The New Penguin History of the World (6 page)

It remains true, though, that if nothing very general can be confidently said about the behaviour of hominids before man, still less can anything very precise be confirmed. We move in a fog, dimly apprehending for a moment creatures now more, now less, manlike and familiar. Their minds, we can be sure, are almost inconceivably unlike our own as instruments for the registration of the outside world. Yet when we look at the range of the attributes of
Homo erectus
it is his human, not pre-human, characteristics which are most striking. Physically, he has a brain of an order of magnitude comparable to our own. He makes tools (and does so within more than one technical tradition), builds shelters, takes over natural refuges by exploiting fire, and sallies out of them to hunt and gather his food. He does this in groups with a discipline which can sustain complicated operations; he therefore has some ability to exchange ideas by speech. The basic biological units of his hunting groups probably prefigure the nuclear human family, being founded on the institutions of the home base and a sexual differentiation of activity. There may even be some complexity of social organization in so far as fire-bearers and gatherers or old creatures whose memories made them the databanks of their ‘societies’ could be supported by the labour of others. There has to be some social organization to permit the sharing of cooperatively obtained food, too. There is nothing to be usefully added to an account such as this by pretending to say where exactly can be found a prehistorical point or dividing line at which such things had come to be, but subsequent human history is unimaginable without them. When a sub-species of
Homo erectus
, perhaps possessing slightly larger and more complex brains than others, evolved into
Homo sapiens
it did so with an enormous achievement and heritage already secure in its grasp. Whether we choose to call it human or not hardly matters.

2
Homo Sapiens

The appearance of
Homo sapiens
is momentous: here, at last, is recognizable humanity, however raw in form. Yet this evolutionary step is another abstraction. It is the end of the prologue and the beginning of the main drama, but we cannot usefully ask precisely when this happens. It is a process, not a point in time, and it is not a process occurring everywhere at the same rate. All we have to date it are a few physical relics of early humans of types recognizably modern or closely related to the modern. Some of them may well overlap by thousands of years the continuing life of earlier hominids. Some may represent false starts and dead ends, for human evolution must have continued to be highly selective. Though much faster than in earlier times, this evolution is still very slow: we are dealing with something that took place over perhaps two hundred thousand years in which we do not know when our first true ‘ancestor’ appeared (though the place was almost certainly Africa). It is not ever easy to pose the right questions; the physiological and technical and mental lines at which we leave
Homo erectus
behind are matters of definition, and during tens of millennia that species and early specimens of
Homo sapiens
both lived on the earth.

The few early human fossils have provoked much argument. Two famous European skulls seem to belong to the period between two Ice Ages about two hundred thousand years ago, an age climatically so different from ours that elephants browsed in a semi-tropical Thames valley and the ancestors of lions prowled about in what would one day be Yorkshire. The ‘Swanscombe’ skull, named after the place where it was found, shows its possessor to have had a big brain (about 1300 cc) but in other ways not much to resemble modern man: if ‘Swanscombe man’ was
Homo sapiens
, then he represents a very early version. The other skull, that of ‘Steinheim man’, differs in shape from that of
Homo sapiens
but again held a big brain. Perhaps they are best regarded as the forerunners of early prototypes of
Homo sapiens
, though creatures still living (as their tools show) much like
Homo erectus
.

The next Ice Age then brings down the curtain. When it lifts, a hundred and thirty thousand or so years ago, in the next warm period, human remains again appear. There has been much argument about what they show but it is indisputable that there has been a great step forward. At this point we are entering a period where there is a fairly dense though broken record. Creatures we can now call humans lived in Europe just over a hundred thousand years ago. There are caves in the Dordogne area which were occupied on and off for some fifty thousand years after that. The cultures of these peoples therefore survived a period of huge climatic change; the first traces of them belong to a warm interglacial period and the last run out in the middle of the last Ice Age. This is an impressive continuity to set against what must have been great variation in the animal population and vegetation near these sites; to survive so long, such cultures must have been very resourceful and adaptive.

For all their essential similarity to ourselves, though, the peoples who created these cultures are still physiologically distinguishable from modern human beings. The first discovery of their remains was at Neanderthal in Germany (because of this, humans of this type are usually called Neanderthals) and it was of a skull so curiously shaped that it was for a long time thought to be that of a modern idiot. Scientific analysis still leaves much about it unexplained. But it is now suggested that
Homo sapiens neanderthalis
(as the Neanderthal is scientifically classified) has its ultimate origin in an early expansion out of Africa of advanced forms of
Homo erectus
, possibly a million years ago. Across many intervening genetic stages, there emerged a population of pre-Neanderthals, from which, in turn, the extreme form evolved whose striking remains were found in Europe (and, so far, nowhere else). This special development has been interpreted by some as a Neanderthal sub-species, perhaps cut off by some accident of glaciation. Evidence of other Neanderthalers has turned up elsewhere, in Morocco, in the northern Sahara, at Mount Carmel in Palestine and elsewhere in the Near East and Iran. They have also been traced in Central Asia and China, where the earliest specimens may go back something like two hundred millennia. Evidently, this was for a long time a highly successful species.

Eighty thousand years ago, the artifacts of Neanderthal man had spread all over Eurasia and they show differences of technique and form. But technology from over a hundred thousand years ago, and associated with other forms of ‘anatomically modern humans’, as scholars term other creatures evolved from advanced forms of
Homo erectus
, has been identified in parts of Africa. Moreover, it was more widely spread than that of Neanderthal man. The primeval cultural unity had thus already
fragmented, and distinct cultural traditions were beginning to emerge. From the start, there is a kind of provincialism within a young humanity.

Neanderthal man, like the different species which specialists refer to as anatomically modern, walked erect and had a big brain. Though in other ways more primitive than the sub-species to which we belong,
Homo sapiens sapiens
(as the guess about the first skull suggests), he represents none the less a great evolutionary stride and shows a new mental sophistication we can still hardly grasp, let alone measure. One striking example is the use of technology to overcome environment: we know from the evidence of skin-scrapers they used to dress skins and pelts that Neanderthals wore clothes (though none have survived; the oldest clothed body yet discovered, in Russia, has been dated to about thirty-five thousand years ago). Even this important advance in the manipulation of environment, though, is nothing like so startling as the appearance in Neanderthal culture of formal burial. The act of burial itself is momentous for archaeology; graves are of enormous importance because of the artifacts of ancient society they preserve. Yet the Neanderthal graves provide more than this: they may also contain the first evidence of ritual or ceremony.

It is very difficult to control speculation, and some has outrun the evidence. Perhaps some early totemism explains the ring of horns within which a Neanderthal child was buried near Samarkand. Some have suggested, too, that careful burial may reflect a new concern for the individual which was one result of the greater interdependence of the group in the renewed Ice Ages. This could have intensified the sense of loss when a member died and might also point to something more. A skeleton of a Neanderthal man who had lost his right arm years before his death has been found. He must have been very dependent on others, and was sustained by his group in spite of his handicap.

It is tempting but more hazardous to suggest that ritualized burial implies some view of an after-life. If true, though, this would testify to a huge power of abstraction in the hominids and the origins of one of the greatest and most enduring myths, that life is an illusion, that reality lies invisible elsewhere, that things are not what they seem. Without going so far, it is at least possible to agree that a momentous change is under way. Like the hints of rituals involving animals which Neanderthal caves also offer here and there, careful burial may mark a new attempt to dominate the environment. The human brain must already have been capable of discerning questions it wanted to answer and perhaps of providing answers in the shape of rituals. Slightly, tentatively, clumsily – however we describe it and still in the shallows though it may be – the human mind is afloat; the greatest of all voyages of exploration has begun.

Neanderthal man also provides our first evidence of another great institution, warfare. It may have been practised in connection with cannibalism, which was directed apparently to the eating of the brains of victims. Analogy with later societies suggests that here again we have the start of some conceptualizing about a soul or spirit; such acts are sometimes directed to acquiring the magical or spiritual power of the vanquished.

Whatever the magnitude of the evolutionary step which the Neanderthals represent, however, they failed in the end as a species. After long and widespread success they were not in the end to be the inheritors of the earth. Effectively, Neanderthal survivors were to be genetically ‘vanquished’ by another strain of
Homo sapiens
, and about the reasons for this we know nothing. Nor can we know to what extent, if at all, it was mitigated by some genetic transmission through the mingling of stocks.

The successor both to Neanderthal man and the archaic human forms among whom he first appeared was
Homo sapiens sapiens
, the species to which we all belong. Biologically, it has been outstandingly successful, spreading all over Eurasia within a hundred thousand or so years of its first appearances in Africa (they are dated to about 135,000
BC
) and eventually all over the world. Its members are from the start anatomically identifiable modern humans, with smaller faces, a lighter skull and straighter limbs than the Neanderthals. From Africa they entered the Levant and the Middle East, duly progressing to central and further Asia, and eventually reaching Australasia in about 40,000
BC
. By then, they were beginning to colonize Europe, where they were to live for thousands of years beside the Neanderthals. In about 15,000
BC
they crossed a land bridge across what was to be the Bering Strait to enter the Americas.

Much remains speculative in assessing the reasons for the timing and pattern of the diffusion of
Homo sapiens sapiens
and palaeoanthropologists remain cautious about the fossil record; some of them do not like to assert without qualification that remains more than thirty thousand years or so old are indeed those of our species. Nevertheless, most agree that from about fifty thousand years ago to the end of the last Ice Age in about 9000
BC
we are at last considering plentiful evidence of men of modern type. This period is normally referred to as the ‘Upper’ Palaeolithic, a name derived from the Greek for ‘old stones’. It corresponds, roughly, to the more familiar term ‘Stone Age’, but, like other contributions to the chaotic terminology of prehistory, there are difficulties in using such words without careful qualification.

To separate ‘Upper’ and ‘Lower’ Palaeolithic is easy; the division represents the physical fact that the topmost layers of geological strata are the most recent and that therefore fossils and artifacts found among them
are later than those found at lower levels. The Lower Palaeolithic is therefore the designation of an age more ancient than the Upper. Almost all the artifacts which survive from the Palaeolithic are made from stone; none is made from metal, whose appearance made it possible to follow a terminology used by the Roman poet Lucretius by labelling what comes after the Stone Age as the Bronze and Iron Ages.

These are, of course, cultural and technological labels; their great merit is that they direct attention to the activities of man. At one time tools and weapons are made of stone, then of bronze, then of iron. None the less, these terms have disadvantages, too. The obvious one is that within the huge tracts of time in which stone artifacts provide the largest significant body of evidence, we are dealing for the most part with hominids. They had, in varying degree, some, but not all, human characteristics; many stone tools were not made by men. Increasingly, too, the fact that this terminology originated in European archaeology created difficulties as more and more evidence accumulated about the rest of the world which did not really fit in. A final disadvantage is that it blurs important distinctions within periods even in Europe. The result has been its further refinement. Within the Stone Age scholars have distinguished (in sequence) the Lower, Middle and Upper Palaeolithic and then the Mesolithic and the Neolithic (the last of which blurs the division attributed by the older schemes to the coming of metallurgy). The period down to the end of the last Ice Age in Europe is also sometimes called the Old Stone Age, another complication, because here we have yet another principle of classification, simply that provided by chronology.
Homo sapiens sapiens
appears in Europe roughly at the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic. It is in Europe, too, that the largest quantity of skeletal remains has been found, and it was on this evidence that the distinction of the species was long based.