The Magdalenians painted Lascaux and hunted across an Ice Age Europe
The first excavators of a rock shelter in France's Dordogne called the era the age of the reindeer. Today it is known as the Magdalenian, a culture of Ice Age hunters who carved seals and mammoths onto antler, modelled bison in clay deep inside caves, and kept dogs related to our own.
Named after the Abri de la Madeleine in the Vézère valley, which Édouard Lartet and Henry Christy dug and described in 1875, the Magdalenian spans roughly 21,000 to 13,000 years ago. It probably grew out of the earlier Solutrean culture in southwestern France and northern Spain, set apart by a much heavier reliance on points made of bone. When the harsh cold of the Oldest Dryas eased around 15,000 years ago, its people pushed north and east to recolonise land from Portugal to Poland and as far as England and Wales.
Their toolkit leaned on antler and bone: barbed points, spear throwers and, in the latest of six recognised phases, harpoons with barbs on one or both sides. Perforated antler batons, whose purpose is still unclear, may have been used to make rope. They hunted reindeer, red deer, wild horses and other big game of the late glacial world. Sea shells and fossils found far from their sources suggest seasonal wanderings and a trade network reaching the British Isles.
Art runs through everything. Lascaux holds the most famous Magdalenian paintings, and Altamira in Spain, rich in portable art, may have been a place where scattered bands gathered. In the deepest chamber of the Tuc d'Audoubert cave sits an 18-inch relief of two bison shaped from clay. People also wore pierced carnivore teeth and shells as ornaments.
Ancient DNA shows they descended mainly from earlier Cro-Magnon groups such as the Gravettians who sheltered in southwestern Europe through the coldest millennia; one study of seven individuals traced 70 to 80 percent of their ancestry to a population in Belgium some 35,000 years ago. They probably had darker skin than modern Europeans. Around 14,000 to 12,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers moving north across the Alps largely replaced them, though their ancestry lingered in Iberia and France.
Source: Magdalenian
