Gravettian Life

Will return to Santa Cruz between 1714 and 1732 on Sunday. Now, back to life in early Spain and in areas that preceded the Clovis culture.

Settlements dotted the land between the Danube and the northern foothills from just west of Vienna east to the river’s confluence with the Morava during the Gravettian era.

Bohuslav Klíma originally thought the archaeological site at Pavlov represented one large village with 13 huts. At Dolní Vìstonice he believed five or six huts were used at one time, and that each held 20 to 25 people. The area was enclosed by low walls of mammoth bones.

Since then, carbon dating has shown that there were multiple occupations of the areas, with long periods when bands, and probably mammoths, were elsewhere. Some of the huts served special functions. Four at Pavlov looked like they once were workshops with remnants of stone knapping. Two at Dolní Vìstonice were kilns. Another was open to the sky.

Settlements themselves seem to have served different functions. Many on the south side of the Danube-Baltic watershed may have been winter camps. The recently excavated Dolní Vìstonice VI had a central hearth surrounded by large pits where at least two mammoths were processed. The artifacts found at Pavlov I and Dolní Vìstonice suggest they were centers of communal activities.

If you look carefully at the list of dates below you notice the recurrent stops began around 26,650 years ago and continued to about 25,530 years ago. That was the millennium before the Scandinavian and Alpine glaciers began expanding. One guesses woolly mammoths were already responding to climatic change when they wintered in the Danube valley. There bands using Gravettian technology made the difficult change to become mobile hunters.

In addition to developing shelters in open fields, they were clothed. None of the Moravian burials preserved clothing, only beads, pierced teeth, and shells. From their positions on or near the body, some have been interpreted to be the remains of trim on caps at sites in Russia and Italy. Caps or hoods are one of those things we take for granted that are universal in cold climates.

The burials themselves also showed adaptations to an open environment. A woman in her 40s was found under two shoulder bones from mammoths at Dolní Vìstonice I, while an infant at DV III also was protected by shoulder blades. Three adolescents had been covered with spruce logs and branches at Dolní Vìstonice II.

In each case, the body had been covered with red ochre, and animals remains were left with each. Bones of an arctic fox were found near the left hand of the woman; the right hand still held ten fox canine teeth. The infant had the remains of a necklace of 27 fox teeth. The heads of the two young men were surrounded by pierced canines from arctic foxes and grey wolves, along with ivory beads from mammoth tusks.

Archaeologists assumed the buried individuals had some special status. The woman had signs of a disfigured face. The three adolescents were probably related because they shared rare genetic traits: no frontal sinuses, impacted upper wisdom teeth, and bony spurs in their ears. In addition, the girl laying between the two boys had a shortened, curved thigh, which would have made walking difficult. She also had shortened forearm bones.

As important as their physical attributes were the symbolic grave goods that reflected the same notions as the clay figurines. Next to the woman were some flint flakes and an ivory statue bearing an echo of her facial disfigurement. Most statuettes, like the one found at Willendorf, were generic females with exaggerated breasts, bellies or buttocks.

In addition to clay models, artisans also made images of bears, foxes, and cave lions at Dolní Vìstonice. At Pavlov they created bears and woolly rhinoceroses. Jean Clottes said that of the total 67 statuettes so far identified, 21 were bears, 11 were small carnivores, 9 were felines of some kind, 8 were mammoths, and 4 were rhinoceroses.

Like the statuettes of women mentioned in the last post, most had been fired while they were still wet and shattered. Archaeologists assumes that since they had mastered kiln making and mixed powdered bone with the clay, the fractures were deliberate.

With the exception of foxes, none of the reproduced animals were hunted or used by Gravettians. However, bones of lions and rhinoceros have been found at both Dolní Vìstonice and Pavlov in numbers that suggest they were neither rare nor common. Jirí Svoboda thought some were killed because the attacked the site or tried to raid the supplies. Some of species also would have competed with humans for rights to weakened or young mammoths.

Site	Date C14 yrs ago	Years Between	20 Year Genera- tions	Notes on Timing
DV I	27,790
DV II hearth	27,660	130	6.5
DV II hearth	27,080	580	29
DV II hearth	27,070	10	0.5
DV II hearth	26,970	100	5
DV II hearth	26,920	50	2.5
Pavlov I	26,730	190	9.5
				Gap of 80 years
Pavlov I	26,650	80	4
DV II burial	26,640	10	0.5	5 generations in 100 years
Pavlov I	26,620	20	1
Pavlov I	26,580	40	2
DV II hearth	26,550	30	1.5
				Gap of 120 years
DV I hearth	26,430	120	6
Pavlov I	26,400	30	1.5	2 generations in 10 years
DV II	26,390	10	0.5
				Gap of 200 years
DV IIa	26,190	200	10
Pavlov I	26,170	20	1	2 generations in 30 years
DV III	26,160	10	0.5
DV II	26,100	60	3
				Gap of 160 years
Pavlov I	26,000	100	5
DV I	25,950	50	2.5	2.5 generations in 50 years
				Gap of 60 years
DV IIa	25,890	60	3
DV IIa	25,870	20	1	7.5 generations in 150 years
Pavlov I	25,840	30	1.5
DV I middle	25,820	20	1
DV I	25,790	30	1.5
DV II hearth	25,740	50	2.5
				Gap of 170 years
DV II burial	25,570	170	8.5
Pavlov I	25,530	40	2	2 generations in 40 years
Pavlov I	25,160	370	18.5
Pavlov I	25,020	140	7
DV III hearth	24,560	460	23
DV I	22,840	1720	86

Dates from Don Hitchcock from material provided by Jirí Svoboda
DV = Dolní Vìstonice

Notes:
Clottes, Jean. "Art between 30,000 and 20,000 bp," in Wil Roebroeks, Margherita Mussi, Jiøí Svodoba and Kelly Fennema, Hunters of the Golden Age, 1999; the other animal statues were 6 birds, 6 horses, 1 caprid (ibex), and 1 deer.

Hitchcock, Don. "Dolní Vìstonice and Pavlov Sites," Don’s Maps website.

Jochim, Michael. "The Upper Paleolithic," in Sarunas Milisauskas, European Prehistory, 2011 second edition.

Soffer, O., J. M. Adovasio, and D. C. Hyland. "The ‘Venus’ Figurines: Textiles, Basketry, Gender, and Status in the Upper Paleolithic," Current Anthropology 41:511-537:2000.

_____, _____, _____, B. Klíma, and J. Svoboda. " Perishable Industries from Dolní Vìstonice I: New Insights into the Nature and Origin of the Gravettian," Society for American Archaeology, annual meeting, 1998.

Svoboda, Jirí. "The Pavlov Site, Czech Republic: Lithic Evidence from the Upper Paleolithic," Journal of Field Archaeology 21:69-81:1994.

_____. "The Gravettian on the Middle Danube," Paleo 19:203-220:2007.

_____, V. Formicola, and A. Pontrandolif. "The Upper Paleolithic Triple Burial of Dolní Vìstonice: Pathology and Funerary Behavior," American Journal of Physical Anthropology 115:372-374:2001.

Gravettian

Will return to Santa Cruz between 1714 and 1732 next Sunday. Now, back to life in early Spain and in areas that preceded the Clovis culture.

The Gravettian arose around 30,000 years ago when the climate supported pine and spruce on lands dominated by steppe vegetation. It lasted until the severe cold of the last glacial maximum which began about 22,000 years ago.

Along the Danube, groups at Willendorf, Dolní Vìstonice and Pavlov depended on mammoths. To their west and in Ukraine, bands relied on reindeer. On the Iberian and Italian peninsulas people ate red and roe deer. North of the Black Sea they hunted bison and horses.

On the map below, the Danube is traced in red. The Willendorf site is about 50 miles west in Austria. Dolní Vìstonice and Pavlov are a few miles apart on the Czech side of the Morava river that flows along the border between the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Archeologists found a female figure carved from limestone and stained with red ochre at Willendorf in 1908. In 1924, others found clay figurines of women at Dolní Vìstonice. Few had heads, arms or feet. Marianna Gvozdover noted the statuettes found to the east emphasized breasts and bellies. Those found in the south of France exaggerated thighs and hips. The ones from the Danube were less schematic.

The statuettes captured the popular imagination, but archaeologists saved all the clay remnants. Recently, Olga Soffer recognized patterns on some of the pieces that suggested basketry or cordage. They provided more detailed information about how people survived on open sites instead of in the caves and rock shelters used in Iberia.

At Pavlov, Bohuslav Klíma had uncovered a 33' x 20' swallow depression with the remains of burned posts. Inside, the hearth was surrounded by a wall of mammoth bones. Another depression in the area was surrounded by bones. It contained four hearths, with seven nearby. He postulated they had erected frames over the areas and covered them with hides. Soffer’s team found evidence of plant fibers in the dried clay that suggested they had daubed the interiors.

Some of the clay fragments from Dolní Vìstonice suggested plant materials had been plaited into mats. They speculated they could have been used on the floor where their weaves pressed into the clay. When the structure burned, the clay was fired for posterity.

Stoffer’s team also found evidence of cordage. Four pieces from Pavlov and two from Dolní Vìstonice had been knotted. That suggested they were making nets.

The bones found at Dolní Vìstonice came from woolly mammoth, horse, grey wolf, reindeer and arctic hare. At Pavlov there were reindeer, arctic hare, grey wolf, arctic fox and mammoth. Jirí Svoboda suspected there may have been more mammoths at Pavlov, but that erosion on one side of the site may have destroyed them.

Hares and foxes weren’t easy to kill with hand-held stone weapons. Their bones suggested cooperative, if not communal, hunts that allowed groups to come together and still have enough to eat. According to Miriam Nývltová-Fisáková, they also used many different bones from arctic foxes and grey wolves for tools. The ulna in the forelegs of red foxes and arctic hares were used for awls and barbs.

The long, narrow stone blades were part of the Pavlovian regional variant of the Gravettian. Svoboda believed their origins lay in the Levant around 40,000 years ago. Tsenka Tsanova found the technology had reached Kozarnika cave along the lower Danube in present-day Bulgaria between 39,000 and 33,000 years ago. Tool makers used large fragments of long bones to finish the edges.

What was remarkable about the blades wasn’t their form, but their raw material. The stones weren’t local. Svoboda discovered the flint and radiolarite used at Pavlov came from the other side of the watershed between the Baltic and the Danube. At Willendorf, Philip Nigst said they used local chert and brought flint from the far north.

Bands from Pavlov and Dolní Vìstonice no doubt followed mammoth trails, if not mammoths, from their Danube camps up the tributaries of the Morava river to its headwaters in the Carpathian mountains and then through the Moravian Gate to the plains on the other side. Today’s pass is at an altitude of 1,020 feet.

Notes:
Guadelli, Aleta, et alia. "The Retouchers from the Gravettian Levels in Kozarnika Cave," International Conference of Archaeozoology, Worked Bone Research Group, biennial meeting, 2011.

Gvozdover, M. D. "The Typology of Female Figurines of the Kostenki Paleolithic Culture," Soviet Anthropology and Archaeology 27:32-94:1989; cited by Soffer (2000).

Hitchcock, Don. "Dolní Vìstonice and Pavlov Sites," Don’s Maps website.

Jochim, Michael. "The Upper Paleolithic" in Sarunas Milisauskas, European Prehistory, 2011 second edition.

Klíma, Bohuslav. Work discussed by Svoboda (1994).

Musil, Rudolf. "Animal Prey," in Svoboda (2005); cited by Svoboda (2007).

Nigst, Philip R. "Willendorf II: Geography and Culture," in Claire Smith, Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, 2014.

Nývltová-Fisáková, M. "Animal Bones Selected for Tools and Decorations" in Svoboda (2005).

Soffer, O., J. M. Adovasio, and D. C. Hyland. "The ‘Venus’ Figurines: Textiles, Basketry, Gender, and Status in the Upper Paleolithic," Current Anthropology 41:511-537:2000.

_____, _____, _____, B. Klíma, and J. Svoboda. " Perishable Industries from Dolní Vìstonice I: New Insights into the Nature and Origin of the Gravettian," Society for American Archaeology, annual meeting, 1998.

_____, _____, and B. Klíma. "Upper Palaeolithic Fibre Technology: Interlaced Woven Finds from Pavlov I, Czech Republic, c. 26,000 Years Ago," Antiquity 70:526-534:1996.

Svoboda, Jirí. "The Pavlov Site, Czech Republic: Lithic Evidence from the Upper Paleolithic," Journal of Field Archaeology 21:69-81:1994.

_____. "Gravettian Mammoth Bone Deposits in Moravia," The World of Elephants International Congress, 2001; cited by Hitchcock.

_____. Pavlov I - Southeast. A Window into the Gravettian Lifestyles, 2005.

_____. "The Gravettian on the Middle Danube," Paleo 19:203-220:2007; included comments on origins in Levant and Bulgaria.

Tsanova T. Les Débuts du Paléolithique Supérieur dans l’st des Balkans, 2006; cited by Svoboda (2007).

Graphics: Geologik, "Flow of the Danube River," uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, 12 February 2007, based on map from United States, Central Intelligence Agency, World Factbook.

Mammoths

Will return to Santa Cruz between 1714 and 1732 in a few weeks. Now, back to life in early Spain.

The Miocene, which began 23 million years ago, was the last truly warm period before the onset of the great glaciers. The mastodon family split from the emerging elephant one in Africa some 22 million years ago. By 11 million years ago, the Mammut genus had crossed to North America. Mammoths separated from Asian and African elephants around 6 million years ago, just before the era ended 5.3 million years ago.

As northern temperatures cooled during the Pliocene, grass lands that had developed in the Miocene spread. The first of the mammoths migrated into Europe about 3 million years ago. It became the Mammuthus meridionalis found in the cave paintings of Spain and France north of the Pyrenees.

The European Mammoth was already in North America when the late Pleistocene developed 1.8 million years ago. The species evolved into the steppe mammoth of central Europe (Trogontherii) and the Columbian mammoth (Columbi) that ranged from the northern United States into central America. Woolly mammoths (Primigenius) came later, when the cold became more intense in the north.

Based on the habits of modern elephants and the sizes of mammoth skeletons, zoologists believe Columbian mammoths would have needed about 500 pounds of food a day and up to 40 gallons of water. They also would have dropped about 400 pounds of dung.

If the grass were anything like modern timothy, there could have been as much as 4,000 pounds of hay on an acre. That could have supported eight mammoths for one day, or a larger herd for part of a day. Every day, as they mowed grass tops they left fertilizer and conditioned seeds.

Mammoths didn’t begin as grass eaters. In the early years of the Pleistocene, 1.5 to 2.5 million years ago, the European mammoth browsed woodlands of oak, ash, beech, hemlock and wing nut hickory. Their molars had comparatively low crowns with 12 to 14 ridges to chew leaves, bark and fruit.

During glacial advances, which trapped water, the climate dried. Winds blew sand against mountains, and loosened more grains that spread into great dune fields near the mountains. When conditions warmed, water collected. The Danube waterway that ultimately flowed across the northwestern lowlands toward England began developing around 900,000 years ago.

Local mammoths adapted to the steppe tundra marked by the light pink band bordering the gray glaciers on the map Their molars had higher crowns with 18 to 20 ridges to withstand the grit embedded in the coarse grasses. It’s droppings no doubt added to the growing fertility of the Ukraine and adjacent Danubian plains.

The Great Plains east of the Rockies was temperate steppe grassland (peacock blue on the map). Columbian mammoths had a few more ridges, perhaps 20 to 22. A male mammoth found in southeastern Utah’s Manti La-Sal National Forest had remains of sedge, grass, fir twigs and needles, oak, and maple in his stomach. The dung left in Bechan Cave, also in southeastern Utah, was 95% grass and sedge, with sedge composing about a third of the fossils. The rest were birch, rose, saltbush, blue spruce, wolf berry, and red osier dogwood.

It was colder in the polar and alpine desert where woolly mammoths adapted with heavier coats and 26 ridges on their molars. Last year, Eske Willerslev’s team published an analysis of 50,000 years of vegetation preserved in permafrost. It showed the environment was dominated by flowering plants like northern plantain, which thrive when their seeds are trampled. It was only when grass and shrubs replaced the forbs around 12,000 years ago that woolly mammoths disappeared.

The last known Columbian mammoth died 12,850 years ago. The American mastadon, Mammut americanum, survived a little longer in the plum colored taiga in the eastern part of North America until 10,500 years ago.

Notes: Pliocene temperatures were cooler than Miocene, but warmer than today. Some palaeontologists believe Trogontherii is the species that crossed into North America to evolve into the Columbian. The nomenclature and relationships between species have been refined several times. Most scientists would agree they could change again when more bones are found and more scientific tests are run.

Haynes, Gary. Mammoths, Mastodonts, and Elephants, 1993.

Lister, Adrian and Paul Bahn. Mammoths, 2007 revised edition; includes data on molar evolution.

Muitoni, Giovanni, Dennis V. Kent, Giancarlo Scardia, and Edoardo Monesi. "Migration of Hominins with Megaherbivores into Europe via the Danube-Po Gateway in the Late Matuyama Climate Revolution," Rivista Italiana di Paleontologia e Stratigrafia 120:351-365:2014.

Peters, Amy. "How Many Bales of Grass Hay per Acre from the Average Pasture?," Oregon State University Extension Service website. Any estimate of pounds per acre makes assumptions about species, moisture, and soil fertility. This is a generic number. If you lower the yield, you simply decrease the size of the herd.

University of California, Berkley. "About Mammoths," university website.

Willerslev, Eske, et alia. "Fifty Thousand Years of Arctic Vegetation and Megafaunal Diet," Nature, 6 February 2014. The northern plantain is Plantago canescens.

Graphics: "Last Glacial Maximum Vegetation Reconstructed vegetation cover at the Last Glacial Maximum period ~18,000 years ago-( ~16th millennium BC), describing the type of vegetation cover present, based on fossil pollen samples recovered from lake and bog Sediments." Based on J. M. Adams, Global Land Environments since the Last Interglacial, 1997, and on N. Ray and J. M. Adams. "A GIS-based Vegetation Map of the World at the Last Glacial Maximum (25,000-15,000 BP)," Internet Archaeology 11, 2001. Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, 16 December 2006 by Fabartus, revised 26 November 2007 by J. Rockley.

Aurignacian at El Castillo

Will return to Santa Cruz between 1714 and 1732 in a few weeks. Now, back to life in early Spain.

The Aurignacian era was characterized by sparseness. The Homo sapiens population was still too small to enforce genetic uniformity or perpetuate its greatest innovations.

A mutation or recessive gene, which normally would have been reabsorbed by a dynamic genetic pool, could have become a dominant trait in an isolated band. As groups moved farther afield they came into contact with others like Denisovans in Asia, other Cro-Magnons in the Trans-Baikal, and, possibly, Neanderthals in Spain.

Did they interbreed, exchange tools, or did later transients simply pick up relics when they reused rock shelters? Anthropologists are debating, but with little evidence. The Aurignacians left few bones to associate with artifacts.

El Castillo, a cave in the Cantabrian region of Spain near the coast of the Bay of Biscay, illustrates the problem. It has clearly separated layers of Mousterian and Aurignacian artifacts with no hominid remains. Charcoal from the upper layer has been dated to 38,700 years ago.

The walls are covered with red ochre decorations. There’s nothing to connect the walls culturally with the floor. Sometimes, archaeologists get very lucky and find bits of pigment or shell containers stained with paints in a dated layer. Not here.

The oldest painting is a disk found in a group at the base of the Panel de las Manos. The calcite film that formed over it has been dated to 40,800 years ago. Anthropologists agree, it had to have been left by a Neanderthal.

More difficult to interpret are some hand stencils and a series of disks. The first, from the same area, has been dated 3,500 years or 175 generations later, that is 37,300 years ago. Three circles in the series, found in the far interior of the Corredor de los Puntos, were executed sometime between 34,000 and 36,000 years ago. All within the time range of the Aurignacian layer.

Some believe they too were the work of Neanderthals who appropriated the Aurignacian tool-kit or evolved their own variant. It’s as likely the red ochre technique was recreated from the earlier examples but used to satisfy a desire to make concrete images of abstract ideas.

That impulse for symbolic gestures was one of the defining traits of Cro-Magnons. It reached its apogee in the Swabian Alps. Someone left a statuette of a human body with a lion’s head in the Hohlenstein Stadel cave. It was chiseled from ivory with a flint knife 40,000 years ago.

At the nearby Hohle Fels cave a female figure was carved from a woolly mammoth tusk 35,000 to 40,000 years ago. Underneath it lay a 35,000-year-old bone flute made from a griffon vulture’s wing. At Geißenklösterle, archaeologists found fragments of two flutes, one from the bone of a mute swan, one from a woolly mammoth tusk. The instruments were 42,000 to 43,000 years old.

Geißenklösterle, near Blaubeuren, and Hohle Fels, near Schelklingen, are less than ten miles from each other on the Ach river that flows to the Danube by the Blau. Hohlenstein Stadel, nine miles from Ulm, is down river on the Lone tributary, maybe 25 miles away depending on the route.

Their carving tradition did not survive migration. No doubt it took craftsmanship pioneered by one individual who passed it on through demonstration. Those who moved southwest may have lost the skill, but kept the cultural vocabulary of symbols.

At Cuevo Morín, Leslie Freeman and Joaquín González Echegaray found molds of four bodies. The head and feet of one had been removed. As if they were recreating the Hohlenstein Stadel statue, the head of a large animal was placed above the torso. A smaller animal was laid across the legs, with a quartzite blade placed near the decapitated head. The pit was filled. Its mound was covered with red ochre, then burned.

Cave painting replaced carving as the primary medium for visual ritual expression in northern Spain. Dean Snow determined most of the hands stenciled on the walls were those of women.

Paul Pettitt isn’t convinced the fact most were left hands meant the artists who applied the pigment were using their own bodies. Some of the locations made it nigh impossible.

When he tried to replicate the process, he said his best results came from placing a hollow bird bone in a shell filled with liquified pigment. He held the shell near the hand resting against the hall and used another tube "to blow across the first. This created a vacuum which sucked the pigment up from the shell and out as a fine spray. This created the characteristic diffuse cloud of colour around the hand, while revealing the hand in sharp outline."

He noted the process created "a strange, loud whirring and whistling noise," perhaps like those Swabian flutes. He remembered it made him light headed in a cave lit by lamps burning animal fat.

Notes:
Cabrera Valdés, Victoria and James L. Bischoff. "Accelerator ¹⁴C Dates for Early Upper Paleolithic (Basal Aurignacian) at El Castillo Cave (Spain)," Journal of Archaeological Science 16:577-584:1989.

Freeman L. G., and J. G. Echegaray. "Aurignacian Structural Features and Burials at Cueva Morín (Santander, Spain)," Nature 226:722-6:1970; burial described by Hodge.

Hodge, Philip R. "Aurignacian Culture," in H. James Birx, Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2005; comment of small sample sizes.

Pettitt, Paul. "Hand Stencils in Upper Palaeolithic Cave Art," Durham University website; described attempts to replicate the process.

_____. The Palaeolithic Origins of Human Burial, 2013; comments on the absence of burials.

_____, A. W. G. Pike, J. Zilhão, et alia. (2012). "U-Series Dating of Paleolithic Art in 11 Caves in Spain," Science 336:1409-1413:2012.

Snow, Dean R. "Sexual Dimorphism in European Upper Paleolithic Cave Art," American Antiquity 78:746-761:2013.

Cro-Magnon Cold Period Cultures

Will return to Santa Cruz between 1714 and 1732 in a few weeks. Now, back to life in early Spain.

While the Aurignacian was diffusing to the west in the Indian-summer of the warm period, the onset of the new colder era in the east drove mammoths out of central Asia about 38,000 years ago. Those who depended on them may have followed. The merger of two cultures along the upper Danube river led to the development of the Gravettian. These were the first people to experiment with hardening clay with fire. They also left evidence of bone needles, basketry and cordage, perhaps for snares.

Their technology was slow to penetrate the west. Still 59 Gravettian sites have been located on the Iberian peninsula.

It disappeared about 22,000 years ago. The climate had continued to deteriorate with the expansion of the glaciers around 25,000 years ago. Much of northern and central Europe became uninhabitable arctic desert. Animals and plants retreated to refuges of the Pyrenees and Cantabrian mountains, where the Solutrean appeared about 20,000 years ago and disappeared about 5,000 years later. They were the first Europeans to throw their spears.

People living along the Danube moved east onto the Russian plains, where their Gravettian tools evolved into Epigravettian. The map below shows the Solutrean in rust and the late Gravettian in plum.  White represents glaciated areas.

Still farther east, in the mountainous region beyond Lake Baikal, Cro-Magnon culture became more complex, sometime after 30,000 years ago. Evgeny Rybin said, the reasons for the divergent life style in the open steppe were not yet identified, but could include "interactions between migrating human communities, ecological, and/or demographic stress."

Another merger of hitherto independent groups occurred in southern France where people were crowed together in refuges. Again, a new technical culture developed, this time around 16,000 years ago when the climate began warming. During the Magdalenian era, large central sites developed around mountain caves that functioned as civilization centers. Groups came together for ceremonies, but lived in smaller camps.

The map below shows the extent of the Magdalenian.

While tools changed through time, regional variations that arose from the local fauna persisted. Western areas of Europe relied on reindeer and tended to frequent caves, while eastern parts exploited mammoths in open-air sites. In northern Spain, individuals continued to eat horse and red deer.

Leslie Freeman said, during the unstable but generally warm Aurignacian of MIS3, 13 species were reported from 15 Cantabrian occupation layers with sites averaging 4.5 animals. Horse and red deer were the most common.

The number of species rose in the Solutrean as animals migrated south during the cold MIS2 years. He counted 19 species, with 8 occupation layers averaging 7.3. Horses were the most common. He believed the Pleistocene species of Equus tended to be associated with the open vegetation of colder climates.

During the severe conditions of the early Magdalenian, the number of species dropped to 9. Many of the 14 occupation sites only had 3. In the later Magdalenian, as the climate began to warm again, the variety rose to 22, and the average to 5.4 in 11 sites. Red deer was the most common. Cervus elaphus prefer woodlands that thrive in slightly warmer environments.

Notes:
Freeman, L. G. "The Significance of Mammalian Faunas from Paleolithic Occupations in Cantabrian Spain," American Antiquity 38:3-44:1973. He was counting occupation layers; any archaeological site can have more than one occupation. He was only including those that had identifiable animal remains.

Jochim, Michael. "The Upper Paleolithic," in Sarunas Milisauskas, European Prehistory, 2011 second edition.

Rybin, Evgeny P. "Middle and Upper Paleolithic Interactions and the Emergence of ‘Modern Behavior’ in Southern Siberia and Mongolia" in Yousuke Kaifu, et alia, Emergence and Diversity of Modern Human Behavior in Paleolithic Asia, 2015.

Graphics:
1. Wobble. "Map of Europe 20,000 years Ago," uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, 25 February 2007.

2. Sémhur. "Location Map of Homo Sapiens during Magdalenian Culture, between 19,000 - 12,000 BP," uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, 6 February 2010.