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Mammoth Bone Yurts
Caves are terrible places to live, dark and vermin
ridden as they are and there is growing evidence that
early men used cave shelters mostly for religious and
artistic purposes preferring to sleep in the open. In the
1980s a 15,000-year-old yurt-like hut made from
stacked mammoth bones found by archaeologists
in the Ukraine provided the earliest example of men
living in shelters other than caves. Archaeology, as
it is want to do, is gradually overturning assumptions
about primitive early men – the Ukraine huts were
quite sophisticated. The walls were made with
mammoth leg bones and skulls and the roof from
tusks. The bones came from at least 100 mammoths
and may have been taken from a nearby mammoth
graveyard. There’s also evidence of stone age
freezers, pits dug into the permafrost to store meat.
Now archaeological evidence from Russia that might
be 30,000 years old (or just 10,000 – it’s hard to tell
really) shows men living in long animal skin shelters
and from Czechoslovakia comes the remains of round
huts with animal skin rugs and beds next to mammoth
bone hearths. These folk may have rocked babies to
sleep in reindeer skin cradles and enjoyed bedtime
drinks of reindeer fat mixed with boiling water.
The Contagious Yawning of Cave Men
The brain has a rather clever inbuilt system to
stimulate drowsiness. At dusk receptors in the eye
sense changes in the blue rays in light and this
stimulates the hypothalamus to produce melatonin
and that makes us drowsy. Even blind people have
functioning receptors of this kind. There is a theory
among evolutionary anthropologists that yawning is
contagious because it was an important non-verbal
way of communicating to your tribe that it was time
to go to sleep. Fascinating subject in itself sleep –
it’s worth bearing in mind that right up until the
introduction of artificial light folk tended to go to
bed when it got dark but after what was widely
referred to as their first sleep they’d wake up at
about one am and not go back to sleep, or indeed to
bed, until maybe three am. During the wakeful hours
they might even visit with neighbours! This is the
natural sleeping pattern of the human species.
From the invention of the electric light bulb to the
marketing of the first sleeping pill took just 24 years.
Today it costs the NHS £50 million each year to keep
Britain in sleeping tablets. There are many references
in literature to first and second sleep including this
from Cervantes in 1615:
"
Don Quixote followed nature, and being satisfied
with his first sleep, did not solicit more. As for
Sancho, he never wanted a second, for the first
lasted him from night to morning."
parasitic on bats. These insecticidal plants are still
used in traditional medicines today. Lyn Wadley
(below) who leads the team of archaeologists from the
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg that
has been excavating the cave for the past 15 years,
also found that the cave dwellers burnt their bedding
in the way that we might change our sheets and, as
there is food material caught up in the bedding, she
notes that "Breakfast in bed may have been an almost
daily occurrence."
A Three Dog Night
Perhaps the cave men of South Africa or the ones
from colder Northern climes whose art is currently
on display at the British Museum slept with their dogs
for warmth as the indigenous people of Australia did
until very recently. Indeed on colder nights the
Aborigines, stone-age hunter-gatherers and culturally
very similar to the Ice Age cave men, might sleep
with two one or dogs but if it was really cold then it
could be a 'three dog night '. The dogs would also act
as flea magnets, attracting the little biters away from
their masters. We certainly know from archaeological
finds that cave men kept dogs and treated them as
pets. As recently as 2011 the skeleton of a dog,
26,000 years old, was found in the Czech Republic:
it had been laid to rest with a mammoth bone in its
mouth. The dog as hot water bottle reached a cultural
zenith in Imperial China where the Pekingese was
bred specifically for the purpose.