Link to the video on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_Qy7TFCvZg
Hi! Today we are taking you to the area between Dolni Vestonice and Pavlov in Czech Republic, which is famous from good wine and fascinating deep prehistory. In Dolni Vestonice you can see a statue of the most famous piece of prehistory at this land – black, clay Venus of Dolni Vestonice. Here is only her statue, famous figurine is small and hidden somewhere in a museum repository, in Brno, I think. In interesting Archeopark Pavlov and in museums in Czech Republic you can only see her copy. Anyway Archeopark Pavlov is worth visiting. It is inside the hill, at the level of an archaeological site from 30 thousand years ago. In the farthest part of the archeopark you can even see the part of the archeological site in situ. It is the place, where the Mammoth Bone Deposit was discovered in 2013-2015. In the rest of the archeopark, we move to the world of the Ice Age.
At the times of large Pleistocene glaciations, Central Europe had the narrow part of the unglaciated area between the Scandinavian ice-sheet and the Alpine glacier in the south. The blue route traced by the google map shows more or less this territory. There are mountain ridges and highlands but this territory is interconnected by lowlands and rivers. This narrow part connected the West with the East of the continent during Ice Age. Look at this map. About 35 to 26 thousands years ago the route led through the Wachau Gate near Vienna. Then along the river Morava to the Moravian Gate and further to the Central European Lowland and the plains of Eastern Europe. This corridor is a comfortable passage provided by continuous mountain ridges. The advantages of such corridor were especially appreciated by Palaeolithic communities dependent on distant sources of good flint and regular herd movements. This simple map from the article by Jiří Svoboda shows the settlement dynamics in the Danube region before and after the Glacial Maximum. In this video we are interested in settlements near Dolni Vestonice in Czech Moravia about 26 600 years ago because the title triple burial is dated to this period. At that distant past in Moravia lived people formally classified to the Gravettian culture in its local variation known as the Pavlovian Culture. An eye-catching feature of the Pavlovian people was that they made ceramic figurines and that they were specialized in hunting mammoths. Pavlovian people lived in settlements not on the tops of the hills, but rather lower at the slopes, near rivers, even at the cost of losing dominant landscape positions. These locations allowed them to control the floodplain – the biotope of mammoth. The distance from sources of stone raw material was not a constraint, because Pavlovian hunters imported high-quality siliceous rocks from larger distances. For example in the Moravian inventories from that time 76% of Polish flints were found, from Jura Krakowsko-Częstochowska or from the Świętokrzyskie region. And on the route to the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland or to the Świętokrzyskie Mountains, there was the Obłazowa cave where the oldest boomerang in the world was found, just from this period. Link to the video about the boomerang an about the place in which it was found is under this content.
Returning to Moravia. Now on the north-eastern slopes of Pálava Hills are vineyards and about 30 000 years ago in this region the climate was also milder. In the Dolní Věstonice – Pavlov area some settlements were used all year round. About 33 – 26 thousand years ago the great sheets of glacial ice temporarily retreated north into Scandinavia and south up into the Alps. Open areas of cold steppe and tundra were broken by islands and even compact belts of forests. Alders and willows grew on the shores of flooding, meandering Dyje River. On the the slopes of the Pálava Hills grew spruces, larches, and pines, leaving bare only the Děvín ridge and the flat-top Stolová hora, high above the surrounding terrain. On the protected and sunny slopes of the Pálava Hills grew oaks, beeches, and even yew trees.
26 600 years ago a glacier was already sliding from the north. After about 400 years, it will make life on the slopes of the Pálav Hills impossible but for now there is a special funeral ceremony at a certain location on the slope - three young, special people are buried. The place of their burial was so carefully cared for at that time that it was not damaged by animals and the climate, and survived 26,600 years until 1986, when it was discovered. The burial is as intriguing as it is difficult to interpret, so it will be best to describe what the archaeologists found.
In the upper part of archeological site near Dolni Vestonice, somewhere here, researchers discovered three skeletons in one burial. In this place was unusually large amount of charcoal, particles of burnt wood and irregular spots of red-burnt loess. The upper parts of the bodies were located slightly deeper than the slope surface. The bodies were lain, more or less, on the original surface, oriented with the heads against the slope. The legs were located within the cultural layer, whereas the three heads were buried under the loess. So three people were buried on a platform partially dug into the slope, shallowly, probably protected by some structure. Fragments of wooden logs were found next to the skeletons - probably a remnant of a tomb. On the surfaces of certain bones of the skeletons tree roots left some traces, which also shows the originally shallow arrangement of the bodies, inside some funerary structure.
The central person lied on his back, the right man on his belly, with his left arm superimposed over the left arm of the central person. The left man was positioned on his back, slightly twisted towards the central person with both arms directed towards the latter‘s pelvis. Such an arrangement indicates that the person in the middle was first in the grave, but they were all buried at more or less the same time.
The left man was 17-19 years old (new data from “A Molecular Approach to the Sexing of the Triple Burial at the Upper Paleolithic Site of Dolní Věstonice”. Link in bibliography) He was 168-169 cm tall. His approximate weight was 65 kg.
The right man in this grave was 16-17 years old, 179-180 m tall and his weight was about 68 kg.
Central person - the most intriguing. I say a person without gender because there have been problems with that for years. At first, the middle person was considered to be a woman. Several theories arose with the woman in the middle. Simply the structure of the bones seemed feminine to the researchers. Moreover this person had a rare illness, which deformes one’s bones. This illness is lethal for males during early infancy. So in this case it would require being a woman to survive to a young adult age. But the latest research shows that the middle person was male after all – link in bibliography. Maybe with some features of two sexes? This man was about 20 years old with weight 66 – 68 kg. He was 159 cm tall.
All three were relatives. The man in the middle and the man in the right side of the grave were brothers. The man whose hands were on the middle person's pelvis was their cousin.
Ochre was present in a powdered state and as compact lumps in the whole burial area and its direct vicinity. Compact plastered crusts were attached to the skulls and also ocher concentration was in the pelvic area of the central man.
As if it was not enough, the central skeleton had in his mouth a piece of animal bone with cutmarks.
The skeletons were surrounded by animal bones – perforated or not, pendants made from mammoth ivory, bone awls, lumps of baked clay and Tertiary mollusc shells. The Tertiary mollusc shells from the same place were in the shrine in Obłazowa Cave in the Białka River Valley in Poland (It was that grotto with the oldest boomerang in the world).
Conus shells Dolni Vestonice – Pavlov. One to four. And conus shells from Obłazowa Cave.
In the frontal part of the cranium of the man in the left side of the tomb, the ochreous coverage survived very good and it formed a thick red crust with inserted perforated carnivore teeth ordered in three rows partially selected according to size.
Researchers explored also a fire ring (the hearth) located about 1 meter from the burial area. Five fragments composing a longitudinal piece of siltstone were found there. These unusual objects had rhythmically ordered longer and shorter incisions. Despite the fragmented nature of it, Bohuslav Klíma identified on it a series of nicks of 5,5,7,7 and again 5 nicks which makes up 29 nicks altogether and interpreted it as a lunar calendar - Emmerling, Geer and Klíma (1993).
I haven’t got the picture of that lunar calendar, so look at another lunar calendar from the site in France from the same time.
And with this intriguing findings, I finish today's video. Please subscribe if you liked it - to not miss the next content and bye bye :-)
