The Incredible Human Journey (49 page)

The date of Göbekli Tepe places it slightly earlier than other archaeological sites where the transition to agriculture is
clearly documented. It now seems clear that this area, between the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates, was indeed the
place where farming got started in the West.
⁵
Early farming communities – still without pottery – became established in Turkey and northern Syria between about 11,600
and 10,500 years ago.
⁴
At these very early sites, archaeologists have found burnt remains of wild cereals (like einkorn wheat, rye and barley) and
legumes (peas, vetch and lentils). Slightly later, from around 9500 years ago (7500 bc), evidence of domesticates such as
emmer wheat and barley appears – sometimes in higher (more recent) layers at the same sites.
⁵
Later still, herd animals are domesticated.
³
People whose recent ancestors had hunted wild animals in the foothills of the Taurus and Zagros Mountains started corralling,
tending and breeding them. Along with plant and animal domestication came a new toolkit, with sickle-knives for cutting and
querns for grinding cereals.
⁵

Botanical and genetic studies also point to this area as the ‘cradle of agriculture’. Wild varieties of the important Neolithic
crops (einkorn and emmer wheat, barley, lentil, pea, bitter vetch, chickpea and flax) are found growing together in this area.
The limited genetic variability of domesticated crops also lends support to the idea of a single, core area of plant domestication.
⁵

Once agriculture began, it allowed populations to expand further. Food resources became more reliable. People settled down and large villages started to appear. It all sounds wonderful – until
you take a closer look at what was happening to the health of individual people. Because, although much of the risk of inadequate
food supply may have been shed by growing crops and keeping domesticated animals, the quality and range of the farmers’ diets
was not particularly good. Archaeologists have long supposed that the transition to agriculture was positive in all sorts
of ways, bringing better health and nutrition, increased longevity, and more leisure time. But the truth is a little harder
to bear and somewhat counter-intuitive. From the study of human skeletons from this crucial period of changeover, biological
anthropologists have found that the switch from foraging to farming brought with it a
general decline
in health
.

Compared with hunter-gatherers, farmers had more tooth loss and more dental caries, had restricted growth and shorter stature,
and reduced life expectancy. Skeletal evidence of trauma becomes more common, indicating an increase in violence and conflict. Neolithic people also suffered more from infectious diseases than previous groups, probably because of the combined effects of a poor diet and more crowded living conditions. Anaemia was also more common.
^6
,
7
Traditionally, archaeologists have argued that the Neolithic brought with it improved health and reduced mortality, and
so populations could expand rapidly, but the bones of our ancestors show us that this was not the case at all. The dawn of
agriculture and permanent settlement brought about worse health and reduced life expectancy. But in spite of all these disadvantages
for individuals, agriculture brought with it an increased birth rate that outstripped the reduced life expectancy – so the
populations expanded.
^6
,
8
It is difficult to work out the sizes of past populations, but researchers seem to agree that population growth was extremely
slow during the Palaeolithic, and that at 10,000 years the world contained around eight million humans. By ad 1800, the global
population was a stonking thousand million people.
⁸

Agriculture then spread out of the Levant: into central Anatolia by 8000 to 9000 years ago, then eastwards into the Zagros
foothills and Indus Valley, and westwards, along the Danube and along the Mediterranean coast.
⁴
By 7500 years ago the first farmers appeared in Hungary, and by around 6000 years ago the culture had spread all the way to
northern Spain, where the Neolithic seemed to have been adopted as a ‘package’: evidence of domesticated crops and livestock, pottery and megalithic monuments suddenly appears in the archaeological record.
⁹
So, the spread of agriculture into Europe, between 10,000 and 6000 years ago, followed similar routes to the original, Upper
Palaeolithic colonisation of Europe.
⁴
But was this a movement of people (demic diffusion) or ideas (cultural diffusion) – or both?

When I started considering this question I thought that genetic studies might provide the answer. But in fact, over the years,
various studies have turned up somewhat conflicting results. Y chromosome studies have revealed what appears to be a cluster
of lineages spreading from the Levant across Europe: in other words, a movement of people.
^10
,
11
Some analyses of mtDNA data have also uncovered a potential Neolithic contribution to the European population,
¹²
but others have produced very little evidence for demic diffusion. Extraction of ancient DNA from some Neolithic skeletons
from central Europe revealed that a quarter of them had a type of mtDNA that is now extremely rare in Europe, suggesting that
the genetic contribution to the European gene pool from Neolithic incomers was probably minor, at least within maternal lineages.
¹³
The discrepancy between the maternal mtDNA and paternal Y chromosome patterns has been explained by some as indicating a
spread of male farmers out from the Near East, intermarrying with indigenous women. Other researchers have suggested that
the contradictory results actually warn us against coming up with too simple a model. The spread of farming across Europe
would have been a complicated matter, with the degree of demic and cultural diffusion varying in different regions.
¹⁰
Broadly speaking, it seems that there was a movement of some people out of the Near East in the Neolithic, but these people
mingled with the ancient populations already established in western Europe, rather than replacing them. At the moment, the
picture is far from clear, but, as more work is done and more samples collected, particularly from ancient skeletons, the
way that the Neolithic made its mark on Europe should become clearer.

The beginning of food production was a revolutionary event in prehistory. It paved the way for large-scale settlement – for
civilisation. After hundreds of thousands of years of being nomadic hunter-gatherers, humans began to settle down and farm. It seems like
a long time ago, but set against the scale of human prehistory it’s a relatively recent development.

Göbekli Tepe had lain hidden under rocky fields at the top of a hill for 12,000 years, but when the ancient gods had been
rediscovered they held their discoverer firmly in their grasp. When Klaus found the place, he was exhilarated, but he also
knew at that moment that he had two options: either to walk away right there and then, or to spend the rest of his life there,
excavating this remote hill where human society had started to change.

‘I was very excited. But it was clear from the first minute that I had a choice, too: to turn back and not tell anyone about
this discovery, and never come back … or to stay and work here for the rest of my life.

‘It is a dream,’ he said, ‘but it is also difficult to have such a site. You are captured by it. You belong to it.’

I left Göbekli Tepe very sure that I would hear more about this amazing place in the future. But, for now, my journey would
take me to the lands of my final destination, to the Americas, the last continents to be reached by humans.

5. The New World:
Finding the First Americans

Bridging the Continents: Beringia

This vast continent was the last of all the great landmasses to be populated by humans. For hundreds of thousands of years,
while humans spread throughout Africa, Asia and Europe, the New World was unknown and unreachable. Whereas modern humans replaced
archaic populations –
Homo erectus
, Neanderthals – in the Old World,
Homo sapiens
would be the first human species to set foot in the Americas.

Palaeolithic archaeology in America is riddled with controversy: there is ongoing argument over the date of colonisation,
the number of ancient migrations into the New World, the origin of the incoming populations and the routes they took.

Some have suggested very ancient dates of colonisation, as early as 40,000 or 50,000 years ago, but the evidence is very shaky
indeed. Most researchers agree that humans did not reach the Americas until after the LGM. Until very recently, the prevailing opinion
was that the first inhabitants of America were hunter-gatherers who moved down through North America about 13,500 years ago,
and who carried with them a stone toolkit called ‘Clovis’, named after the site in New Mexico where Clovis stone points were
found in the 1930s, associated with the remains of a dozen mammoths.
¹
But now, with the emergence of new archaeological sites, the redating of some previously discovered sites, as well as a growing
database of genetic evidence from living Native Americans, the dates for the occupation of the Americas have been pushed back
further and further.

Most archaeologists agree that the route taken into the New World was, very broadly speaking, eastwards from north-east Asia,
and then down through North America and into the south.

Getting into the Americas via this northern route, during the Ice Age, required an ability to exist and subsist in extremely
cold, Arctic environments. Vladimir Pitulko’s Yana site in the north-east of Siberia – the place I had arranged to visit but
then been thwarted by Russian airline schedules – showed that modern humans were living far up in the Arctic from at least
30,000 years ago. Some of the elements in the Yana toolkit are similar to the Upper Palaeolithic technologies of North America,
including ivory foreshafts for spears, which are also found among Clovis tools.

And, unlike today’s geography, where the two landmasses are separated by the Bering Strait, when people were living at Yana,
there was a connection between Siberia and Alaska. So people
could
have crossed over into the Americas. This now-submerged land is sometimes referred to as the ‘Bering land-bridge’, although
this term is somewhat misleading as the ‘bridge’ was about the size of Europe: a landmass in its own right. It stretched all
the way from the Kolyma River in Siberia to the Mackenzie River in Canada: about 3200km wide and 1600km from north to south.
²
Many archaeologists prefer to call it Beringia.

Even during continental glaciations, it seems that Beringia remained, although very cold tundra, ice-free, and there would
have been plenty of herd animals roaming the grassy tundra to tempt the Siberian hunters eastwards, including woolly mammoth,
horse, steppe bison and saiga antelope.
³
As the Ice Age rolled on, and northern Siberia became less and less habitable, Beringia would have formed a refuge for the
hunters of the north.

Looking at a map of this area as it would have been 20,000 years ago, the route across from Asia to Alaska may have been ‘open’
but the rest of North America was sealed off by a vast ice sheet. In fact, there were two great bodies of ice – that merged
east of the Rockies – known to palaeoclimatologists as the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets (see map on page 300).

But archaeological evidence of humans in Alaska and the Yukon dating to before the LGM is very scrappy, inconsistent – and
hotly debated. The first well-dated, generally accepted evidence of modern humans in eastern Beringia – what is now central
Alaska – comes from a site called Swan Point, where a collection of stone tools, including microblades and burins, has been
found, similar in many ways to the Siberian lithic industries. The archaeology at Swan Point dates to around 14,000 years
ago. Then there are a number of other archaeological sites in central Alaska dating to between 13,000 and 14,000 years ago.
⁴
These dates are well after the LGM, but there are some controversial sites in the northern Yukon that may hint at a human
presence there – well before the height of the last Ice Age.

Fragments of bone – which some archaeologists think are tools – have been found at Bluefish Caves and Old Crow River sites
in the northern Yukon. Canadian archaeologist Richard Morlan claims that there are definite signs of human interference with
these bone fragments: there is a bison rib, dating to around 40,000 years ago, bearing a cut mark that appears to indicate
that it has been sliced into with a stone tool. Other, apparently butchered, bison bones have been found at sites near the
Old Crow River, as well as mammoth bones that appear to have been split to access the marrow inside, then broken further to
use as tools. Richard Morlan has gone as far as to call the bone fragments ‘cores and flakes’, by analogy with stone tools.
Similar bone ‘tools’ and apparently butchered bones have been discovered in the Bluefish Caves, to the south of Old Crow
River.
²
These have been dated to around 28,000 years ago.
⁴
(There were also stone tools in these caves, but they have not been dated, and are similar to much later tools from Alaska,
dating to well after the LGM.)

But other archaeologists have argued that the bones could have been broken by natural processes: through being gnawed by carnivores,
trampled by large animals, being carried along and smashed up in rivers, becoming frozen and thawed, or even blown to pieces
by volcanic eruptions. Even though some of the bone fragments
look
as though they have been deliberately flaked, most archaeologists find this evidence too flimsy. Flaked bone tools are not
unique to these controversial sites in the Yukon: there are precedents for bone-flaking from a range of sites across Eurasia,
including the Dyuktai culture of Siberia and in North America.
²
However, the peculiar absence of any other well-stratified, well-dated evidence (stone tools, human bones, indeed anything
else) from these sites means that most archaeologists view them with caution.

But these very early dates (for America) are certainly quite intriguing, and they don’t seem that unbelievable given that
we know people were living in Yana, in north-east Siberia, 30,000 years ago. Those Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets
expanded to seal off the rest of North America by about 24,000 years ago. Before that, if there really were people living
in Alaska that early, they
could
have made their way south, down through gaps between the ice sheets.
⁴
The archaeologists working at the Old Crow River and Bluefish Cave sites are even now uncovering and analysing evidence, so
this opening of the American chapter is still very much in draft form.
²

At the moment, though, there is no evidence of humans in the rest of North America, or in South America, prior to the LGM,
so although an early entry into the Americas, before the ice sheets spread across from coast to coast, is a possibility, it
remains a hypothesis with no firm archaeological evidence to support it.

But what about genetic evidence? Can we be sure that Siberia was the ancestral home of the first Americans, and can genetic
analyses offer any further insight into dating the colonisation of the Americas?

Mapping Native American Genes: Calgary, Canada

I travelled to Canada to meet up with American geneticist Tracey Pierre. We were to meet, not at a university or a research lab, but at a First Nation Powwow, near Calgary, Alberta.

Having flown over the Rockies, from Camloops to Calgary, I arrived at the powwow early in the morning, before the events of
the day had begun. There was a circle of tepees around a central, circular, roofed arena and I had a moment of
déjà vu
when I saw them: they were so similar to the Evenki chums in Siberia. Some even had stoves inside them, although there was
really no need for heating in Alberta in July.

People were wandering around the camp in various states of preparedness and some of the dancers were already fully decked
out in beaded costumes and feather headdresses. There were, too, lots of very excited small girls, many in costumes which
were largely pink. But, despite the range of colours, including bright neon pinks and greens, and the very untraditional fabrics
that some costumes employed, there was a definite style that everyone had adhered to. This was a Tsuu T’ina (formerly Sarsi)
get-together, and the identity of this First Nation group was stamped on their costumes and would be reiterated throughout
the day, as the master of ceremonies listed again and again the families and chiefs who were present.

Walking around the powwow ground, listening to the drumming and watching the dancing, I felt a mixture of emotions. It was
clear that the Tsuu T’ina people had a strong sense of identity. Their culture was under threat, and they needed to keep it
alive, somehow to sustain it in the wider Canadian culture they were now part of. The powwow was like a metaphor for this
struggle: inside the covered arena, Native Americans drummed and danced and honoured their leaders and ancestors. Outside,
there was the ring of tepees which men entered in T-shirts and jeans and came out of dressed in their costumes, as warriors.
And outside the tepees was a village of burger vans and hot-dog stalls, white Canadians selling Native American kitsch, and
a fairground.

But when I met Chief Big Plume in his tepee the struggle for culture didn’t seem so futile. He was a strong leader, and exuded
an amazing sense of pride in his heritage and his people. He sat on a bison skin, dressed in a regal red robe with weasel
skins sewn, hanging, on to the sleeves. He wore a magnificent eagle-feather headdress. Invited in, I sat down beside the
Chief and asked him about stories of the origin of his people.

‘As it was told down through the generations, there was an argument within the camp. A dog had knocked down a tripod with
a warrior’s hunting tools – his arrows, his quiver. So there was an argument and a separation of people.’

He described a small splinter group heading south. They made off, across the frozen water of the Great Slave Lake.

‘There was a young child on her grandmother’s back, and there was a horn sticking out of the ice. The child was asking for
the horn, so they had to stop the migration. They started to chip away at that ice, to bring out the horn, and it split the
ice. The clans already on the south side continued migrating south. The ones in the north stayed in the north.’

So the wanderers were cut off from their original home – and became the ancestors of the Tsuu T’ina. It was a wonderful story,
and I was intrigued by the mention of ice. I had read about another Native American tale, told by the Paiute, involving ice,
where a raven pecked at a great wall of ice until it cracked and allowed people to pass through.
It is tempting to see these stories as memories of a time when much of North America was covered by massive ice sheets, though
it’s impossible to know if the oral traditions actually stretch back that far.
¹

I asked the Chief what he thought about connections with Siberia. He knew the theories and thought it very likely that his people had originally come from north-east Asia. I showed him some
photographs, and he was very interested in the Evenki chums, and their similarity to tepees. He also thought the Evenki resembled
some of the more northern Native Americans. Then it was time for the Chief to get back to the powwow, as the afternoon’s events
required his presence. I left the tepee and went off to find Tracey.