The Dawn of Human Culture (18 page)

0

2 in

Atapuerca

Sima de los Huesos

oval area of roughened bone on the

rear of the skull

FIGURE 5.5

Outlines of the three human skulls from the Sima de los Huesos, Atapuerca, Spain.

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projected far forwards along the midline (the line that bisects the face from top to bottom) and a conspicuous oval area of roughened or porous bone just above the upper limit for the neck muscles on the rear of the skull. In their retention of primitive skull features, the Sima people were not Neanderthals, but they were clearly on or near the line that produced them.

The Sima fossils have powerfully illuminated the broad pattern of later human evolution, but they have also raised a puzzle all their own—

how did they get into the Sima? The layer in which they occur contains only fragmented human bones, and the bones are tightly packed. There are no artifacts, fireplaces, or anything else to suggest that people lived in the cave. The excavated bone sample has grown to more than 2000

individual specimens, including the three skulls, large fragments of six others, numerous smaller skull or facial fragments, forty-one complete or partial lower jaws, many isolated teeth, and hundreds of postcranial bones, that is, bones from parts of the body other than the head.

At least 32 people are represented by bones in the Sima, and measurements on jaws and teeth indicate that they divide about equally between males and females. Tooth eruption and wear shows that seventeen of the thirty-two people were adolescents between 11 and 19 years or age and ten were young adults, between 10 and 25 years old. Only three individuals were younger than 10 and none were older than 35.

Children may be rare, because their relatively soft bones were more likely to disappear in the ground, and older adults may be absent, because, like the Neanderthals, the Sima people rarely lived beyond 35 years. Still, the age distribution is puzzling, for if it resulted from normal, everyday mortality events like accidents and endemic disease, we would expect older, weaker people to be much more abundant relative to teenagers and 05 Humanity Branches Out.r.qxd 1/29/02 5:05 PM Page 152

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young adults. The implication may be that the Sima people did not die from everyday events, but from a catastrophe that affected everyone equally. One possibility is an epidemic disease, but we would still have to explain how the bodies ended up in the Sima. Another possibility that would cover both death and body disposal would be a devastating attack by a neighboring group. In this instance, however, the Sima bones should show wounds from spears or clubs, and there are none. Also, unlike the bones from the Gran Dolina, the Sima bones exhibit no stone-tool marks, and cannibalism can be ruled out. The only damage is from the teeth of foxes or other small carnivores, who were probably attracted to the chamber by decomposing human remains.

Since the Sima sample includes virtually all parts of the skeleton, even the tiniest, the excavators believe that whole bodies reached the cave. The bones are mostly broken, and the broken edges are sometimes smoothed, perhaps by sediment flow or by occasional cave bear trampling that would have disarticulated the bones and spread them across the cave floor. If we accept that whole bodies were introduced, the mystery boils down to how it happened. At the moment, a plausible explanation is that other people dropped them down the shaft, and we must then ask if the practice was ceremonial or simply hygienic.

Ritual or ceremony can never be categorically rejected, but the deposit contains no special artifacts, once-fleshy animal bones, or other items that we can interpret as ritual offerings or grave goods. An understandable desire to dispose of bodies away from a nearby living site thus becomes a credible alternative. If the Sima people were simply practicing hygienic disposal, they may have anticipated the Neanderthals, who buried their dead, at least on occasion, but who dug the shallowest possible graves into which they inserted bodies also 05 Humanity Branches Out.r.qxd 1/29/02 5:05 PM Page 153

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without grave goods. Much more elaborate graves with unequivocal ideological or religious implications show up only after 50,000 years ago, and they are then an important part of what we mean when we talk about the dawn of human culture.

* * *

The Sima people almost certainly belonged to the late Acheulean tradition that was widespread in Europe, western Asia, and Africa at the time.

Most Acheulean sites have produced nothing that could be mistaken for art, but as always in archeology, there are apparent exceptions. The most compelling one comes from the site of Berekhat Ram on the Golan Heights in Syrian territory presently controlled by Israel. Berekhat Ram is a typical late Acheulean site, which has provided eight small hand axes, numerous Levallois flakes, and carefully retouched flake tools like those of the people who succeeded the Acheuleans after 250,000 years ago. Potassium/argon dating of underlying and overlying lavas brackets the artifact layer between 470,000 and 233,000 years ago, and the excavation leader, Hebrew University archeologist Na’ama Goren-Inbar, and her colleagues believe it formed between 280,000 and 250,000 years ago.

Along with flaked stone artifacts, Berekhat Ram has produced a small lava pebble, about 35 millimeters (1.4 inches) long, that arguably resembles a crude human figurine (Figure 5.6). A deep groove that encircles the narrower, more rounded end of the pebble may set off a head and neck, while two shallow, curved grooves that run down the sides could delineate arms.

The most obvious question to begin with is whether the grooves could be natural. To investigate this, archeologists Francesco d’Errico 05 Humanity Branches Out.r.qxd 1/29/02 5:05 PM Page 154

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0

5 cm

Berekhat Ram

0

2 in

(Acheulean)

0

0

5 cm

2 in

Lespugue

(Upper Paleolithic

Gravettian

Culture)

FIGURE 5.6

The proposed human figurine from the Acheulean site of Berekhat Ram, Golan Heights, and an Upper Paleolithic “Venus” figurine from Lespugue, France (Drawn by Kathryn Cruz-Uribe from a photograph [top] and from a cast [bottom]).

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and April Nowell experimentally incised similar pebbles with sharp-edged flint tools, and they compared their results with the grooves on the putative figurine. Their experimental grooves differed conspicuously from natural ones in several features, including, for example, the smoother texture of the bottom and sides, where small rock specks had been gouged out and then ground back in by the motion of a sharp edge. Under a microscope, the groove that defined the figurine’s neck closely resembled the experimental ones, and d’Errico and Nowell conclude that it was humanly produced. More tentatively, their comparisons also imply that the arm grooves are artificial.

D’Errico and Nowell are careful to point out, however, that they have not proven that the modified pebble was a figurine. It only dimly recalls the carefully crafted, aesthetically appealing human figurines that mark the dawn of human culture in Europe after 40,000 years ago, and even if it were more persuasively artistic, it is of course unique. It fails to establish a pattern of creative expression not only for the Acheulean, but even for Berekhat Ram, and like other occasional, supposed art objects from before 50,000 years ago, it does nothing to alter the impression of a creative explosion afterwards.

* * *

Late Acheulean people may have lacked art, but they were far advanced over earlier people in their ability to flake stone, and we will see below that they were also dedicated hunters. The sum might suggest that they were also distinctively human in another vital respect—a mastery over fire. Archeologists like Alison Brooks of George Washington University and Avraham Ronen of Haifa University have frequently argued that 05 Humanity Branches Out.r.qxd 1/29/02 5:05 PM Page 156

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fire must have played a central role in human evolution. Brooks told
Discovering Archaeology
magazine, “It is really the beginning of humans. When you have fire, you have people sitting around the camp-fire together. You have people changing the environment.” And Ronen has written that “Beyond being a tool, fire is a symbol . . . the only substance which humans can kill and revive at will. . . . If there had been a trigger to arouse self consciousness and the ultimate sense of ‘otherness,’

it was fire.” So it is only natural to ask when people first tamed fire. The answer must be equivocal.

Logic alone suggests that human expansion throughout Africa and to Eurasia by 1 million years ago required fire for bodily warmth, predator protection, and food preparation. Nonetheless, to demonstrate fire use beyond a shadow of a doubt, most archeologists would require fossil fireplaces, that is, circular or oval lenses of ash and charcoal, surrounded by stone artifacts and broken-up animal bones. This requirement is unfortunate, because most early human sites formed on ancient land surfaces in relatively dry tropical or subtropical environments where charcoal and ash do not last long. Caves provide better preservation conditions, but most caves older than 150,000 to 200,000 years have either collapsed or been flushed of their original deposits, so we have no option but to concentrate on “open-air” sites. Patches of burned earth at two such sites in eastern Africa may indicate human mastery of fire by 1.4

million years ago, but in each case, the burning might simply mark a tree stump or patch of vegetation that smoldered after a brush fire. Occasional charred bones that accompany 1.5-million-year-old artifacts at Swartkrans Cave, South Africa, present the same dilemma. The charring is indisputable, but the bones originated outside the cave, where they might have been naturally burned.

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If in fact, we insist on well-defined fossil hearths, the oldest firm evidence for human mastery of fire comes only from African and Eurasian cave sites that are younger than 250,000 years. This puts fire control solidly before the dawn of human culture, but only after
heidelbergensis
and the late Acheulean culture.

Still, we accept the logical argument that people must have tamed fire much earlier, and with our bias laid bare, we suggest relax-ing the evidentiary requirement to include an unusually high proportion of burned bones, diffuse spreads of mineral ash, patches of burned earth, possible fire-pits, or some combination of these features. We can then argue for fire use between 500,000 and 300,000 years ago at the famous “Peking Man” cave (Zhoukoudian) in north China, at Montagu Cave and the aptly named Cave of Hearths in South Africa, and at a handful of European sites, including Vértesszöllös in Hungary, Terra Amata and Menez-Dregan in France, and Bilzingsleben and Schöningen in Germany. The logical argument seems particularly strong for north Chinese
erectus
and European
heidelbergensis,
both of whom occupied environments where fire would have been far more than a luxury.

* * *

Human stomachs are poorly equipped to digest raw muscle fiber, and without fire people before 250,000 years ago might have had little incentive to hunt. Yet, it is difficult to imagine that people could have colonized Europe 500,000 years ago if they were not active hunters, and excavations at Schöningen, Germany, have now provided incon-trovertible proof. It is perhaps no coincidence that Schöningen is 05 Humanity Branches Out.r.qxd 1/29/02 5:05 PM Page 158

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prominent on the list of sites that contain ancient, if admittedly tentative, evidence for fire.

Schöningen is an active, open-cast, brown-coal mine that just happens to contain one of the most informative early archeological occurrences in Europe. In October 1994, less than two weeks remained before the mining company’s giant rotor digger was scheduled to oblit-erate the site. German government archeologist Hartmut Thieme and a colleague were working to recover the maximum possible number of stone artifacts and animal bones, when they unearthed a short wooden stick that had been artificially pointed at both ends. The Schöningen deposits are dense and waterlogged, meaning that they are relatively airtight, and it was this unusual circumstance that preserved wood.

Ancient wooden artifacts are the archeological equivalent of hen’s teeth, and the discovery bought Thieme another excavation season. The following year, in a layer dated between 400,000 and 350,000 years ago, he uncovered three unmistakable wooden spears, each between 2 and 3

meters (6.5 and 10 feet) long and carved from the heartwood of a mature spruce tree (Figure 5.7). Nearby, he found bones from at least ten wild horses, many of which showed fractures and cut marks from butchery.

Thieme concluded that stone-age hunters, lurking near the margin of a former lake, had ambushed the horses, driven them into the water, and then quickly dispatched them with the spears.

He published his discovery in a February 1997 issue of
Nature
magazine that also included a startling report on the cloning of Dolly the sheep. The public was captivated by the cloning, but archeologists took note of the spears. Before Schöningen, only two other sites had provided comparable objects. One was Clacton in England, where deposits that were probably about the same age as those at Schöningen 05 Humanity Branches Out.r.qxd 1/29/02 5:05 PM Page 159

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0

0

50 cm

2 ft

FIGURE 5.7

Wooden spears from

spear 1

Schöningen, Germany

(recovered in 5 parts)