sizes came to understand themselves as linked by shared kinship and culture, and as different from other groups. Words were devised to describe such groups, which in English include people, ethnic group, tribe, race, and nation. Shared culture included language, religion, foodways, rituals, clothing styles, and many other factors, whose importance in defining membership in the group changed over time (though language was almost always important). Because of extensive intermarriage within the group over many generations, the differences between groups were (and are) sometimes evident in the body, and were (and are) often conceptualized as blood, a substance with deep meaning. Kinship ties included perceived and invented ones, however, as adoption and other methods were devised to bring someone into the group, or traditions developed of descent from a common ancestor. At the heart of all such groups was a conscious common identity, which itself enhanced endogamy as people chose (or were required) to marry within the group. These groups came into being, died out, morphed into other groups, split, combined, lost and gained in significance, and in other ways changed, but their fluidity and the fact that they were constructed through culture as well as genetics does not make them any less real. They came to have enormous significance later in world history, but developed before the invention of writing and appear to have been everywhere.
The burial of the young woman in southern France was a social occasion, and it was also a way to express ideas and beliefs about the material world and perhaps an unseen world beyond. Paleolithic mortuary rituals created social and political messages, and conveyed (and possibly distorted) cultural meaning (as have funerals ever since). They marked membership in a group, which might have been understood to continue after death took one from the realm of the living. Together with paintings and decorated objects, burials suggest that people thought of their world as extending beyond the visible. People, animals, plants, natural occurrences, and other things around them had spirits, an animistic understanding of the spiritual nature and interdependence of all things. The unseen world regularly intervened in the visible world, for good and ill, and the actions of dead ancestors and the spirits could be shaped by living people.
Rock art from around the world and a wide array of ethnographic evidence suggests that ordinary people were thought to learn about the unseen world through dreams and portents, while messages and revelations were also sent more regularly to shamans, spiritually adept people who communicated with or traveled to the unseen world. Shamans created complex rituals through which they sought to ensure the health and prosperity of an individual, family, or group. These included rituals with gender and sexual imagery, and shamans in some places may have constructed a transgender role through which they harnessed power that crossed gender boundaries, just as they crossed the boundary between the seen and unseen world. Many cave paintings show groups of prey or predator animals, and several include a masked human figure usually judged to be a shaman in a gesture or pose assumed to be some sort of ritual. Sometimes the shaman is shown with what looks like a penis, and such figures used to be invariably described as men. More recently the suggestion has been made that these figures may have been gendered male, but could have been a woman wearing a costume, as gender inversions are often part of many types of rituals and performances. Or the figure – and the actual shaman who it may have represented – was understood as a third gender, neither male nor female, or both at the same time. Shamans in many cultures wore masks that gave them added power, and were understood to take on the qualities of the animal, creature, or spirit represented by the mask; transcending boundaries was thus their role.
Interpreting what certain objects that appear to have had ritual purposes might have meant to those who made or possessed them is just as contentious as other aspects of early human history. For example, small stone, ivory, bone, or clay figures of women, often with enlarged breasts, buttocks, and/or stomach, dating from the later Paleolithic period (roughly 33,000–9,000 BCE) have been found in many parts of Europe. These were dubbed “Venus figures” by nineteenth-century archaeologists, who thought they represented Paleolithic standards of female beauty just as the goddess Venus represented classical standards (Figure 3.1). Some scholars have interpreted them, as well as later Neolithic figurines of women, as fertility goddesses, evidence of people’s beliefs in a powerful female deity. Others view them as aids to fertility, carried around by women hoping to have children – or perhaps hoping not to have more. Perhaps they were made by women looking at their own bodies in mid-life, with the rounded form of most women who have given birth, and represent hopes for good health during aging. Or they were sexualized images of women carried around by men, a sort of Paleolithic version of the centerfold in a men’s magazine. Or perhaps they might have represented different things to different people. Small clay figurines of women from Mesoamerica and coastal Ecuador in the second millennium BCE have been similarly interpreted in a range of ways: as fertility emblems, ritual objects, models of sexuality, and aids to pregnancy.
Figure 3.1 Venus of Willendorf, c. 23,000 BCE.
This small limestone figurine of a woman, made about 25,000 years ago, was unearthed at an archaeological site at Willendorf, Austria. Its large breasts and stomach, and the plaited hair that continues across the face, have given rise to many theories, but like all “Venus figures,” who made it and for what purposes are unknown. Wikimedia Commons. Source, Bjørn Christian Tørrissen.
The painted, carved, and otherwise decorated objects and locations from the later Paleolithic may have had ritual purposes, but they are also products of imagination, reason, pride, mischeviousness, and a range of emotions (including boredom). Objects modified in a particular way or by talented individuals – what we might now call “luxuries” or “art” – conveyed status and prestige, which is why they show up in burials, including those of women.
Domestication
Foraging remained the basic way of life for most of human history, and for groups living in extreme environments, such as tundras or deserts, it was the only possible way to survive. In some places, however, the natural environment provided enough food that people could become more settled. About 15,000 years ago, as the earth’s climate entered a warming phase, more parts of the world were able to support sedentary or semi-sedentary groups of foragers. Archaeological sites in many places begin to include storage pits, bins, and other sorts of containers, as well as grindstones. They show evidence that people were intensifying their work to get more food from the surrounding area, preparing a wide range of foods out of hundreds of different ingredients, acquiring more objects, and building more permanent housing.
Sedentism used to be seen as a result of the plant and animal domestication that scholars use to separate the Neolithic from the Paleolithic, but in many places it preceded intentional crop-raising by thousands of years, so the primary line of causation runs the other way: people began to raise crops because they were living in permanent communities. Thus people were “domesticated” before plants and animals were. They developed socioeconomic and sociopolitical structures for village life, such as ways to handle disputes or to make decisions about community resources.
Sedentary villages grew first in an area archaeologists call the Fertile Crescent, which runs from present-day Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan north to Turkey and then south to the Iran–Iraq border. Here beginning about 10,000 BCE, people built houses and larger buildings, and used digging sticks, hoes, and other tools to gather wild wheat, barley, and legumes, along with flax, with which they made linen cloth. The population grew, but when they needed more food, instead of moving to a new area – the solution that foragers relied on when faced with the problem of food scarcity – people chose to stay put, with the physical and social structures of the sedentary villages they had built. They developed a different way to increase the food supply to keep up with population growth – plant and animal domestication – thus beginning cycles of expanding population and intensification of land use that have continued to today. They saved some seeds for planting, selecting certain ones in order to get crops that had favorable characteristics, such as larger edible parts or kernels clustered together that ripened all at one time and did not just fall on the ground, qualities that made harvesting more efficient. Through this human intervention, certain crops became domesticated, modified by selective breeding so as to serve human needs.
A similar process – first sedentism, then domestication – happened elsewhere