Anthropology

by A. L. Kroeber

215. Upper Palæolithic Culture Growths and Races

With the advent of the Upper Palæolithic, possibly some 25,000 years ago, the divergent culture-areas of the early Lower Palæolithic which had become largely effaced during the Mousterian, emerge again; but with shifted boundaries. The line of demarcation now is no longer formed by the Rhine and the Alps, but by the Pyrenees. Throughout the Upper Palæolithic, most of Spain formed an annex to the North African province, whose culture has been named the Capsian after the type station of Gafsa in Algiers. The Aurignacian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian as they have been previously described (§ [72-81]) ran their course in a middle European belt stretching from France to Poland (Figs. [38], [39]). Northern Spain, southern England, at times Italy and southern Russia, were more or less in this mid-European province. The Balkans remain insufficiently explored; all northernmost Europe was still uninhabited. In general, it may be said that the mid-European Upper Palæolithic culture is characterized by the associated traits of work in bone and art; the contemporary Spanish-African Capsian by specialization along the line of increasingly smaller and finer flint implements, culminating in neat microliths measurable only in fractions of inches.

Fig. 38. Aurignacian culture-areas (about 25,000-18,000 B.C.). 1, West-central European Aurignacian, with art. 2, Italian Aurignacian. 3, Lower Capsian of North Africa and Spain. 4, Lower Capsian of Syria. 5, South Russia, perhaps post-Aurignacian. (Mainly after Obermayer.)

The southern equivalent of the mid-European Aurignacian was the Lower Capsian, of at least equal territorial extent even in its narrowest form ([Fig. 38]). The industry of Syria at this period was allied to the Capsian of Africa and may be regarded as related to it. The rather scant remains of the age in Italy are perhaps also to be allied with the Capsian culture rather than with the true Aurignacian. This makes it look as if at this time a great Lower Capsian culture-area embraced nearly all the shores of the Mediterranean. As against this, the mid-European true Aurignacian, so far as now known, covered only a narrow region.

During the Solutrean and Magdalenian, Africa and Spain were in the Upper Capsian. Evidence from the eastern Mediterranean begins to fail. Italy is wholly without discovered remains. There are indications (§ [240]) that at least by the beginning of the Magdalenian in Europe, the favored land of Egypt had already entered into the Neolithic. If this is so, westernmost Asia, Greece, and even Italy may have begun to be affected by this higher phase of culture, and the paucity or absence of their late Palæolithic remains would be accounted for. This view seems reasonable, but is unproved.

The Solutrean seems to have been a brief period in western Europe, and its extent appears limited also ([Fig. 39]). It reveals two principal areas: one north of the Danube, the other in southern France. The former may have been the earlier, from which the culture, or certain phases of it, such as the art of even surface retouch on leaf-shaped blades, were carried westward into France. In this connection two facts may be significant.

First is the circumstance that the north Danubian Solutrean area possessed an art, apparently largely of Solutrean age, which is quite different from the Upper Palæolithic art of the west. Naturalism was scarcely attempted, figures were highly conventional, the style was one of concentric curves or stippling or hatching.

Fig. 39. Solutrean and Magdalenian culture-areas (about 18,000-10,000 B.C.) S, areas of pronounced Solutrean industry. 1 (vertical shading), Magdalenian culture. 2A, 2B, Upper Capsian, western and eastern provinces, contemporaneous with Solutrean and Magdalenian. (Based on Obermayer.)

The second consideration is the Brünn race. This type, which as yet is known only from a few examples (§ [17]), is generally considered Neandertaloid, but also shows leanings toward the Cro-Magnon race as well as differences from it. The less dubious Brünn remains, those from Brünn, Brüx, and perhaps Predmost, are all from Czecho-Slovakia, that is, the north Danubian region; and they seem to be of Solutrean age. These facts render it likely that there existed a connection between the east Solutrean culture, the geometric art, and the Brünn race, and they indicate at least some probability of the spread of Solutrean culture from eastern to western Europe. Brünn man may have been a modified Neandertal man who persisted in the east after Cro-Magnon man had become established in the west during the Aurignacian. Or he may have been a local eastern variant of a generic type whose better known western form we call Cro-Magnon man.

As to Grimaldi man, his Negroid affiliations also seem less startling once it is clear that the Aurignacian civilization was a mid-European phenomenon, and that contemporary Spain and probably Italy formed part of the essentially African development of the Lower Capsian. With southern Europe a cultural annex of north Africa at this period, the presence there of a Negroid type is reasonable enough. Further, both the strait of Gibraltar and that between Tunis and Sicily were land bridges during part of the Pleistocene; Gibraltar, for instance, probably during the Lower Capsian and, again, after a subsidence, in the Upper Capsian. The Mediterranean, in other words, must be conceived not as a great barring sea, but as a land-locked lake or pair of lakes, so that Europe and Africa were joined geographically as well as racially and culturally.

As to the Cro-Magnon race, its association with the Aurignacian-Magdalenian culture of mid-European type is clear enough, but its origin remains problematical. One naturally looks eastward: to the north lay ice, to the west the Atlantic, to the south a different even though related culture. But nothing is really known; no ancestral Asiatic form, no closely cognate later race, no eastern culture out of which the Aurignacian might have sprung nor to which it might have been specifically related. All or some of these may have existed, but in the absence of discovery, speculation is of little profit. There is the further difficulty about a theory that brings Cro-Magnon man out of the east into the west of Europe, that a little later, in the Solutrean, central Europe, through which he presumably passed, seems to have been in possession of the Brünn race. True, this might have been a later wave out of the east; but to derive both races out of Asia, and perhaps the preceding Neandertal type also, is a bit monotonous as a hypothesis, besides being one of those assumptions that seem to answer problems without really helping their understanding.

Much the same may be said as to the fate of Neandertal man—whether he was exterminated by the Cro-Magnons, or absorbed, or was driven away, or died out. A single discovery on this point will be worth more than the most elaborate conjecture.

Two points seem clear, whatever may have been the diffusions of race and culture at the time that the Lower Palæolithic was being replaced by the Upper. On the side of flint industry, there was no break: the Aurignacian is the continuation of the Mousterian. The experts occasionally have difficulty in agreeing whether a station or level is to be assigned to the late Mousterian or early Aurignacian. Whatever, therefore, was imported in the Upper Palæolithic was joined to something that remained over and continued in middle Europe from the Lower Palæolithic. Secondly, the center of known naturalistic art development was the west, southern France especially; perceptibly in the Aurignacian, notably in the Magdalenian. Yet this tract is peripheral to the Aurignacian-Magdalenian culture as a whole. It would thus be a forced explanation to look upon this art as the outright result of a diffusion or migration: the supposed recipients of the accomplishment would be carrying it farther than its originators. In other words, Upper Palæolithic art was in the main a growth on the soil of western Europe, so far as present evidence indicates. These findings diminish the probability of any large scale importation of Upper Palæolithic culture ready made as a by-product of the irruption of a new race. The change from Lower to Upper Palæolithic was indeed profoundly significant. But much of it may have been consummated by a gradual evolution within western and central Europe.

It is worth observing that the Lower Palæolithic of Europe with all its fundamental unity of culture stretched through different climates. The Chellean was at least in part sub-tropical, the Acheulean a time of cooling steppe climate, the Mousterian the period of maximum glaciation. The Upper Palæolithic again has its transition from the close of the Würm glaciation to the present temperature of Europe broken by three temporary advances of the ice, known as they occurred in the Alps as the Bühl, Gschnitz, and Daun phases. The following correlation of climatic and cultural periods has been suggested: Aurignacian, close of the last glacial and beginning of the post-glacial; Solutrean, first maximum of ice recession (Achenschwankung); Magdalenian, Bühl advance, second recession, and Gschnitz advance, corresponding respectively to the early, middle, and late stages of the period. To these might be added that the Azilian came at about the third recession and brief final Daun advance; the Neolithic, with the final recession of ice and appearance of modern conditions. It is clear that climatic circumstances were not the chief determining factor in the cultural development of early Europe. Had they been such, the Chellean would have differed culturally more from the Mousterian than this from the Aurignacian.

Southern Europe and North Africa were not glaciated in the Pleistocene. Heavier rainfall, perhaps accompanied by forestation, are likely to have taken the place of the ice, whereas a change from forest to steppe, or steppe to desert, corresponded to the recession of the ice in Alpine and northern Europe. For more distant regions, such as India and south Africa, the climatic correlations with Europe become dubious; which is one of the reasons why as yet no sure linking in time can be effected between their Palæolithic culture and that of Europe.