When well-equipped New Age hunters become stranded they simply call home, and someone, perhaps in a helicopter, comes to the rescue. These new technologies conveniently come at a time when global warming has made pack ice unpredictable and dangerous. Traditional hunters now run a higher risk of being trapped on ice, and without these satellite technologies many would be cast away on the open sea. Similarly, the LGM’s shifting climates and ice conditions required new technologies for survival, but many people were likely lost to the ice or sea while they were being developed. Perhaps the skin boat is analogous to the helicopter.
Weather was another thing that was necessary to keep track of. Early hunting cultures learned commonsense ways to predict the weather on the basis of various atmospheric conditions and no doubt keenly observed important indicators of change—changing wind directions and intensity, for example, or the twinkling of stars before a powerful storm. Light rings around the sun or moon indicate approaching wet weather. Haze, fog, and clouds frequently precede storms and indicate the direction from which the storm will emerge. Elongated clouds stretching out at right angles to the wind indicate an advancing storm front. Abnormal rising or falling of the tide or increased surf warns of an approaching windstorm. Weather predictions can also be made on the basis of animal behavior. For instance, wolves howl when the atmospheric pressure rises; seals basking for long periods indicates good weather. On the other hand, if seals rise only briefly to the sea surface and then disappear, there might be an approaching storm.
If a storm approached while a hunter was in a boat along the ice edge, he could make a quick retreat into a lead to find calmer waters. A light, flexible skin boat could have been pulled onto the ice and turned on its side, perhaps near a pressure ridge that blocked the wind, to provide a quick shelter. If it appeared that the weather was going to set in for a long spell, the hunter might have used a sail or skin tarp to expand the shelter and snow blocks for additional protection.
Oil or blubber would have been used for heating, cooking, and light. All that was needed was a shallow container or lamp to hold the fuel. The container could have been as simple as a depression chipped into the ice or, on land, dug into the ground. A skin could be placed in the depression to form a bowl, keeping porous ground from absorbing the oil. A wick could have been made from fine wood shavings, moss, or even shreds of the skin, and moving more of it into the fuel would decrease the intensity of the flame. Hanging a slab of fat over the flame in such a lamp can keep it burning unattended for many hours: when the oil in the container becomes low, the exposed wick burns higher and melts more oil from the fat above.7
WE’VE BEEN TO NEW YORK!
In the summer of 1968, while I was directing an excavation near Point Barrow, Alaska, an Iñupiat hunter told me that a couple of men from his village wanted to speak with me. Several weeks later two fellows showed up at the site. They approached me and without any introduction announced, “We’ve been to New York.” A bit nonplussed, I responded, “That’s nice. What were you doing in New York?” The answer was, “Coast Guard took us.” Confused, I asked how this had happened. The answer was, “Icelandic Navy gave us to the U.S. Coast Guard.” This was the start of an intriguing hour-long conversation in which they recounted that they had been spring hunting on the edge of the ice when the ice broke up and set them adrift. They survived by hunting seals while their ice island traversed the polar sea, skirted the North Pole, and entered the Denmark Strait along the east coast of Greenland. As they drifted south, the floe had begun to shrink rapidly and they had gotten “a bit nervous.” Fortunately they were sighted and picked up by the Icelandic Coast Guard, who transferred them to the U.S. Coast Guard. They spent a few days in New York, where they saw many wondrous sites before they were returned to Point Barrow.
From our point of view, they had survived an extraordinary hardship on an ice floe for several months with only the equipment they had brought hunting. However, by the time they told me their story, the rigors of the ordeal had come to seem relatively insignificant compared to having been to New York!
A few years ago I was back in Point Barrow. Now that we were developing our Solutrean hypothesis, I wanted to get more details of how they had survived on the ice. A friend at an elder care home remembered the hunters and their adventure, but he had few details, and the castaways had long since passed away. Dennis
Seals and great auks would have produced many pounds of fat or blubber. The oil could be rendered by placing strips of blubber in a container or on a non-porous skin and allowing the oil to ooze out naturally. This process goes faster on warm, sunny days. If oil was needed more quickly the blubber could be placed near a fire and squeezed out by hand. Moreover, blubber strips would burn like logs if placed in a fire.
Along with their use as fuel, animal fats would have been excellent for waterproofing many objects, in particular clothing and skin boat coverings. Seal oil can keep a boat made of bearded sealskin waterproof for several weeks, but eventually the boat will need to be hauled out, dried, and re-oiled. Celtic mariners used boats known as currachs, made of cow skins stretched over wooden frames, for unknown millennia. Currachs remained sea-worthy for several months when treated with sheep tallow.8 Bovid hides were available to Solutrean people, along with excellent sources of waterproofing oil.
Though the ice pack would have been a world of frozen water, freshwater could be had by applying heat and was even found seasonally in meltwater ponds. Freshwater can be melted from snow piled around a depression and collected from troughs chipped in the ice near a fire. These troughs are also handy sources of water while cooking. Brave souls can melt snow with their body heat by placing it in a pouch next to their skin.
During a storm the locations of leads can change, as old ones close and new ones form elsewhere. Finding a new lead or the ice edge is relatively easy, for the difference in temperature between the warmer seawater and the ice causes a thick fog bank, which can be seen for miles, to hang over the open water. Moreover, on overcast days sea ice reflects against the clouds as dull white, while dark streaks indicate an open lead below, and snow-covered land reflects as brilliant white. If newly fallen snow covers the aprons in the leads, they reflect as unusually bright pathways in the clouds.
Traveling on and around sea ice and open water would have been relatively simple, especially on clear days. Beyond celestial positioning, mariners could navigate by the Picos de Europa, which loom 2,500 meters above the southern horizon, providing a constant landward marker. Given the earth’s curvature, the mountains could be seen from 50 kilometers or so out on the ice or sea. Fixes on distinct landmarks such as this would have provided destination directions. When landmarks shifted position on the horizon, it was a warning that the ice was beginning to move.
When landfast ice formed during the winter, it greatly expanded the available geography for pedestrian hunting. In fact, there would have been little difference between hunting on snow-covered ground and on landfast winter ice, and the latter’s return of seal meat, fuel oil, and other animal products would likely have been much greater, as land mammals grow leaner throughout the winter.
One of the greatest impacts of the LGM was the forcing of life zones southward by hundreds of kilometers and the reorganization of those zones into disharmonious biospheres. Species that now flourish in northern waters would have found themselves displaced by the expansion of the polar ice cap and the formation of the annual pack ice, to such glacial refugia as the Celtic-Armorican-Aquitaine coastlines and the north coast of the Iberian Peninsula.9
Other than harbor seals, the seals of the North Atlantic are generally associated with ice-edge environments for breeding and birthing during late winter and into spring. When the ice breaks up in the late spring, the seals stay with the edge or with floating islands as the ice retreats northward, and they return as the ice builds southward in the fall.
Since seal pups are weaned within a few weeks and are not particularly weather dependent for growth, we suspect that the LGM’s southward shift of rookeries did not affect the birthing season to any great degree and that seasons of birthing, breeding, and molting—the periods when seals are the most congregated and most vulnerable to predation—have not changed significantly through time.
Seals can have a dozen or more breathing holes, and they start making them when the ice begins forming in the fall so they can break through with their heads. As the ice thickens they keep the holes open by gnawing and scratching. Holes can be identified by an elevated circular platform caused by water pouring over the ice and freezing when the seal surfaces. Passing seals use any breathing hole they encounter, so hunters can return after a kill and hunt again. A patient hunter with a pike or a self-barbed spear could get several in a day from a single hole. Hunters in groups might tend holes scattered across the ice to increase their chances of getting seals. Consequently, during the winter when the ice was solid, whole extended families might have moved offshore for prolonged periods to collect a supply of food and oil.
During the winter adult female seals tend to stay beneath the ice or inside the dens in heavy ice beyond the leads. Dens can hold several seals and their pups but would have been hard to find. So despite the bounty dens held, major winter hunting activities probably centered on breathing holes for seals and leads and open-water areas for overwintering birds.
When the sea ice began to fragment and open in late spring, seals would have appeared in greater numbers. Throughout the spring and summer they sleep on the ice and bask in the sunshine. During these seasons onshore winds push unconsolidated floes toward shore, and many hundreds of basking seals can be seen scattered across the horizon. Scenes such as this would have tempted any hunter to consider ways to get out among the pans and may well have initiated experimentation in the use of watercraft to harvest nature’s ice garden.
The principle seal-hunting methods among Arctic peoples are clubbing, netting, spearing with a barbed pike, and harpooning, alone or in combination. The choice of method varies with the species of seal, the prevailing geographic and climatic conditions, and the season. Clubbing is confined to gregarious species, such as the gray seal, which unlike the harp or spotted varieties sometimes establishes rookeries on the beach well above sea level. Ringed seals can be clubbed on the ice if a series of holes are plugged and the seals are forced to come to a central hole for breathing. When a hapless creature appears, it is clubbed to death and dragged out of the water.
For the Solutreans, hunting seals in leads or while they floated on pans along the ice margin would have required either darts propelled by a spear thrower or bows and arrows. Parts of spear throwers have been found in Solutrean middens, but we are less confident that they had bows and arrows in the areas around the Bay of Biscay. A spear thrower could be used effectively by a hunter either standing on the ice or seated in a watercraft. Retrieving dead seals would have been possible for pedestrian hunters without special equipment if the animals snagged on the ice edge while floating in the current of the salty water. If the apron was too weak to walk on, the carcass could be retrieved with a pike or a hook, which might have been as simple as a branch tied to a line.
Other trapping techniques include the use of nets made of hair, which are stretched across narrow channel inlets to catch seals coming and going. At least one of the pennipeds painted on the walls of Cosquer Cave is covered by a series of lines that could represent netting (figure 5.11g). Other seals are depicted with lines that probably represent spears penetrating their bodies.
Although one could set a net by wading in the water, this would be most easily accomplished from a boat. Other than the possible illustration of a seal caught in a net at Cosquer Cave, there is no evidence of Solutreans using nets for hunting seals. There is also no direct evidence of the terrestrial hunting technologies proposed by Lawrence Straus (see chapter 8).10 Each is equally plausible.
Ice hunting can be extremely hazardous, especially near breakup, for a sudden change of wind can drive an ice floe away from shore. If hunters found themselves in this situation without boats, they would be marooned and adrift until blown back into the ice pack or onto shore. They could survive long periods of floating in the northern currents with all-weather gear and clothing. (Solutrean people clearly knew and used winter technologies, or they could not have survived the LGM even if protected by caves.) If the ice melted out from under them, however, they would perish.
There were more marine resources available for Solutrean people than just seals. Saltwater fish such as halibut and flounder joined salmon and trout as decorations on cave walls, no doubt speaking to their importance.11 Walruses may have been common on the ice, and many overwintering migratory waterfowl would have frequented leads and open-water ponds. The great auk was no doubt a major resource for people who lived along the beach.
Adding seals and auks to their subsistence strategy would have been a significant step for ice age people. These animals provided not only oil and fat for fuel but also nutrients and calories critical for surviving the winter and spring months. This motivation probably accelerated the understanding of animal behavior and ice floe dynamics, leading to innovations in ice edge hunting. Simply extending winter activities onto the landfast ice would also have had big rewards.
By summer the ice was clear of the bay and people shifted their activities to hunting terrestrial animals, fishing, and logistical tasks such as collecting stone for artifact manufacture. Summer and fall camps were likely established in the foothills for hunting ibex and other subalpine species and for spearing spawning fish. This also would have been the time of year when plant resources were harvested, some with special significance for healing various ailments. The summer and fall camps were normally abandoned in the late fall as attention once again turned toward the frozen sea. As discussed in chapter 9 the polar front shifted its position many times during the LGM, and during warming climatic episodes the winter and spring habitats of seals shifted northward along with it. It is highly likely that humans adapted to these shifts by either following the ice front’s northward retreat along the edge of the continental shelf or enhancing their maritime capabilities to follow the seals across open water.
Critics of the hypothesis that Solutrean people crossed the North Atlantic are more than content to point out that there is no evidence that they had watercraft or ever used marine resources beyond those gathered from local estuaries and shores. While this is not entirely true, the evidence is indeed slim—environmental processes, such as rising sea levels, have destroyed evidence of advances in marine technology—but when placed into a global perspective it forces us to reconsider the negative position. The question of when humans first used watercraft for transportation has vexed archaeologists for decades. Constructed rafts and boats have long been considered relatively recent additions to cultural inventories, but this assumption is rapidly falling away in the face of both direct and indirect worldwide evidence of the extreme antiquity of watercraft and ocean travel. Solutrean people were likely in sync with the rest of the Paleolithic world, so it is likely that they knew of and used watercraft for transportation and to exploit the LGM marine environment.
In extreme southeast Asia, perhaps earlier than 60,000 years ago, the first mariners left terra firma for lands beyond their home shores. The events leading up to these first expeditions are virtually unknown, but the scatter of archaeological evidence on far-flung South Pacific islands leaves little doubt that they occurred.12 The world these early explorers left behind, called Sunda by prehistorians, was created when falling sea levels exposed the continental shelf, connecting the islands of Indonesia north of the Timor Sea to the continental mass of southeast Asia.
A myriad of inter-visible islands and the human sense of adventure likely lured these first sailors away from the shores of Sunda. By 50,000 years ago voyages across the Timor Trench landed settlers on another ice age continent, known as Sahul. Sahul stretched from New Guinea southward to encompass Australia and Tasmania. So many were the successive sea voyages that by 30,000 years ago pioneers were scattered over virtually the entire expanse of Sahul and the islands of Near Oceania from New Britain to New Ireland. By 29,000 years ago the people living on Buka Island in the northern Solomons were descendants of mariners who had made extended ocean voyages of nearly 200 kilometers, more than half of which would have been out of sight of land.
Evidence of the use of watercraft in the East China Sea appears on the eastern shore of Honshu more than 30,000 years ago. Seamen buried their kinsmen in caves on Okinawa and other islands that were separated from the mainland by as much as 150 kilometers of water. Paleolithic Honshu sailors also navigated a 50-kilometer-wide channel to Kozushima in the Izu Island chain, where they found obsidian, volcanic glass that they carried back to the mainland to make into weapon tips and knives.13
Whether the idea of boats and the skills necessary for water travel developed in multiple independent centers or at a single center from which it spread across the world is a thought-provoking question for future research. At about the same time period when early mariners were exploring the south Pacific, evidence of water transportation appears in other widely separated regions. For example, a date of 51,000±12,000 years ago derived from calcareous breccia adhering to Homo sapiens sapiens remains suggests the possibility of an early human occupation on the island of Crete. Since Crete was not connected to the mainland at the time of the burial, anyone who came to the island would have to have made an open sea crossing.14 Intriguing too are Aurignacian artifacts found at Fontana Nuova di Ragusa, a site on Sicily, an island that was never connected to the European mainland. These discoveries provide intriguing indirect evidence that prehistoric humans used watercraft to explore the Mediterranean as far back as 38,000 years ago.
Most illuminating for our hypothesis of a Solutrean maritime tradition are depictions of flightless great auks, deep-sea fish, and seals found on the walls of El Pendo Cave on the coast of northern Spain and Cosquer Cave on the Mediterranean coast of France. At Cosquer a diorama of three auks is dated within the Solutrean era, to between 18,000 and 19,000 years ago, by charcoal fragments found in the vicinity of the painting. Two of the birds are facing each other with outspread wings, while a third, set slightly apart, is lying down with its wings folded. Francesco d’Errico, an archaeologist at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique whose research interests are Paleolithic art and technology and the evolution of human cognitive abilities, interprets this life scene as two males fighting to mate with a female, who is inviting copulation by her prone breeding posture.15
All recorded auk breeding sites were located on small, isolated islands with flat, easy access to breeding sites. It has been suggested that auks nested at mainland rookeries before human hunting pressure drove them onto islands.16 However, even in regions of Greenland where the birds were not subjected to human hunting, their rookeries were on islands. It is probable that this nesting behavior evolved as protection against terrestrial predation, especially considering how vulnerable the birds were when out of water, but the trait was likely in place eons before humans were part of the predator guild. The Paleolithic artist who depicted this scene of mating behavior likely observed a battle on an island between giant males. As d’Errico points out, battles such as this must have been impressive because of the size of the birds and the fierceness of the combat, which sparked the prehistoric artist to commemorate this scene.
Solutrean artists illustrated deep-sea fish species such as flounder and halibut at Cosquer, and a lifelike tuna appears at El Pendo. Perhaps these fish were caught by hook and line from the shore, but that seems highly unlikely to us. We suggest that the fish and auks illustrated in the Solutrean rock art indicate that watercraft were used for transportation, hunting, and fishing. It is unfortunate that Paleolithic artists did not depict domestic scenes, because there are no clear images of boats. However, there are also no images of tents or other forms of constructed shelters, which they must have had to survive in open ice age environments.
The sudden appearance of Solutrean technology in Europe may also suggest the use of watercraft. Where did these people come from in the first place? Marcel Otte, a European Paleolithic specialist, argues that Solutrean technology developed from the bifacial Aturian technology of northwestern Africa and spread into Europe by crossing the Mediterranean at the Straight of Gibraltar, or perhaps farther to the east where currents are less swift.17 Although this was not a great span to traverse, such a trip would have required watercraft. The use of watercraft by the colonizers of the Mediterranean coast of Spain and France would explain the knowledge of the breeding behavior of auks, illustrated on the walls of Cosquer Cave.
Although slightly later in time than the Solutrean, the continued use of watercraft by Paleolithic Mediterraneans is documented in southwest Greece. Here, some 13,000 years ago, long after Pacific sailors had started importing obsidian to Honshu, flintknappers from Franchthi Cave on the southwestern coast of Greece crossed 24 kilometers of open water to collect prized volcanic glass from the island of Milos.18
Other discoveries in the Mediterranean point to the early maritime exploration and occupation of the island of Cyprus. Here, researchers have excavated a massive pygmy hippopotamus bone bed dating to more than 11,000 years old at the Akrotiri Aetokremnos. Controversy raged when the investigators suggested that these animals had been hunted to extinction—not because this meant that people had been on the island, presumably arriving by boat, but because they had hunted the hippos to extinction.19
Regardless of the outcome of the debate over the Aetokremnos evidence, it is clear that early pre-Neolithic peoples settled on Cyprus and other Mediterranean islands more than 9,000 years ago. Several sites even show that these people not only got to the islands but did so in veritable Noah’s arks with cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs on board. The vessels used to transport these livestock were certainly not simple skin boats or even dugouts propelled by rowers. Indeed, these mariners were likely under sail in relatively large crafts, be they rafts or keeled boats.
Such cargo capacities and sailing feats remind us of the pre-Columbian Ecuadorian balsa rafts that plied the Pacific coastline of Latin America to trade in far-flung ports. These large rafts were equipped with one or more masts and propelled by triangular fore-and-aft-rigged cotton sails. Planks inserted below the waterline through gaps between the logs of the rafts formed vanes that with adjustments in the sailing balance allowed adequate steering. According to Smith and Haslett these rafts could sail within 60 degrees of the wind.20 By comparison, modern sailboats rarely sail more than 45 degrees into the wind. Bartolomé Ruiz, a Spanish engineer, encountered one of these balsa rafts off the coast of northern Ecuador in 1526 and estimated that it was carrying more than twenty-five tons of cargo along with a crew of twenty people.21 In our opinion the pre-Neolithic settlers of Crete would have required a similar craft to transport their livestock to the island.
There is no question that watercraft-manufacturing technologies were developed during the Paleolithic, but the earliest physical remains of a boat are from a log craft found in Pesse in the Netherlands that is between 9,510 and 10,040 years old.22 A 7,800-year-old dugout canoe was excavated at La Marmotta, a wet site northwest of Rome.23 The vessel was made from a single oak trunk and measures 35 feet in length and 3.5 feet across the stern. Three trapezoidal blocks of wood drilled with holes are thought to be fastenings for sails, while fabric fragments found in the bottom of the vessel have been identified as sail remnants. Clay models representing the same style of boat were also unearthed at the site. If these interpretations are correct, this boat is 3,000 years older than the Egyptian vessels that are known to have sailed in the Mediterranean by 3,500 B.C.24
Along with pottery similar to ceramics from Thessaly in northern Greece, obsidian from the Aeolian Islands off Sicily or the Ponza Islands was also found at the site, suggesting the possibility that boats were used during this period for commerce. Just the fact that early Neolithic and pre-Neolithic peoples sailed around the Mediterranean demonstrates that they had already accumulated a fair amount of expertise.
Asian maritime innovations kept pace with the advances in the Mediterranean. In the eighth millennium before the present, early Jomon navigators guided oceanworthy craft across the treacherous Kuroshio Current, which separates the northern Izu Islands from the southern end of the chain.25 They made landfall on Hachijo-Jima, 300 kilometers south of Honshu, then part of the Asian mainland. It may well be that they continued on over another 320 kilometers of open sea to visit the Ogasawara Islands. The evidence from Japanese sites also makes it abundantly clear that by 9,000 years ago Jomon peoples were not only using estuarine resources but exploiting tuna and marlin along with other resources from the open sea. Curiously, like early Mediterranean island colonizers, Jomon people carried livestock along on their voyages of exploration.
The discovery of whaling equipment and the remains of sperm, right, and humpback whales at Bangudae, a site in southeast South Korea, attests to a major increase and intensification of maritime skills in eastern Asia by 8,000 years ago.26 Near the site, etched into a cliff face, are images of whaling activities including specialized whale-hunting equipment and the sophisticated techniques, such as using floats, employed by the early whalers here. These discoveries suggest a greater antiquity of whaling in the western Pacific, as the social and technological complexity necessary to hunt these ocean creatures required a long period of developing these hunting techniques.
At about the time when the Jomon sailors were exploring the Philippine Sea, other Asians, perhaps closely related to the Jomon people or to the Korean whalers, piloted their seagoing vessels farther and farther north, into the Bering Sea. Some eventually made landfall on the Aleutian Islands.
Sites on islands scattered along the rugged, partially glaciated coast of southeastern Alaska have evidence of a long tradition of exploiting the sea and its resources. Nearly 9,000 years ago the residents of Anangula, a site on the Aleutian island of Ananiuliak, were skilled seamen who exploited a wide range of sea mammals, fish, and birds while exploring the Aleutians for other resources, including obsidian from Unmak Island.27 Isotopic analysis of the remains of a young man found at On Your Knees Cave, Prince of Wales Island, indicated that his diet was primarily marine foods such as sea mammals and fish.28 Obsidian artifacts made nearly 10,000 years ago, as in the Old World, document voyages between Baranof and Suemez Island and the mainland of southeast Alaska and northern British Columba.
Farther south, human remains from Arlington Springs on Santa Rosa, one of California’s Channel Islands, date to the Clovis era.29 Non-Clovis artifacts found on Santa Rosa are made of chert transported from San Miguel Island, 15 kilometers to the west.30 San Miguel is also the location of Daisy Cave, where excavations of a 10,600-year-old occupation level yielded sea birds, seals, eighteen species of marine fish, fishhooks, and sea grass cordage, demonstrating that the technological foundations of a maritime society were in place before the arrival of Clovis people in California.31
The east coast of the North American continent had a much different history, but just as trace element studies can pinpoint offshore obsidian sources found in Japanese sites and Franchthi Cave, the movement of raw lithic tool stock provides the best evidence for watercraft.
Clovis people are known to have used exotic or extra-local raw lithic materials exported great distances across several major river drainages before the stones were used and discarded or lost. For example, a Clovis projectile point made of Knife River flint from North Dakota is reported as part of a cache buried in upper New York State, 2,000 kilometers from its source.32 Pedestrian transportation of these resources is possible, especially parallel to river courses, but foot traffic along river bottoms would be difficult at best. Cross-drainage movement would pose the biggest problems for pedestrian travelers, since major streams and rivers were impossible to wade or swim . . . especially while toting a bag of rocks! The crossings could have been made when the rivers were frozen by winter temperatures, or they could have been avoided with (unlikely) detours around the headwaters, which may have added hundreds of miles to a trip. Most crossings required a boat. Clovis people likely relied on some sort of floating transportation, perhaps including expedient vessels such as bullboats. These were simple, cup-like craft, made with an animal hide pulled over a stick frame, used by many primitive people. They were difficult to steer and usually used only to cross steams.
Of great interest for our argument is the recognition by the archaeologist Steve Loring that a fluted projectile point found on the surface of a former shoreline of the Champlain Sea was made of a stone from Labrador.33 The Champlain Sea formed when the Laurentide Ice Sheet depressed the Saint Lawrence and Champlain Valleys of New England below sea level. Around 12,500 years ago as the glacier retreated northward, the ice dam blocking the Saint Lawrence River collapsed, allowing Atlantic seawaters to flood the valleys, creating an inland brackish sea that was home to marine mammals such as beluga and bowhead whales, harbor porpoises, and seal species that are frequently hunted by humans. As the glacier continued to melt, the crust it had been depressing began to return to its previous condition, a process called isostatic uplift, which by 10,200 BP had raised the valleys and drained the sea.
FIGURE 10.1.
Projectile point made of chert from Ramah Bay, Labrador. The point was found on the upper strandline of the late glacial Champlain Sea in Vermont.
In 1980 Loring published an analysis of more than thirty fluted points associated with a former shoreline of the Champlain Sea in present-day Vermont.34 He proposed that they had been used for hunting sea mammals in the near shore environments of the ancient sea. One of the points is made of a fine-grained blue-gray material that he originally thought was a variant of the local Cheshire quartzite (figure 10.1).
Loring turned his attention to fieldwork in northern Labrador, where he became familiar with Ramah chert, which outcrops in the Torngat Mountains south of Hamilton Inlet. The Ramah chert reminded him of the fluted point he had thought was made of an “odd Cheshire quartzite.” His curiosity piqued by the potential implications of the Paleo-Indian use of this material, he arranged to re-examine the point. His visual comparison of the point with both Cheshire and Ramah stone confirmed that Ramah was likely the source of the raw material. Subsequent laser microprobe analyses confirmed his suspicions.
The straight line distance from Ramah Bay to where the point was found is about 1,300 kilometers. However, following that course would have been impossible, since nearly the entire distance between the two areas was glaciated. Further, most of the Canadian coastline from the Torngat Mountains to the mouth of the St. Lawrence was also glaciated, with tongues of ice extending into the Atlantic Ocean. In fact, at the time the point was made, a boat would have been the only way to travel between the two areas. Moreover, the flintknapper or an intermediary would have had to skipper a vessel with the ability to sail into the wind against the iceberg-laden Labrador current and skirt marine glaciers along a storm-ridden coast with few if any places to make landfall. Following the shortest water route, the distance from Ramah to Vermont is more than 2,400 kilometers.
The most likely scenario is that the Paleo-Americans who made the trip to the Ramah source left not from the Champlain Sea but from a closer port, perhaps in Nova Scotia, the last point of land before the open ocean. Even from that ice-bound remnant of land, the sea voyage would have been a round trip of 1,500 or so kilometers. We doubt that the expedition wintered on the source, as it was a barren, rocky area isolated by glaciers and sea ice for most of the year; hence we suspect that the entire expedition was accomplished during a single summer.
The Ramah chert source is located on the seaward side of the Torngat Mountains, which stand skyward like a beacon towering above the glacier-covered landscape. Our question is, why make such a long and dangerous trip? Did the sailors know the chert was there? Was it a destination point learned from oral history? Was it part of their society’s origin story? Or were they simply out exploring along the margin of the ice and sea?
Even those who still believe that Clovis people were the first Americans should not be too surprised that they knew about watercraft. After all, these were clever people who hunted and killed mammoths while exploring the breadth of North America. Boats would have been very useful, especially in the last activity. Moreover, by the time Clovis bands arrived on the Pacific shore of America, boats were in use by the people already living there. So if Clovis people didn’t know about boats when they arrived on the West Coast, they would have learned fast!
In some areas of the southeastern United States an archaeological culture known as Dalton succeeded Clovis. Among the stone tools that Dalton flintknappers produced were formal woodworking adzes and distinctive fluted points. Residue studies of their adze blades reveal traces of charred wood, perhaps evidence of the alternating burning and adzing technique used to make board planks and hollow out large logs for dugout canoes.35 While this is not proof positive that Dalton people constructed dugouts, it is highly likely that they did. The remains of creatures such as swordfish in their middens leave little doubt that post-Dalton eastern Maritime Archaic peoples, who lived in the northeastern part of the United States and southeastern Canada around 5,000 years ago, fished far out to sea. This prehistoric deep-sea fishing tradition once again speaks to the well-established relationship between humans and oceans.
Fifty-three prehistoric dugout canoes were found when Newnans Lake in Florida dried up during the drought of 2000.36 Of these, nearly 70 percent date to between 3,000 and 5,000 years of age. Although the canoes are not extremely old, their sheer number is a mind-boggling reflection of what remains to be found in the archaeological record and a sobering reminder of how much maritime archaeological evidence was lost when coastal sites were destroyed by rising sea levels at the end of the ice age.
Some people have surmised that evidence of trans-oceanic migrations in the warm tropical waters of Indonesia 20,000 years before the Solutrean is irrelevant to the ice age North Atlantic.37 But this discounts the post-development cross-cultural spread of new and important ideas that can move across the globe with lightning speeds, especially when disseminated by sailors. Prehistoric people were clearly exploiting marine resources in colder Pacific waters 30,000 years ago. Unfortunately there is a hiatus in the archaeological record of Paleolithic maritime development between 11,000 and 26,000 years ago because the LGM shoreline sites were inundated when melting glacial ice raised the sea level to its current elevation. It is no coincidence that the first evidence of maritime development worldwide is from 10,000 years ago, give or take a thousand years. Was the sudden appearance of Bell Beaker people on the Baltic Coast an invasion from the south, as archaeologists have long thought? No, they were indigenous refugees retreating southward before rising sea levels. Only underwater archaeology can decipher the cultural events that took place on the continental shelves before the establishment of the modern mean sea level.
Without the distractions of modern life prehistoric human actors studied their scenes, observing the interrelated flows that connected earth, sky, and water. These were the essence of life, to be pondered, to be understood, and to be used in harmony. It must have taken generations to fully appreciate the relationships between the sky and the water. Rising ocean swells and falling tides warn of approaching storms, fog banks reveal hiding ice leads, flocks of screeching birds indicate surface schools of fish. The wind at our back carried them home, and the sun, moon, and stars showed them the trails.
When the climate warmed during the LGM and the polar front shifted northward, the annual formation of landfast ice along the Cantabrian coast became undependable. “A friend acting strangely” is the lament of Inuit elders referring to today’s similar weather patterns, as global warming makes their traditional knowledge irrelevant.38 As the ice edge shifted northward, fragmented and intermixed ice pans temporarily replaced it, but fewer and fewer basking seals likely appeared on the horizon as their habitat receded. New skills and technologies were required to cope with these changes of resource availability. Watercraft, perhaps already in use for hunting the late spring floes, would have to play a larger role as resource catchment areas moved farther out to sea. An alternative taken by many Solutrean people was to fall back on terrestrial creatures to provide the groceries.
Another option was to move along with the ice edge as its annual arrival shifted northward along the Aquitaine-Celtic coastline. By the warmer phases of the LGM there may have been many bands of hunters scattered along the coast whose families moved out to sea along the ice edge, following the harp seals, great auks, and other animals in their annual migrations. There were eastern and western populations of these animals. The European pods and flocks fed on cod migrating along the ice edge toward Greenland. The western animals followed cod bred in the shallows of the Flemish Platform east of the Grand Banks in a combined summer migration that moved east-northeast, converging with their eastern cousins south of Greenland in mid-summer.
Savvy Solutrean sailors would have known from the behavior of polar bears, as well as birds and foxes that scavenge seal kills made by the bears, that they would find land to the west.39 They would have noted driftwood floating eastward in the sea current; perhaps the search for a wood source was itself a motivation to find the land to the west. Because of a polar atmospheric condition that produces a visual effect known as an Arctic mirage, hunters following the Canadian seals toward the Grand Banks could have seen the mountains of Newfoundland from 400 kilometers away. This phenomenon—also called superior mirage, Fata Morgana mirage, looming, or hillingar in Icelandic—is caused by a temperature inversion: when cold air is under warm air, light from distant objects is refracted in a downward arc, making it possible to see things that are far beyond the horizon.40 In their experiences navigating along the Celtic shelf, Solutrean sailors would have become well aware of looming and had probably spotted Iceland, with its plumes of volcanic ash, Greenland’s high ice cap, and Labrador’s tallest mountain.
Once the westward passage was keyed to the mountains looming in the horizon, Solutrean explorers likely made a beeline toward land, knowing that ice of the year would soon be forming and that a winter camp on land would be a pleasant respite from living on the ice. Before arriving on the glaciated shores of Newfoundland they would have been diverted southwest along the ice edge until they encountered a chain of low islands connected by inland passages with lee bays. This island chain includes the Grand Banks, Sable Island, and Georges Bank, now submerged beneath the sea but then a safe haven for winter camping (figure 9.1). Here was a refuge uninhabited by other humans and with ice dynamics and seal populations that were familiar to these people, an ideal area to expand their range of exploitation.
During the following summers and years, hunters would explore these new lands, most likely following the seals back to Europe during their annual migration east along the ice margin. They would have encountered old friends and other people working the ice edge, whom they might have lured with tales of rich resources to join them in the New World. Those who explored northward would discover the unglaciated Torngat Mountains and their treasure of Ramah chert. Southern expeditions would eventually make landfall on Georges Bank. Here were coveted stands of spruce trees, not to mention land animals, and the gateway to the interior lands of the New World.
Eventually the roller coaster climate once again plunged into deep freeze, forcing the polar front back south and covering much of the North Atlantic in a thick mantle of ice. In North America, seals and their predators alike were forced southward into refugia along the eastern continental coast. Now the new south became an economic windfall, and these Solutrean people were no longer trapped on a narrow strip of land wedged between Europe’s mountain glaciers and Arctic seas. Indeed, vast lands opened up to the west, rivers that needed exploring teemed with salmon, and other new terrestrial resources augmented their maritime larder. With these new resources and unclaimed territory, their population grew and continued to expand southward. By the end of the LGM the descendants of those early mariners were well established at least as far south as the Susquehanna and Notaway Rivers of the mid-Atlantic region.
Around 14,500 years ago global warming terminated the LGM, dramatically reducing glaciers and shifting the polar front northward. Worldwide, continental shelves were rapidly inundated with seawater, beginning sequences of local coastal environmental changes. In eastern North America the seawaters that breached the wide, flat continental shelf created vast tidal marshes along the coast. Rivers that cut wide valleys during the LGM filled beyond their capacity, creating estuaries, and some eventually became bays, like the Chesapeake. Early mid-Atlantic people, the descendants of the Solutrean hunters, witnessed dramatic changes to their environment and retreated upstream from the sea level rise. The Arctic sea mammals disappeared from the seascape, but they were replaced by other species. Mammoths and mastodon, horses and bison—animals whose images were long before painted on cave walls by Iberian ancestors replaced sea mammals and were once again the primary prey. Darts tipped with detachable foreshafts and end blades were found to be as lethal to terrestrial animals as they were to sea mammals (figure 7.5).
The evidence from La Riera Cave supports the general outline of this model (see chapter 8). The formation of landfast ice likely began during the onset of the cold, dry climatic phase recorded in levels 4, 5, and 6. That climate, which presumably displaced people toward northern Spain, was also responsible for the establishment of sea mammal rookeries in the Bay of Biscay. This convergence acted as a balance, and the local people’s exploitation of new economic opportunities seems to have allowed for population expansion with minimal stress or hostilities. The nutrition gained from fatty oils and other nutrients derived from sea mammal consumption not only significantly aided survival during the coldest phases of the LGM but also ensured the reproductive success of the Solutrean people living in northern Spain.
La Riera’s level 7 registers a clear shift in economic and residential strategies. Although there are plenty of possible explanations for the change, we suggest that the underlying cause was the onset of an LGM warming phase that rendered the annual landfast ice unpredictable. By level 8 there were marked changes in tool kits and site functions from those of levels 4–6. In fact, the previous occupants may have abandoned the area, since several new point styles were introduced into the cave debris. The change of use of La Riera Cave may well signal that some of its former occupants elected to follow the ice northward along the Aquitaine coast. The replacement population keyed in on the red deer as their primary food source.