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.