among contemporary foraging peoples have led some analysts to turn these stereotypes on their heads. They see Paleolithic bands as egalitarian groups in which the contributions of men and women to survival were recognized and valued, and in which both men and women had equal access to the limited amount of resources held by the group. This may also be a stereotype, overly romanticizing Paleolithic society as a sort of vegetarian commune. Social relations among foragers were not as hierarchical as they were in other types of societies, but many foraging groups from more recent periods had one person who held more power than others, and that person was almost always a man. In fact, anthropologists who study such groups call them “Big Man” societies. This debate about gender relations is often part of larger discussions about whether Paleolithic society – and by implication “human nature” – was primarily peaceful and nurturing or violent and brutal, and whether these qualities are gender-related. (See the later section on the origins of patriarchy for more on this debate.) Like much else about the Paleolithic, sources about gender and about violence are fragmentary and difficult to interpret; there may simply have been a diversity of patterns, as there is among more modern foragers.
Whether peaceful and egalitarian, violent and hierarchical, or somewhere in between, heterosexual relations produced children, who were fed as infants by their mothers or by another woman who had recently given birth. Breast milk was the only food available that infants could easily digest, so mothers nursed their children for several years. Along with providing food for infants, extended nursing brings a side benefit: it suppresses ovulation and thus acts as a contraceptive. Foraging groups needed children to survive, but too many could tax scarce food resources. Many groups may have practiced selective infanticide or abandonment. They may also have exchanged children of different ages with other groups, which further deepened kinship connections between groups. Other than for feeding, children were most likely cared for by other male and female members of the group as well as by their mothers, as they are in modern foraging cultures.
Within each band, and within the larger kin group, individuals had a variety of identities; they were simultaneously fathers, sons, brothers, and mates, or mothers, daughters, sisters, and mates. Each of these identities was relational (parent to child, sibling to sibling, mate to mate), and some of them, especially parent to child, gave one power over others. The interweaving of these relationships and their meaning varied from culture to culture, but one’s status in one relationship affected one’s status in the others, and often changed throughout one’s life. A woman’s situation as daughter or sister in a specific kin group, for example, shaped her relationship with her mate; her becoming a mother often further altered her status vis-à-vis the father of her child or other kin group members. A man’s relationship with his father and his status in the kin group often changed when he took a mate, and in some areas changed again if he became the father of a son. Judging by later ethnographic parallels, how kin groups were defined and understood varied tremendously, but they remained significant power structures for millennia, and in some areas still have influence over major aspects of life, such as an individual’s job or marital partner.
Burials provide evidence of social differentiation and social connections. The people who buried a young adult woman near Bordeaux in southern France about 19,000 years ago, for example, dressed her in clothing, covered her with ochre pigment, and placed her in a container made of stone slabs, along with a few perforated shells, a bead, some tools made of bone and stone, bones of antelope and reindeer, and 71 red deer canine teeth that had holes drilled in them for stringing and may have been on a necklace. Red deer did not live near Bordeaux at this time of worsening climate, so the teeth had most likely been brought there over many years through networks of exchange, perhaps given as gifts in marriages or in trade for other goods. Something about this young woman or her death led those who buried her to decide to include so many valuable grave goods; through this they referenced both her individual identity (and perhaps high social position) and her links to a social network that ranged across time and space.
Bands of foragers may have been exogamous, but as humans spread out over much of the globe, kin groups and larger networks of interrelated people often became isolated from one another, and people mated only within this larger group. Thus local exogamy was accompanied by endogamy at a larger scale, and over many generations humans came to develop differences in physical features, including skin and hair color, eye and body shape, and amount of body hair, although genetically there is less variety among them than among chimpanzees. Language also changed over generations, so that thousands of different languages were eventually spoken. Groups created widely varying cultures and passed them on to their children, further increasing diversity among humans.
Over time, groups of various sizes came to understand themselves as linked by shared kinship and culture, and as different from other groups. Words were devised to describe such groups, which in English include people, ethnic group, tribe, race, and nation. Shared culture included language, religion, foodways, rituals, clothing styles, and many other factors, whose importance in defining membership in the group changed over time (though language was almost always important). Because of extensive intermarriage within the group over many generations, the differences between groups were (and are) sometimes evident in the body, and were (and are) often conceptualized as blood, a substance with deep meaning. Kinship ties included perceived and invented ones, however, as adoption and other methods were devised to bring someone into the group, or traditions developed of descent from a common ancestor. At the heart of all such groups was a conscious common identity, which itself enhanced endogamy as people chose (or were required) to marry within the group. These groups came into being, died out, morphed into other groups, split, combined, lost and gained in significance, and in other ways changed, but their fluidity and the fact that they were constructed through culture as well as genetics does not make them any less real. They came to have enormous significance later in world history, but developed before the invention of writing and appear to have been everywhere.
The burial of the young woman in southern France was a social occasion, and it was also a way to express ideas and beliefs about the material world and perhaps an unseen world beyond. Paleolithic mortuary rituals created social and political messages, and conveyed (and possibly distorted) cultural meaning (as have funerals ever since). They marked membership in a group, which might have been understood to continue after death took one from the realm of the living. Together with paintings and decorated objects, burials suggest that people thought of their world as extending beyond the visible. People, animals, plants, natural occurrences, and other things around them had spirits, an animistic understanding of the spiritual nature and interdependence of all things. The unseen world regularly intervened in the visible world, for good and ill, and the actions of dead ancestors and the spirits could be shaped by living people.
Rock art from around the world and a wide array of ethnographic evidence suggests that ordinary people were thought to learn about the unseen world through dreams and portents, while messages and revelations were also sent more regularly to shamans, spiritually adept people who communicated with or traveled to the unseen world. Shamans created complex rituals through which they sought to ensure the health and prosperity of an individual, family, or group. These included rituals with gender and sexual imagery, and shamans in some places may have constructed a transgender role through which they harnessed power that crossed gender boundaries, just as they crossed the boundary between the seen and unseen world. Many cave paintings show groups of prey or predator animals, and several include a masked human figure usually judged to be a shaman in a gesture or pose assumed to be some sort of ritual. Sometimes the shaman is shown with what looks like a penis, and such figures used to be invariably described as men. More recently the suggestion has been made that these figures may have been gendered male, but could have been a woman wearing a costume, as gender inversions are often part of many types of rituals and performances. Or the figure – and the actual shaman who it may have represented – was understood as a third gender, neither male nor female, or both at the same time. Shamans in many cultures wore masks that gave them added power, and were understood to take on the qualities of the animal, creature, or spirit represented by the mask; transcending boundaries was thus their role.
Interpreting what certain objects that appear to have had ritual purposes
