This is evidenced by traces of pasty ocher, the remains of which were found at an Upper Paleolithic site.
The inhabitants of the Paleolithic site of Sungir wore clothes painted with red ocher “paint”; Moreover, this was both a festive and everyday outfit. This conclusion was reached by archaeologists and chemists from Moscow State University named after M.V. Lomonosov. They write about this in the magazine Camera Prehistorica.
Parking Sungir located on the outskirts of Vladimir, it was opened in 1955. People lived at the site in the Upper Paleolithic – about 32-35 thousand years ago. Archaeologists have discovered residential or household sites (remains of buildings), fire pits, hearth and ritual pits, and accumulations of bones of large animals (mainly mammoths). In addition, they found two burials of Cro-Magnons (humans of the modern species): one – a man and a female skull, the second – two children (it was long believed that these were brother and sister, but recent DNA analysis showed that these were two boys https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aao1807). The burials turned out to be especially rich: they contained more than 3,500 beads made of tusk, arctic fox fangs that decorated children’s hats, 20 bracelets made of tusk plates, darts and spears made of tusk rods, etc. Other famous finds from Sungir include horse figurines (also made from mammoth ivory), “slotted disks” and “straightening rods”, etc.
The authors of the new study studied pieces of ocher from the cultural layer of Sungir (35 pieces) and particles on seven jewelry from a male burial. This analysis showed that ocher was used not only in the form of a powder, as archaeologists usually imagine, but also in the form of a relatively liquid paste: a kind of “splash”, the remains of “streams” were preserved from it. In this paste form, ocher was also applied to clothing, that is, it was painted a bright red color. In particular, children from the burial with spears were wearing such clothes. But archaeologists believe that such red “paint” was also used for everyday clothing, and also, possibly, for hygienic and ritual purposes.
In a similar way, in recent times, clothes were decorated in Moravia and the Apennine Peninsula. In particular, the same funeral tradition is recorded in Dolní Vestonice in Moravia. This, according to Vladislav Zhitenev (the first author of the article), allows us to speak at a new level about the general “supra-group unity” of Europe in the Upper Paleolithic. Moreover, judging by a previously published DNA analysis, the Upper Paleolithic people from Moravia and Sungir were united not only by cultural, but also by family ties.
Casts of a child’s burial from Sungir are exhibited in the State Historical Museum in Moscow and in the Vladimir-Suzdal Museum-Reserve (the “Chambers” center in Vladimir). In the latter, it is part of a new permanent exhibition dedicated to the finds Sungirya.
Based on materials from the press service of Moscow State University. M.V. Lomonosov
Source: www.nkj.ru
