Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

By Walter Kish

Not being otherwise gainfully employed, I have been spending a lot of time this summer at the family cottage in the magnificent verdurous expanses north of Bancroft and a “kamin’s” throw from Ontario’s Algonquin Park.  Aside from its lush picturesque scenery, the area is also known for its abundant deposits of minerals and semi-precious stones and is a geologist’s and rock collector’s paradise.  In the early part of the last century, a large number of mines and digs in the area supplied radium, uranium, gold, lead, quartz, marble, granite, molybdenum, feldspar, apatite, corundum, nepheline, sodalite, and many other minerals whose names are as exotic to me as their appearance. Every year in August, the “Rockhound Gemboree” brings thousands of aficionados to Canada’s largest gem and mineral show.

On a recent local excursion, I dropped into a local rock collector’s emporium by the name of the Princess Sodalite Mine Shop, and after admiring their vast collection of unusual rocks, I started perusing their small selection of books on geology and mining.  It was with more than a little surprise that I chanced to find an interesting little book entitled Ice Age Hunters of the Ukraine, whose primary topic was the geological changes wrought on the area now known as Ukraine by the onset and subsequent receding of the last ice age.  It was written by a Professor Richard Klein of the University of Washington and published in 1973, hence the now politically incorrect reference to “the Ukraine”.  Nonetheless, the information contained in this short 140 page book presents a fascinating picture of what was happening in Ukraine during that period of time when vast seas of ice covered much of the known world including Eastern Europe.

The last ice age began its inexorable creep southwards approximately 70,000 years ago, and only released its arctic grip some 10,000 years or so in our recent past.  According to the book, although the actual ice cap never reached as far south as modern day Ukraine, the permafrost extended to south of modern day Kyiv, and all the area north of the Black Sea was essentially tundra in nature.  Since a large proportion of the earth’s water was locked up in ice, sea levels were considerably lower than today, and the Black Sea was significantly smaller than it is now, with a continuous land mass separating it from the Mediterranean Sea.

Although, ecologically, the land was classified as tundra, you cannot say that it was devoid of vegetation or habitation.  In fact, the ecosystem of that time was fairly rich with wildlife, including the wooly mammoth, wooly rhinoceros, bison, yaks, aurochs, giant deer and many other species that had adapted to survive sub-arctic conditions, much as we find now in our own northwest territories or the far reaches of Siberia.

Of course, where there was plentiful wildlife, there were human hunters to exploit them.  Over the past century in particular, archeologists have uncovered plentiful evidence of the stone-age peoples that made this area home.  Needless to say, these were not “Ukrainians” in any true anthropological sense.  In fact, they were not even Homo sapiens or modern man as we call ourselves, but our cousins on the evolutionary scale, the Neanderthals.  Whatever misconceptions we may have about Neanderthals, they were a capable lot, having mastered fire and the ability to fashion a variety of sophisticated stone tools.  They were proficient hunters, as evidenced by the multiple species of animals, such as the mammoth, that they hunted to extinction. 

At a well known archeological site near the town of Mezhirich, just south of Kyiv, a large number of what had been skin-covered shelters were unearthed in 1965 that were built during this era using large mammoth bones as frames for their construction.  Also found was a vast array of stone and bone tools as well as other artifacts.  Similar sites have been found in other areas of Ukraine including Crimea and the Dnister River basin, in particular.

For almost a hundred thousand years, the Neanderthals held sway over most of what we now know as Europe, including Ukraine, and as far east as Uzbekistan.  As the ice age came to an end some ten thousand years ago, the Neanderthals disappeared, losing the evolutionary competition to their more adaptable and smaller cousins pushing up from the south, the species we now call Homo sapiens.  They succeeded in colonizing all of the Earth, and differentiating themselves into the wide array of ethnic cultures we have today, including Ukrainians.  The traces or “shadows” of our forgotten ancestors however, are still being dug up today, giving us an interesting picture of what life was like in that time.  This too is part of our history.