Life in a Cave E-Book

Paul Jordan

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 85

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

What was it like to be a cavemen? What sort of house would you live in? What sort of clothes would you wear? Life in a Cave shows what it was like to live in prehistoric times, what kind of animals we would have shared the land with, and what our daily life would involve.

Leseprobe

Life in a Cave

First published in 2007

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2011

All rights reserved

© Paul Jordan, 2007, 2011

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Paul Jordan has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 7051 1

MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 7052 8

Original typesetting by The History Press

Life in a Cave

PAUL JORDAN

Contents

1   People and Caves

2   Early Man

3   The Neanderthal Era

4   The Ice Age World

5   Upper Palaeolithic Life in Caves

CHAPTER 1

People and Caves

Our earliest ancestors in Africa did not live in caves: they lived in the trees. Later they ventured onto the savannah and were able to spread around the tropical and subtropical world, even when the era of the ice ages was coming on, without needing the shelter of caves. Only in the cold environments of the northern latitudes in the times of full glaciation did people develop the way of life we can reconstruct for our ‘caveman’ forebears. Even then, they by no means in all times and places lived in caves.

This book tells the story of the lives of our fully human ancestors (Homo sapiens sapiens) and their close relatives the Neanderthalers (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) who lived in Europe and Western Asia, often in caves, during the last ice age. (That epoch ended about 10,000 years ago - before the invention of farming, urban living, writing, the wheel, and so much else we regard as natural to our lives.) Of course, for the ‘caveman’ way of life to have ever come about, there needed to be both human evolution and the formation of caves.

Caves and cave systems come into being as the result of natural processes and natural processes destroy them in the end: few caves are very old in geological terms, often younger in fact than the oldest fossils of our ancestors. Caves come in a variety of shapes and sizes because they are formed by different processes acting on different rocks and we know them at different stages of their creation and destruction. Some of the caves we know – and there must be many we do not – have been found in the course of mining operations. But most caves are evident to us, as they were to our ancestors, because they have visible openings. Some caves present themselves as a single, large and open cavern or little more than an overhanging shelter, while others form part of deep underground systems with negotiable passages including pits and chimneys or with quite impassable crawlways. In the depths of such systems there may be water in the form of streams, lakes and waterfalls and a myriad of exotic cave deposits including crystals and stalactites and stalagmites. The large open caves and rock overhangs offer people shelter from enemies and the elements, while the deep systems offer extraordinary experiences and mysteries. Our ancestors explored both situations.

Landscapes endowed with limestone cave systems are called ‘karsts’ and a world map of such landscapes shows the area around the Mediterranean and up into temperate northern Europe well pocked with such features. The same is true across the Middle East to the Far East, down East Africa to the south-west of the African continent, over Australasia and especially in southern Australia. Caves are found across the USA and down into Central America along with western South America. There are also stray pepperings into Scandinavia and across Russia and Siberia. It is especially the northern and eastern Mediterranean regions, together with Europe from northern Spain across to Russia, that set the stage for the story of prehistoric human life in the last ice age.

How Caves Begin and End

Rocks like limestone are soluble in water and the caves that form in them are called solution caves. Europe has some very impressive solution caves – in Belgium, France and Spain and eastwards in the Alps to the Adriatic. There are processes other than solution that can create caves, or at least start them off, but most caves have been largely ‘excavated’ by running water, not so much in the way that a river scours its course but rather by the sheer dissolving effect (solution) of running, circulating, percolating water.

Some caves were started when cavities were left in the layer formations of marine deposits (or in lava flows). The sea has played a big part in the making of coastal caves as a result of sea-driven erosion with sand and pebbles and boulders, or just pressure of the waves aided by chemical action or the boring of marine organisms. Bodies of water have also played a part in the generation of caves along stream banks and lake margins. Sometimes weather alone can eat out caves in the weaker members of rock structures with the action of rain, wind-driven sand and regular alternations of frost and thaw or wetting and drying. Even rock-splitting plants can initiate the process of cave making, but solution remains the chief cause of most caves, including the most complex and spectacular, whether working on cavities already available or creating its own from scratch. Plain water is enough – its natural acids do the dissolving as it soaks into the terrain and finds its way through the weaknesses in the rock. Of course, it has plenty of time to work in, by our standards, and there are many variables in the process of cave formation: of temperature, pressure, chemical concentrations, rate of refreshment with more water, to say nothing of the nature of the rock involved.

In the formation of cave systems, a complex pattern develops – of run-off variations, stream diversions, free discharges and blockages, of deepening runs of underground water along lines of joints and faults in the rock, of collapses above and below ground. By such means were the very varied cave systems of the world created: by such means, too, are cave systems eventually destroyed, with the occasional help of other factors like earthquakes and all against the background of the world’s dynamic weather systems and ever-changing climate. Some caves just get silted up or blocked with larger rubble. Rock falls, whether due simply to ongoing solution or to seismic shocks, can be the beginning of the end for caves, as further solution works on the rubble and weather erosion enters the picture. While they last, caves can be subject to quite startling changes of circumstance: geological upheaval can place sea caves high above the waters that initiated them, while rising sea levels in the warm, melting times between ice ages can bring the sea to their door, so to speak.

Caves for People

The characteristic cave of what we may think of as the ‘caveman’ era, handily overlooking a watercourse with plenty of game passing by, comes about when the stream’s erosion of its course exposes caves along its banks and goes on to cut its way down below them. There are caves just like that, notably in the Périgord region of France where so much important evidence of our relatively recent Neanderthal cousins and Crô-Magnon ancestors has come to light in the valleys of rivers like the Dordogne. But most of the very earliest human remains – the bones of the people and the stone tools they made – have not come from caves. This is partly because some of the caves they may have used have not survived to our day and their contents are lost. It is also because caves were not the only or even the main places where very early people lived and laboured. Caves were never available (or required) in some of the regions occupied by evolving humanity and even where they were occupied there was still a need for open-air camps and work sites. The archaeological remains of these open-air sites are harder to find than those from caves, in which materials can survive in much better shape and order, with layers of stratigraphy to help date them. Stone tools transported and rolled in old river gravels (their makers were working on the welcoming banks of long lost or wandered streams) are all we have to chart some epochs of human evolution. In some places, like Eastern Europe which does on occasion afford us some magnificent open-air sites, the advance and retreat of the ice ages’ glaciers and their floodwater run-offs have erased a great deal of evidence for the highly significant open-air aspect of ‘caveman’ times. But its significance must be remembered, along perhaps with an appeal for the abolition of this ‘caveman’ notion altogether, not least in view of its lingering sexist connotations. The people whose lives we shall be considering belonged to the Old Stone Age, before the development of polished stone implements let alone of metal ones, though they employed wood and sometimes bone and antler too: archaeologists call them palaeolithic people and we can now fix our sights on their appearance in the archaeological record after millions of years of evolution in Africa.

CHAPTER 2

Early Man