I N T R O D U C T I O N
UI-RA-LA
The Way of the Waters
Synopsis:
The "UIRALA" banner is created to
signal articles that deal with the development of peoples adapted to
the flooded landscape left when the world climate warmed and the
glaciers melted and retreated leaving behind a land flooded with
glacial meltwater. They developed a boat-oriented way of life which was
very successful and which then expanded in all directions where
waterways could take them. Under the "UIRALA" banner, with a
multidisciplinary approach, we look at all aspects of the boat-oriented
way of life that was born in the meltwater of the glaciers from about
12,000 years ago with the archeological "Maglemose" and then "Kunda"
cultures
Introduction: What is "Uirala"?
This series of articles or web pages was started
over a decade ago (2002) , for the personal study for me of a
remarkable period
of human history - the period at the end of the Ice Age, when the world
began warmng up very rapidly. By about 10,000 years ago, the world
climate was about the same as today, and the vegetation similar, and
sometimes the climate was even warmer. BUT half of the glaciers that
covered the northern parts of continents were still there, melting like
a snowball on a summer's day, with torrents of water gushing out of
them, flooding the land below them. Imagine you were humans, who spent
thousands and thousands of years perfecting the hunting of large herd
animals in open plains or tundras, and suddenly, in as little as half a
millenium, the open grassy plains were becoming forests, and the
tundras becoming marshes and bogs. While the tundras and plains tried
to shift northward, in response to the cold, in Europe the forests took
over the entire west, leaving only small patches of open grassy plains
and meadows for the formerly large herds of horses, bison, aurochs
(wild cattle). The tundras towards the north, shifted north until they
came up against the wall of glacier and the tundra could not shift
north any further. (If the enormous glacier was not there, then of
course the tundra could have continued shifting north until it reached
Lapland). The tundras were able to shift north for a while
longer, skirting the east side of the glacier and water, but almost
immediately the northward shift in that northeasterly direction was
blocked again. The meltwater from the glacier moved the coastline many
hundreds of kilometers south. Had it not been there, then the tundra
could have shifted north to its position today at the arctic coast of
Russia. Note that towards eastern Eurasia, there were no glaciers
to block northward progress, and so the tundra reached its modern
locations in many places in northeastern Siberia.
Without tunda, some of the animals of the tundra,
like mammoths, went extinct. Reindeer herds, which must once have
overed middle Eurasia in enormous numbers (perhaps much like the bison
in the plains of North America when Europeans arrived) and been
followed by very successful tribes. But now, with the disappearance of
the grassy plains and tundra, all those large animals depicted on the
walls of caves in southern France, on which humans depended were
disappearing. Humans were forced to completely change the way of life
they had known for tens of thousands of years, and become peoples of
forests and wetlands. The reindeer hunters of course did not
entirely disappear - Asian reindeer hunters were still able to follow
reindeer into the Siberian arctic, and continue their way of life. When
the glaciers were gone, and the coastlines returned to normal, there
were be westward migrations along the Eurasian arctic coast, by
reindeer and reindeer hunters. restoring some of the reindeer. With the
glaciers over Scandinavia gone, this may be the time reindeer and
reindeer hunters reached northern Norway from the east. Meanwhile
towards the south, towards the drier eastern Europe where
open grassy plains survived, the herds of bison, horses and wild cattle
had been decimated, and the large populations of their hunters had to
change their way of life too, to hunting in the more deciduous forests
in central European highlands. It was this struggle that gave
rise to domesticating these animals, notably wild cattle. In order to
give wild cattle, horses, and of course deer, pasture, these people
initiated the burning of forests to create meadows. But the story of
the domestication of the original herd animals of the Ice Age, is a
different one. This one titled "Uirala" is about the adapting of humans
to the flooded landscape by the development of a boat-oriented way of
life, and being so successful, it expanded everywhere, almost
representing a second expansion of humankind. (The first was on foot,
the second one now via boats) This second expansion as you will see
took them into the oceans and to other contents by around 6.000 years
ago.
Figure
1
UIRALA
is depicted above - the entire
region of flooded lands south of the glacier, into which boats
expanded. The boat peoples expanded not just the inland wetlands
and rivers, but also the swollen seas and glacial lakes.
Thus "Uirala" is a more or less invented word in
Finnic, combining UI 'float, swim' RA 'path, route, way' and LA
'place, location, area'. This world of 10,000 years ago and for
several millenia afterward was, towards the north, endless wetlands and
thick wilderness through which it was no longer possible to travel like
in the former open tundra or plains. Note that when the glaciers had
melted, the lands that had once been under the kilometer of ice was not
just filled with the meltwater, but also was depressed - in places many
meters below current elevations. Today these areas that were originally
lakes and wetlands, are far from what they are now. The land has been
rebounding for 10,000 years and the water that flooded the landscape
has been flowing to the sea since that time as well. The rise of the
sea-level from this flow of water back to the sea, also had an impact -
coastal regions originally dry became innundated.
It was a world of water everywhere, as the enormous
slowball - the glaciers - were melting. And the first thing the former
reindeer hunters had to learn, was how to simply navigate through the
marshes and dense wilderness, if it was now nearly impossible to do so
on foot. They developed a way of life that involved moving around in
dugout boats.
Dramatic change from about 12,000 BP
.
Figure
2
this
animated map shows the region where the Maglemose and Kunda Cultures
emerged when the glaciers melted and flooded the lands.
THE
SUDDEN CLIMATE WARMING AROUND 10,000 YEARS AGO
If you read archeological texts, you will
generally find those texts simply describe how the original hunters of
large herd animals in the open parklike steppes of Eurasia during the
Ice Age very suddenly had to bring that activity to an end and revert
to a mixed hunting-gathering economy.
The following is excerpted from two pages of the
famous university-level book by Grahame Clarke.
...reindeer hunters of western
and
northern Europe during the period between ten and fifteen thousand
years ago provide a well-documented example [of narrowing down of
animals pursued] Analysis of the larger game animals represented in the
food-refuse of the Late-Magdalenians who sheltered in the south German
cave of Petersfels for example, shows that they obtained four-fifth of
their meat from reindeer. And even greater concentration can be seen on
the summer hunting stations of the Hamburgian and Ahrensburgians sited
on the margins of glacial tunnel-valleys in Schleswig-Holstein. In that
case over 99 percent of the larger game animals were of a single
species. The evidence suggests that other animals were the victims of
chance encounters and that the only serious quarry was the
reindeer...By attaching themselves to a herd of reindeer a group of
hunters would not only possess themselves if a walking larder,
comparable up to a point with a domesticated herd, but also a source of
many of the most important raw materials they needed, skins for
clothing and tents, antler and sinew for hunting gear........quite
suddenly, in the course of a few generations the ecological setting
changed: as Late-glacial gave way to Post-glacial climate and
glaciers
entered on their final retreat, forests encroached rapidly on the open
grazing grounds formerly occupied by reindeer.....the hunting people of
the North European Plain reacted in part by reverting to a mixed
hunting economy... but in part by developing special skills in fishing
and winning food from the seashore. [Clarke, World Prehistory, pp73-74]
"In the course of a few generations"!
It
seems archeologists do not stress it enough how dramatic this change
was on humans. Imagine your people have been hunting a large herd
animal
in either the grassy steppes, or further north the tundra, and been
doing so now for thousands
of years throughout the Ice Age.
Since humans, just like our ape relatives, are
territorial about that
on which we depend, each tribe of the large animal hunters would have
identified a particular herd
as their property, and followed it generation after generation through
the thousands of years of the Ice Age, knowing
pretty much every individual.
And now suddenly these animals are deprived
of their habitat. Towards the south, the grassy plains originally
filled with
horses, bison, and auroches (ancestors of cattle), give way to forests,
and towards the north, the reindeer tundra permafrost thaws turning the
land into bogs, and flooded with the water from the melting glaciers
towards the north. The original large animals on which humankind
was dependent for millenia through the Ice Age, are in peril. But,
since the changes take several generations, there is room for the
animals and their hunter-owners to shift in directions where the open
country or hard tundra still remain. The traditional hunting of large
animals in open plains can continue for a while longer. Until the
climate warming accelerates, tundra disappearing and open plains
becoming densely forested.
ADAPTING
TO CLIMATE CHANGE IN FORMER GRASSY PLAINS AREAS
Interior regions
towards southeast Europe - far from the prevailing winds that bring
rain, will be drier. There will be steppes north of the Black Sea, as
there is now. Those hunter tribes who followed, and 'owned' the herds
of the open plains animals will
witness the tragedy and take measures to help their animals. For
horses, bison, or auroch
herds, who needed open grassy lands, their hunter-owners could
deliberately put forests on fire, and soon grassy meadows suitable
especially for auroches would spring up. Bison and horses desire quite
open spaces, so the auroch was the ideal animal to be helped with slash
and
burn. Archeologists who come across slash-and-burn evidence in
continental Europe will assume it was done for agriculture. However,
bear in mind that humans were primarily meat-eaters through the Ice
Age, and they would have been more interested in helping the large meat
sources, than to plant crops. At that time forests were lush, and there
was no lack of wild edible plants. No - the slash-and-burn was
primarily for creating open lands for the large animals, if not for
aurochs that the hunters considered their property,. then for the
completely wild animals like deer. In North America's northeast, the
Iroquoian tribes, who practiced farming of maize, squash, etc. moved
their village every thirty years (to allow lands to recover fertility)
and carried out slash-and-burn at their new location. They certainly
wanted to also attract deer and other wild animals to the cleared
regions to provide meat. Thus even after crop farming developed,
the role of creating meadows for hooved large animals was also behind
the slash and burn activity. As a result of the slash and burn
activity, the original forested areas became savannah. For example, in
the 17th century when French explorer Champlain travelled into the
regions around Rice Lake north of Lake Ontario, he commented that it
looked like a European countryside that had previously been inhabited.
(It had. The Huron/Wendat branch of the Iroquoian farmers had lived
there in the 16th century, and had abandoned the area when attacked by
Iroquoians from the south side of Lake Ontario. There is much to
be learned about early Europe from studying the behaviour of Iroquoian
farmers, and Algonquian nomadic boat-using hunter-gatherers, who were
analogous to continental Europe up to around 5,000 years ago, and
longer in more remote locations.
Today scholars make a big deal out of the 'invention
of
agriculture', but I think it is a small step from deliberately burning
forests to produce grazing land for the aurochs, to actually planting
fodder in the ashes. It's my belief that farming for human consumption
was never deliberately invented. It was a byproduct of helping cattle
survive by producing grass for them. Someone then discovered humans
could eat the seeds and give the rest to the cattle. Assisting
cattle to retain grazing meadows could and probably did occur
independently everywhere that aurochs where threatened by forests
closing in on them, and humans taking steps to help them, by
burning large areas of forest. Horses were domesticated too, but that
may not have been properly achieved until a later time. Bison seem
never to have been domesticated, perhaps from the domestication of
aurochs being easier.
The above, then, is the story of the development of
farming. My theory, to summarize, is that humans were most accustomed
to eating meat of large animals of open plains, and their largest
concern was to help those animals survive, and one action was to create
meadows via slash and burn. Where did agriculture develop, then.
The narrative we often hear is that agriculture developed in Asia
Minor. But paleoclimatology also says that during the Ice Age, Asia
Minor was a wonderful setting. What happened there was that as
the world climate warmed, it dried up, and instead of excess wetness
such as in continental Europe (needing slash and burn to create
meadows), in Asia Minor, the challenge was to bring back at least the
vegetation used by the animals. The solution was of course to use
irrigation. But I believe originally the purpose was the same - to help
the large meat animals survive, namely cattle. Grasses were promoted by
irrigation to provide fodder to the cattle. Humans discovered that they
could eat the grains and give the cattle the rest. Thus in that
instance too, agriculture originally developed as a byproduct of the
primary objective of helping the animals they consumed for food. This
helping meant domestication. As archeology of very ancient sites in
Anatolia show, there was a culture that both worshipped the bull and a
mother goddess. Mother goddess figurines have been found dating to the
Ice Age, in the "Gravettian Culture". The fact that they worshipped the
mother goddess, meant they understood reproduction. It follows that
descendants of the Gravettian Culture not only helped their cattle
herds with providing them with meadows, but also to regulate their
browsing. That meant 'harvesting' only the excess males, and leaving
the females with only the most promising bull. And from that came the
worshipping of the bull. Since the Gravettian Culture extended from
southeast Europe in an arc north of the Alps, all the way to the
Iberian Peninsula, it is not surprising that the bull cult also became
prominent in the Iberian Peninsula. This culture may have migrated by
sea, since it also appeared in Crete.
My point is that in the evolution of humankind out
of the Ice Age, farming began with helping the large open plains
animals to survive during the time forests were eating up the open
plains just north of the Alps, or Asia Minor was becoming dry desert.
But our central interest in this article is in the
tundra, its reindeer, its reindeer hunters and the disappearance of
tundra. Here the problem was not forests devouring open grassy plains,
but of tundra turning into wetlands and impassible lowland wilderness.
It required a quite different response than artificially creating
habitat. (Indeed, whereas it is possible to create meadows by
burning down forests from time to time, it is impossible to create
tundra artificially. In this case humans had to transform themselves
completely from a pedestrian hunter of plains herds, to a boat using
hunter in dense wilderness.
ADAPTING TO
CLIMATE CHANGE IN FORMER TUNDRA LOCATIONS
Then there were the reindeer. As the climate
warmed, the direction the reindeer herds wanted to go was northward, to
stay within their ideal habitat - the tundra with its reindeer moss.
If
the reindeer herds were originally around Germany, and in a few
generations the tundra turned into marshy bogs, where could the herds
go? If they went north from there, they came up against the enormous
wall of the glacier.
By that time, the world climate was now the same
as it is today, and yet the enormous glacier that covered half of
Europe was only half melted. The glacier was for many of the subsequent
millenia like a huge snowball in the summertime. Just melting and
pouring water out of it.
The lands freed from glacier cover - exending almost
to the Alps, were both
depressed from the weight of the glaciers, and flooded by the
meltwater. The sea levels were low and it would take some millenia for
the meltwater to flow to the sea and the sea level to rise. And then
when the sea level rose the coastal areas were flooded by the sea rise.
The original reindeer hunters could not win.
It would
take many millenia for the land to rebound to where it is today. Today,
the regions around the Baltic, and south in the Oder and Vistula water
systems, do not seem so bad today, because the land has been rising for
some 10,000 years. .
As the climate warmed from around 12,000 years ago,
there was a gradual warming that resulted in tundra shifting northward
gradually from their original location at the latitude of central
Europe. But as time passed, the warming accelerated. This is
because as more ice and snow cover is freed, the dark of the earth and
sea absorbs more of the sun's rays instead of reflecting it back into
space from the white of the snow and ice of the glaciers. According to
paleoclimatology, the climate was about the same as today, and then
even warmer in the later Holocene period, even as the glacier in the
north still covered the entire Scadinavian Peninsula and northern
Russia's coast. The difference between than and today was that back
then, the sea level was low, and glacier meltwater was creating rushing
rives and wetlands to the south of the glaciers.
Note in the map of Figure 1, the outline of
today's coast through the
glacier, I have made a little transparent. That means, although today
there may be some tundra right along the arctic coast the glacial seas
roughly shown south of the glaciers, in effect situated the coast
hundreds of kilometers south. Unless there was some way reindeer could
find refuge in the mountains at the north end of the Ural Mountains, or
that there was a passage to the Kola Peninsula, there was absolutely no
terrain left for the reindeer herds. (The same was true of the
mammoths. Mammoths could only survive for a while in the little
remaining tundra on the arctic coast of northeast Siberia east of the
Lena River.)
Unlike the former hunters of the grassy plains, who
could adapt by helping their herds and domesticating them, the reindeer
hunters could do nothing (unless some hunters in mountains took
intiatives to domesticate reindeer, by which they could help reindeer
to useful wild pastures, and hunt only males.)
In the Estonian language, the word used for
the moose (in British English the "elk") is from the same word that in
Finnish means 'reindeer'. It seems to suggest that the first reaction
of the reindeer hunters to the loss of reindeer, was to turn to hunting
the moose. The moose is ideally suited for the marshy wilderness. It
can swim ten miles, and can even browse on aquatic plants, while being
completely submerged for several minutes, It can close its nostrils
during that time. The only problem with hunting moose was that it did
not form herds, and could not be easily accessed, since it lived in
wetlands and dense wilderness. The development of a way to get through
dense wet wilderness was also needed.
THE
EMERGENCE OF THE BOAT PEOPLE CULTURES
Archeological discoveries in the last century
has
identified the conversion to the boat-using hunter-gatherers in the "Maglemose Culture".
The Maglemose
Culture
(c 11000 – 8000 Before Present) probably began with great difficulty as
the
reindeer hunters had over many generations developed a successful way
of life with reindeer, and now had to find a new way of life over many
generations that would serve them well. My theory is that the Maglemose
culture perfected a way of life that used water as highways, solving
the problem of travelling through a swampy wilderness, and at the same
time providing access to the bounty of water plants and animals that
were springing forth in the warming environment released from the
glaciers. This new way of life produce dramatic population growth that
caused breakaway groups every few generations, who took their canoes
into the unknown and uninhabited wilderness, following the major coasts
and rivers, to establish new tribes in new regions.
This suggests that those boat peoples who were
descended from the reindeer hunters became carriers of their
haplogroups. Investigations have found that the N-haplogroup
originated in Asia. Since the Samoyedic reindeer people who have the N
-haplogroup, are located at the Tamyr Peninsula in Asia, this is to be
expected. But how did some N-haplogroups end up in Fennoscandia, the
source of these boat people. Did the Maglemose culture inherit the
N-haplogroup from their reindeer hunter ancestors, thought to be the Ahrensburgian Culture
(13th to 12th millenia Before Present); and that it was since displaced
by carriers of R1a? What is the story?
The story is clearer for the related Kunda Culture .(10,000 - 7,000
Before Present). The "Kunda culture" archeologists believe, arose from
the Swiderian Culture. (13,000
– 10200) Before Present) in the region now Poland.
The following map shows the cultures. I propose that
the original expansion was via rivers and marshes, through lowland
regions, but after the Kunda Culture began hunting reals and whales in
the sea, a seagoing version of the boat people developed. The seagoing
boat peoples will be discussed separately in the third article, after
first discussing the marshland boat peoples. The following map also
shows, with orange arrows possible or likely locations where reindeer
found a refuge during this overly warm period.
Figure 3
The
map depicts Eurasia about 10,000 years ago - the beginning of the
transformtion, when the boat-oriented way of life was brand new, and it
was able to expand everywhere boats could go, but humans on foot had
avoided, with no resistance from anyone already there. The yellow
arrows indicate the expansions of the original "Maglemose" culture
during a time when the climate was as today or warmer, and yet the
glaciers were still only half their original size. Note that in the
expansion of boat peoples, they would follow rivers and wetlands. We
cannot show boat peoples in the mountainous parts of Europe. That is
very important to interpreting what archeology and population genetics
finds. The blue indicates the descendants of the "Kunda" culture that
took an interest in the sea and their descendants expanded into places
with sea life like seals and whales. When the glacier allowed a gap at
the Kola Peninsula and some ice-free coast, the seahunting peoples
would have moved to arctic Norway and further. The dark orange
arrows suggest a few locations where reindeer, at least small numbers,
would have found refuge, if not in actual tundra, then in high
elevations of northern mountains that had the environment and food
reindeer needed.
The Evolution and Expansion of Boat
Peoples
Humanity has mostly been interested in
scholarly
explorations of the wanderings of pedestrial humans during and just
after the last Ice Age, before about 10,000 years ago. From archeology
comes the story of early hunters following the mammoths, crossing a
land bridge from Asia into North America and down an ice-free corridor
around 10,000 years ago. From archeology too are theories about an even
earlier mysterious coastal migration from Asia and down the Pacific
coast of North America. From population genetics comes the story
of migrations out of Africa, from an original "mitochrondrial Eve"
and y-chromosome Adam, based on comparing similar DNA features in
different parts of the world that indicate the descent of mtDNA along
female lineage and y-chromosome DNA along male lineage. With further
paleoanthropological work, it is now believed that before the
expansion of humanity, we lived along the coast of southern Africa, an
ideal refuge from dramatic climatic changes elsewhere in the world.
It is therefore the general belief today that humans
expanded from Africa throughout the world, reaching North America
around 10,000 years ago, and that no further migrations of relevance
occurred since then. But this is to be questioned. There is also the
migrations by water that went where humans travelling on land could not
go.
The world in the Ice Age.
It was in this
world that humans spread on foot, until they had reached all continents
by 10,000 years ago This is what we tend to study exclusively in
school.
Meanwhile archeologists have studied the
period after the Ice Age, and prehistoric peoples presence after
10,000 years ago, such as the reindeer hunters in the North European
Plain, who when finding themselves in rapidly warming climate,
had to change their way of life or follow reindeer herds heading north
where the land and climate was still cold and barren. But there
has been accumulating evidence of long distance migrations by sea as
well. The
Arctic seas of North America recieved people who almost certainly
arrived by sea from across the Altantic before 3000BC (before 5000
years from present.) On the
Pacific coasts archeologists find coasts that were originally
uninhabited and then a coastal culture arrived about this time as
well. On the European side of the Atlantic rock carvings on the
arctic coast of Norway showing images of skin boats date to about the
same time. There was a great amount of developments with boats about
6,000-5,000 years ago.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF BOAT PEOPLES OF
FORESTS AND LOWLANDS
SInce today everyone can get into a boat and
go fishing, it is a popular notion that humans could make and
use boats instantly
whenever they wished. This is naive. Today the culture of boats
is already established. We no longer have to develop that culture.
In
the beginning, who even knew how to make a boat? If one needed to cross
water, one rode a log or made a raft. I offer the theory
that originally, like apes, we simply straddled logs to cross rivers,
and the more we did it, the more we thought of ways to keep our legs
dry, and the logs acquired cavities. The next step was to make the
dugout log lighter and more streamlined for easier handling.
Yes, it is clear that humans were always able to
make bridges and rafts to cross rivers and bodies of water when
needed.
They could always straggle a log or bind logs together to form a raft,
or even ride a natural raft of debris. This is something even
apes are capable of doing. We should not be surprised for
example that humans had to cross a body of water to reach Australia.
The real question was whether the raft or log used was a one-time
contraption, or if there was a seagoing way of life. Likely it was a
one-time crossing on some contrived raft since there is no evidence of
a boat-using culture having been sustained.
Who can blame humans for remaining land-based
hunters if they did not have to go out on the water? We are not
dolphins. Humans
evolved
on land, and are most comfortable on solid ground in dry air, instead
of bouncing around in waves, getting wet, and hunting water
creatures.
If it is possible to remain on the land, humans will do so.
Thus the
debate is not about ocassionally going out onto the water when
necessary, but about developing an entire way of life in which
travelling in boats was a necessary everyday activity, was only
way hunters could make journeys longer than short walks around their
campsites on dry islands. Such a development required
environmental pressures
that
simply made it impossible to travel by land.
Once a new way of life that includes a practice
unnatural to humans, it is easily adopted by others. In the beginning,
we do not even know what a boat looks like or how it is beneficial, and
other peoples will have no interest in it; but once the culture has
matured, once the design of the boats and their use are clear, once the
benefits of their use are obvious, then any other people can adopt it
by simply copying. Today if we want a boat to go fishing,
everything is done - we simply follow the instructions.
Nonetheless, it is certainly that boat use could have
developed elsewhere that it was necessary, such as the annual flooding
of the Nile - did reed boats develop independently there? It is also
possible to develop a seagoing boat based on the concept of the raft.
It could have developed on the Atlantic coast where there was a lack of
really large trees for making a seagoing dugout, but enough smaller
trees for raft construction. European rock carvings depict a kind
of boat that appears
to be based on using large streamlined logs to give buoyancy, and then
building a platform above it so that these logs actually remained
underwater and stable, instead of bounding with the surface, while
lifting the crew well above the splashing waves. Such
a streamlined raft concept boat would have been very heavy, and usable
only for long distance journeys with a large crew of oarsmen to
get up the momentum and to steer. Such a boat could have
travelled the Atlantic coast of Europe during the era of dugouts, and
before the introduction of the light seagoing skin boat from arctic
Norway. The 'streamlined raft' approach was good only for large crews
in long distance ocean journeys,
but unmanagable for short uses needing maneuvering. Because of this
limitation, they did not develop as universally as the boat made of
ribs and skin -
the skin later becoming wooden planks and most recently steel.
THE FAR RANGING IMPACTS OF THE
NORTHERN POST-GLACIAL BOATS
The story of how the dramatic change in climate lead
to a new way of life using boats, is an elaborate one. Boat use turned
out not just to be a way to travel around in a wet landscape, but it
introduced, for the first time, a way of travelling also through
densely forested areas that may not have been marshy, but were still
dense and impassable on foot - but the forests had to be on lower lands
and contained navigable rivers. This made it advantageous to peoples
who wished to inhabit lowland forested areas: not just wetlands.
Another unexpected benefit was that where there were waterways, it was
now possible to travel some five times faster too. This allowed
seasonally nomadic hunter-gatherers to cover much larger hunting areas
than even when on foot in open plains.This is clear when we imagine a
man walking on open ground beside a river, and imagining a canoe
travelling past that man. If we are dealing with forested areas where
the pedestrian did not even have flat open ground, the difference in
speed was even greater. Imagine for example hunters without boats, such
as in central Europe highlands, where there were no rivers. The hunters
there could barely move at all, compared to the great distances the
boat peoples in the lowlands of the Rhine, Oder, and Vistula River
valleys were able to cover in a year. When we think it
through, we realize that one of the reasons farming developed in the
higher lands of central Europe was because the people there could not
travel enough to be able to successfully hunt the deer and other
animals there. It is easy to see how slash-and-burn activities
would have developed there, to open up the forests and attract and
support more deer, and that when ideas arrived regarding deliberately
growing crops came along, by hearsay or immigrants from the southeast,
it was easy for even the hunter-gatherers there, to easily enter the
settled, farming way of life. In the north the pressures were not
as great, and hunter-gatherers may have adopted only some innovations
from the south that could co-exist with continued hunting-gathering. In
the further north, farming was not even possible dure to the cold
climate, and the original boat-using hunter-gatherer culture continued,
up until relatively recent history.
But the use of boats in wetlands not only allowed
human success in lowland forests, but also in the sea. The large
harpoons of the Kunda Culture, and the location of sites on prehistoric
islands, suggests the Kunda Culture represented the Maglemose Culture
proceeding into the sea. While it is unnatural enough for humans
to go out on rivers and lakes fore extended periods, it was even more
unnatural - and scarely - to go out into the sea, especially into high
waves out of sight of the short. But once the dugout boats existed, it
was possible to create large seagoing dugout containing a number of
men, a team of hunters, to ambush seals and other large aquatic
animals. When the seagoing boats reached the arctic, and there were no
large trees for seagoing dugouts, the people invented the skin
boat. The illustrations below show a descendant of the Maglemose
small boat among the Hanti (Khanty, Ostyaks) of the Ob River. It is
small because trees in northern Asia are small. But the rock
carving from arctic Norway, reveal that seagoing people went to arctic
Norway and brought not just the traditional one-person dugout (top) but
also the skin boat with high prow, with the head of the animal from
which the skin came on the prow - the moose. More detailed discussion
of the expansion of seagoing peoples will be presented in other
articles.
Figure 4,5
DUGOUTS AND SKIN BOATS PREHISTORIC
AND
STILL IN USE
Dugout canoes still used by
the
Hanti (Khanty,Ostyaks) of the Ob River
today. These dugouts are limited in size to the largest trees that can
be found in the north, and ridden like open kayaks, and precedents to
kayaks.
A rock carving from the
arctic
coast of
Norway depicting both a one-man dugout, and a skin boat with a
moosehead prow capable of holding several men and dealing with the high
waves of the sea
A final consequence of the development of the
boat-using culture in the Maglemose Culture around 10.000 years ago, is
that it created the basis for successful large scale trade. I
mentioned above how central European hunters, and then farmers, could
not travel very far - maybe no more than 100km per year - whereas
boat-peoples could use waterways to travel some 1000 km or more per
year (Best example, the hunters who travelled annually between Lake
Onega and arctic Norway a distance of 1500-2000km (More discussion in a
later article)). This large contrast between the immobility of settled
peoples in the uplands of Europe, compared to the high mobility of the
boat peoples, created a situation that allowed some boat peoples to
develop into professional traders/shippers. The settlement-bound
peoples were very receptive to such trader peoples arriving at their
doorsteps, to offer exotic goods obtained in the civilizations of the
Mediterranean and Asia Minor.
DUGOUT BOATS EXPANSION BEYOND
EUROPE
In the article about expansion into the seas, there
is much discussion about skin boats, but the above illustrations show
that knowledge of making dugouts did not die even among peoples who
made skin boats for use on the oceans. . (It was not simply a matter of
cutting a hole in a log, but a skill passed down fhrough the
generations of how to make the hull thin and streamlined, meaning not
any culture could achieve good ones just by observing one.)
The following illustration shows a very large dugout
boat, probably ultimately from the Kunda Culture large dugout
tradition, that is shown on a rock carving at Shishkino on the Lena
River not far from Lake Baikal. If you look at the map of Figure 3. you
will see how explorers in such boats could have reached the area by
river at an early time or later.
Figure
6
Lena River rock art showing large dugouts,
indicative of occasional long journeys.
These carvings (I guess enhanced in
chalk by archeologists) show well made large dugouts. Another image
shows six men. The east Baltic seagoing dugout tradition had places for
three pairs of rowers, and one helmsman with a steering oar. What
is interesting about these images is the headdresses. Since all the men
in the boats have them, it is not a status or ceremonial headdress, but
utilitarian. What I think is shown, is that these men were moose
hunters, and they made headgear out of moose's heads, with ears
attached. The clothing may have looked much like those pyjamas with
ears made for children sometimes.
2017 (c) A. Pääbo.
