Info dump to clear all confusions:
The roots of history lie in the pre-human past and it is hard (but important) to grasp just how long ago that was. If we think of a century on our calendar as a minute on some great clock recording the passage of time, then Europeans began to settle in the Americas only about five minutes ago. Slightly less than fifteen minutes before that, Christianity appeared. Rather more than an hour ago people settled in southern Mesopotamia who were soon to evolve the oldest civilization known to us. This is already well beyond the furthest margin of written record; according to our clock, people began writing down the past much less than an hour ago, too. Some six or seven hours further back on our scale, and much more remote, we can discern the first recognizable human beings of a modern physiological type already established in western Europe. Behind them, anything from a fortnight to three weeks earlier, appear the first traces of creatures with some human characteristics whose contribution to the evolution which followed is still in debate.
How much further back into a growing darkness we need go in order to understand the origins of man is debatable, but it is worth considering for a moment even larger tracts of time simply because so much happened in them which, even if we cannot say anything very precise about it, shaped what followed. This is because humanity was to carry forward into historical times certain possibilities and limitations, and they were settled long ago, in a past even more remote than the much shorter period of time – 4½ million years or so – in which creatures with at least some claim to human qualities are known to have existed. Though it is not our direct concern, we need to try to understand what was in the baggage of advantages and disadvantages with which human beings alone among the primates emerged after these huge tracts of time as change-makers. Virtually all the physical and much of the mental formation we still take for granted was by then determined, fixed in the sense that some possibilities were excluded and others were not. The crucial process is the evolution of human creatures as a distinct branch among the primates, for it is at this fork in the line, as it were, that we begin to look out for the station at which we get off for History. It is here that we can hope to find the first signs of that positive, conscious impact upon environment which marks the first stage of human achievement.
The bedrock of the story is the earth itself. Changes recorded in fossils of flora and fauna, in geographical forms and geological strata, narrate a drama of epic scale lasting hundreds of millions of years. During them the shape of the world changed out of recognition many times. Great rifts opened and closed in its surface, coasts rose and fell; at times huge areas were covered with a long-since vanished vegetation. Many species of plants and animals emerged and proliferated. Most died out. Yet these ‘dramatic’ events happened with almost unimaginable slowness. Some lasted millions of years; even the most rapid took centuries. The creatures who lived while they were going on could no more have perceived them than a twenty-first-century butterfly, in its three weeks or so of life, could sense the rhythm of the seasons. Yet slowly the earth was taking shape as a collection of habitats permitting different strains to survive. Meanwhile, biological evolution inched forwards with almost inconceivable slowness.
Climate was the first great pacemaker of change. About 65 million years ago – an early enough point at which to begin to grapple with our story – a long warm climatic phase began to draw to a close. It had favoured the great reptiles and during it Antarctica had separated from Australia. There were no ice-fields then in any part of the globe. As the world grew colder and the new climatic conditions restricted their habitat, the great reptiles did not manage to adapt, though it is likely that it was a sudden event – the impact of a giant asteroid – that killed them off completely. But the new conditions suited other animal strains which were already about, among them some mammals whose tiny ancestors had appeared 200 million years or so earlier. They now inherited the earth, or a considerable part of it. With many breaks in sequence and accidents of selection on the way, these strains were themselves to evolve into the mammals which occupy our own world – ourselves included.
Crudely summarized, the main lines of this evolution were probably determined for millions of years mainly by astronomical cycles and a few sudden events, such as eruption of massive volcanoes or the impact of asteroids. Climate was the all-important factor, changed by the earth’s position in relation to the sun or by short-term circumstances. A huge pattern emerges, of recurrent swings of temperature. The extremes which resulted, of climatic cooling on the one hand and aridity on the other, choked off some possible lines of development. Conversely, in other times, and in certain places, the onset of appropriately benign conditions allowed certain species to flourish and encouraged their spread into new habitats. The only major sub-division of this immensely long process which concerns us comes very recently (in prehistoric terms), slightly less than 4 million years ago. There then began a period of climatic changes which we believe to have been more rapid and violent than most observed in earlier times. ‘Rapid’, we must again remind ourselves, is a comparative term; these changes took tens of thousands of years. Such a pace of change, though, looks very different from the millions of years of much steadier conditions which lay in the past.
Scholars have long talked about ‘Ice Ages’, each lasting between 50,000 and 100,000 years, which covered big areas of the northern hemisphere (including much of Europe, and America as far south as modern New York) with great ice sheets, sometimes a mile or more thick. They have now distinguished some seventeen to nineteen (there is argument about the exact number) such ‘glaciations’ since the onset of the first, over 3 million years ago. We live in a warm period following the most recent of them, which came to an end some 10,000 years ago. Evidence of these glaciations and their effects is now available from all oceans and continents and they provide the backbone for prehistoric chronology. To the external scale which the Ice Ages provide we can relate such clues as we have to the evolution of humanity.
The Ice Ages make it easy to see how climate determined life and its evolution in prehistoric times, but to emphasize their dramatic direct effects is misleading. No doubt the slow onset of the ice was decisive and often disastrous for what lay in its path. Many of us still live in landscapes shaped by its scouring and gouging thousands of centuries ago. The huge inundations which followed the retreat of the ice as it melted must also have been locally catastrophic, destroying the habitats of creatures which had adapted to the challenge of arctic conditions. Yet they also created new opportunities. After each glaciation, new species spread into the areas uncovered by the thaw. Beyond regions directly affected, though, the effects of the glaciations may have been even more important for the global story of evolution. Changes in environment followed cooling and warming thousands of miles from the ice itself; and the outcome had its own determining force. Both aridification and the spread of grassland, for instance, changed the possibilities of species spreading themselves into new areas, especially if they could stand upright and move on two feet. Some of those species form part of the human evolutionary story, and all the most important stages in that evolution – so far observed – have been located in Africa, far from the ice-fields.
Climate can still be very important today, as contemplation of the disasters caused by drought show. But such effects, even when they affect millions of people, are not so fundamental as the slow transformation of the basic geography of the world and its supplies of food which climate wrought in prehistoric times. Until very recently climate determined where and how humans lived. It made technique very important (and still does): the possession in early times of a skill such as fishing or fire-making could make new environments available to branches of the human family fortunate enough to possess such skills, or able to discover and learn them. Different food-gathering possibilities in different habitats meant different chances of a varied diet and, eventually, of progressing from gathering to hunting, and then to growing. Long before the Ice Ages, though, and even before the appearance of the creatures from which humanity was to evolve, climate was setting the stage for and thus shaping, by selection, the eventual genetic inheritance of humanity itself.
One more backward glance is useful before plunging into the still shallow (though gradually deepening) pool of evidence. One hundred million or so years ago, primitive mammals were of two main sorts. Some, rodent-like, remained on the ground; others took or had taken to the trees. In this way the competition for resources was lessened and strains of each survived to people the world with the creatures we know today. In the second group were the prosimians. We are among their descendants, for they were the ancestors of the first primates.
It is best not to be too impressed by talk about ‘ancestors’ in any but the most general sense. Between the prosimians and ourselves lie millions of generations and many evolutionary blind alleys. It is important none the less that our remotest identifiable ancestors lived in trees because what survived in the next phase of evolution were genetic strains best suited to the special uncertainties and accidental challenges of the forest. That environment put a premium on the capacity to learn. Those survived whose genetic inheritance could respond and adapt to the surprising, sudden danger of deep shade, confused visual patterns and treacherous handholds. Strains prone to accident in such conditions were wiped out. Among those that prospered (genetically speaking) were some species with long digits which were to develop into fingers and, eventually, the oppositional thumb, and other forerunners of the apes already embarked upon an evolution towards three-dimensional vision and the diminution of the importance of the sense of smell.
The prosimians were little creatures. Tree-shrews still exist which give us some idea of what they were like; they were far from being monkeys, let alone men. Yet for millions of years they carried the traits which made humanity possible. During this time geography counted for much in their evolution, by imposing limits on contact between different strains, sometimes effectively isolating them, and thus increasing differentiation.
Changes would not happen quickly but it is likely that fragmentations of the environment caused by geographical disturbance led to the isolation of zones in which, little by little, the recognizable ancestors of many modern mammals appeared. Among them are the first monkeys and apes. They do not seem to go back more than 60 million years or so.
These monkeys and apes represent a great evolutionary stride. Both families had much greater manipulative dexterity than any predecessor. Within them, species distinct in size or acrobatic quality began to evolve. Physiological and psychological evolution blur in such matters. Like the development of better and stereoscopic vision, the growth of manipulative power seems to imply a growth of consciousness. Perhaps some of these creatures could distinguish different colours. The brains of the first primates were already much more complex than those of any of their predecessors; they were bigger, too. Somewhere the brain of one or more of these strains became complex enough and its physical powers sufficiently developed for the animal to cross the line at which the world as a mass of undifferentiated sensations becomes at least in part a world of objects. Whenever this happened it was a decisive step towards mastering the world by using it, instead of reacting automatically to it.
Some 25 or 30 million years ago, as desiccation began to reduce the area of the forests, competition for diminishing forest resources became fiercer. Environmental challenge and opportunity appeared where the trees and the grasslands met. Some primates, not powerful enough to hold on to their forest homes, were able, because of some genetic quality, to penetrate the savannahs in search of food and could meet the challenge and exploit the opportunities. Probably they had a posture and movement marginally more like that of men than, say, that of the gorillas or chimpanzees. An upright stance and the capacity to move easily on two feet make it possible to carry burdens, among them food. The dangerous open savannah could then be explored and its resources withdrawn from it to a safer home base. Most animals consume their food where they find it; man does not. Freedom to use the forelimbs for something other than locomotion or fighting also suggests other possibilities. We cannot confirm what the first ‘tool’ was, but primates other than man have been seen to pick up objects which come to hand and wave them as a deterrent, use them as weapons, or investigate and expose possible sources of food with their aid.
The next step in the argument is enormous, for it takes us to the first glimpse of a member of the biological family to which both man and the great apes belong. The evidence is fragmentary, but suggests that some 15 or 16 million years ago a very successful species was widespread throughout Africa, Europe and Asia. Probably it was a tree-dweller and certainly specimens were not very large – they may have weighed about forty pounds. Unfortunately, the evidence is such as to leave it isolated in time. We have no direct knowledge of its immediate forebears or descendants, but some kind of fork in the road of primate evolution seems to have occurred to its later relatives, often called hominids, around 5 million years ago. While one branch was to lead to the great apes and chimpanzees, the other led to human beings. This line has been named ‘hominin’. It is likely that the separation of these groups was a relatively slow process, occurring over millions of years, with episodes of interbreeding taking place. During that time big geological and geographical changes must have favoured and disfavoured many new evolutionary patterns.
The earliest surviving hominin fossils belong to a species which may or may not provide the ancestors for the small hominids which eventually emerged over a wide area of east and south-east Africa after this huge period of upheaval. They belong to the family now called
Australopithecus. The earliest fragments of their fossils have been identified as over 4 million years old, but the oldest complete skull and a nearly complete skeleton found near Johannesburg in 1998 are probably at least half-a-million years ‘younger’ than that. This is not very different (allowing for the generous stretches of time and approximation available in prehistoric chronology) from the dating of ‘Lucy’, formerly the most complete specimen of
Australopithecus discovered (in Ethiopia). Evidence of other species of ‘australopithecines’ (as they are usually termed), found as far apart as Kenya and the Transvaal, can be dated to various periods over the next 2 million years and has had a great impact upon archaeological thinking. Since 1970, something like 3 million years has been added to the period in which the search for human origins goes on, thanks to the australopithecine discoveries. Great uncertainty and much debate still surround them, but if the human species have a common ancestor it seems most likely that it belonged to a species of this genus. It is with
Australopithecus, though, and with what, for want of a better word, we must call its ‘contemporaries’ that the difficulties of distinguishing between apes, man-like apes and other creatures with some human characteristics first appear in their full complexity. The questions raised are still becoming in some ways more difficult to deal with. No simple picture has yet emerged and discoveries are still being made.
We have most evidence about
Australopithecus. But there came to live contemporaneously with some australopithecine species other, more man-like creatures, to whom the genus name
Homo has been given.
Homo was no doubt related to
Australopithecus, but is first clearly identifiable as distinct about 2 million years ago on certain African sites; remains attributed to possible ancestors, however, have been dated by radioactivity to some 1½ million years before that.
Where specialists disagree and may be expected to go on arguing about such fragmentary evidence as we have (all that is left of 2 million or so years of hominid life could be put on a big dining-table), laymen had better not dogmatize. Yet it is clear enough that we can be fairly certain about the extent to which some characteristics later observable in humans already existed more than 2 million years ago. We know, for instance, that the australopithecines, though smaller than modern humans, had leg-bones and feet which were man-like rather than ape-like. We know they walked upright and could run and carry loads for long distances as apes could not. Their hands showed a flattening at the fingertips characteristic of those of men. These are stages far advanced on the road of human physique, even if the actual descent of our species is from some other branch of the hominid tree.
It is to early members of the genus
Homo, none the less, that we owe our first relics of tools. Tool-using is not confined to men, but the making of tools has long been thought of as a human characteristic. It is a notable step in winning a livelihood from the environment. Tools found in Ethiopia are the oldest which we have (about 2½ million years old) and they consist of stones crudely fashioned by striking flakes off pebbles to give them an edge. The pebbles seem often to have been carried purposefully and perhaps selectively to the site where they were prepared. Conscious creation of implements had begun. Simple pebble choppers of the same type from later times turn up all over the Old World of prehistory; about 1 million years ago, for example, they were in use in the Jordan valley. In Africa, therefore, begins the flow of what was to prove the biggest single body of evidence about prehistoric man and his precursors and the one which has provided most information about their distribution and cultures. A site at the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania has provided the traces of the first identified building, a windbreak of stones which has been dated 1.9 million years ago, as well as evidence that its inhabitants were meat-eaters, in the form of bones smashed to enable the marrow and brains to be got at and eaten raw.
Olduvai prompts a tempting speculation. The bringing of stones and meat to the site combines with other evidence to suggest that the children of early hominins could not easily cling to their mother for long foraging expeditions as do the offspring of other primates. It may be that this is the first trace of the human institution of the home base. Among primates, only humans have them: places where females and children normally stay while the males search for food to bring back to them. Such a base also implies the shady outlines of sexual differentiation in economic roles. It might even register the achievement of some degree of forethought and planning, in that food was not devoured to gratify the immediate appetite on the spot where it was taken, but reserved for family consumption elsewhere. Whether hunting, as opposed to scavenging from carcasses (now known to have been done by australopithecines), took place is another question, but the meat of large animals was consumed at a very early date at Olduvai.
Yet such exciting evidence only provides tiny and isolated islands of hard fact. It cannot be presumed that the East African sites were necessarily typical of those which sheltered and made possible the emergence of humanity; we know about them only because conditions there allowed the survival and subsequent discovery of early hominin remains. Nor, though the evidence may incline that way, can we be sure that any of these hominins is a direct ancestor of humanity; they may all be precursors. What can be said is that these creatures show remarkable evolutionary efficiency in the creative manner we associate with human beings, and suggest the uselessness of categories such as ape-men (or men-apes) – and that few scholars would now be prepared to say categorically that we are not directly descended from
Homo habilis, the species first identified with tool-using.
It is also easy to believe that the invention of the home base made biological survival easier. It would have made possible brief periods of rest and recovery from the hazards posed by sickness and accident, thus sidestepping, however slightly, the process of evolution by physical selection. Together with their other advantages, it may help to explain how examples of the genus
Homo were able to leave traces of themselves throughout most of the world outside the Americas and Australasia in the next million or so years. But we do not know for certain whether this was through the spread of one stock, or because similar creatures evolved in different places. It is generally held, though, that tool-making was carried to Asia and India (and perhaps to Europe) by migrants originally from East Africa. The establishment and survival in so many different places of these hominins must show a superior capacity to grapple with changing conditions, but in the end we do not know what was the behavioural secret which suddenly (to continue to talk in terms of prehistoric time) released that capacity and enabled them to spread over the landmass of Africa and Asia. No other mammal settled so widely and successfully before our own branch of the human family, which was eventually to occupy every continent except Antarctica, a unique biological achievement.
The next clear stage in human evolution is nothing less than a revolution in physique. After a divergence between hominins and more ape-like creatures, which occurred around 5 million years ago, it took rather less than 2 million years for one successful family of hominins to increase its brain size to about twice that of
Australopithecus. One of the most important stages of this process, and some of the most crucial in the evolution of humanity, were already reached in a species called
Homo erectus. It was already widespread and successful a million years ago, and had by then spread into Europe and Asia. The oldest specimen of the species so far found may be about half a million years older than that, while the last evidence for its survival (from Indonesia) suggests members of it were still living between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago, well after our own kind had spread throughout most of the earth.
Homo erectus therefore successfully exploited a much bigger environment than earlier species and did so for much longer than has
Homo sapiens, our species of modern man. Many signs once more point to an African origin and thence to a spread through Europe and Asia (where
Homo erectus was first found). Apart from fossils, a special tool helps to plot the distribution of the new species by defining areas into which
Homo erectus did not spread as well as those into which he did. This is the so-called ‘hand-axe’ of stone, whose main use seems to have been for skinning and cutting up large animals (its use as an axe in the usual, hafted sense seems unlikely, but the name is established). There can be no doubt of the success of
Homo erectus as a genetic product.
Sub-species of
Homo erectus survived for a very long time, and, although few scholars now believe that any of these, at least in their non-African form, is one of our direct ancestors, there is no precise dividing line between them and us (there never is in human prehistory, a fact it is only too easy to overlook or forget). With the different sub-species of
Homo erectus we are already dealing with a creature who has added to the upright stance of his predecessors a brain approaching that of modern man in magnitude. Though we still know only a little of the way in which the brain is organized, there is, allowing for body size, a rough correlation between size and intelligence. It is reasonable, therefore, to attribute great importance to the selection of strains with bigger brains and to reckon this a huge advance in the story of the slow accumulation of human characteristics.
Bigger brains meant bigger skulls and other changes too. An increase in antenatal size requires changes in the female pelvis to permit the birth of offspring with larger heads, and another consequence was a longer period of growth after birth; physiological evolution in the female was not sufficient to provide antenatal accommodation to any point approaching physical maturity. Human children need maternal care long after birth. Prolonged infancy and immaturity in their turn imply prolonged dependency: it is a long time before such infants can gather their own food. It may be with the early
Homo erectus that there began that long extension of tolerated immaturity, whose latest manifestation is the maintenance of young people by society during long periods of higher education.
Biological change also meant that care and nurture came gradually to count for more than large litters in ensuring the survival of the species. This in turn implied further and sharper differentiation in the roles of the sexes. Females were being pinned down much more by maternity at a time when food-gathering techniques seem to have become more elaborate and to demand arduous and prolonged co-operative action by males – perhaps because bigger creatures needed more and better food. Psychologically, too, the change may be significant. A new emphasis on the individual is one concomitant of prolonged infancy. Perhaps it was intensified by a social situation in which the importance of learning and memory was becoming more and more profound and skills more complex. About this point the mechanics of what is going forward begin to slip from our grasp (if, indeed, they were ever in it). We are somewhere near the area in which the genetic programming of the hominids is infringed by learning. This is the beginning of the great change from the natural physical endowment to tradition and culture – and eventually to conscious control – as evolutionary selectors, though we may never be able to say where precisely this change occurs.
Another important physiological change is the loss of oestrus by the female hominin. We do not know when this happened, but after it had been completed her sexual rhythm was importantly differentiated from that of other animals. Man is the only animal in which the mechanism of the oestrus (the restriction of the female’s sexual attractiveness and receptivity to the limited periods in which she is on heat) has entirely disappeared. It is easy to see the evolutionary connection between this and the prolongation of infancy: if female hominins had undergone the violent disruption of their ordinary routine which the oestrus imposes, their offspring would have been periodically exposed to a neglect which would have made their survival impossible. The selection of a genetic strain which dispensed with oestrus, therefore, was essential to the survival of the species; such a strain must have been available, though the process in which it emerged may have taken a million or a million and a half years because it cannot have been effected consciously.
Such a change has radical implications. The increasing attractiveness and receptivity of females to males make individual choice much more significant in mating. The selection of a partner is less shaped by the rhythm of nature; we are at the start of a very long and obscure road which leads to the idea of sexual love. Together with prolonged infant dependency, the new possibilities of individual selection point ahead also to the stable and enduring family unit of father, mother and offspring, an institution unique to mankind. Some have even speculated that incest taboos (which are in practice well-nigh universal, however much the precise identification of the prohibited relationships may vary) originate in the recognition of the dangers presented by socially immature but sexually adult young males for long periods in close association with females who are always potentially sexually receptive.
In such matters it is best to be cautious. The evidence can take us only a very little way. Moreover, it is drawn from a very long span of time, a huge period which would have given time for considerable physical, psychological and technological evolution. The earliest forms of
Homo erectus may not have been much like the last, some of whom have been classified by some scientists as archaic forms of the next evolutionary stage of the hominin line. Yet all reflections support the general hypothesis that the changes in hominins observable while
Homo erectus occupies the centre of our stage were especially important in defining the arcs within which humanity was to evolve. He had unprecedented capacity to manipulate his environment, feeble though his handhold on it may seem to us. Besides the hand-axes which make possible the observation of his cultural traditions, late forms of
Homo erectus left behind the earliest surviving traces of constructed dwellings (huts, sometimes fifty feet long, built of branches, with stone-slab or skin floors), the earliest worked wood, the first wooden spear and the earliest container, a wooden bowl. Creation on such a scale hints strongly at a new level of mental ability, at a conception of the object formed before manufacture is begun, and perhaps an idea of process. Some have argued far more. In the repetition of simple forms, triangles, ellipses and ovals, in huge numbers of examples of stone tools, there has been discerned intense care to produce regular shapes which does not seem proportionate to any small gain in efficiency which may have been achieved. Can there be discerned in this the first tiny budding of the aesthetic sense?
The greatest of prehistoric technical and cultural advances was made when some of these creatures learnt how to manage fire. Until recently, the earliest available evidence of its use came from China, and probably from between 300,000 and 500,000 years ago. But very recent discoveries in the Transvaal have provided evidence, convincing to some scholars, that hominins there were using fire well before that. It remains fairly certain that
Homo erectus never learnt how to make fire and that even his successors did not for a long time possess this skill. That he knew how to use it, on the other hand, is indisputable. The importance of this knowledge is attested by the folklore of many later peoples; in almost all of them a heroic figure or magical beast first seizes fire. A violation of the supernatural order is implied: in the Greek legend Prometheus steals the fire of the gods. This is suggestive, not solid, but perhaps the first fire was taken from outbreaks of natural gas or volcanic activity. Culturally, economically, socially and technologically, fire was a revolutionary instrument – if we again remember that a prehistoric ‘revolution’ took millennia. It brought the possibility of warmth and light and therefore of a double extension of the habitable environment, into the cold and into the dark. In physical terms, one obvious expression of this was the occupation of caves. Animals could now be driven out and kept out by fire (and perhaps the seed lies here of the use of fire to drive big game in hunting). Technology could move forward: spears could be hardened in fires and cooking became possible, indigestible substances such as seeds becoming sources of food and distasteful or bitter plants edible. This must have stimulated attention to the variety and availability of plant life; the science of botany was stirring without anyone knowing it.
Fire must have influenced mentality more directly, too. It was another factor strengthening the tendency to conscious inhibition and restraint, and therefore their evolutionary importance. The focus of the cooking fire as the source of light and warmth had also the deep psychological power which it still retains. Around the hearths after dark gathered a community almost certainly already aware of itself as a small and meaningful unit against a chaotic and unfriendly background. Language – of whose origins we as yet know nothing – would have been sharpened by a new kind of group intercourse. The group itself would be elaborated, too, in its structure. At some point, fire-bearers and fire specialists appeared, beings of awesome and mysterious importance, for on them depended life and death. They carried and guarded the great liberating tool, and the need to guard it must sometimes have made them masters. Yet the deepest tendency of this new power always ran towards the liberation of mankind. Fire began to break up the iron rigidity of night and day and even the discipline of the seasons. It thus carried further the breakdown of the great objective natural rhythms which bound our fireless ancestors. Behaviour could be less routine and automatic. There is even a discernible possibility of leisure.
Big-game hunting was the other great achievement of
Homo erectus. Its origins must lie far back in the scavenging which turned vegetarian hominids into omnivores. Meat-eating provided concentrated protein. It released meat-eaters from the incessant nibbling of so many vegetarian creatures, and so permitted economies of effort. It is one of the first signs that the capacity for conscious restraint is at work when food is being carried home to be shared tomorrow rather than consumed on the spot today. At the beginning of the archaeological record, an elephant and perhaps a few giraffes and buffaloes were among the beasts whose scavenged meat was consumed at Olduvai, but for a long time the bones of smaller animals vastly preponderate in the rubbish. By about 300,000 years ago the picture is wholly altered.
This may be where we can find a clue to the way by which
Australopithecus and his relatives were replaced by the bigger, more efficient
Homo erectus. A new food supply permits larger consumption but also imposes new environments: game has to be followed if meat-eating becomes general. As the hominins become more or less parasitic upon other species there follows further exploration of territory and new settlements, too, as sites particularly favoured by the mammoth or woolly rhinoceros are identified. Knowledge of such facts has to be learnt and passed on; technique has to be transmitted and guarded, for the skills required to trap, kill and dismember the huge beasts of antiquity were enormous in relation to anything which preceded them. What is more, they were co-operative skills: only large numbers could carry out so complex an operation as the driving – perhaps by fire – of game to a killing-ground favourable because of bogs in which a weighty creature would flounder, or because of a precipice, well-placed vantage points, or secure platforms for the hunters. Few weapons were available to supplement natural traps and, once dead, the victims presented further problems. With only wood, stone and flint, they had to be cut up and removed to the home base. Once carried home, the new supplies of meat mark another step towards the provision of leisure as the consumer is released for a time from the drudgery of ceaselessly rummaging in his environment for small, but continuously available, quantities of nourishment.
It is very difficult not to feel that this is an epoch of crucial significance. Considered against a background of millions of years of evolution, the pace of change, though still unbelievably slow in terms of later societies, is quickening. These are not men as we know them, but they are beginning to be man-like creatures: the greatest of predators is beginning to stir in his cradle. Something like a true society, too, is dimly discernible, not merely in the complicated co-operative hunting enterprises, but in what this implies in passing on knowledge from generation to generation. Culture and tradition are slowly taking over from genetic mutation and natural selection as the primary sources of change among the hominins. It is the groups with the best ‘memories’ of effective techniques which will carry forward evolution. The importance of experience was very great, for knowledge of methods which were likely to succeed rested upon it, not (as increasingly in modern society) on experiment and analysis. This fact alone would have given new importance to the older and more experienced. They knew how things were done and what methods worked and they did so at a time when the home base and big-game hunting made their maintenance by the group easier. They would not have been very old, of course. Very few can have lived more than forty years.
Selection also favoured those groups whose members not only had good memories but the increasing power to reflect given by speech. We know very little about the prehistory of language. Modern types of language can only have appeared long after
Homo erectus disappeared. Yet some sort of communication must have been used in big-game hunting, and all primates make meaningful signals. How early hominins communicated may never be known, but one plausible suggestion is that they began by breaking up calls akin to those of other animals into particular sounds capable of rearrangement. This would give the possibility of different messages and may be the remote tap-root of grammar. What is certain is that a great acceleration of evolution would follow the appearance of groups able to pool experience, to practise and refine skills, to elaborate ideas through language. Once more, we cannot separate one process from others: better vision, an increased physical capacity to deal with the world as a set of discrete objects, and the multiplication of artefacts by using tools were all going on simultaneously over the hundreds of thousands of years in which language was evolving. Together they contributed to a growing extension of mental capacity until one day conceptualization became possible and abstract thought appeared.
It remains true, though, that if nothing very general can be confidently said about the behaviour of hominins 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, man-like 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 co-operatively 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 an African relative 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.
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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 almost certainly overlapped by more than 100,000 years the continuing life of other hominins. 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 200,000 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 occurred during the many millennia that variants of that species and early specimens of
Homo sapiens all lived on the earth.
The few early human fossils have provoked much argument. There is no doubt that men of a new type expanded into Eurasia in the warm period between two glacial eras from about 250,000 to 180,000 years ago, an age climatically so different from ours that elephants browsed in a semi-tropical Thames valley and hippopotami swam in the Rhine. The ‘Swanscombe’ skull, named after the place where it was found, shows its possessor to have had a big brain (about 1,300cc) but in other ways not much to resemble modern man. It is likely that he represents a breed of
Homo Heidelbergensis (named after the German city where remains were first found). These groups are descendants of some type of
Homo erectus, and probably the ancestors of both the Neanderthals and ourselves (in their African forms). They spread fast throughout Africa and Eurasia, and reached levels of development not seen in earlier types of men. They were almost certainly the first species that learnt to kindle fire, with the momentous effects that had for humankind’s further development.
The next Ice Age then brings down the curtain. When it lifts, 130,000 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 50,000 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, 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. Now we know infinitely more about these our evolutionary cousins. In 2010 scientists were able to map the genome of Neanderthals, based on genetic material from the remains of three ancient skeletons. We now know that
Homo Neanderthalis (as the Neanderthal is scientifically classified) had its ultimate origin in an early expansion out of Africa of very early forms of humans, possibly half a million years ago. Across many intervening genetic stages, there emerged a population of pre-Neanderthals, from which, in turn, the extreme form evolved about 200,000 years ago whose striking remains were found in Europe. European Neanderthals, in other words, developed roughly in parallel with
Homo sapiens, the species to which we belong. Other forms of early humans related to the Neanderthals spread into Asia, probably as far as China. Evidently, this was for a long time a highly successful species.
The ancestors of Neanderthals and modern humans separated in Africa around 350,000 years ago. By then it is quite possible that some of their kind had already established themselves in Eurasia. One hundred thousand years ago, the artefacts of Neanderthal-type man had spread all over Eurasia and they show differences of technique and form. Neanderthals, like the different species which specialists refer to as anatomically modern, walked erect and had a big brain. They represent a great evolutionary stride and show 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 35,000 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 artefacts 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 hominins 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.
Neanderthals of the later stages lived in developed groups. Not only did they care for the sick and bury their dead; they joined together in small bands, which co-ordinated effectively, hunted collectively, and had at least some form of communication with each other. By 100,000 years ago they had generated regional variations; their DNA shows, for instance, that some groups living in Europe had developed lighter skins than others. In Central Eurasia, a new species had emerged, the Denisovans, who were genetically different from their Neanderthal ancestors. Neanderthal man also provides our first evidence of a terrible human 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.
In spite of their successes, the curtain started to come down on the Neanderthals around 60,000 years ago. After long and widespread domination they were not in the end to be the inheritors of the earth. Climatic change may have played a role in their demise. So may the way they hunted. Neanderthals lived life dangerously. The big game they concentrated on may not have been very cost-effective – a lot of young Neanderthal skeletons are buried with deadly injuries from hunting mammoth. The need for whole family groups to hunt together in order to be successful may also have deprived them of the time needed for specialization and learning. And it is possible that at the end they were out-competed in the battle for resources by their genetic cousins, emerging out of Africa –
Homo sapiens, our species.
We were to be successors to Neanderthals and to all other types of humans living around the world when our expansion out of Africa began some 60,000 years ago. But genetic research shows that we still carry with us traces of these other forms of human life. We know that
Homo sapiens and humans of what we broadly call Neanderthal groups interbred – up to 4 per cent of our own DNA is of Neanderthal origin. But was such intermingling common also with other groups, whose identity we still cannot trace for certain? It will still take a bit of time before we can determine where and with what results different groups of humans interbred after our ancestors left Africa. This is one of the most exciting fields of prehistorical research and one that is going to have great consequences for our understanding of humans living today. After the Neanderthal genome was mapped, it became clear that some of the most important disease-fighting genes that humans now have originate from outside our own species. Some researchers think that the very fact that we could interbreed with other human groups contributed massively to the peopling of the earth, because it provided the ‘hybrid vigour’ that helped us become ubiquitous on all continents save Antarctica.
Homo sapiens has been outstandingly successful, spreading all over Eurasia within 100,000 or so years of its first appearances in Africa (they are dated to about 160,000 BC) and eventually all over the world. But its origins are definitely African; we can now trace the male ancestry of every living man back to a common ancestor who lived in East Africa a little over 60,000 years ago. Its members are from the start anatomically identifiable modern humans, with smaller faces, a lighter skull and straighter limbs than the Neanderthals. At first a relatively small group entered the Levant and the Middle East, and mainly by following the coasts progressed to East and South-East Asia, eventually reaching Australasia in about 50,000 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.
Before groups of
Homo sapiens left Africa, the species had gone through a very long development – longer, in fact, than the time it has now spent outside Africa. Over about 100,000 years mankind slowly developed the means that would propel us to become the dominant species. Not all of this happened as linear progress. Our ancestors were few in numbers and often lived a precarious existence, even compared to other human species that existed on the continent. One scholar has compared our development there with small candles flickering. Even if humans were already capable of transmitting learning, most of these attempts were snuffed out, with its tribe, through some cataclysmic event. It seems, however, that at some point, less than 100,000 years ago,
Homo sapiens in East Africa reached a critical threshold, in which accumulation of innovations and contact between groups became permanent. Some of this is probably linked to the development of language, which even in its most rudimentary forms facilitated learning and memory. About 65,000 years ago almost all of the means needed for expansion existed in Africa: complex tools, long-distance transport, ceremonies and rituals, nets, traps and fishing gear, cooking and huts. Some of these skills were undoubtedly picked up from interaction with genetically different groups of humans. There would be ‘bottlenecks’ in later human development, both before and after the first groups left Africa, in which our population may have been reduced to a few thousand individuals. But some form of continuity would survive.
Much remains speculative in assessing the reasons for the timing and pattern of the diffusion of
Homo sapiens and palaeoanthropologists remain cautious about the fossil record; some of them do not like to assert without qualification that we are all descendants from a small number of humans who left Africa roughly at the same time. Nevertheless, most agree that from about 50,000 years ago to the end of the last Ice Age in about 9000 BC we are at last considering plentiful and expanding 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 artefacts 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 artefacts 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 artefacts 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 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.
For this period in Europe much has been done to classify and group in sequence cultures identified by their implements. The climate was not constant; though usually cold, there were important fluctuations, probably including the sharp onset of the coldest conditions for a million years somewhere about 20,000 years ago. Such climatic variations still exercised great determinative force on the evolution of society. It was perhaps 30,000 years ago that the climate changes began which later made it possible for human beings to enter the Americas, crossing from Asia by a link either provided by ice or by land left exposed because the ice-caps contained so much of what is now sea-water and the sea-level was much lower. They moved southwards for thousands of years as they followed the game which had drawn them to the uninhabited continent. The Americas were from the start peopled by immigrants. But when the ice sheets retreated, huge transformations occurred to coasts, routes and food supplies. This was all as it had been for ages, but this time there was a crucial difference. Man was there. A new order of intelligence was available to use new and growing resources in order to cope with environmental change. The change to history, when conscious human action to control environment will increasingly be effective, is under way.
This may seem a big claim in the light of the resources early men possessed, judging by their tool kits and weaponry. Yet they already represent a huge range of capacities if we compare them with their predecessors. The basic tools of
Homo sapiens were stone, but they were made to serve many more precise purposes than earlier tools and were made in a different way, by striking flakes from a carefully prepared core. Their variety and elaboration are other signs of the growing acceleration of human evolution. New materials came into use in the Upper Palaeolithic, too, as bone and antler were added to the wood and flint of earlier workshops and armouries. These provided new possibilities of manufacture; the bone needle was a great step in the elaboration of clothing, pressure flaking enabled some skilled workmen to carry the refinement of their flint blades to a point at which it seems non-utilitarian, so delicately thinned have they become. The first man-made material, a mixture of clay with powdered bone, also makes its appearance. Weapons are improved. The tendency, which can be seen towards the end of the Upper Palaeolithic, for small flint implements to appear more frequently and for them to be more regularly geometrical suggests the making of more complex weapon points. In the same era come the invention and spread of the spear-thrower, the bow and arrow, and the barbed harpoon, used first on mammals and later to catch fish. The last shows an extension of hunting – and therefore of resources – to water. Long before this, perhaps 600,000 years ago, hominins had gathered molluscs for food in China and doubtless elsewhere. With harpoons and perhaps more perishable implements such as nets and lines, new and richer aquatic sources of food (some created by the temperature changes of the last Ice Ages) could now be exploited, and this led to achievements in hunting, possibly connected with the growth of forests in post-glacial phases and with a new dependence on and knowledge of the movements of reindeer and wild cattle.
It is tempting to see support of this in the most remarkable and mysterious evidence of all which has survived the men of the Upper Palaeolithic: their art. It is the first of its kind of whose existence we can be sure. Earlier men or even man-like creatures may have scratched patterns in the mud, daubed their bodies, moved rhythmically in dance or spread flowers in patterns, but of such things we know nothing, because, of them, if they ever happened, nothing has survived. Some creature took the trouble to accumulate little hoards of red ochre some 40,000–60,000 years ago, but the purpose of doing so is unknown. It has been suggested that two indentations on a Neanderthal gravestone are the earliest surviving art, but the first plentiful and assured evidence comes in paintings on the walls of European caves. The first were made over 30,000 years ago and their number swells dramatically until we find ourselves in the presence of a conscious art whose greatest technical and aesthetic achievements appear, without warning or forerunner, almost mature. They continue so for thousands of years until this art vanishes. Just as it has no ancestor, it leaves no descendant, though it seems to have employed many of the basic processes of the visual arts still in use today.
Its concentration in space and time must be grounds for suspicion that there is more to be discovered. Caves in Africa abound with prehistoric paintings and carvings dated as far back as 27,000 years ago, and were being added to well into the reign of England’s Queen Victoria; in Australia there was cave-painting at least 20,000 years ago. Palaeolithic art is not, therefore, confined to Europe, but what has been discovered outside Europe has, so far, been studied much more intermittently. We do not yet know enough about the dating of cave paintings in other parts of the world, nor about the uniqueness of the conditions which led to the preservation in Europe of objects which may have had parallels elsewhere. Nor do we know what may have disappeared; there is a vast field of possibilities of what may have been produced in gesture, sound or perishable materials which cannot be explored. None the less, the art of western Europe in the Upper Palaeolithic, all qualifications made, has a colossal and solid impressiveness which is unique.
Recent finds confirm that forms of art were spread in different parts of Europe earlier than what has so far been believed. A remarkable figure of a large-breasted woman (almost certainly a fertility symbol) found in south-eastern Germany in 2008, dates to almost 40,000 years ago. Other finds in south-western France and northern Spain consist of small figures of stone, bone or, occasionally, clay, decorated objects (often tools and weapons) and the painted walls and roofs of caves. In these caves (and in the decoration of objects) there is an overwhelming preponderance of animal themes. The meaning of these designs, above all in the elaborate sequences of the cave-paintings, has intrigued scholars. Obviously, many of the beasts so carefully observed were central to a hunting economy. At least in the French caves, too, it now seems highly probable that a conscious order exists in the sequences in which they are shown. But to go further in the argument is still very hard. Clearly, art in Upper Palaeolithic times has to carry much of a burden later carried by writing, but what its messages mean is still obscure. It seems likely that the paintings were connected with religious or magical practice: African rock painting has been convincingly shown to be linked to magic and shamanism, and the selection of such remote and difficult corners of caves as those in which the European paintings have been traced is by itself strongly suggestive that some special rite was carried out when they were painted or gazed upon. (Artificial light, of course, was needed in these dark corners.) The origins of religion have been hinted at in Neanderthal burials and appear even more strongly in those of the Upper Palaeolithic peoples which are often elaborate; here, in their art, is something where inferences are even harder to resist. Perhaps it provides the first surviving relics of organized religion.
The birth, maturity and death of the earliest artistic achievement of mankind found in Europe occupies a very long period. Somewhere around 45,000 years ago appear decorated and coloured objects, often of bone and ivory. Then, four or five millennia later, we reach the first figurative art. Soon after that we reach the peak of the prehistoric aesthetic achievement, the great painted and incised cave ‘sanctuaries’ (as they have been called), with their processions of animals and mysterious repeated symbolic shapes. This high phase lasted about 5,000 years, a startlingly long time for the maintenance of so consistent a style and content. So long a period – almost as long as the whole history of civilization on this planet – illustrates the slowness with which tradition changed in ancient times and its imperviousness to outside influence. Perhaps it is an index, too, of the geographical isolation of prehistoric cultures. The last phase of this art that has been discerned takes the story down to about 9000 BC; in it, the stag more and more replaces other animals as subject-matter (no doubt thus reflecting the disappearance of the reindeer and the mammoth as the ice retreated), before a final burst of richly decorated tools and weapons brings Europe’s first great artistic achievement to an end. The age which followed produced nothing approaching it in scale or quality; its best surviving relics are a few decorated pebbles. Six thousand years were to pass before the next great art.
We know little about the collapse of this great human achievement. The light is never more than dim in the Upper Palaeolithic and the darkness closes in rapidly – which is to say, of course, over thousands of years. Nevertheless, the impression left by the violence of the contrast between what was before and what came after produces a sense of shock. So relatively sudden an extinction is a mystery. We have no precise dates or even precise sequences: nothing ended in one year or another. There was only a gradual closing down of artistic activity over a long time which seems in the end to have been absolute. Some scholars have blamed climate. Perhaps, they argue, the whole phenomenon of cave art was linked to efforts to influence the movements or abundance of the great game herds on which the hunting peoples relied. As the last Ice Age ebbed and each year the reindeer retreated a little, men sought new and magical techniques to manipulate them, but gradually as the ice sheets withdrew more and more, an environment to which they had successfully adapted disappeared. As it did, so did the hope of influencing nature.
Homo sapiens was not powerless; far from it, he could adapt, and did, to a new challenge. But for a time one cultural impoverishment at least, the abandonment of his first art, was a consequence of adaptation.
It is easy to see much that is fanciful in such speculation, but difficult to restrain excitement over such an astonishing achievement. People have spoken of the great cave sequences as ‘cathedrals’ of the Palaeolithic world and such metaphors are justified if the level of achievement and the scale of the work undertaken is measured against what evidence we have of the earlier triumphs of man. With the first great art, the hominids are now left far behind and we have unequivocal evidence of the power of the human mind.
Much else that is known of the Upper Palaeolithic confirms the sense that the crucial genetic changes are behind and that evolution is now a mental and social phenomenon. The distribution of major racial divisions in the world which last down to early modern times appears already broadly fixed by the end of the Upper Palaeolithic. Geographical and climatic divisions had produced specializations in skin pigment, hair characteristics, the shape of the skull and the bone structure of the face. In the earliest Chinese relics of
Homo sapiens the Asian regional characteristics are discernible. All the main regional groups are established by 10,000 BC, broadly speaking in the areas they dominated until the great resettlements which were one aspect of the rise of European civilization to world domination after AD 1500. The world was filling up during the Old Stone Age. Men at last penetrated the virgin continents, where none of their ancestors or relatives had been.
Already around 50,000 years ago the first humans reached Australia, roughly at the same time as men of our kind settled in Europe. They were the descendants of people who had mainly followed the coasts from the Middle East, becoming skilled gatherers of protein-rich seafood in the process. It is now thought likely that they used boats to travel onwards to the new continent, although the sea-level in the Indonesian archipelago then would have been significantly lower than what it is today, opening up a world of land-bridges and calm seas. After reaching Australia by island-hopping through the Timor and Banda seas, they spread out very quickly. The then lush landscape suited them; it had huge lakes and rivers, with a number of now-extinct species that could be hunted for food, such as the giant wombat-like marsupial
Zygomaturus (similar in size to a modern pygmy hippopotamus) and a 450-pound kangaroo, the
Procoptodon.
Human colonization of the last new world began much later. An Asian people, probably in several small but closely related groups, arrived in America by crossing a land bridge to Alaska from North Asia some 17,000 years ago. They brought with them tools and techniques developed in a region between the Altai Mountains and the Amur valley in southern Siberia over the previous millennia. They then spread all over the Americas, first following the coasts and then, only slightly later, beginning to penetrate the interior. Some among the first Americans soon learnt how to build small boats. Others became experts at hunting mammoth and mastodon. The first finds of human habitation in Chile date back to 11,000 BC; parts of the US upper mid-west and possibly small areas of the Atlantic coast were populated roughly at the same time.
Homo sapiens was already a venturesome fellow at the end of the last Ice Age, it seems. Only Antarctica among the continents was still awaiting his arrival and establishment (as it would wait until the year 1895 of our own era). Yet the Upper Palaeolithic world was still a rather empty place. Calculations suggest that 20,000 humans lived in France in Neanderthal times; this becomes possibly 50,000 out of perhaps 10 million humans in the whole world twenty millennia ago. ‘A human desert swarming with game’ is one scholar’s description of it. They lived by hunting and gathering, and a lot of land was needed to support a family.
Homo sapiens were exceptional hunter-gatherers when times were good; there is new evidence suggesting that the newcomers when first in Europe outbred the Neanderthals by a factor of ten to one. But even so, human population was small and the world very big.
It is not hard to see that such population figures mean very slow cultural change. Greatly accelerated though man’s progress in the Old Stone Age may be and much more versatile though he is becoming, he is still taking thousands of years to transmit his learning across the barriers of geography and social division. A man might, after all, live all his life without meeting anyone from another group or tribe, let alone another culture. The divisions which already existed between different groups of
Homo sapiens open a historical era whose whole tendency was towards the cultural distinction, though in no way isolation, of one group from another, and this was to increase human diversity until reversed by technical and political forces in very recent times.
About the groups in which Upper Palaeolithic man lived there is still much unknown. What is clear is that they were both larger in size than in former times and also more settled. The earliest remains of buildings come from the hunters of the Upper Palaeolithic who inhabited what are now the Czech and Slovak republics and southern Russia. In about 10,000 BC in parts of France some clusters of shelters seem to have contained anything from 400 to 600 people, but judging by the archaeological record, this was unusual. Something like the tribe probably existed, therefore, though about its organization and hierarchies it is virtually impossible to speak. All that is clear is that there was a continuing sexual specialization in the Old Stone Age as hunting grew more elaborate and its skills more demanding, while settlements provided new possibilities of vegetable gathering by women.
Cloudy though its picture is, none the less, the earth at the end of the Old Stone Age is in important respects one we can recognize. There were still to be geological changes (the English Channel was only to make its latest appearance in about 7000 BC, for example), but we have lived in a period of comparative topographical stability which has preserved the major shapes of the world of about 9000 BC. That world was by then firmly the world of
Homo sapiens. The descendants of the primates who came out of the trees had, by the acquisition of their tool-making skills, by using natural materials to make shelters and by domesticating fire, by hunting and exploiting other animals, long achieved an important measure of independence from some of nature’s rhythms. This transformation had brought them to a high enough level of social organization to undertake important co-operative works. Their needs had provoked economic differentiation between the sexes. Grappling with these and other material problems had led to the transmission of ideas by speech, to the invention of ritual practices and ideas which lie at the roots of religion, and, eventually, to a great art. It has even been argued that Upper Palaeolithic man had a lunar calendar. Man as he leaves prehistory is already a conceptualizing creature, equipped with intellect, with the power to objectify and abstract. It is very difficult not to believe that it is this new strength which explains the last and greatest stride in prehistory, the invention of agriculture.
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