Amber pendants, shell bracelets, fox tooth beads: the prehistoric jewelery found in a hundred excavations across Europe demonstrate that 30,000 years ago, in the Upper Paleolithic, there existed at least nine distinct cultural groups.
The populations of gatherers and hunters living on the continent were therefore more complex than described by genetic data alone.
This was revealed by the study published in the journal Nature Human Behavior by a group of anthropologists from the University of Bordeaux.
The researchers examined the available studies on prehistoric ornaments dating back to the Gravettian period (34,000-24,000 years ago) which were found in 112 excavations carried out between the mid-nineteenth century and 2010. Thousands of elements were thus classified into 134 different typologies , based on the raw material used and other stylistic elements.
By comparing the objects found in the various European sites, it emerged that the Gravettian culture was not unique, but rather composed of at least nine distinct cultural subgroups: for example, the populations of the more eastern regions, such as those along the Don river in Russia, preferred ornaments made of stone and red deer teeth, while those living in the north-western regions carried the tubular shells of the Dentalium mollusc.
The choice of raw materials was not always determined by the resources available in the area: the researchers noticed for example that bones and teeth of foxes and red deer, abundant throughout the continent during that period, were used only by some populations.
The materials could also come from very distant lands, as in the case of the ornaments found in the burial of a teenager in Italy.
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