"Culture is a powerful social tool that can create a sense of common purpose, help us accomplish great projects, or survive in the toughest conditions. It is also a concept that can easily move us to hate and attack those we perceive as being different from us," writes Ariel David in the Israeli publication Haaretz, which has an excellent archaeological section.
He's writing about the Gravettians, who lived all across Europe from Iberia to Russia, 34,000 to 24,000 years ago.
These are the people who made the fantastic cave paintings and the clinically obese Venus statuettes.
You'd think they were the same gang. But a new study of the ornaments they made, by Jack Baker, Solange Rigaud, Daniel Pereira, Lloyd A Courtenay and Francesco d’Errico, published in Nature Human Behaviour, has found that they were a group of different peoples.
On studying their ornaments, it turns out that - like Irish emigrants in America or Polish emigrants in Israel - the people making these ornaments often had greater cultural affinities with faraway places than with the place they were living in.
"For example, ornamental assemblages found in southwestern France, in the Pyrenees, are statistically much closer to those from Belgium than to those much closer in nearby northeastern Spain, Baker and colleagues say.
"So geographical distance was not necessarily the main factor in determining how the Gravettians decorated themselves and who they identified as being part of their group, the researchers infer.
"'What we think is at work here is just this feeling of belonging to a culture,' Baker says. 'It's saying: I dress in this way, and regardless of whether my people move or migrate to another place we are going to keep that style.'"
Really interesting piece. One of the illustrations, however, which to me looks like a man or woman wearing corn rows, "the Lady of Brassempouy" has it reconstructed as a woman wearing a decorative frame over her hair. Well, we shall see what we shall see…