#hamburg culture

Hamburg Culture       (Germanicseidr is a blog also created by me)

Today I want to go a lot further back in time than usual, back to the paleolithic era. I have written a post about the Ahrensburg culture several weeks ago, these were reindeer hunters who lived in North Western Europe. Now I want to give you some information about the Hamburg Culture, this culture is older than the Ahrensburg people, the Hamburg culture dates back to 15,500BC-13,100BC.

The Hamburg culture existed during the last part of the Weichsel Glaciation. The Weichsel Glaciation was a moment between 117,000BC and 11,650BC in which the ice sheets were at their maximum, reaching from the North Pole until modern day Hamburg, Germany.

Scandinavia was still one huge ice sheet and thus uninhabitable land but the people belonging to the Hamburg culture lived close to the ice sheets in modern day The Netherlands, Northern Germany and Poland. The name of the culture itself is named after the German city of Hamburg where the first discoveries were made in the 1920’s by Alfred Rust. He discovered several camps which belonged to these Hamburgian hunters.

To put it simply, it was cold in Northern Europe, really freezing cold during this time period. Yet still early humans migrated North, to the later birthplace of the Germanic culture, to hunt for reindeer. These hunters are in fact the first modern humans who settled in Northern Europe. They are our earliest Northern European ancestors.

Living in Northern Europe during the Weichsel Glaciation was hard. With an eternal winter, snow and a gigantic ice sheet nearby, it would have been hard for these people to just survive. Reindeer were the main source of food for the Hamburgian people, besides reindeer they also hunted for smaller game and fish.

Characteristic for this culture are the specific kinds of tools found in several areas, the shouldered point and the zinken. These tools were used when working with antler. Since reindeer was their primary food source, it is no wonder they developed specific tools to process killed reindeer.

What is also interesting is that traces of this culture have been found along the Norwegian coast in 2005. The Hamburgian people must have travelled North during the slightly warmer periods in summer. Ships were not necessary for this, the sea level was 50 meters lower than today.

When looking at the archeological remains of the camps, we can assume that these people lived in tipis, which you might recognize from the native Americans. Circles of stones found at Hamburgian camps, could have served as weights to keep the tent stable. From the debris found at these camps we can assume with certainty that they almost lived solely on reindeer meat.

These people led a nomadic life, they brought their tents with them while moving around, following the reindeer wherever they went. They are the oldest modern humans of Northern Europe so they definitely deserve a mention in here and respect for surviving one of the coldest periods of our current ice age. For those who wonder, yes we still live in an ice age and ours is called the Quaternary Glaciation which started 2,58 million years ago.

Here are photos of:
Shouldered points found in Frisia and Denmark
A depiction of a Hamburgian family
A map of the ice sheets