Natural Science Forum / Biology / Paleontology / January 2007

Thanx for such informative posts and links. But I'd like to see the
climate data, like from the Greenland ice cores, added to the mix. From
what I already know, Glaciers would have come down to cover the whole
region or made it so damn cold, without any significant summer to grow
the grasses their herbivorous prey depened on, that everyone, both man
& beast, would have been repeatedly driven out, then come back in again
during the warm spells.

And do so each time with people that are different, with different
customs and technologies. It aint like *continuous* occupation was
possible.

I'd also like to see the strategraphic data to know whether the sites
were subjected to the floods when the glaciers melted. I can see where
this could have added organic matter to the sites making C-14 data
unreliable. But if the sites were all on high ground, then this wouldnt
have been a problem. But from what I have read, the Don valley is far
bigger than needed to carry the river it now has, but was carved out by
enormous floods of meltwater, that in turn, filled the Euxine basin.
Which Ryan & Peterson go into in "Noah's Flood".

Another thing that strikes me is why this region around the Black Sea
was on the cutting edge of new technology far longer than any other on
Earth. The Chalcolithic flowering along the riverine floodplains that
drained into the west end of the Black Sea must have been carried out
by the descendants of the innovative ice age peoples who lived along
the Don and/or Anatolia, and certainly along the shores of the Euxine
between them.

Allow me to be politically incorrect enough to point out that there is
a genetic factor here. The region pushed people together and pulled
them apart again just like the tectonic forces were reshaping the land
and the sea. From the Greenland ice cores, it looks like there never
was a period of more than a few hundred years for people to live at any
given location, such as those in this thread, before the ice came back
and kicked them all out. Its telling that when the ice age ended,
*that* was then the human interaction with plants produced the mutation
of einkorn in the Taurus mountains that we now call wheat. 10,000 years
BP.

Alpine, Caucasoid, & Semite skulls have been found at Chatal Hoyuk;
indicative of this kind of hybridization that resulted in a genetic
line that still dominates far more than its fair share of the planet,
In sharp contrast to the Levant and Africa, where the warrior class is
*still* fighting over well understood ecosystems and resource bases,
this region of SE Europe had continual changes that repeatedly pushed
people out. And every time they returned, conditions were different.
The more *adaptable* to ecosystem resource variations survived. The
relatively low population for so many eons disempowered the warrior
classes. I've read that the Mammoth bone Longhouses along the Don were
100 miles apart. That's too damn far to make the typical warrior
tradition of 'rape, pillage, & burn' economically useful. and
absolutely impossible during the long ice age winters.

I mean what are the implications of such low populations. What do we
have here? 17 habitation sites that mite have had a few score of people
each? Not all of which were occupied in the same era? Are there many
more such sites to be discovered, or has this ground been gone over
enough to suggest that these few, these lucky few, are it? in the
warmer regions, there are now, and there have *always* been genocides
like Rwanda. What Joshua did to Caanan we now call genocide. There are
"Constant Battles" as LeBlanc put it in his book by that name. over
territory. But here, along the Don, they got territory up the yin yang.
A few hundred, or even a few thousand occupying, if that's the word, an
area the size of Texas.

If men dont fight with each other, they can listen to each other. and
thus we see the evolution going on in their tools at a much faster rate
than was going on in the lower latitudes. We see the evolution of the
climate in the ice cores and dendochronology, and it makes perfect
sense to me that we'd see some kind of evolution in the DNA of the
hominids that had to cope with it all.

Robert and John,

The John Hawks weblog links, taken together, make a very good summary
of the situation at Kostenki.  Contrary to the uninformed rant of Day
Brown, both the climate and stratigraphy of the sites at Kostenki are
and have been very well studied.   I have read and saved files of
nearly everything ever published about Kostenki in the English
language, including this new paper, as well as all the paper Hawks
references.  The dating 42-45 ka looks good.  While it is true that
there are some 14C dates of 36-32 ka from sites in the humic bed lying
beneath the Campanian Y5 ashfall, these are now thought to be
underestimates, and the ashfall itself has been extensively and
reliably dated to 38-40 ka.  Even if the older 42-45 ka dating is
disregarded, all Kostenki sites date to OIS 3, a relatively mild period
in Eastern Europe (glaciers well north of Moscow).  Having more than 25
sites, and at least 10 of these being multi-component, there were some
50 occupation at Kostenki from >40 ka to about 22 ka.  The area was not
abandoned for any great length of time until the onset of the Last
Glacial Maximum.  

Dar