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Showing posts with the label Neanderthals

Three Caves

Part of Serbia below the Danube River is pretty mountainous, with complex geology, especially in the eastern parts where the Carpathian and Balkan mountains collided and over eons formed the Serbian Carpathians, with a total of 14 independent mountain ranges in existence today. These rocks date back to the Proterozoic Eon (2.5 billion–541 million years ago), with limestones and dolomites mainly formed from the late Jurassic to early Cretaceous, around 100 million years ago. There are dozens of large caves within these mountains, and many have tourist paths built to visit and admire their beauty and history. Two of them we visited last week, and they both gave us extraordinary experiences and impressions.


However, the first cave in this blog story belongs to the one formed in the foothills of an ancient volcano of the nowadays mountain of Bukulja in western Serbia, although the recent paper posted a theory that the mountain is much younger (15 million years ago) and instead formed in tectonic processes. Whatever the case, the Risovača cave is definitely unique in the Balkans and probably on several occasions hosted families of Neanderthals during the Late Pleistocene era. Numerous tools from this period similar to those found within other Neanderthal sites across Europe are found here and preserved for display in local museums. Like with other groups, and due to small numbers overall, Neanderthals most likely went extinct due to assimilation with modern humans in a process called "bred into extinction". More about it I wrote in Neanderthals, Humans and Shared Caves.

During the same time, the cave hosted various dominant animals from the same period, like cave lions, hyenas, and bears. This image is from the local museum of Arandjelovac, and its special space is occupied by the cave bear, fully assembled from the bones found in the cave. The bones belonged to more than one animal and formed a skeleton up to three meters high, which was approximately the average height for the cave bears. Those behemoths could go up to 1 ton in mass and 3.5 meters in height.


In the Balkans, during the last couple of millenniums of coexistence of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, our ancestors lived mainly along the rivers, especially the Danube to the north, while Neanderthals occupied more inland territories, no doubt in the vicinity of caves like this one. There is strong evidence that Neanderthals buried their dead, most likely not in the caves themselves, which is the main reason for the lack of human remains excavated to date.

Compared to the Risovača, two other caves, Ravništarka, named after the nearby village, and Lazar's cave, named after a rebel man who found shelter there in the time of the Ottoman Empire, stand out with their natural beauty rich in cave jewelry and mineral formations. 


Ravništarka cave is pretty long and one of those river caves with the small stream flowing its entire length. The water dug the whole canal of around 500 meters, and the mountain minerals did the rest. Numerous stalactites and stalagmites decorated the tourist path, like the one in this image, in the shape of a flying horse. Dozens of other pareidolia-decorating wall formations are made of glittering calcite, which under the LED lights gives the amazing feeling of surreality. 

Lazar's cave on the other end, with its large entrance, is probably hiding more history than it is currently known. For its wide space within, it has always been the center of human activity ever since the Copper Age. During the Bronze Age, Lazar's Cave played the role of a hunting station, and in the Iron Age it became a center of metallurgy. Even in recent history, the cave attracted people for multiple reasons. Numerous legends are circulating around, with one claiming that lots of Serbian soldiers hid inside after surviving the battle of Kosovo and the defeat by the invading army of the Ottoman Empire on June 15, 1389. 


Even though the caves could be crowded with tourists, we had luck that all three were free of charge at the opening hours, and browsing the mysterious caverns alone added an extra feeling afterwards. Somehow it felt like we traveled back in time, and all the sites inside caves seen in pristine condition looked unearthly beautiful and alien.

The following photos and videos are the best we could do with modest smartphones in dark light conditions, but some of them turned out really phenomenal.

Risovača cave:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/ienEnC1xypJBdNut7
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwEWXtFiKhE
https://www.nmar.rs/en/risovaca-cave/
 

Early Man in Motion Picture

There is a period of time we are familiar with the acronym "BC". It stands, of course, for "Before Christ", the period before the famous tale about the origin of the Christian religion. But this time goes far behind Jesus. Far beyond the origin of all monotheistic religions. It goes even before the eons when our ancestors knew gods in the plural and to the ages when modern humans started their everlasting and ongoing endeavors. The time in prehistory was occupied with the endless wonders of surrounding nature without firm beliefs but surely filled with many invisible divine spirits and mysterious stars.

Due to the illiteracy of the period, there's almost nothing tangible we could use to gain full knowledge of what early society really looked like, and even though we know a great deal about those times only by analyzing cave walls, fossil records, and DNA samples, in order to describe one early settlement, we still must use lots of imagination and scientific guesses.


Personally and definitely caused by the mystery of the ancient times, I do enjoy reading and, in this case, watching fictitious stories about early people, events, and how everything was in the beginning. Hence, if we stay in the realm of motion pictures, I want to share four movie recommendations from the rather small pile of films covering prehistory free of wild imagination that might be anthropologically correct. So, let's start in, appropriately, in chronological and descending order, starting with the latest film about the earliest period of prehistory in all four movies. The story is about the first joint adventures of man and man's best friends. The wolves. Well, you know... the dogs.

Portraying Europe at the end of the Pleistocene epoch some 20,000 years ago, Alpha is telling an adventurous story of Keda, a teenage boy on his first hunting trip, and Alpha, the first domesticated wolf. They struggle to survive the harsh environment of the last ice age and, along the way, learn to enjoy new special friendships among two species. Something we are taking for granted in our very contemporary age. Three things about this movie are fascinating: for one, there are no human villains in the film, and this is amazing for nowadays movies, and yet the story works just as perfectly. Secondly, I learned something I didn't know: Alpha was played by a real Czechoslovakian Wolfdog, a mix between a German shepherd and real Carpathian wolves created for military purposes. I always admired German shepherds, but I have to say that this relatively new breed is really magnificent in every way. Finally, the language they used is a fictional one, fully developed for the movie by Christine Schreyer, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia who used three ancestral languages in the process, and this effort alone gave the movie a genuine and really extraordinary feeling.


The next two movies went even further in the past. The set was still the Eurasian continent, and the time could be estimated at some 30-40K BC, when one of the kind events in the history of two dominant species happened. It was the time when our ancestors started to populate the area that was already taken by Neanderthals. Barely compatible, this caused the death of the weakest and most unprepared party in conflict. It is still a mystery what exactly was happening in those shared periods that probably lasted hundreds or more likely thousands of years, but in the aftermath, just like proposed in one of the movies, Neanderthals suffered and died out from both major issues: their bodies were totally unprepared for new diseases humans unknowingly delivered, and equally important, their minds couldn't stand or understand the violent behavior of newcomers.

Ao, le dernier Néandertal and The Clan of the Cave Bear are both dealing with the collision of two dominant humanoid species of the time only from different angles. At first, Ao was a desperate Neanderthal man whose family was brutally murdered by modern humans, and he was forced to seek his life elsewhere and find happiness with a homo sapiens woman. The movie offers outstanding performances by Aruna Shields and especially Simon Paul Sutton, who portrayed the story with one word—perfectly. The same goes for Jean Auel's first book of the "Earth's Children" series and the movie with the same name. Here, the script is the opposite and follows young girl Ayla, who finds shelter within the Neanderthal clan. It's hard to say which film is more appealing, historically accurate, better performed, and better made, but if you choose to watch them, entertainment filled with drama, adventure, and even romance is guaranteed.


Finally, if we go even further into the past, more or less 80000 years ago, in the time of tribal societies where the fire was a luxury and hard to find, the last film recommendation was the oldest movie of them all. Quest for Fire was filmed back in 1981, and it was the first movie I watched from this genre. I remember I was fascinated with scenes with mammoths who were played by circus elephants in full wardrobe and trained lions in the role of saber-toothed tigers. In short, three cavemen are sent on the quest to find the fire, for which they still don't have the knowledge of how to start it. The quest turned into a real adventure, and what they learned and returned to their cave was priceless. And I am not talking just about fire. Enough said.

Refs:
https://www.milanzivic.com/2015/10/neanderthals-humans-and-shared-caves.html
https://www.livescience.com/40311-pleistocene-epoch.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czechoslovakian_Wolfdog
https://www.thestar.com/vancouver/2018/08/23/bc-professor-creates-language-for-alpha
https://www.cbc.ca/arts/the-wild-story-behind-quest-for-fire