‘They Were Us’ : Ice Age Cro-Magnon Man Finally Gets Some Respect

They lived in an ice world, surrounded by woolly beasts and a profusion of plants that sprang to life only in the brief days of a cold summer.

Their homes were made of bones and hides, their clothes of animal skins, and they got most of their food by hunting with wooden spears and gathering berries.

But from this hostile environment, Ice Age man created the elements that would later define the greatest civilizations. They had art and music, language, God, grief, adornment, culinary skills, abstract ideas and a rather wicked sense of humor.

“Yes, I think they have gained more respectability,” anthropologist Randall White said of the Cro-Magnon people popularly known as cavemen. “There still is a problem in the popular imagination of a stooping, brutish lout with a club.

“Really, they were us,” he said. “They looked like us, thought like us. The only difference is that they lived in an environment that most people couldn’t live in for more than a few days.

“And they created culture; we’ve just improved on it.”

Natural History Exhibit

Ice Age people are the subject of a new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York that opened in last month.

White was one of the curators who drew together Ice Age art objects and tools from around the world in an effort that has given anthropologists a chance to take a new look at a very old subject.

“There was always too much emphasis on finding the earliest thing that walked on two legs,” said White, a professor of anthropology at New York University. “We don’t know anything more about why we are the way we are than we did 20 years ago. This is a chance to look at what we have, what we began as.”

Our earliest ancestors made the first tools about 2 million years ago. The civilization of Ice Age people lived on the European continent 30,000 to 10,000 years ago.

In between, about 1.5 million years ago, Earth underwent a dramatic climatic cooling known as the Ice Age. There have been several periods of intense glaciation in the Northern Hemisphere during the last 1.5 million years, with warmer periods in between. The current warm period began when the last major glaciers receded from Europe 12,000 years ago.

The earlier part of the Ice Age belonged to the Neanderthals, a robust and thicker-boned people than Cro-Magnons and modern humans. Although considered very human-like, recent theories suggest that their gestation period lasted 12 to 13 months, and some anthropologists say their similarity to modern humans has been overstated.

What strikes anthropologists most about Neanderthals, they say, is their total lack of mental advancement over the thousands of years of their existence. Tools made 40,000 years ago are identical to tools made 60,000 years ago. The objects left behind for us to study do not bear even the semblance of markings, and their hearths appear to have been simple and bare.

End Was Sudden

By evolutionary standards, their end was sudden. Anthropologists still debate whether the Neanderthals were somehow wiped out by modern man or died of some unknown catastrophe. But by 32,000 years ago they seem to have disappeared completely, or at least, archeologists say they have not been able to find evidence of them existing after that date.

“It’s a time line you learn in school,” White said. “But it says nothing about a people, a civilization. We have a time line now. It’s time to look at the people who are made up of it.”

At the recent opening of the American Museum of Natural History exhibit, professional musician Jelle Atema of Woods Hole, Mass., held a replica of the first known wind instrument, which scientists believe was made 30,000 years ago.

Notes From Flute

It was a flute--four holes bored into a hollow bone with a broken mouthpiece on one end. Atema blew sharp, shrill notes that were loud and clear.

“It has the range of a soprano, about one and a half octaves,” he said appreciatively. “It’s really more like a recorder. It’s high-pitched but it has a very pure sound.”

Atema, who also works as a marine biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, sat back on a railing surrounding the replica of an ancient dwelling and thought about the person who made the world’s first known instrument.

“What possessed them, I don’t know,” he said. “No other animal has musical instruments, other than perhaps their voices. It must be some need that humans alone have to make sound and rhythm to make music.

“When you think of all that’s come from this,” he said lifting the small replica, “then you really have to be impressed. They took some sort of leap that is really extraordinary.”

On the surface, it would seem that late Ice Age man in Europe would have had little time to make music--or paint on walls.

Hemmed in by towering sheets of ice, their climate was cold and dry during the millennium when glaciers advanced. The ground was probably covered by snow most of the year.

The landscape of much of Europe at the time is believed to have been that of grasslands with a few trees. But mountains and river valleys probably held an abundance of plant life. The plants supported an ancient zoo of animals--woolly mammoths, reindeer, bison and stocky horses coexisted with modern humans.

“It was a thinking-man’s environment,” White said. “They had to contend with more than we do today.”

The centerpiece of the museum’s exhibit is a 16-ton bone dwelling, the remains of which were found in the Ukraine on the banks of the Dnepr River in 1976. The round igloo-shaped hut was formed by arranging the thigh and jaw bones of mammoths in a herringbone design and was probably plugged with mud and grass.

Archeologists estimate that it is 15,000 years old.

“On a day-to-day basis they probably got up in the morning, sometimes in a camp and sometimes in a cave, and went to work,” White said. “They were nomads, but not in the sense (that) they were wandering aimlessly. They knew where they were going to be next season and next week. Periodically, we know, they met with other tribes, or what have you, for massive get-togethers.”

Contrary to the modern perception of cavemen wearing loose skins tied at a knot at the shoulder, late Ice Age people probably wore tailored clothes. Anthropologists know this because they have found bone needles as fine as any made today and drawings on rocks and cave walls depict people wearing what look like jackets with hoods.

Elaborate Beadwork

The clothes they wore to their graves did not survive the centuries, but the elaborate bone and shell beadwork that was sewn into them have.

“They decorated themselves,” White said. “We have depictions of women that show they had coiffeurs--hair styles. Nothing elaborate, but they groomed. We have depictions of men both bearded and not bearded. They were shaving.”

They were cooking too.

Archeologists have dug through garbage pits and come up with the remains of many dinners. Most of the time Ice Age man ate reindeer and, since the bones are charred, their meals were probably cooked. Small earthen clay pits filled with burnt rocks prompted scientists to theorize that they boiled water by throwing in heated stones.

“Perhaps they were making a soup; we just don’t know,” White said.

Their garbage has yielded seeds of ancient raspberries and strawberries. Archeologists know they gathered nuts because they have found piles of the shells.

‘Few Tooth Cavities’

“They were a big, healthy, people,” White said. “They were as tall as we are today, and we’ve found the remains of men in their 60s. We’ve found evidence of very, very few tooth cavities.”

But anthropologists know little of Ice Age man’s social life. Theories brought forward in the 1950s had cavewomen at home rearing the young while their mates stalked game on the tundra. But many anthropologists have since dismissed the picture of the early nuclear family as a by-product of the era in which it was conceived.

The graves of more men than women have been uncovered, but those women who were buried received the same decorations, honors and gifts as those of the men. The most elaborate graves were those of children.

“They grieved,” White said. “They also had a sense of humor. There is a bas-relief here of a bison behind the bent-over figure of a man who is about to get it in the rear end.

“They were happy, sad; they were industrious, lazy,” he said. “They were us. But they were the first to have complex notions, to think, to reason.

“People believe God made Earth,” he said. “People created God 30,000 years ago. Their art, probably their music, was symbolic. They were dealing with forces they couldn’t see but they could perceive.”

Much of man’s earliest art consists of drawings of hunted animals and figurines of pregnant women. Most anthropologists, like White, believe the art had a purpose.

“They didn’t do this in their free time because they had nothing better to do,” White said. “This was an important part of their lives.”

The drawings made on rock thousands of years ago are faded and the etchings into bone and wood almost obliterated. But, if stared at long enough, ghostly figures emerge of fat bison and men with spears playing out a hunt long since ended.

Abstract scratches on bone and stone implements appear so frequently that some anthropologists believe they are the hieroglyphics of an early, complex language.

And the fat, voluptuous figurines, often called Venuses, are the center of a raging debate as to their significance as fertility figures.

Anthropologists say they probably will never know the stories behind these representations. They only know that about 30,000 years ago man had a need to draw out life on rock.

“If I could wish anything, I would wish I was in the mind of that man who drew that bison about to give it to the guy in the rear end,” White said. “What in the world was he thinking?

“We’ll never really know what they were thinking, only what came of it.”