European houses
from 30,000 years ago (Sungir archaeological site, eastern part of early Gravettian culture):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sungir
Sungir (also spelled Sunghir) is an Upper Paleolithic archaeological site in Russia and one of the earliest records of modern Homo sapiens in Europe. It is situated about 200 km east of Moscow, on the outskirts of Vladimir, near the Klyazma River. It is dated by carbon analysis to between 28,000 and 30,000 years ago. (...)
More about this from Anthropark website (made by the Academy of Sciences in Brno in 2005):
http://www.anthropark.wz.cz/gravetta.htm
"A boy and a girl in clothing resembling the clothing found in the graves in Sungir. The circle in the background is the bonnet of the girl with belemnite beads. The work shows a very rich cultural pattern of the kostěnkovsko-strelecká culture of the Sungir type:"
"A Sungir family standing in front of a big house. This picture reflects the fact, that not only men, but even women and children were wearing decorated clothes (here are clothes decorated with patterns known from some Sungir artefacts). The dwelling in the background has a size of a dwelling of indigenous peoples of North America and could give a shelter for several families. The dwellings had quadratic or rectangular groudfloor shapes, which are known for a long time in Paleolithic (as these in Plateau Parain, France, and other Upper Paleolithic settlements in the USA.) It was not possible to use stakes because of the frozen ground (permafrost), therefore the people built the dwelling out of horizontally laid stocks:"
"In Sungir, the groundfloor of the dwellings were of a rectangular shape and built in pairs. The Upper Paleolithic builders used the qualities of the available materials to achieve the results of massive winter dwellings, that could last a long time. They used the jowls of the mamooths (Meziříčí), mamooths skulls (Mezin), stones with antlers (Malta in Sibirien) and long mamooths bones to build oval or circular dwellings and flat massive timber that could be easy chopped for quadrate buildings. From the ethnography of indigenous people in North America, we know, that the people did not need axes or saws; all they needed was lithic tools, wooden wedges and lump hammers. The solid planks were chopped right from the standing trees. The decoration of the dwellings was representative, as well as the decorative clothing. A tomb with Sungarian children skeletons was discovered in the middle of one of the dwellings; the man was buried later. Than, another human remains were found nearby, probably from older burials. Therefore, this place is considered as a burial- place. Two other dwellings were built probably later and farther from the graves:"
Looks like those European hunters already 30,000 years ago built more solid houses than people build in some parts of the world today.
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BTW:
Those eastern Gravettians from Sungir were ancestors of Mal'ta-Buret' culture (late Gravettian), part of which was Siberian Mal'ta boy, who died 24,000 years ago and had Y-DNA haplogroup R, which is ancestral to modern Indo-European and Dravidian haplogroups R1 (including R1a and R1b) and R2.
Mal'ta-Buret' culture:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mal'ta-Buret'_culture
Mal'ta boy:
http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2013/11/first-genome-of-upper-paleolithic-human.html
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Apart from being ancestors of Indo-Europeans and Dravidians, late Gravettians were also among ancestors of Native Americans:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mal'ta-Buret'_culture#Relationship_to_American_Indians_and_Europeans
Research published in 2014 suggests that a Mal'ta like people were important genetic contributors to the American Indians, Europeans, and South Asians but did not contribute to and was not related to East Eurasians. Mal'ta had a type of R* y-dna that diverged before the hg R1 and R2 split and an unresolved clade of haplogroup U mtdna.[3] Between 14 and 38 percent of American Indian ancestry may originate from gene flow from the Mal'ta Buret people, which is essentially western Eurasian in a modern sense, while the other geneflow in the Native Americans appears to have an Eastern Eurasian origin [4]
The genetic findings at Mal'ta may also help account for the Caucasian characteristics of Kennewick Man, a 9,000 year old skeleton discovered in the state of Washington. Mal'ta suggests that the Upper Paleolithic population of western Eurasia may have spread into Siberia and contributed to the physical characteristics of some early American Indians who were different from the East Asians who contributed most of the genetic heritage of the indigenous people of the Americas.[5]
And ancestors of Mal'ta people from 24,000 years ago were - as already mentioned - Sungir people from 30,000 years ago:
Early Gravettian (note its eastern part):
"The map shows the area of Gravettian at the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic era. The circles indicate some archaeologically important areas:"
Mal'ta-Buret' (eastern late Gravettian):
"The map represents the borders of Europe after the glacial moved more in the North after the glacial maximum. The dashed line borders the area of late Gravettian, the circle indicates the Mezin locality and the arrows points in the center of Siberia, in the middle of Asia and symbolises the locality of Mal'ta and Bureť:"
