Velda and Tara both lived at roughly the same time, seventeen thousand years ago, in the depths of the last Ice Age. They may even have been exact contemporaries; but they certainly never met and their lives were very different. Velda lived in Spain, while Tara’s homeland was the hills of Tuscany in north-west Italy. Velda, and Helena before her, were relatively well off. They both lived in a world where the predictable seasonal migrations of the large tundra animals brought fresh meat almost to the doorstep. This abundance led to a relative affluence, and the human population increased. At the annual gatherings of the reindeer hunters there were frequent interactions and exchanges between bands, and a flourishing artistic culture grew up. Beautifully carved ornaments and lucky charms were made from all sorts of raw materials – wood, ivory, shells and bone. Hundreds of caves were decorated with the brilliant and haunting images of wild animals.
Tara’s world was much less prosperous although, ironically, it was warmer. The higher temperatures meant that the landscape, other than the highest hills, was heavily wooded. The tundra animals were not there. Instead, the forests were home to red deer and wild boar. These were hard and sometimes dangerous to hunt. Though the woods provided plenty of scope for foraging, the absence of a predictable supply of big game meant that the land could support far fewer people than Velda’s Cantabria or Helena’s Dordogne. This relative poverty had stifled the growth in artistic expression and the patterns of social exchange. Bands were more self-contained, about twenty strong, and had to work much harder for their food. They were always on the move as they exhausted the meagre harvest of the woods. This was Tara’s life.
Her own mother had died when she was ten and her brother only six. They were cared for by their mother’s sister, and shared in the daily routine of foraging in the woods. Their father still brought in what he could – a wild piglet, a pine marten, a small roe deer, or, if he was very lucky, a red deer. Killing a red deer was a cause for celebration throughout the camp, and everyone had a share of the meat around the fire. Tara had kept her mother’s flute and played a lively tune on these rare but joyful occasions. Her father had made it years ago from the wing-bone of a swan by drilling holes along one edge, one to blow across and three for the fingers to change the notes. The range was limited and the sound rather breathy, but it added to the atmosphere around the camp fire as they sang and danced late into the night. Next day everybody slept late. For once, the daily grind could wait.
As summer passed into autumn, they made their way slowly down to the lower ground, along the valley of the Arno and downstream to the coast. This was twenty miles further than the same journey today because of the lower sea levels. Out of sight, beyond the horizon, the uninhabited islands of Corsica and Sardinia were joined to each other by dry land. Tara enjoyed the sea and walked for miles along the broad sandy beaches, picking up driftwood and anything else that caught her eye that might be of some use. She loved collecting seashells and always brought handfuls back to the camp every night. She would gouge holes in them with a sharp stone and thread them into a long necklace with seaweed or strands of marram grass, knotted together. They didn’t last long as ornaments because the thread soon broke, but that wasn’t the point – and it gave her a good excuse to go down to the shore again to collect more shells.
One day on her walks along the shore she saw in the distance a large grey shape lying just above the waterline. As she got nearer she could see it was the carcass of a beached dolphin, its jaw open wide showing its sharp and regular teeth. It had definitely not been there the day before, and was quite fresh. Seagulls were already on the scene, pecking at the eyes but making no impression on its thick skin. Even though she had never seen a dolphin before, Tara knew at once that this was food and ran back to tell the others. Everyone stopped what they were doing, gathered up their knives and headed up the beach. The young men, women and children ran as fast as they could, the middle-aged walked, and those over thirty-five stayed behind, remembering what it was like to be young.
As they rounded the headland to the bay where Tara had seen the carcass they stopped in their tracks. There were other humans already there. They had started to cut into the skin. They looked up when they saw Tara’s band in the distance and stopped what they were doing. This could turn nasty. There were only five of them – two men, a woman and two children – against ten from Tara’s band. If it came to a fight, they would lose. A dolphin carcass was a valuable prize, but not worth dying for. There were strict conventions, universally understood, that a hunter always kept what he killed. Likewise, a carcass belonged to the band that found it. Normally Tara’s band would have turned back at this point, acknowledging that they were not the first to arrive. But Tara was the one who had found the dolphin.
Tara did not know the rules, but she sensed that she might be forced to abandon her prize and began running towards the group who were threatening to deprive her of it. Her father shouted at her to stop, but she kept going. Dropping everything except a short spear, he rushed after her. The others followed. The three adults by the carcass stood their ground. Tara had always been a fast runner and her father, fit though he was, was gaining on her only slowly. She was only three hundred yards away from the carcass. Two hundred yards. One hundred. The group by the water raised their spears. Fifty yards. With a final burst of speed, Tara’s father grabbed her by the shoulder and brought her down in a bundle on the soft sand. Immediately he was up again and shielding Tara. He faced the spears of the two men who had rushed forward. He was still a long way in front of the support team and in great danger. They were only feet away when he recognized the face of the tall fair one on the left. It was his sister’s man. He called out his name. The others stopped in their tracks. An enormous grin spread across the face of the fair one. He dropped his spear and rushed up to Tara’s father and embraced him. The relief shone through on everyone’s face as the adrenaline ebbed away. The others caught up. Tara spluttered out how she was the one that found the dolphin and pointed by way of proof to a set of footprints in the sand that led back in the direction of her camp. But the men had already agreed to share the spoils. There was enough for everyone, and anyway they had to work fast. The tide was coming in.
Tara’s aunt arrived with the other members of her band and the process of stripping the carcass began. Every so often they had to haul the carcass further up the beach as the incoming tide threatened to take it back out to sea. Relays of children carried the butchered meat to a safe place in the dunes above the high-water mark. By the time they had finished, the great orange sun was setting over the sea. It was a still night and they all decided to camp where they were and share a meal on the beach. There was soon enough driftwood to start a fire, and a spit was hastily assembled to rotate the chunks of dark red meat. Their faces illuminated by the soft glow of the fire, the members of both bands renewed acquaintances. Tara was too young to remember her aunt, and her father had not seen his sister for several years since she left the band. Now he sat down with her and told her of the tragic death of Tara’s mother two years before and how much he missed her. Why not bring Tara and her brother and join our band for a while? his sister suggested.
That is how Tara moved with her brother from one band to another who hunted further up the coast. Four years later she was pregnant and the first of her two daughters was born. As soon as the baby appeared it was obvious she had inherited her father’s flame-red hair. By the time she was a year old it was also obvious that she had inherited Tara’s independent streak. She refused to listen to any instructions and was always putting pebbles and even sharp flints into her mouth. Tara was a diligent mother and a welcome new member of the band. She had a good man and the hard life was as enjoyable as it could be.
She looked forward to the winters spent down by the sea. She was always the first to volunteer for beachcombing and, with her daughter on her back, she would walk along the shore for miles, day after day. She knew every rock, every stone, every patch of sand, and spotted at once if the sea had cast up anything new. She liked the wild weather best, with the spray blowing off the waves driven inland by the fierce west wind. After these storms, which could last for days, was the best time for beachcombing. She was out at first light, eager to discover what new treasure the sea had flung on to the land. After one particularly vicious storm, and with the wind and rain still blowing in her face, she came across a long tree-trunk, bleached by its time at sea and thrown up on the highest point of the beach. It had obviously been in the water for a long time, because barnacles had attached themselves to the wood – but only on one side, which seemed odd.
The next day she came back with her father. Even though it was a large trunk, about three metres long and half a metre across, they could move it a little if they both put their backs into it. What made it so light? One side, the side with the barnacles, was hard and polished by the waves. The other side was pock-marked and soft. Tara dug into this with a flint. It came away easily. They carried on scraping out the soft parts, which must originally have been diseased, until they had hollowed out the whole log. This was still heavy but, with a few friends who had joined them, they could carry it quite easily. And, of course, the first thing they did was to launch it into the sea and start throwing stones at it. The water was calm by now and the log floated easily on the smooth surface. But it always floated the same way up, with the opening above the surface and the barnacles underneath. This was very curious, but it did mean there was an added dimension to the game: one point if you hit the log, but two points if you landed a stone inside it.
After a while everyone got bored with this game and began to go home. For no particular reason, Tara and her daughter stayed behind. They were at the edge of the bay where it ended in a low rocky outcrop. The log drifted along the shore until it came to rest against the rocks. Tara and her daughter followed it, sat down and idly threw some more stones at it, many of which landed inside because it was now so close. The log was still floating but there were at least twenty stones inside it. Tara then wondered what would happen if she put a much larger rock into the log. She picked up a big grey stone and carefully placed it in the opening. Surely this would sink it. But it didn’t. In fact it seemed to stabilize the log even more.
She had a flash of inspiration. She called her daughter over and lifted her into the log. It settled lower in the water but it still didn’t sink. She pulled the log right up to the side of the rocks and stepped in herself. They were floating. She pushed off from the rock and the boat, for that is what it had become, slid slowly across the clear water. She knelt down and paddled instinctively with her hands. The boat slowed and began to change direction. This was fantastic. Over the side she could see the white patches of sand and the dark rocks of the sea bed. She had to be careful not to overbalance the boat and sensed when it was beginning to roll. After twenty minutes she realized she had been carried along by the current into the next bay. With a few movements of her hands she drifted on to the sandy shore and leaped free, pulled the boat up on to dry land and lifted her daughter off.
Fortunately, the weather was still calm the next day, and the boat was still on the beach when she returned with the rest of the band. The children played in it, the men raced in it. Someone produced a flat piece of driftwood and used it as a paddle. At the end of the day Tara and her man paddled the boat down the shore to the camp and pulled it to safety above the tide line. Other bands came that winter to admire the new plaything. It had no obvious immediate use other than for fun. Only later was it used to reach offshore islands and cruise the shallow waters of the river estuaries on the lookout for flatfish and eels. In the late spring they hauled it high up on to the beach and left it as they headed inland for the summer hunting on the higher ground. That autumn, Tara’s second daughter was born: not red-haired like her father, but with her mother’s straight dark brown hair. But like them both she had bright blue eyes, quite unusual in the band, whose eyes were more commonly a light hazel brown.
The boat was still there when they returned in the early winter, still seaworthy but a little decayed. The men began to make new ones from freshly fallen timber. It was hard work; most of the trees were either too rotten, which was why they had fallen down, or too tough if they had been blown down in a storm. The next spring Tara, who so loved the sea, suggested to the band that instead of going into the hills, they should stay down by the shore, build some more boats and use them for fishing in the shallow waters and creeks around the coast. Two more families agreed to give it a try, and they spent the whole year moving up and down the coast in the new craft. The men hunted deer and wild pig in the marshes, and the women and children picked limpets and winkles from the rocks at low tide. When the hunting deteriorated in one place, they moved easily along the coast to another. They discovered offshore islands with rocks covered in steel-blue mussels. Seals also visited these islands to haul out or to breed. They made easy prey for the hunters, who could drift up slowly without disturbing them, then clamber ashore and club their victims before they could slip into the water. This maritime life suited Tara. They did not depend on the sea, because they could always head for the woods and the hills; but they were making a living from it, and it made a change from grubbing around on the forest floor. And it felt safer too.
Tara had one more child, a boy. All three were healthy and lived long enough to have their own children. Tara saw her first three grandchildren, all girls, before she died one winter close to the beach where she had found the dolphin all those years ago. She was buried in a grave dug into the sand dunes. Her face was reddened with ochre, as if bringing colour to her cheeks would somehow revive her. Around her neck were placed a dozen strands threaded with hundreds of pierced seashells. She lies there now, twenty miles off the coast of Livorno, under the blue Mediterranean, while a hundred metres above her descendants glide to and fro on their own updated versions of her hollowed-out log.
Today just over 9 per cent of native Europeans are in the clan of Tara, living along the Mediterranean and the western edge of Europe, though they are not restricted to these regions. They are particularly numerous in the west of Britain and in Ireland.