How Many Friends Does One Person Need? (15 page)

With its body newly designed for long-distance walking,
Homo erectus
set off to conquer the world, breaking out of Africa for the first time around a million years ago, and very rapidly colonising the farthest corners of main-
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land Asia. For a long time, nothing much of interest happened, and there was little to differentiate between the Afro-European populations and those in eastern Asia. But in the millennia that followed, the Asian populations went their own way, cut off from their African cousins.

Around half a million years ago, some of the African populations began to undergo rapid change, mainly involving a dramatic increase in brain size and another exodus out of Africa into Europe. Then over the space of the next couple of hundred thousand years, the African populations of this new species metamorphosed into modern humans, and exploded out of Africa once again (about seventy thousand years ago). In the next ten thousand years, this new species colonised every corner of the ice-free Old World (including Australia), finally even launching itself across the Bering Strait into the Americas around sixteen thousand years ago.

When these newly minted modern humans reached the Far East, it has always seemed likely that they came into contact with the remnants of the east Asian
erectus
populations surviving in the backwaters of China long after their African equivalents had died out or evolved into the modern human form. So far as we knew, none of these Asian
erectus
populations had survived past sixty thousand years ago – just about the time that modern humans turned up on their doorstep. Given our historical record when colonising new lands, was that a coincidence, I wonder... ?

The discovery of the little lady of Flores changed all that. There she and her kinfolk were, hale and hearty, perhaps as recently as twelve thousand years ago – a mere handshake away in geological time. Modern humans must
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surely have come across them in the forests of Indonesia on their way to Australia (given that they had made it over to Australia by about forty thousand years ago).

But the Hobbit and her kind were nothing if not distinctive: she was tiny. We are familiar enough today with diminutive humans – today’s Pygmy peoples of central Africa and the negrito peoples of the south Asian forests are not much taller than she was. But whereas all these modern human pygmies have brains that are the same size as ours, the Hobbit and her kind had brains that were no bigger than those of our mutual apeman ancestors.

What did surprise everyone was the fact that their bones had been found beside stone tools of a modestly sophisticated kind, as well as evidence for fire and the hunting of large animals (including the now extinct, formidable stegadon and the very much still living giant lizard, the Komodo dragon). For something the size of a five-year-old human child, killing a thousand-kilogram stegadon is no small feat; at best, it seems to suggest some degree of co-ordinated planning and co-operation. Of course, it is always possible that the tools were actually made by modern humans. But if that is so, it raises the question of how the tools and Ms Hobbit and her friends got to be in the same place at the same time. The usual conclusion drawn in such cases is that the tool-makers ate the individuals whose bones we find among the tools. That’s not beyond the bounds of possibility – after all, chimpanzees and gorillas are eaten with culinary enthusiasm in western Africa today, and monkeys are a delicacy in Indo-China. The Hobbits would have seemed neither more nor less than another ape to our ancestors. However, as yet, there is no
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incontrovertible evidence for their having been eaten –something that would normally be signalled by cut marks on bones, broken marrow bones and perhaps evidence of cooking (for example, scorch marks on the bones). So the jury is out on this one.

There is, however, one last curiosity worth mentioning. On the nearby island of Borneo, one of the largest of the Indonesian chain of which Flores is a part, the local people have long claimed that they were familiar with three kinds of people in the forest –
orang rimba
(a tribe of perfectly respectable forest people also known as the Suku Anak Dalam, meaning ‘children of the inner forest’), the
orang utan
(the familiar Asian great ape) and the
orang
pendek
(a diminutive forest dweller that was half man, half ape). Perhaps the orang pendek is a surviving folk memory of contacts with the Hobbit. We really must have come within just a whisker of shaking her hand.

Until very recently, the geological strata of Africa (or indeed anywhere else) have stubbornly refused to yield up any hominid fossils more than 4.5 million years old. However, in 2000, a French team unearthed fragments of a hominid-like creature from deposits in the Tugen Hills just above Lake Baringo in central Kenya that were dated to around six million years ago. In all, twelve fragments (including parts of limb bones, jaws, a hand bone and some teeth) representing at least five different individuals have been recovered from four sites. The specimens were named
Orrorin tugenensis
(
orrorin
means ‘original man’ in the local Tugen dialect), but the inevitable nickname
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‘Millennium Man’ soon caught on.

The following year and a thousand miles to the west, another French team, which had been fossil-hunting in west Africa for the better part of two frustrating decades, turned up a near-complete skull and some jaw and teeth fragments at a remote site on the southern edge of the Sahara in Chad. It had a slightly older date (between six and seven million years old). Nicknamed
toumaï
(a name for a child born dangerously close to the dry season in the local native dialect), the species was formally named
Sahelanthropus tchadensis
(literally, the ‘Sahara ape-man from Chad’)
.

Dates of around six million years place both finds within the timescale for the common ancestor of modern humans and chimpanzees suggested by the molecular data. This was getting pretty exciting.

The
orrorin
material includes two well-preserved partial femurs (thigh bones), which are similar in shape to (but considerably larger than) the diminutive femurs of the earliest australopithecines. Although claimed as evidence of bipedalism, it is difficult to be certain that these femurs really are from a bipedal walker rather than a more conventional quadrupedal great ape because the lower ends are missing. In modern humans (and all uncontroversial hominids), the shaft of the thigh bone is angled outwards when the knee joint is placed on a flat surface. This allows the body’s centre of gravity to lie directly above the foot that is in contact with the ground at any given moment when striding. In contrast, the shafts of all habitually quadrupedal living great ape femurs are vertical – which causes them to waddle awkwardly when walking on two legs.
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Although the leg bones do not rule out bipedalism, the fragment of an upper arm bone from Tugen shows some similarities to those of living chimpanzees and suggests a partially arboreal lifestyle. The suggestion of an arboreal life is reinforced by the curved shape of the finger bone, a feature that is characteristic of tree-climbing great apes but not modern humans.

The slightly older Chad material has been the subject of much more controversy. The discoverers claimed that the species is the oldest known member of our lineage on the grounds that the remarkably complete skull shows features (brow ridges and small canines) that are only found in early members of the genus
Homo
(which date from around three to four million years later). Although the front of the face does share some resemblances with those of later hominids, the skull looks like most other ape skulls when seen from behind and its cranial volume (approximately 350cc) is well within the range for modern chimpanzees. More importantly, the foramen mag-num (the hole in the base of the skull through which the spinal cord passes on its way from the spinal column into the brain) seems to be positioned towards the back of the skull (as in living great apes) rather than in the centre of the skull (as in living humans – and all known fossil hominids whose skulls are balanced on top of a vertical spine). This rather suggests a quadrupedal style of loco-motion more like that of living apes.

Despite these uncertainties, it is clear that both
toumaï
and
orrorin
represent important members of the African great ape family at the critical juncture when the hominid lineage was parting company with the chimpanzee lineage. One aspect of their biology is of particular interest
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given that at some early stage our first ancestors moved out of the forests still preferred by all living great apes and moved into more open, wooded habitats: the presence of antelope and colobine monkey fossils at the same site as
orrorin
is indicative of a wooded rather than a forested habitat, suggesting that a number of these early ape species may have been venturing into this new world.

These two new fossils point to two key conclusions. First, there seem to have been several different species present at around the time of the hominid–ape split. And, second, these various species were very widely distributed – and living in areas like central Chad that are now far from the forests occupied by contemporary great apes, the nearest of whom live some four hundred miles (650 km) to the south.

Meanwhile, back in Europe, we were missing another opportunity to shake hands with our past – this time, in the form of the artists who created the magical prehistoric cave paintings of Spain and southern France.

Our story begins one day in 1879 when a bored young girl out exploring a cave with her father, the local landowner Don Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, chanced to look up at the ceiling. She made a spectacular discovery. Above her, bison, deer and horses turned and twisted, bunched up against each other fighting for space, or lay chewing the cud, just as they had been left eighteen thousand years before by the prehistoric painters who had made them. This cave, at Altamira in northern Spain, has turned out to be far from unique: there are around 150
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known sites of prehistoric cave art in Europe. And the artwork is little short of exquisite. It is easy, in the dark of these caves, to become lost in the mystery of the figures that some unseen hand sketched so long ago. Grown men have been reduced to tears before them.

Here, in one corner of an ancient gallery, is a child’s hand, stencilled around by paint blown from the mouth. If the guardians of the cave would allow it, you could place your own hand over the outline, and reach out across the millennia to touch that child. A delicate, hesitant touch, such as one might give to a new lover. It is impossible not to feel the magic in the air. Who was this child? By what name were they known? And what became of them? Did he or she grow up, have children of their own, and live to a ripe old age, a respected white-haired member of the community, remembering in the misty twilight years of old age a day – one spring, perhaps – when they had been led down the winding tun-nels by the dim light of a tallow lamp to a remote back chamber and made to press their hand against the cold wall of the cave while one of the men blew paint across it. Or, instead perhaps, did they die of some childhood illness or accident, or fall prey to a wandering predator – a future cut off in the first flush of childhood, one of many small tragedies in the life of its mother, each marked by the anguish of loss, its passing signalled by a shrill brittle halo of inconsolable wailing.

We shall never know. But what we can say is that the people who made these drawings engaged in life with an exuberance that resonates with us today. Cave art is the final flowering of a remarkable development in human evolutionary history, a phenomenon that archaeologists
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refer to as the Upper Palaeolithic Revolution. It began around fifty thousand years ago with a sudden burst of very much more sophisticated stone, bone and wooden tools – including needles, awls, fishhooks, arrow- and spearheads.

From around thirty thousand years ago, this is followed up by a veritable explosion of artwork that has no particular function in terms of everyday survival but seems rather to be entirely decorative. There are brooches, carved buttons, dolls, toy animals and, most spectacular of all perhaps, figurines – exemplified above all by the so-called Venus figures of central and southern Europe. These famous ‘Michelin-tyre’ ladies seem to have been the pin-ups of their day. Big-hipped and ample-bosomed, with their hair often beautifully braided, these ivory and stone (sometimes even baked clay) statuettes are quite the most spectacular of the late Palaeolithic artefacts.

Then, from about twenty thousand years ago, we begin to find evidence for deliberate burials, for music and for a life in the mind. The cave paintings of Altamira, Lascaux, Chauvet and the many other grottoes, shelters and cav-erns across southern Europe and beyond are but the icing on this grand artistic cake. Nothing like it had ever been seen in the history of human evolution. Buried within it lay the foundations for modern human culture, from literature to religion and, beyond, to science.

This outpouring of craftsmanship speaks to us across the intervening millennia. Here are a people who are not so very different from ourselves: what we find beautiful, they too found beautiful. Here, it seems, encapsulated in a brief moment in time is the essence of what made us who we are, what finally produced humans as we know
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them, with all that inflorescence of culture that makes us in some intangible but very certain way utterly different from every other species alive today – and, indeed, every other species that preceded us in the long history of life on earth.

When the ancestors of the Altamira cave artists arrived in Europe some forty thousand years ago, they did not find an empty continent. Europe had already been home to the Neanderthals for two hundred thousand years. The Neanderthals were an exceptionally successful race of humans whose ancestors probably arrived in Europe around five hundred thousand years ago. Over the following few hundred thousand years, they gradually developed the characteristic Neanderthal form – a thickset, very heavily muscled body, a large head with its characteristic ‘Neanderthal bun’ (or bulge) at the back, a heavy chin-less jaw and massive nose. In this form, they successfully colonised the plains of Europe as far east as the Urals. There, they hunted large game (including the much fabled mammoths) by the very risky strategy of impaling their victims on heavy thrusting spears. Not for them the light-weight, javelin-like hurling spear or the bow and arrow later to be favoured by our own immediate ancestors.