Mesolithic

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The boundary is not a date but a thaw. Around the end of the eleventh millennium BCE the ice that had locked the northern world for tens of thousands of years began its long retreat, sea levels rose, and the cold-steppe mammoth country broke up into forest, marsh, river, and a lengthening coastline. The Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age, is the name given to the human world on the far side of that change — the last hunter-gatherers of Eurasia, living in the warmed landscape of the early Holocene before farming arrived to replace them. It is a period defined less by a single event than by an adjustment, and its edges blur in every direction: it opens, in northern and central Europe, after the cold snap of the Younger Dryas and the Ahrensburgian cultures that closed the Paleolithic, and it ends whenever the local Neolithic farming package reaches a given region — early in the Near East, where some archaeologists barely use the term at all, and as late as the fourth millennium BCE on the Atlantic fringe. The word itself is a piece of nineteenth-century classification: John Lubbock coined the terms Paleolithic and Neolithic in his Prehistoric Times (1865), and Hodder Westropp proposed the intervening Mesolithic the following year, to fill a middle ground that some of his contemporaries doubted existed at all. It remains in part a convenience — a bridge laid across the gap between Ice-Age big-game hunting and the village, rather than a sharp historical seam (the broad chronology and the regional cultures below follow the standard period synthesis).

What changed across that bridge was, above all, the food. The great migratory herds of the cold open plains thinned and scattered as the forests closed in, and the people who lived through the warming turned to a more dispersed and varied subsistence: red deer, roe deer, and wild boar in the woodland; fish, shellfish, seals, and waterfowl along the rivers and the rising coast; hazelnuts, tubers, and the wild plants of a temperate world. On the Danish shores the great shell middens — heaps of discarded oyster and mussel shell — record generations of this coastal life. The signature technology of the period answers the same diffuse abundance: the microlith, a small, finely struck stone blade, often geometric in shape and rarely more than a few centimeters long. Microliths were made to be combined. Set in rows along a wooden or bone haft and fixed with resin and pitch, they armed arrows and harpoons, edged knives and barbed points — a modular, repairable tool kit in which the broken part could be swapped out rather than the whole. The composite weapon is the period’s quiet revolution: at Téviec in Brittany a skeleton was recovered with a geometric microlith still lodged in a vertebra, the projectile that killed its owner preserved inside the wound.

These last foragers were not a single people but a scatter of regional cultures, each named for a type-site or a region: the Maglemosian of the north European plain and the bogs that have preserved its wood and antler so well; the Kongemose and then the Ertebølle of southern Scandinavia, the latter making pottery and harvesting the sea so intensively that it sat on the very threshold of farming; the Sauveterrian and Tardenoisian inland in France and the Low Countries; the Azilian of the Franco-Cantabrian zone, heir to the painted-cave world that had just ended. Across this patchwork the way of life was broadly shared — mobile or semi-settled bands, attuned to season and shoreline — and so, it appears, was a developing care for the dead.

Almost everything that can be said about the inner life of these communities is read backward from objects, and the reading has to be done with caution, because the people left no writing and no account of themselves. What the archaeology does establish, plainly and repeatedly, is that they buried their dead with deliberate attention. At Téviec and the neighboring island of Hoëdic on the Breton coast — excavated between 1928 and 1934 by Marthe and Saint-Just Péquart, and dated to roughly the sixth and fifth millennia BCE — the dead were laid in graves cut into the shell middens, the bodies placed in marked positions, strewn with red ochre, and accompanied by ornaments worked from marine shell, animal bone, and pierced teeth. The fullest modern reassessment of these graves, by Rick Schulting, reads them as possible precursors of the western European megalithic tradition. Over several of the graves the excavators found structures built from red-deer antler, framing or roofing the skull. In southern Scandinavia, the cemeteries of the Ertebølle world tell a parallel story. The clearest of them is Bøgebakken at Vedbæk in Denmark, dated to around 6000 BCE: a graveyard of some twenty individuals in single, double, and triple interments, several reddened with ochre and furnished with tools and ornaments. In one grave a young woman — perhaps twenty years old, who may have died in childbirth — was laid with two hundred red-deer teeth arranged about her head, and beside her an infant, the child resting on the outstretched wing of a swan. The arrangement is exact and unmistakably intentional, and it is the kind of evidence around which the whole question of Mesolithic belief turns.

Scholars read such graves, with broad agreement, as evidence of mortuary ritual and of some structured response to death — the ochre, the careful posture, the chosen grave goods, the swan’s wing under a dead child. What the content of that response was, the bones cannot say. Whether the people of Vedbæk held any notion of an afterlife, whether the swan carried a meaning, whether the ochre stood for blood or life or nothing nameable — these lie past the edge of what grave goods can disclose. The gestures are recoverable; the doctrine, if there was one, is not.

Imagery survives as well, and it raises the same difficulty in a sharper form. Along the Mediterranean coast of eastern Spain — the Levantine rock art of the Iberian peninsula, named for Spain’s eastern seaboard and not for the eastern Mediterranean — hundreds of rock-shelters carry painted scenes very unlike the deep-cave animals of the Paleolithic: small, lively human figures shown in motion, drawing bows, running in files, gathering honey, and dancing. The corpus, inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site in 1998, spans the transition from the last foragers to the first farmers, and its precise dating is debated; some of the imagery is plausibly Mesolithic, much of it certainly later. Among its most discussed panels is the scene at El Cogul in Catalonia, where a row of women appears to dance around a central male figure. Files of figures and apparent dance scenes have repeatedly been read as ritual — as shamanic performance, as ceremony, as the depiction of trance — and the reading is at once plausible and contested, for a painted dancer can be a rite, a hunt, a festival, or a story, and the picture does not adjudicate among them. A recent critical review by Neemias Santos da Rosa and colleagues, applying formal criteria for identifying dance, found only a small number of the candidate scenes that securely qualify, a caution that runs against the looser ritual readings.

The shamanic question presses hardest at a single English site. At Star Carr in North Yorkshire, on the shore of a long-vanished lake, excavators have recovered a series of headdresses made from red-deer skulls — the upper cranium with the antlers left attached, the bone thinned and perforated, dating to around the ninth millennium BCE. Some two dozen and more have now been found, a concentration without parallel. They may have been worn as disguise in the hunt; they may have been ritual gear, the means by which a person took on the form of the animal; the two functions need not exclude one another, and the modern debate has not settled which weighs more. A 2016 study by Aimée Little and a large team of co-authors titled the Star Carr crania the world’s earliest shamanic costume — a claim deliberately strong, and contested precisely in its naming, since the very word shaman is borrowed from much later Siberian ethnography and pressed onto a silent past.

It is into that silence that the modern esoteric imagination has reached. From the nineteenth century onward, currents within Western esotericism — and later the Goddess-spirituality and earth-religion movements of the twentieth — have looked to the deep past for a lost, intuitive, earth-based mysticism supposed to predate the organized religions: a primordial unity with nature, a religion of the body and the seasons, dimly visible in the painted dancers and the ochre-strewn graves and recoverable, the hope runs, by those who know how to look. The pull is understandable, and the projection is itself a documented chapter of modern religious history. But it is reception, not recovery. The figures who raised the Star Carr antlers or laid the swan beneath the child left no scripture and no name for what they did, and scholarship is careful to mark the distance between a reddened bone and a doctrine of the soul; the Great-Goddess and earth-religion genealogies that trace an unbroken line back to these millennia are read by historians as modern constructions rather than survivals. What the period itself yields is sparing and concrete, and strange enough without amplification: that across the warming forests and rising coasts of the early Holocene, the last hunter-gatherers of Europe brought a whole and competent way of life to its highest finish — the composite microlithic tool, the shell-mound, the first true cemeteries — at the precise moment the ground shifted beneath it. The Mesolithic is the threshold made into a period: a people entirely at home in forests and coasts that were, valley by valley, turning into a farmed world with no place for the way they lived.

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