Interesting facts about the ice age. How people survived the Ice Age What people lived during the Ice Age

What kind of people lived in the era of the great glaciation? and got the best answer

Answer from Vladimir STEN[guru]
Europe was under ice. So only ESKIMOS chocks - as I expected !!! ! This is 30 million years ago. . back then there were no people at all. 6. PRIMARY MAN IN THE ICE AGE The outstanding event of this ice age was the evolution of primitive man. Slightly to the west of India, in an area currently under water, among the descendants of an ancient North American type of lemur that migrated to Asia, mammals suddenly appeared, which became the early predecessors of man. These small animals walked mostly on their hind legs and had a large brain in relation to their height and in comparison with the brains of other animals. In the seventieth generation of this type of living being, a new, more advanced group suddenly emerged. These new mammals—the intermediate precursors of man, nearly twice the height of their ancestors and possessing proportionately enlarged brains—had hardly established themselves when a third major mutation suddenly occurred: primates appeared. (At the same time, as a result of the reverse development of the intermediate predecessors of man, the great apes appeared; from that day to this day, the human branch has progressed through gradual evolution, while the great apes have remained unchanged and even regressed somewhat.) 1.000 .000 years ago Urantia was registered as an inhabited world. A mutation that occurred in a tribe of progressive primates suddenly gave rise to two primitive people - the real progenitors of mankind. In time, this event roughly coincided with the third glacial advance; therefore it is obvious that your ancient ancestors were born and raised in a stimulating, tempering and difficult environment. And the only surviving descendants of these Urantian natives - the Eskimos - still prefer to live in the harsh northern regions. Humans appeared in the Western Hemisphere only shortly before the end of the Ice Age. However, during the interglacial epochs, they moved west around the Mediterranean Sea and soon spread to all of Europe. In the caves of Western Europe, one can find human bones mixed with the remains of both tropical and arctic animals. This proves that man lived in these regions during the last epochs of advance and retreat of glaciers.

Answer from Prince of Wales[guru]
severe

Answer from Fedorovich[guru]
Snow people.

Answer from Milena Strashevskaya[guru]
Are we mammoths to live in the era of glaciation??

Answer from Protivostoyanie yunge[guru]
carp

Elements of spiritual culture were already found in the communities of Pithecanthropes (Homo erectus), but the Neanderthals had a fully developed spiritual culture. The beginnings of religion, magic, healing, sculpture, painting, dances and songs, musical instruments, spiritualization of nature were characteristic of the Cro-Magnons. The burial of the corpses of dead and perished comrades distinguishes man from animals. Sorrow for the dead speaks of the strength of people's attachment to each other, of friendship and love. Tools, jewelry, bones of dead animals are found in the burial places of ancient people. Consequently, already at that distant time, our ancestors believed in an afterlife and equipped their deceased for this life. All these questions are well covered in the literature and I will not dwell on them.

The number of people and population density are closely related to the type of crop and the way food is produced. The area of ​​​​the territory that is needed to feed three people who get their own food in different ways is different. Hunter-gatherers for a family of 3 require at least 10 sq. km, for farmers not used by irrigation - about 0.5 sq. km, and for farmers using irrigation - 0.1 sq. km. Consequently, with the transition from hunting and gathering to irrigated agriculture, the population should have increased by about 100 times. This is a very important factor, which anthropologists obviously take into account insufficiently. All ancient technologically advanced civilizations were created by farmers.

However, it should be noted that agricultural civilizations are more vulnerable to sudden changes in climate. With the drying up of the climate, the civilizations of farmers either perished or were transformed into civilizations of nomadic pastoralists. Some may have returned to hunting and gathering again.

The future of humanity

From a group of primates, poorly protected from the effects of the external environment, evolution has selected our prolific species, which has a unique ability to reproduce, migrate and transform our planet.
Will the evolution of man as a biological being continue? Nowadays, many say: "No. Cultural evolution has protected us from biological overload that eliminated weak, slow and ill-thinking individuals. Now the use of machines, computers, clothes, glasses, and modern medicine have devalued the former inherited advantages associated with a powerful physique, intelligence, pigmentation, visual acuity and resistance to diseases such as, say, malaria.In every society there is a high percentage of physically weak or poorly built people, as well as people with poor eyesight or skin color and weak resistance to diseases that do not correspond to the climatic conditions of the area they live in. Physically imperfect people who would have died in childhood 100 years ago now survive and reproduce, passing on their genetic defects to future generations.
Migration also contributed to the suspension of human evolution. Now, none of the groups of the Earth's population lives in isolation for a sufficiently long time, necessary for its transformation into a new species, as happened in the Pleistocene epoch. And racial differences will be smoothed out as the number of intermarriages among the peoples of Europe, Africa, America, India and China grows. "Yes, this gloomy scenario for the future of mankind is quite real. The extinction of mankind as a biological species seems more likely than its further evolution.

However, the development of technology can lead to the emergence of some hybrids - people and mechanisms. Even now, teeth are being boldly replaced, artificial kidneys and an artificial heart are being built into the human body, if necessary. Prosthetic arms and legs are controlled by signals from the brain. Connecting the human brain to a powerful computer or the Internet can create a monster whose actions are incomprehensible and unpredictable. Hybrids of people and mechanisms (robot people) may well master other worlds, penetrate into the depths of space. This is the second scenario for the development of mankind and the evolution of beings-mechanisms.

A third scenario is also possible. By the way, it seems to me the most probable. The rapidly increasing world population is dependent on increased food and energy production. But both require the over-exploitation of our planet's natural resources. Heavy tillage leads to soil erosion, which reduces fertility, and the depletion of fossil fuels poses a threat to energy supplies. Climate change could exacerbate both of these problems. An over-populated, food- and fuel-starved species, Homo sapiens, can be drastically reduced in numbers by wars, famines, and epidemics. The remaining handful of human survivors will be returned to the hunter-gatherer state. The natural factors of evolution - mutations and natural selection - will begin to act again. Groups of people will be isolated from each other by long distances, water barriers, language barriers and prejudice. I can say one thing - in this case, not residents of multimillion-dollar policies and large cities, not residents of the so-called civilized countries, but the natives of Australia, the Arctic, residents of tropical rainforests will survive and pass on their genes to their descendants, in whose oral traditions mentions of iron birds, wars will be preserved demon titans, etc.

Ecology

The ice ages that have taken place more than once on our planet have always been covered in a mass of mysteries. We know that they shrouded entire continents in cold, turning them into uninhabited tundra.

Also known about 11 such periods, and all of them took place with regular constancy. However, we still don't know much about them. We invite you to get acquainted with the most interesting facts about the ice ages of our past.

giant animals

By the time the last ice age arrived, evolution had already mammals appeared. Animals that could survive in harsh climatic conditions were quite large, their bodies were covered with a thick layer of fur.

Scientists have named these creatures "megafauna", which was able to survive at low temperatures in areas covered with ice, for example, in the region of modern Tibet. Smaller animals couldn't adjust to new conditions of glaciation and perished.

Herbivorous representatives of the megafauna have learned to find their food even under layers of ice and have been able to adapt to the environment in different ways: for example, rhinos ice age had spatulate horns, with the help of which they dug up snowdrifts.

Predatory animals, for example, saber-toothed cats, giant short-faced bears and dire wolves, perfectly survived in the new conditions. Although their prey could sometimes fight back due to their large size, it was in abundance.

ice age people

Although modern man Homo sapiens could not boast at that time of large size and wool, he was able to survive in the cold tundra of the ice ages for many millennia.

Living conditions were harsh, but people were resourceful. For example, 15 thousand years ago they lived in tribes that were engaged in hunting and gathering, built original dwellings from mammoth bones, and sewed warm clothes from animal skins. When food was plentiful, they stocked up in the permafrost - natural freezer.

Mostly for hunting, such tools as stone knives and arrows were used. To catch and kill the large animals of the Ice Age, it was necessary to use special traps. When the beast fell into such traps, a group of people attacked him and beat him to death.

Little Ice Age

Between major ice ages, there were sometimes small periods. It cannot be said that they were destructive, but they also caused famine, disease due to crop failure, and other problems.

The most recent of the Little Ice Ages began around 12th-14th centuries. The most difficult time can be called the period from 1500 to 1850. At this time in the Northern Hemisphere, a fairly low temperature was observed.

In Europe, it was common when the seas froze, and in mountainous areas, for example, in the territory of modern Switzerland, the snow did not melt even in summer. Cold weather affected every aspect of life and culture. Probably, the Middle Ages remained in history, as "Time of Troubles" also because the planet was dominated by a small ice age.

periods of warming

Some ice ages actually turned out to be quite warm. Despite the fact that the surface of the earth was shrouded in ice, the weather was relatively warm.

Sometimes a sufficiently large amount of carbon dioxide accumulated in the atmosphere of the planet, which is the cause of the appearance greenhouse effect when heat is trapped in the atmosphere and warms the planet. In this case, the ice continues to form and reflect the sun's rays back into space.

According to experts, this phenomenon led to the formation giant desert with ice on the surface but quite warm weather.

When will the next ice age start?

The theory that ice ages occur on our planet at regular intervals goes against theories about global warming. There's no doubt about what's happening today global warming which may help prevent the next ice age.

Human activity leads to the release of carbon dioxide, which is largely responsible for the problem of global warming. However, this gas has another strange by-effect. According to researchers from University of Cambridge, the release of CO2 could stop the next ice age.

According to the planetary cycle of our planet, the next ice age should come soon, but it can take place only if the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be relatively low. However, CO2 levels are currently so high that no ice age is out of the question any time soon.

Even if humans abruptly stop emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere (which is unlikely), the existing amount will be enough to prevent the onset of an ice age. at least another thousand years.

Plants of the Ice Age

The easiest way to live in the Ice Age predators: they could always find food for themselves. But what do herbivores actually eat?

It turns out that there was enough food for these animals. During the ice ages on the planet many plants grew that could survive in harsh conditions. The steppe area was covered with shrubs and grass, which fed mammoths and other herbivores.

Larger plants could also be found in great abundance: for example, firs and pines. Found in warmer regions birches and willows. That is, the climate by and large in many modern southern regions resembled the one that exists today in Siberia.

However, the plants of the Ice Age were somewhat different from modern ones. Of course, with the onset of cold weather many plants died. If the plant was not able to adapt to the new climate, it had two options: either move to more southern zones, or die.

For example, the present-day state of Victoria in southern Australia had the richest variety of plant species on the planet until the Ice Age most of the species died.

Cause of the Ice Age in the Himalayas?

It turns out that the Himalayas, the highest mountain system of our planet, directly related with the onset of the ice age.

40-50 million years ago the land masses where China and India are today collided to form the highest mountains. As a result of the collision, huge volumes of "fresh" rocks from the bowels of the Earth were exposed.

These rocks eroded, and as a result of chemical reactions, carbon dioxide began to be displaced from the atmosphere. The climate on the planet began to become colder, the ice age began.

snowball earth

During different ice ages, our planet was mostly shrouded in ice and snow. only partially. Even during the most severe ice age, ice covered only one third of the globe.

However, there is a hypothesis that at certain periods the Earth was still completely covered in snow, which made her look like a giant snowball. Life still managed to survive thanks to the rare islands with relatively little ice and with enough light for plant photosynthesis.

According to this theory, our planet turned into a snowball at least once, more precisely 716 million years ago.

Garden of Eden

Some scientists are convinced that garden of eden described in the Bible actually existed. It is believed that he was in Africa, and it is thanks to him that our distant ancestors survived the ice age.

About 200 thousand years ago came a severe ice age, which put an end to many forms of life. Fortunately, a small group of people were able to survive the period of severe cold. These people moved to the area where South Africa is today.

Despite the fact that almost the entire planet was covered with ice, this area remained ice-free. A large number of living beings lived here. The soils of this area were rich in nutrients, so there was abundance of plants. Caves created by nature were used by people and animals as shelters. For living beings, it was a real paradise.

According to some scientists, in the "Garden of Eden" lived no more than a hundred people, which is why humans do not have as much genetic diversity as most other species. However, this theory has not found scientific evidence.

The Neanderthal was the last ancient man, not the first. He stood on shoulders even stronger than his own. Behind him stretched five million years of slow evolution, during which Australopithecus (Australopithecus), the offspring of monkeys and not yet quite a man, became the first kind of true man - Homo erectus (Homo erectus), and Homo erectus gave rise to the next species - Homo sapiens (Homo sapiens). This latter species still exists today. Its early representatives laid the foundation for a long line of varieties and sub-species, culminating first in Neanderthal and then in modern man. Thus, the Neanderthal concludes one of the most important stages in the development of the Homo sapiens species - only modern man, who belongs to the same species, comes later.

When did the Neanderthals appear

The Neanderthal appears about 100 thousand years ago, but by that time other varieties of Homo sapiens had already existed for about 200 thousand years. Only a few fossils have survived from the pre-Neanderthals, united by paleoanthropologists under the general name "early Homo sapiens", but their stone tools have been found in large quantities, and therefore the life of these ancient people can be recreated with a sufficient degree of probability. We need to understand their achievements and development, because the story of the Neanderthal, like any complete biography, must begin with a story about his immediate ancestors.

Although the outlines and area of ​​the continents in the Ice Age roughly coincided with the current ones (highlighted in black lines in the figure), they differed from them in climate and, consequently, in vegetation. At the beginning of the Würm glaciation, during the time of the Neanderthals, the glaciers (in blue) began to increase and the tundra spread far to the south. Temperate forests and savannas have encroached on former warm climates, including areas of the Mediterranean now flooded with the sea, and tropical regions have become deserts interspersed with rainforests.

Imagine a moment of complete joy of being 250,000 years ago. Fast forward to where England is now. A man stands motionless on a grassy plateau, with obvious pleasure inhaling the smell of fresh meat - his comrades, with heavy stone tools with sharp edges, cut the carcass of a newborn deer, which they managed to get. His duty is to see if this pleasant smell will not attract any predator that is dangerous for them or just a lover to profit at someone else's expense. Although the plateau seems deserted, the sentinel never relaxes his vigilance for a moment: what if a lion is hiding somewhere in the grass or a bear is watching them from a nearby forest? But the awareness of possible danger only helps him to perceive more sharply what he sees and hears in this corner of the fertile land where his group lives.

The gentle hills stretching to the horizon are overgrown with oaks and elms, dressed in young foliage. Spring, which has recently succeeded a mild winter, has brought with it such warmth to England that a sentinel does not feel cold even without clothes. He hears the roar of hippos celebrating their mating season in the river - its banks overgrown with willows can be seen one and a half kilometers from the hunting place. He hears the crackling of a dry branch. Bear? Or maybe a rhinoceros or a heavy elephant grazes among the trees?

This man, who stands in the sun, holding a thin wooden claw in his hand, does not seem so strong, although his height is 165 centimeters, his muscles are well developed and it is immediately noticeable that he should run well. When you look at his head, you might think that he is not distinguished by special intelligence: a protruding face, a sloping forehead, a low skull, as if flattened from the sides. However, he has a larger brain than his predecessor, Homo erectus, who carried the torch of human evolution through more than a million years. As a matter of fact, in terms of brain volume, this person is already approaching the modern one, and therefore we can assume that he is a very early representative of the modern species of a reasonable person.

This hunter belongs to a group of thirty people. Their territory is so large that it takes several days to traverse it from end to end, but such a huge area is just enough for them to safely forage for meat all year round without causing irreparable damage to the populations of herbivores living here. At the borders of their territory, other small groups roam - people whose speech is similar to the speech of our hunter - all these groups are closely related, since the men of one group often take wives from others. Behind the territories of neighboring groups, other groups live - almost unrelated, whose speech is incomprehensible, and even further away live and not known at all. The earth and the role that man was to play on it was much grander than our hunter could have imagined.

Two hundred and fifty thousand years ago, the number of people in the whole world probably did not reach 10 million - that is, they would all fit in one modern Tokyo. But this figure only looks unimpressive - humanity occupied a much larger part of the Earth's surface than any other species taken separately. This hunter lived on the northwestern outskirts of the human range. To the east, where the wide valley stretched over the horizon, which today has become the English Channel separating England from France, groups of five to ten families also roamed. Farther east and south, similar hunter-gatherer groups lived throughout Europe.

In those days, Europe was covered with forests with many wide grassy glades, and the climate was so warm that buffalo prospered even north of the present Rhine, and monkeys frolicked in tropical rainforests along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Asia was far from being so hospitable everywhere, and people avoided its interior regions, because the winters there were severe, and in the summer the scorching heat dried up the land. However, they lived throughout the southern edge of Asia from the Middle East to Java and as far north as Central China. Africa was probably the most densely populated. It is possible that more people lived in it than in the rest of the world.

The places chosen by these diverse groups to live give a good idea of ​​their way of life. Almost always it is an open, grassy area or copses. This preference is explained very simply: huge herds of animals grazed there, the meat of which was the main part of the human diet of those times. Where there were no gregarious herbivores, there were no people. Deserts, rainforests and dense coniferous forests of the north remained uninhabited, which in general occupied a very decent part of the earth's surface. True, some herbivores were found in the northern and southern forests, but they grazed alone or in very small groups - due to the limited food and the difficulty of moving among closely growing trees, it was unprofitable for them to gather in herds. It was so difficult for people at that stage of their development to find and kill single animals that they simply could not exist in such places.

Another habitat unsuitable for humans was the tundra. It was easy to get meat there: huge herds of reindeer, bison and other large animals that served as easy prey found abundant food in the tundra - mosses, lichens, all kinds of grasses, undersized shrubs, and there were almost no trees that interfere with grazing. However, people have not yet learned how to defend themselves against the cold prevailing in these areas, and therefore early Homo sapiens continued to live in areas that previously fed his ancestor, Homo erectus, in the savannah, in tropical light forests, in the steppes and sparse deciduous forests of middle latitudes.

It is amazing how much anthropologists managed to learn about the world of early Homo sapiens, despite the hundreds of thousands of years that have passed since then and the scarcity of the material found. So much of what played a crucial role in the lives of early people disappears quickly and without a trace. Food supplies, skins, tendons, wood, plant fibers and even bones crumble to dust very soon, unless a rare set of circumstances prevent this. And the few remnants of objects made of organic material that have come down to us tease curiosity more than satisfy it. Here, for example, is a pointed piece of yew wood found in Clacton in England - its age is estimated at 300 thousand years, and it survived because it fell into a swamp. Perhaps this is a fragment of a spear, since its tip was burned and became so hard that it could pierce the skins of animals. But it is possible that this pointed, hard piece of wood was used for an entirely different purpose: for example, to dig up edible roots.

Nevertheless, even such objects of unclear purpose are often amenable to interpretation. As for the fragment of a yew, logic helps here. Without any doubt, people used both spears and digging sticks long before this tool was made. However, it is more likely that the person spent the time and effort to burn the spear rather than the digging tool. In the same way, we have every reason to believe that people who lived in temperate regions already wrapped themselves in something many hundreds of thousands of years ago, although their clothes - no doubt animal skins - have not survived. It is equally certain that they built some kind of shelter for themselves - in fact, pole holes discovered during excavations of an ancient site on the French Riviera prove that people were able to build primitive huts from branches and animal skins even in the time of Homo erectus.

However, science has some other materials that help to look into the past. Geological deposits from each given period allow us to learn quite a lot about the then climate, including temperature and rainfall. By examining pollen found in such deposits under a microscope, it is possible to establish exactly which trees, herbaceous or other plants then prevailed. The most important thing for the study of prehistoric epochs are stone tools, which are practically eternal. Wherever early people lived, they left stone tools everywhere, and often in huge numbers. In one Lebanese cave, where people settled for 50 thousand years, more than a million processed flints were found.

stone tools

As a source of information about ancient people, stone tools are somewhat one-sided. They don't say anything about many of the most interesting aspects of their lives - family relationships, group organization, what people said and thought, how they looked. In a certain sense, an archaeologist digging a trench through the geological layers is in the position of a man who, on the Moon, would pick up the transmissions of terrestrial radio stations, having only a weak receiver: from the host of signals sent on the air all over the Earth, only one would sound clear and clear in his receiver. clearly - in this case, stone tools. Nevertheless, a lot can be learned from the broadcasts of one station. First, the archaeologist knows that where the tools are found, people once lived. Comparison of tools found in different places, but belonging to the same time, can reveal cultural contacts between ancient populations. A comparison of tools from layer to layer makes it possible to trace the development of material culture and the level of intelligence of the ancient people who once created them.

Stone tools show that people who lived 250 thousand years ago, although they deserved the name “reasonable” in their intellect, still retained much in common with their less developed ancestors, who belonged to the Homo erectus species. Their tools followed the type that had developed hundreds of thousands of years before their appearance. This type is called "Acheulian" after the French town of Saint-Acheul near Amiens, where such tools were first found. Typical of the Acheulean culture is a tool called a hand ax - relatively flat, oval or pear-shaped, with two working edges along the entire 12-15 cm length (see pp. 42-43). This tool could be used for a variety of purposes - to punch holes in skins, butcher prey, chop or clean branches, and the like. It is possible that the axes were driven into wooden clubs and a composite tool was obtained - something like a modern ax or cleaver, but it is more likely that they were simply held in the hand (perhaps the blunt end was wrapped in a piece of skin to protect the palm).

In addition to a hand ax with two working edges, stone plates were used, which were sometimes serrated. With their help, when cutting carcasses or processing wood, more subtle operations were performed. Some groups of ancient people clearly preferred such plates to large axes, others added heavy cutters to their stone inventory for cutting the joints of large animals. However, in all corners of the world, people basically followed the principles of the Acheulean culture, and only in the Far East did a more primitive type of tool with a single working edge hold.

Although this general uniformity indicates a paucity of ingenuity, nevertheless the ax was improved little by little. When people learned to process flint and quartz not only with hard stone chippers, but also with softer ones - from bone, wood or deer antlers, they were able to create axes with smoother and sharper working edges (see p. 78). In the harsh world of the early people, the improved cutting edge of the utility handaxe provided many benefits.

In the cultural layers left by early Homo sapiens, there are other stone tools that indicate a developing mind and a willingness to experiment. Around that era, some especially smart hunters found a fundamentally new method for making flake tools. Instead of just pounding on the flint joint, knocking off plates at random, which inevitably involves wasting effort and material, they gradually created a very complex and efficient manufacturing process. First, the nodule was upholstered along the edge and from above, getting the so-called "nucleus" (core). Then a precise blow to a certain place in the core - and a flake of a predetermined size and shape with long and sharp working edges flies off. This method of stone processing, called Levallois (see p. 56), speaks of an amazing ability to assess the potential of stone, since the tool visibly appears only at the very end of the process of its manufacture.

The hand ax took shape slowly but surely, and when using the Levallois method, the flake flew off the flint core, which did not look like any tool, completely ready, like a butterfly leaving the shell of a pupa, which outwardly has nothing to do with it . The Levallois method seems to have originated about 200,000 years ago in southern Africa and spread from there, although it may have been independently discovered elsewhere.

If we compare all these diverse data - tools, a few fossils, a piece of organic material, as well as plant pollen and geological indications of the then climate - the people of that ancient time acquire visible features. They had stout, near-modern bodies, but ape-like faces, though their brains were only slightly smaller than today's. They were excellent hunters and were able to adapt to any living conditions and climate, except for the most severe ones. In their culture, they followed the traditions of the past, but little by little they found ways to a stronger and more reliable control over nature.

Their world as a whole was quite welcoming. However, he was destined to suddenly change (suddenly - in the geological sense), and the living conditions in it became so difficult that people, perhaps, did not know either before or after. However, a reasonable man managed to hold out throughout all the cataclysms, and the test clearly benefited him - he acquired many new skills, his behavior became more flexible, and his intellect developed.

Risskoe glaciation 200 thousand years

The cooling began about 200 thousand years ago. Glades and lawns in the deciduous forests of Europe imperceptibly became more and more extensive, tropical rainforests on the Mediterranean coast dried up, and pine and spruce forests in eastern Europe slowly gave way to steppes. Perhaps the oldest members of European groups with fear in their voices recalled that before the wind did not freeze the body and snow never fell from the sky. But since they had always led a nomadic life, it was now natural for them to move to where the herds of herbivores went. Groups that had not previously felt much need for fire, clothing, or artificial shelters now learned to protect themselves from the cold from more northern groups, who had acquired this skill since the time of Homo erectus.

All over the world, so much snow began to fall in the mountains that it did not have time to melt over the summer. Year after year, snow accumulated, filling deep gorges, compacting into ice. The weight of this ice was so great that its lower layers acquired the properties of a thick putty, and under the pressure of growing snow layers, it began to crawl down the gorges. Slowly moving along the mountain slopes, giant fingers of ice tore out huge blocks of stone from them, with which they then, like sandpaper, cleaned the soil down to bedrock. In summer, stormy streams of melt water carried fine sand and stone dust far ahead, then they were picked up by the wind, thrown up by colossal yellow-brown clouds and carried across all continents. And the snow kept falling and falling, so that in some places the ice fields were already thick. two kilometers, buried entire mountain ranges under them and, with their weight, forced the earth's crust to sag. At the time of their greatest advance, glaciers covered more than 30% of the entire land (now they occupy only 10%). Europe has been particularly hard hit. The oceans and seas surrounding it served as an inexhaustible source of evaporating moisture, which, turning into snow, fed the glaciers that slid down from the Alps and the Scandinavian mountains to the plains of the continent and covered tens of thousands of square kilometers.

This is glaciation; known as rice , turned out to be one of the most severe climatic traumas that the Earth has ever suffered in five billion years of its history. Although cold snaps had happened before, in the days of Homo erectus, the Ris glaciation was the first test of the stamina of Homo sapiens. It had to endure 75,000 years of severe cold, interspersed with minor warming, before the Earth regained a warm climate for a relatively long time.

Many experts believe that a necessary prerequisite for the emergence of glaciers is the slow emergence of plateaus and mountain ranges. It is calculated that one era of mountain building raised the earth's land by an average of more than 450 meters. Such an increase in altitude would inevitably lower the surface temperature by an average of three degrees, and in the highest places, perhaps much more. The decrease in temperature certainly increased the likelihood of glacier formation, but this does not explain the alternation of cold and warm periods.

Various hypotheses have been proposed to explain these fluctuations in the Earth's climate. According to one theory, volcanoes from time to time emitted enormous amounts of fine dust into the atmosphere, which reflected part of the sun's rays. Scientists have indeed observed a decrease in temperature around the world during large eruptions, but this cooling is insignificant and lasts no longer than 15 years, and therefore it is unlikely that volcanoes gave impetus to glaciation. However, other types of dust can have a more significant impact. Some astronomers believe that clouds of cosmic dust can pass between the Sun and the Earth from time to time, obscuring the Earth from the Sun for a very long time. But, since no such clouds of cosmic dust have been observed within the solar system, this hypothesis remains just a curious curiosity.

Explanation of ice ages

Another astronomical explanation for the ice ages seems more likely. Fluctuations in the tilt angle of our planet's axis of rotation and its orbit change the amount of solar heat received by the Earth, and calculations show that these changes should have caused four long periods of cooling over the past three-quarters of a million years. No one knows whether such a drop in temperature could have caused glaciations, but it certainly contributed to them. And finally, it is possible that the Sun itself played some role in the appearance of glaciers. The amount of heat and light emitted by the Sun changes over a cycle that lasts an average of 11 years. The radiation increases when the number of sunspots and giant prominences on the surface of the star increases markedly, and decreases slightly when these solar storms subside somewhat. Then everything is repeated again. According to some astronomers, solar radiation may also have another, very long cycle, similar to the short cycle of sunspots.

But whatever their cause, the impact of climate change has been enormous. During periods of cooling, the global wind system was disrupted. Precipitation has decreased in some places and increased in others. Vegetation patterns changed, and many animal species either died out or evolved into new, cold-adapted forms, such as the cave bear or the woolly rhinoceros (see pp. 34-35).

During the particularly severe phases of the rice glaciation, the climate of England, where early Homo sapiens enjoyed warmth and sunshine, became so cold that temperatures often fell below freezing in summer. Deciduous forests in the interior and in the west of Europe were replaced by tundra and steppe. And even far to the south, on the Mediterranean coast, the trees gradually disappeared, replaced by meadows.

What happened in this era with Africa is not so clear. In some places, the cold snap seems to have been accompanied by more abundant rainfall, turning the previously barren regions of the Sahara and the Kalahari desert into grass and trees. At the same time, a change in the world wind system led to the drying up of the Congo Basin, where dense moist forests began to give way to light forests and grassy savannah. Thus, while Europe became less habitable, Africa became more and more hospitable, and people could settle in large parts of this continent.

In the era of the rice glaciation, people, in addition, received a lot of new land at their disposal due to the lowering of the level of the World Ocean. So much water was bound in giant ice layers that this level dropped by 150 meters and vast expanses of the continental shelf were exposed - an underwater continuation of the continents, which stretches in some places for many hundreds of kilometers, and then goes down steeply to the ocean floor. This is how primitive hunters got millions of square kilometers of new land, and they undoubtedly took advantage of this gift from the ice age. Each year, groups of them penetrated further into the expanses of the newborn land, and perhaps arranged camps near thundering waterfalls - where rivers fell from the continental shelf into the ocean, churning far below, at the foot of the cliff.

During the 75,000 years of the Ris glaciation, the inhabitants of the northern latitudes had to overcome difficulties unknown to early Homo sapiens, who were spoiled by a mild climate, and it is possible that these difficulties had a stimulating effect on the development of human intelligence. Some experts believe that the huge leap in mental development that has already occurred in the era of Homo erectus was due to the migration of man from the tropics to the temperate zone, where survival required much more ingenuity and flexibility of behavior. The first upright migrants learned to use fire, invented clothing and shelter, and adapted to complex seasonal changes by hunting and gathering plant foods. The Ris glaciation, which caused such profound ecological changes, should have become the same test for the intellect, and perhaps also spur its development in the same way.

Early Homo sapiens held its footholds in Europe even in the most difficult times. Stone tools serve as indirect evidence of its continuous presence there, but human fossils that would confirm this could not be found for a long time. Only in 1971, two French archaeologists, the spouses Henri and Marie-Antoinette Lumle (University of Marseille), found evidence that 200 thousand years ago, at the beginning of the rice glaciation, at least one European group of Homo sapiens still kept in a cave in the foothills of the Pyrenees . In addition to a large number of tools (mainly flakes), the Lumle spouses found the broken skull of a young man of about twenty. This hunter had a protruding face, a massive supraorbital ridge and a sloping forehead, and the dimensions of the skull were somewhat inferior to the average modern ones. The two lower jaws found in the same place are massive and, apparently, were perfectly adapted for chewing rough food. The skull and jaws are quite similar to the Swanscomb and Steinheim fragments, and give a fairly good idea of ​​humans intermediate between Homo erectus and Neanderthals.

Sitting at the mouth of their vast cave, these men surveyed the country, rather bleak in appearance, but rich in game. On the banks of the river at the bottom of the ravine right under the cave, in the thickets of willows and various bushes, leopards lay in wait for wild horses, goats, bulls and other animals coming to the watering hole. Beyond the ravine, the steppe stretched to the horizon, and not a single tree obscured the sight of the hunters herds of elephants, reindeer and rhinos, slowly wandering under leaden skies. These large animals, as well as rabbits and other rodents, provided meat in abundance for the hunting group. And yet life was very difficult. In order to go outside under the blows of an icy wind carrying sand and prickly dust, great physical hardening and courage were required. And soon, apparently, it got worse, and people were forced to go in search of more hospitable places, as indicated by the absence of tools in later layers. Judging by some data, the climate for some time became truly arctic.

More recently, the Lumle spouses made another sensational discovery in the south of France, in Lazare - they found the remains of shelters built inside the cave. These primitive shelters, dating from the last third of the Rissian glaciation (about 150 thousand years ago), were something like tents - apparently, animal skins were stretched over a frame of poles and pressed down with stones around the perimeter (see p. 73). Maybe hunters, from time to time settling in a cave, built such tents to hide from the water dripping from the vaults, or families were looking for some solitude. But the climate also played an important role here - all the tents stood with their backs to the entrance to the cave, from which it can be concluded that even in this area, near the Mediterranean Sea, strong cold winds blew.

The cave in Lazarbes, in addition, kept another evidence of the increasing complexity and versatility of human behavior. In each tent near the entrance, the Lumle spouses found a wolf skull. The identical position of these skulls indicates beyond any doubt that they were not thrown there like unnecessary garbage: they undoubtedly meant something. But what exactly is still a mystery. One possible explanation is that the hunters, when they migrated to other places, left wolf skulls at the entrance to their dwellings as their magical guardians.

Approximately 125 thousand years ago, the long climatic cataclysms of the Ris glaciation came to naught and a new warm period began. He was to last about 50 thousand years. Glaciers have retreated into their mountain strongholds, sea levels have risen, and northern regions around the world have once again become habitable for human habitation. A number of curious fossils date from this period, confirming the continuous approximation of Homo sapiens to a more modern form. In a cave near the town of Fontechevade in southwestern France, fragments of a skull were found that are about 110,000 years old and look more modern than the skull of the rice man from the Pyrenees.

By the time the first half of the warming that followed the Rice glaciation has passed, that is, about 100 thousand years ago, a true Neanderthal appears and the transition period to him from early Homo sapiens is completed. There are at least two fossils that prove the appearance of a Neanderthal: one from a quarry near the German town of Eringsdorf, and the other from a sand pit on the banks of the Italian river Tiber. These European Neanderthals gradually evolved from a genetic line that gave rise first to Pyrenean Man and later to the more modern Fonteshevad Man. Neanderthals were not very different from their immediate predecessors. The human jaw was still massive and devoid of a chin protrusion, the face protruded forward, the skull was still low, and the forehead was sloping. However, the volume of the cranium has already fully reached its modern size. When anthropologists to describe a certain evolution; yutsionalny stage use the term "Neanderthal", they mean a type of person, reg. which gave a brain of modern size, but placed in a skull of an ancient form - long, low, with steep facial bones.

Neanderthal brain

It is not easy to rate this brain. Some theorists believe that its size does not mean at all that the intellectual development of Neanderthals reached the modern level. Based on the fact that brain size usually increases with body weight, they make the following assumption: if Neanderthals were several kilograms heavier than the early representatives of the Homo sapiens, this already explains the increase in the cranium, especially since in the end it is only about several hundred cubic centimeters. In other words, Neanderthals were not necessarily smarter than their predecessors, just taller and stronger built. But this argument seems dubious - most evolutionists believe that there is a direct relationship between brain size and intelligence. Undoubtedly, this dependence is not easy to define. Measuring intelligence by the volume of the brain is to some extent the same as trying to evaluate the capabilities of an electronic computer by weighing it.

If we interpret doubts in favor of Neanderthals and recognize them - on the basis of the volume of the skull - in terms of natural intelligence equal to modern man, then a new problem arises. Why did the expansion of the brain stop 100,000 years ago, even though the intellect has such a great and obvious value for a person? Why didn't the brain continue to get bigger and presumably better?

Biologist Ernst Mayr (Harvard University) offered an answer to this question. He thinks that before the Neanderthal stage of evolution, intelligence developed with amazing speed because the most intelligent men became the leaders of their groups and had several wives. More wives - more children. And as a result, the next generations received a disproportionate share of the genes of the most developed individuals. Mayr believes that this accelerated process of growth in intelligence ceased about 100,000 years ago, when the number of hunter-gatherer groups increased so much that fatherhood was no longer a privilege of the most intelligent individuals. In other words, their genetic heritage - a highly developed intellect - was not the main, but only a small part of the total genetic heritage of the entire group, and therefore was not of decisive importance.

Anthropologist Loring Brace (University of Michigan) prefers a different explanation. In his opinion, human culture in Neanderthal times reached the stage when practically all members of the group, having adopted the collective experience and skills, received an approximately equal chance of survival. If speech was already sufficiently developed by that time (an assumption disputed by some experts), and if intelligence had reached such a level that the least capable member of the group could learn everything necessary for survival, exceptional intelligence ceased to be an evolutionary advantage. Certain individuals, of course, showed special ingenuity, but their ideas were communicated to the rest, and the whole group benefited from innovations. Thus, according to Brace's theory, the natural intelligence of humanity as a whole stabilized, although people continued to accumulate more and more new knowledge about the world around them.

Both of the above hypotheses are highly speculative, and most anthropologists prefer a more concrete approach. In their opinion, the potential of the Neanderthal brain can only be appreciated by establishing how these early people coped with the difficulties that surrounded them. Such scientists concentrate all their attention on stone tool-working techniques - the only clear signal coming from the depths of time - and notice signs of growing ingenuity everywhere. The ancient Acheulean hand ax tradition persists but becomes more diverse. Double-sided axes now come in a wide variety of sizes and shapes, and are often crafted so symmetrically and carefully that it seems as if they were driven by aesthetic motives. When a man made a small ax to sharpen the points of spears, or serrated a flake to strip the bark from a thin trunk that was to become a spear, he carefully gave these tools a shape that best suits their purpose.

The primacy in updating the methods of processing tools belongs, apparently, to Europe. Because it is surrounded by seas on three sides, early Homo sapiens had no easy retreat to warmer areas with the onset of the Rissian glaciation, and even the Neanderthals were sometimes cut off from the rest of the world for some time when, during the warm period that followed the Rissian glaciation, suddenly it got cold. Abrupt changes in the world around us naturally gave an impetus to the ingenuity of the inhabitants of Europe, while the inhabitants of Africa and Asia, where the climate remained more even, were deprived of such an incentive.

Approximately 75 thousand years ago, Neanderthal man received a particularly strong push - the glaciers again went on the offensive. The climate of this last ice age, which is called the Würmian, was at first relatively mild: it was just that the winters became snowy, and the summers were cool and rainy. Nevertheless, forests began to disappear again - and throughout Europe, up to the north of France, they were replaced by tundra or forest-tundra, where open spaces covered with moss and lichen were interspersed with clumps of stunted trees.

In earlier ice ages, groups of early Homo sapiens usually moved away from such inhospitable lands. But the Neanderthals did not leave them - at least in the summer - and got meat, following the herds of reindeer, woolly rhinos and mammoths. They were probably first-class hunters, since it was impossible to survive for a long time only on the meager plant food that the tundra provided. No doubt death reaped a bountiful harvest in these northern outposts of mankind, the groups were small and perhaps easily succumbed to various diseases. Away from the harsh border of glaciers, the number of groups was noticeably higher.

The tenacity with which the Neanderthals held out in the north, and the prosperity of those who lived in areas with a milder climate, was due, at least in part, to a shift in the art of stone working that occurred at the beginning of the Würm glaciation.

Nuclei and flakes

The Neanderthals invented a new way of making tools, thanks to which a variety of flake tools won the final victory over simple chipped stones. Fine tools from flakes have long been made by the Levallois method - two or three finished flakes were beaten off from a pre-worked core, and in some places this method persisted for a long time. However, the new method was much more productive: many Neanderthals now chipped the stone nodule, turning it into a disc-shaped core, and then hit the edge with a chipper, directing the blow to the center, and chipped off flake after flake until there was almost nothing left of the core. In conclusion, the working edges of the flakes were corrected so that it was possible to process wood, butcher carcasses and cut skins.

The main advantage of this new method was that many flakes could be obtained from one disc-shaped core without much effort. It was not difficult for flakes to be given the desired shape or edge with the help of further processing, the so-called retouching, and therefore disc-shaped cores open a significant era of specialized tools. The stone inventory of the Neanderthals is much more diverse than that of their predecessors. French archaeologist François Bord, one of the leading experts on Neanderthal stonework, lists more than 60 different types of tools designed to cut, scrape, pierce and gouge. No group of Neanderthals had all these tools, but nevertheless, the inventory of each of them included a large number of highly specialized tools - serrated plates, stone knives with one blunt edge to make it easier to press on it, and many others. It is possible that some pointed flakes served as spearheads - they were either pinched at the end of the spear, or tied to it with narrow strips of leather. With such a set of tools, people could receive much more benefits from nature than before.

Mousterians

Everywhere north of the Sahara and east as far as China, such retouched implements become predominant. All tools made in this vast area are called Mousterian (after the name of the French cave Le Moustier, where flake tools were first found in the 60s of the 19th century). Two distinct new types appear south of the Sahara. One, called "Foresmeet," is a further development of the Acheulean tradition, including small axes, a variety of side-scrapers, and narrow flake knives. Forsmith tools were made by people who lived in the same open grassy plains that were preferred by the ancient Acheulean hunters. The second new type, the Sangoan, was characterized by a special long, narrow and heavy tool, a kind of combination of a machete and a piercing tool, as well as axes and small scrapers. This type, like the Mousterian, marked a decisive departure from the Acheulean tradition. Although the Sangoan tools are rather crude in appearance, they were convenient for cutting and working wood.

Over the period from 75 to 40 thousand years BC, Neanderthals managed to establish themselves in many areas that were inaccessible to their ancestors. European Neanderthals were not afraid of the onset of the tundra and mastered it. Some of their African relatives, armed with Sangoan tools, invaded the forests of the Congo basin, cutting paths through the lush thickets, which, with the return of the rainy seasons, again replaced the grasslands. Other Neanderthals settled in the vast plains of the western Soviet Union or moved through the mighty mountain ranges in southern Asia and, having stepped into the very heart of this continent, opened it for human habitation. Yet another Neanderthal, finding ways where bodies of water were not too far apart, penetrated areas almost as dry as real deserts.

These conquests of new areas were not migrations in the strict sense of the word. No even the most enterprising group could have thought of the suicidal idea of ​​gathering up their meager possessions and traveling a hundred and fifty miles to places unknown to any of its members. In fact, this dispersal was a process that anthropologists call budding. Several people separated from the group and settled in the neighborhood, where there were their own sources of food. If everything went well, the number of their group gradually increased, and after two or three generations, resettlement to an even more remote area took place.

Now the focus is on specialization. The northern Mousterians were the best clothing designers in the world at that time, as evidenced by the numerous side-scrapers and scrapers left from them that could be used for dressing skins. The Sangoans must have become the finest experts in the forest, and perhaps learned how to make traps, since the four-legged inhabitants of the dense thickets did not roam in herds, like the animals of the savannah, and it was much more difficult to track them. In addition, people began to specialize in certain game - a significant step forward from the "catch what you catch" principle, which has been the basis of hunting since time immemorial. Evidence of this specialization can be found in one of the European inventory, which is called the serrated Mousterian type, because it is characterized by flakes with serrated edges. Serrated Mousterian tools are always found in close proximity to the bones of wild horses. Apparently, those who made them were so good at hunting wild horses that they were not interested in other herbivores grazing nearby, but concentrated all their efforts on game, the meat of which they especially liked.

Where certain necessary materials were not available, Neanderthals overcame this difficulty by looking for replacements. On the treeless plains of central Europe, they began to experiment with bone tools instead of the corresponding wooden tools. In many areas there was also a shortage of water, and people could not go far from streams, rivers, lakes or springs. However, the Neanderthals penetrated very dry areas using vessels to store water - not earthenware, but made from eggshells. Recently, in the sun-baked Middle Eastern Negev desert, along with Mousterian tools, an ostrich egg shell was found. These eggs, carefully opened, turned into excellent flasks - having filled them with water, the group could safely go on a long journey through the dry hills.

Abundance itself Mousterian guns - already proof enough that Neanderthals far surpassed their predecessors in the ability to take from nature everything that they needed for life. They undoubtedly greatly expanded the domain of man. The conquest of new territories during the time of the Neanderthals brought people far beyond the limits that Homo erectus limited itself to when, hundreds of thousands of years earlier, it began to spread from the tropics to the middle latitudes.

However, the failures of the Neanderthals also speak volumes. They did not penetrate into the depths of tropical rain forests, and, probably, the dense forests of the north also remained practically inaccessible to them. The settlement of these areas required such an organization of the group, such tools and devices, the creation of which was not yet within their power.

Well, what about the New World? Theoretically, at the beginning of the Wurm glaciation, access to the incredible riches of the Americas was open to them. Glaciers again fettered the water, and the level of the oceans dropped. As a result, a wide flat isthmus connected Siberia with Alaska, where the tundra familiar to them was widely spread, replete with big game. The road from Alaska to the south was at times intercepted by the glaciers of western Canada and the Rocky Mountains. Nevertheless, there were millennia when the passage was open. However, getting to the isthmus was very difficult. Eastern Siberia is a mountainous region crossed by several ranges. Even today, the climate there is very harsh and winter temperatures reach record lows. And during the Würm glaciation, it could not but be even worse.

Apparently, separate brave groups of Neanderthals established themselves in the south of Siberia, where then, in place of the present dense taiga, grass-covered plains stretched, in some places turning into forest-tundra. Looking north and east, these Neanderthals saw endless hills stretching out into the unknown. There was a lot of meat - horses, bison, shaggy mammoths with huge curved tusks, which are so convenient to break through the snow crust in order to get to the plants hidden under it. The temptation to follow the herds there must have been very great. And if the hunters knew that somewhere beyond the horizon lies an isthmus leading to the land of fearless game, they would probably go there. After all, these, undoubtedly, were people of a non-timid dozen. Strongly built, hardened by the constant struggle for existence, long accustomed to the possibility of premature death, they were created for daring. But they instinctively knew that they had already invaded the grounds of death itself - one cruel winter storm, and it would all be over for them. This is how the Neanderthals never made it to America. The New World was to remain deserted until man acquired more effective weapons, learned to dress better and build warmer dwellings.

From the vantage point of modern knowledge, it is very tempting to criticize Neanderthals for missing such a golden opportunity, for not reaching Australia, for retreating before the dense jungle and wilds of coniferous forests. And in many other ways they cannot compare with the people who came after them. The Neanderthals never understood the possibilities of bone as a material for tools, and the art of sewing, which required bone needles, remained unknown to them. They did not know how to weave baskets or make earthenware vessels, and their stone tools were inferior to the stone tools of those who lived after them. But Neanderthals can be looked at in a different way. If a hunter, who lived in warm England 250 thousand years ago, suddenly found himself in a Neanderthal camp in ice-bound Europe during the Wurm glaciation, he would undoubtedly be amazed and delighted with what his species, the species of Homo sapiens, managed to achieve. He would see people living perfectly in conditions in which he would not have lasted even a few days.

Determination of time by the protein clock of an ancient skeleton

To determine the age of a bone, a piece of bone is dissolved in hydrochloric acid and the solution is passed through substances that bind amino acids. The acids are then washed out and mixed with the "carrier", which will further separate the dextrorotatory molecules from the levorotatory ones.

To determine the age of objects found in the earth, archaeologists use methods that are ultimately based on the features of "atomic clocks", which mark the passage of time with natural and uniform Changes in the structure of certain atoms, and each clock has its own changes. If the rate of these changes is known, then their number will show how much time has passed since they began.

Simple - but not so simple, if we talk about Neanderthals. For the atomic clock commonly used measures the time elapsed between today and some time about 40,000 years ago, or between some time about 500,000 years ago and the birth of the earth. Between these two measurable lengths of time there is a gap that, in particular, contains the era of the Neanderthals.

It was only very recently that two types of clocks were improved enough to keep time within the gap, helping to unravel some of the Neanderthal mysteries. One type of clock allows you to date the remains of people and animals of the Neanderthal era, and the other - to establish the age of Neanderthal tools and flints.

The dating method illustrated in the photographs uses protein clocks to determine the age of ancient skeletal remains. It is based on the process of racemization that occurs inside amino acids, that is, those protein building blocks that make up all living organisms. There are 20 amino acids, but all of them are characterized by at least one common property - their molecular structure is "left-directed", that is, the atoms of each molecule are arranged asymmetrically in a direction that, under the conditions of the methodology adopted for the analysis of their structure, seems to be left. However, when an organism dies, its amino acid molecules begin to reorient themselves to the right. This slow transition to a mirror image, to "right-handed" molecules, is racemization.

In 1972-1973, organic chemist Jeffrey Beida (Scripps Oceanographic Institute at the University of California) published calculations of the rates at which different amino acids undergo racemization at moderate temperatures - one of them changes at such a rate that half of its molecules change for 110 thousand years, and this completely covers the entire length of time while Neanderthal man existed on Earth, that is, from 100 to 40 thousand years ago.

The protein clock fills a gap in the dating of early humans - but only if the remains of a once living organism are studied. These pages describe the method of dating various types of objects, including stones that were once heated in ancient hearths.

Stone dating technique It is based on thermoluminescence - the emission of light due to the displacement of atomic particles when certain minerals are heated. High temperatures (for example, in a Neanderthal fire) cause particles to approach the center of the atom, and energy is released in the form of light. As the stone cools, the particles move away from the center of the atom. This gradual movement from the center constitutes the movement of this watch. The archaeologist, studying the stone, heats it up again. The amount of light emitted tells him how long the particles have traveled from the center, and therefore how long it has been since this stone was last heated in the flames of a caveman's fire.

Once a Neanderthal-era bone has been found and dated, scientists study its structure to find out what kind of life its owner led, since the arrangement of the crystals within the bone appears to depend in part on the degree of exercise. This internal structure is revealed when a section of bone is examined under a microscope with polarizing filters, which arrange the planes of light waves and create color patterns, the color being determined by the arrangement of the crystals. When the bones of today's active wild animals are subjected to such an examination, they show a cloudy purplish color, indicating a dense structure of great strength with a random arrangement of crystals. A completely different picture is given by the bones of modern humans and domestic animals, which do not experience such great physical exertion. These bones produce turquoise and yellow tones, indicating a lighter, lattice-type crystalline structure.

Ancient soil and climate in prehistoric times

The earth in which the bones of the Neanderthals rested can provide no less information than the bones themselves, for it stores in its deposits weather reports from Neanderthal times.

Typical in this respect are the excavations in the Mugaret-et-Tabun cave on the slope of Mount Carmel. Neanderthals lived there for tens of thousands of years. The lower sedimentary layer, which is 100,000 years old, consists of fine sand (see p. 67, left image). This sand was loose, not dense - which means, geologists say, it was caused by the wind. But the grains of sand retained an irregular shape - it means that the wind was not strong and picked them up somewhere nearby, since the grains of sand that fly long distances, and also raised by a sandstorm, roll into even balls. It follows from this that in those days the distance from the cave to the sea was about the same as now - about three and a half kilometers. The climate, too, most likely resembled the modern one and was hot and dry. The Neanderthals who lived there had no particular need for clothing.

However, later sedimentary layers give a very different picture. Layers formed 50 thousand years ago and later contain little sand, but they contain traces of bone substance dissolved in water - evidence that the area was damp. Presumably, at the foot of Mount Carmel, muddy plains then stretched, and Neanderthals, looking at this dank world, standing at the entrance to the cave, wrapped themselves in skins.

Earth taken from excavations in the Neanderthal cave of Mugaret et Tabun is being prepared for laboratory analysis. A glass with a piece of sedimentary rocks lying in resin is placed under a vacuum bell. When the air is pumped out, the resin permeates all the pores of the piece of rock. It is then fired for several hours and, thanks to the resin, hardens so much that it can be cut and ground for examination under a microscope.

A piece of sedimentary rock from the excavation, soaked in resin and fired, is cut into plates using a circular water-cooled knife. Each plate, about 0.0008 mm thick, is polished until it becomes completely transparent. These thin sections are then examined under a microscope. From their components - for example, sand, particles of silt or clay (right) - it is often possible to determine what a given area was like in antiquity.

A rock sample from the lowest sedimentary layer in Tabun, which is 100,000 years old, is loose and light, which implies that the soil was then applied to the cave by dry wind. Sand brought by water has grains of sand of different sizes. Their irregular shape and sharp corners indicate that they were not polished by a sandstorm.

A sample of sedimentary rock, which is about 50 thousand years old, is crossed by a whitish band of calcium phosphate - the remains of a bone, possibly from a Neanderthal buried there. The fact that the inorganic matter of the bone was dissolved in the water indicates that the climate here was much damper in those days.

Before examining the remains of a Neanderthal man in the laboratory in order to obtain information about the world in which he lived and about his habits, archaeologists search for material for these studies by excavating the floor of a cave - and often they have to search in vain. Anthropologist Steve Copper (Long Island University) has found a way to explore the archaeological potential of the cave without taking shovels in hand.

The Kopner method - one of the methods of electrical exploration - is not new in itself. Geologists have long used it in the search for minerals and groundwater. But for the needs of archeology, it has not yet been used.

Copper drives at least four probes into the ground and passes current through them. Wires connect the probes to a meter that shows how much resistance the current meets at different depths. This data is then compared with meter readings obtained by checking age-determined layers at other sites in the same excavation area. Layers of the same age give similar numbers. In this way, Copper could quickly explore several adjacent caves and, by comparing the results, identify new sites for excavation similar to those that have already yielded rich material, or even discover sites with older layers.

In a limestone cave, anthropologist Steve Copper takes readings from a meter connected to probes between which current is passed. In this way, Copper measures the electrical resistance of the lower layers, which serves as an indicator of their age.

The last ice age ended 12,000 years ago. In the most severe period, glaciation threatened man with extinction. However, after the glacier melted, he not only survived, but also created a civilization.

Glaciers in the history of the Earth

The last ice age in the history of the Earth is the Cenozoic. It began 65 million years ago and continues to this day. Modern man is lucky: he lives in the interglacial, in one of the warmest periods of the planet's life. Far behind is the most severe ice age - the Late Proterozoic.

Despite global warming, scientists are predicting a new ice age. And if the real one comes only after millennia, then the Little Ice Age, which will reduce annual temperatures by 2-3 degrees, can come quite soon.

The glacier became a real test for man, forcing him to invent means for his survival.

last ice age

The Würm or Vistula glaciation began about 110,000 years ago and ended in the tenth millennium BC. The peak of cold weather fell on the period of 26-20 thousand years ago, the final stage of the Stone Age, when the glacier was the largest.

Little Ice Ages

Even after the glaciers melted, history has known periods of noticeable cooling and warming. Or, in other words, climate pessimism and optima. Pessima are sometimes referred to as Little Ice Ages. In the XIV-XIX centuries, for example, the Little Ice Age began, and the time of the Great Migration of Peoples was the time of the early medieval pessimum.

Hunting and meat food

There is an opinion according to which the human ancestor was rather a scavenger, since he could not spontaneously occupy a higher ecological niche. And all known tools were used to butcher the remains of animals that were taken from predators. However, the question of when and why a person began to hunt is still debatable.

In any case, thanks to hunting and eating meat, the ancient man received a large supply of energy, which allowed him to better endure the cold. The skins of slaughtered animals were used as clothing, shoes and walls of the dwelling, which increased the chances of surviving in a harsh climate.

bipedalism

Bipedalism appeared millions of years ago, and its role was much more important than in the life of a modern office worker. Having freed his hands, a person could engage in intensive construction of a dwelling, the production of clothing, the processing of tools, the extraction and preservation of fire. The upright ancestors roamed freely in open areas, and their life no longer depended on the collection of fruits from tropical trees. Already millions of years ago, they freely moved over long distances and obtained food in river flows.

Walking upright played an insidious role, but it became more of an advantage. Yes, man himself came to cold regions and adapted to life in them, but at the same time he could find both artificial and natural shelters from the glacier.

Fire

The fire in the life of an ancient person was originally an unpleasant surprise, not a boon. Despite this, the ancestor of man first learned to “extinguish” it, and only later to use it for his own purposes. Traces of the use of fire are found in sites that are 1.5 million years old. This made it possible to improve nutrition through the preparation of protein foods, as well as to remain active at night. This further increased the time to create conditions for survival.

Climate

The Cenozoic Ice Age was not a continuous glaciation. Every 40 thousand years, the ancestors of people had the right to a “respite” - temporary thaws. At this time, the glacier receded, and the climate became milder. During periods of harsh climate, natural shelters were caves or regions rich in flora and fauna. For example, the south of France and the Iberian Peninsula were home to many early cultures.

The Persian Gulf 20,000 years ago was a river valley rich in forests and herbaceous vegetation, a truly “antediluvian” landscape. Wide rivers flowed here, exceeding the size of the Tigris and Euphrates by one and a half times. Sahara in some periods became a wet savanna. The last time this happened was 9,000 years ago. This can be confirmed by the rock paintings, which depict the abundance of animals.

Fauna

Huge glacial mammals such as bison, woolly rhinoceros and mammoth became an important and unique source of food for ancient people. Hunting such large animals required a lot of coordination and brought people together noticeably. The effectiveness of "collective work" has shown itself more than once in the construction of parking lots and the manufacture of clothing. Deer and wild horses among ancient people enjoyed no less "honor".

Language and communication

Language was, perhaps, the main life hack of an ancient person. It was thanks to speech that important technologies for processing tools, mining and maintaining fire, as well as various human adaptations for everyday survival, were preserved and transmitted from generation to generation. Perhaps in the Paleolithic language, the details of the hunt for large animals and the direction of migration were discussed.

Allerd warming

Until now, scientists are arguing whether the extinction of mammoths and other glacial animals was the work of man or caused by natural causes - the Allerd warming and the disappearance of forage plants. As a result of the extermination of a large number of animal species, a person in harsh conditions was threatened with death from lack of food. There are known cases of the death of entire cultures simultaneously with the extinction of mammoths (for example, the Clovis culture in North America). Nevertheless, warming has become an important factor in the migration of people to regions whose climate has become suitable for the emergence of agriculture.