Who were the Reindeer People of the Ice Age? - I give you the Magdalenians - A Thread
See my earlier thread on the Gravettians for an earlier European Ice Age society.
The expansion of the glacial ice around 20kya pushed all of Europe's people, plants and wildlife into refugia, splitting the Gravettians into the Epigravettians and the Solutreans.
The ice retreated and life expanded out of these pockets to recolonise Europe. The transition from the Solutrean to the Magdalenian is hard to pinpoint, as these names reflect average changes across time, the borders are fuzzy.
The archetypal Solutrean artefact is the long thin laurel-like blade or point, a reflection of superlative skill and control over the material properties of flint and other lithics.
The decline and disappearance of these points roughly coincides with the rise of the true antler or bone harpoon. These are a staple of the Magdalenian period, reflecting the abundance of antler bearing species in the diet and the organisation of the economy around the herd hunt
This close association between antler and bone tools and the boundaries of the Magdalenian culture is a defining feature of their epoch. They manufactured tools, weapons and artwork from bone and antler, earning them their title of the Reindeer People.
The families, clans, bands and groups which expanded out of Western Europe eventually covered an area from Poland to Portugal, maintaining a loose culture roughly between 18-12kya.
Reindeer and horses provided food, bones, antler, skins, teeth, sinews and many more useful materials. Magdalenian sites such as Petersfels in south Germany show evidence for mass killings, likely by planned herding of reindeer into valleys
The Magdalenian saw the best documented use for atlatls in prehistoric Europe. Many stunningly ornate examples have been recovered from caves, often carved with exquisite animal figurines.
Probably the best known examples of their artwork are the cave sites of Lascaux and Altamira. Lascaux, a cave network in Dordogne, boasts some of the finest and most iconic cave paintings in the world, dated to the early Magdalenian period.
Altamira, a cave in Cantabria, Spain, has seen continuous human occupation since the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic. Magdalenian contributions to the accreted artwork include beautiful images of bulls and horses.
Venus figurines do exist during this period, but they become less detailed and more abstract.
Genetically the Magdalenians show a mixture of Gravettian continuity and a minor resurgence in Aurignacian DNA. The well studied 'El Miron Cluster' of five Magdalenian skeletal remains shows links with the contemporary Italian Villabruna Cluster.
This suggests that gene flow occurred between the Italian and west Franco-Cantabrian refugia, creating a fairly homogeneous population which recolonised Europe after the glacial maximum.
As an aside for haplogroup specialists, the Villabruna Cluster is an early source of R1b, possibly the R1b-V88 variant which appears in West Africa during the Holocene.
Magdalenian haplogroups include Y: HIJK and I-M170 and Mt: U5b and U8b.
The end of the Magdalenian comes most likely with the Younger Dryas. In the south a collapse in technological and artistic sophistication produced the Azilian, who went from Lascaux cave painting to crude pebble art
In the north the Ahrensbergian Culture is identified through new lithic technologies. These people began to move into southern Scandinavia, the first modern humans to set foot in the region.
Overall the Magdalenian is the last creative high point of the big game Ice Age hunters, a peak of artistic brilliance before the incoming Holocene totally altered the landscape. In sum, a mobile, thoughtful, sensitive, carnivorous and fascinating culture.
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