Lone Survivors

by Chris Stringer

  Further uncertainty surrounds the evidence of humanlike behavior excavated from Liang Bua. Some of the stone tools are delicately shaped, and there is possible evidence of burning (although perhaps naturally produced) and of predation on young Stegodon. I’m still not convinced that H. floresiensis, with its ape-sized brain, was capable of such behaviors, and in my view we need further evidence and analyses to exclude the possibility that early modern humans were also using caves on Flores before 18,000 years ago and could be responsible for some of the later archaeological evidence left behind—although this is unlikely to be so in the deepest levels of the cave. If H. floresiensis is indeed genuine and distinct, rather than abnormal (and I think the evidence is growing strongly in its favor), there are the intriguing questions not only of where it came from (Java to the west or, as Morwood now believes, Sulawesi to the north?) and how it got there, but of what happened to it, and whether our species encountered these diminutive relatives. Perhaps volcanic eruptions or climatic change around 17,000 years ago affected its habitat, or perhaps modern humans killed it off directly, or by consuming the resources on which it lived. In which case, an even stranger encounter than the one between the Neanderthals and modern humans was played out at an even later date, on the opposite edge of the inhabited world. But against that possibility is the evidence that there may instead have been a period of several thousand years with no one on Flores, following the extinction of the Hobbit, before modern humans finally arrived after 12,000 years ago.

  The Hobbit remains a perplexing find for all of us, whatever our evolutionary views—witness my own problems in coming to terms with the possibility that its chimp-sized brain could be associated with “human” behavioral complexity. But it has proved most difficult for some scientists of multiregional persuasion who are wedded to the idea that there can only have been one human species—Homo sapiens—in existence over the last 2 million years or so. Rather than contemplate a painful divorce from cherished beliefs, they have preferred to argue that the Hobbit represents the “village idiot” of a modern human community—or even more remarkably, that it’s a recently buried oddity, as shown by the presence of dental fillings (there is no evidence that the Hobbit was ever seen by a dentist!). In the short term these researchers have raised their profiles by courting controversy, but in the longer term, I think they have damaged their own, and paleoanthropology’s, reputation.

  As we saw, under Out of Africa 1, most experts consider that H. erectus was the first humanlike creature to emerge from the ancestral African homeland, nearly 2 million years ago. But for some researchers, the Flores material raises the possibility that more primitive, perhaps even prehuman, forms had previously spread from Africa across southern Asia, where the remoteness of Flores allowed them to survive and evolve along their own peculiar path, in isolation. And the evidence from Dmanisi is now being added to this rethink, since the lack of very ancient fossil human evidence from Asia, apart from Dmanisi, is considered by archaeologists like Robin Dennell and Wil Roebroeks to reflect a lack of preservation and discovery, rather than a real absence. Combining the primitiveness of the Dmanisi specimens and tools with a similar view of the Liang Bua finds, it is argued that there was a widespread phase of human evolution in Eurasia about 2 million years ago, which is now only represented by the isolated Dmanisi and Hobbit fossils. This alternative scenario has a small-brained and small-bodied pre-erectus species, perhaps comparable to Homo habilis or even a late australopithecine, dispersing from Africa with primitive tools over 2 million years ago, reaching the Far East and, eventually, Flores. In Asia, this ancestral species also gave rise to the Dmanisi people and Homo erectus, while Dmanisi-like people reentered Africa about 1.8 million years ago and evolved into later populations there—including, eventually, Homo sapiens. So the orthodoxy of Out of Africa 1 is being challenged because of new evidence, and new interpretations of old evidence. And the same process of reevaluation is happening with Out of Africa 2, as we shall see next.

  Views on the origin of our species have gone through many formulations and reformulations since Darwin laid out his expectations of what the evidence would provide, but an African origin for Homo sapiens is now the mainstream view. I explained earlier how finds like those from Dmanisi and Flores have threatened the scenario known as Out of Africa 1, and we will now look at new evidence from Europe, Africa, and Asia that is changing ideas about the more recent parts of our evolutionary story. These finds include the remarkable 160,000-year-old Herto skulls from Ethiopia (some of the oldest and most massive individuals of our species ever discovered), the 40,000-year-old fossils found by cavers deep in an underground chamber in Romania that may show hybridization between modern humans and Neanderthals, and the oldest sapiens fossils from China, whose feet hold clues to a vital modern innovation. In the last few years we have also learned a lot about our Neanderthal cousins: where they came from, how they behaved, how their bodies worked, and even (as I explain later) how their whole genetic code compares with ours. But now I’m going to highlight some of the most interesting fossil finds of Neanderthals from the last twenty years, before going on to discuss the evidence of other peoples who may have been closer to our evolutionary origins.

  Asturias, just south of the Bay of Biscay, is one of the less fashionable provinces of Spain. But like much of the Iberian peninsula, right down to its southern tips in Portugal and Gibraltar, Asturias was a favored territory for the Neanderthals. In 1994 some explorers were probing the depths of the large and still partly unexplored El Sidrón network of caves, hidden among densely forested hills, when they discovered two human jawbones lying in the cave sediments. Because partisans were known to have hidden in the cave during the Spanish Civil War, the police were notified in case the remains were recent, and over a hundred further bones were soon discovered. Forensic investigations over several years showed that the bones were fossilized, not recent, and were in fact those of Neanderthals who had died over 40,000 years ago. The area where the bones were found has been named Galería del Osario—“tunnel of the bones”—and about 1,500 bone fragments from some twelve Neanderthals have now been unearthed there. At first glance it seems like an extended family was represented, since there are adults, teenagers, and children, but this was no happy domestic scene, at least not in the fate that seems to have befallen them. Their bones and teeth suggest they were reasonably healthy, although there are signs of growth disturbances during early and late childhood in the teeth.

  However, the state of the fossilized bones shows that these individuals may have died violent deaths: they displayed many cut marks, especially one jawbone and the children’s skulls, and they may have been pounded and smashed with great force, using stone tools or rocks, apparently to extract the nutritious brain and marrow. So this seems to be evidence, and by no means the first, of cannibalism among Neanderthals. Other examples are known from places like Croatia (Vindija) and France (Marillac and Moula-Guercy), and seem to reinforce stereotypes of the Neanderthals as savage subhumans.

  Oblique view of the most complete 160,000-year-old Herto Homo sapiens skull from Ethiopia.

  Side view of the Herto 1 skull.

  The child’s skull from Herto.

  Yet cannibalism seems to have been a regular enough part of human behavior over the last million years or so for it to be represented in many fossil assemblages, and so it might almost be considered as “normal” for early humans, however distasteful (in every sense!) we might find it today. It appears to be present in the Homo antecessor (“Pioneer Man”) remains at Atapuerca about 800,000 years ago, which are cut-marked and smashed like the Sidrón fossils, and which lie alongside butchered animal bones. It may also have been present in Homo heidelbergensis—at Bodo in Ethiopia about 600,000 years ago (although here it’s mainly evident from cut marks on a skull suggesting the eyeballs had been removed), and at Boxgrove in Sussex, where I explained that two isolated front teeth seem to have been forcefully wrenched from their jawbone (now los
t). Its antiquity may even stretch back to the very first humans. The cheekbone of a 2-million-year-old fossil skull from Sterkfontein (South Africa), often assigned to the very early human species Homo habilis (“Handy Man”), shows signs of having been cut during the slicing apart of the jawbone from the skull, and this too may have been for consumption. And we should not let our own species off the hook either, since 80,000-year-old bones from Klasies River Mouth Caves in South Africa, and 14,700-year-old bones that I helped to excavate from Gough’s Cave in Somerset, also show the telltale signs of butchery. Unfortunately, there is also enough sound evidence beyond the exaggerations in traveler’s tales to indicate that butchery and consumption of human flesh have occurred in the very recent human past.

  Of course, we have to put these gruesome reconstructions of past behavior into context against the possibilities that disarticulation of bodies might also have occurred as a part of funerary rites, or that cannibalism was part of rituals to honor the dead, or was forced on human groups faced with disaster or starvation, as recent history demonstrates. We also have enough evidence of the care of individuals during life, and after their death, to show the other side of the story, as I will discuss in more detail in chapter 6. For example, a child in the Atapuerca early Neanderthal material from the Sima de los Huesos site in northern Spain had severe head deformities that certainly affected its appearance, and probably also its behavior and speech, yet it had survived well beyond the infant stage. At times the Neanderthals buried their dead in caves, from newborn infants through to elderly men and women. In at least some cases, grave goods such as animal remains and special rocks or tools seem to have been placed with the bodies, as tributes or perhaps even in anticipation of an afterlife.

  Notwithstanding those caveats, which show the compassionate face of our predecessors, I think that early humans were probably as capable of love and hate, and tenderness and violence, as we are, and even chimpanzee bands have been observed in violent and often fatal territorial “battles” with other troops. Such behavior is almost certainly part of our evolutionary history too. Many years ago, in an obscure book, The Dawn Warriors, partly inspired by Robert Ardrey’s African Genesis (itself very much a tale of humans, red in tooth and claw), the biologist Robert Bigelow argued that warfare went back to the beginnings of humanity and had shaped our evolution. Coping with conflict from other human groups encouraged individual intelligence and cunning, and group cooperation and cohesion, and thus fueled social evolution, language, and the growth of the brain. This is something I will come back to in chapter 6, but we have not yet finished with the unfortunate Neanderthals of El Sidrón.

  After they had died and apparently been eaten, their defleshed remains must have lain on the floor near the cave entrance, along with other food debris and Middle Paleolithic (Middle Old Stone Age) stone tools, perhaps including those used to butcher them. There the bones would most likely have been trampled, eroded, or scavenged by other animals. But then, serendipitously, a massive muddy collapse of cave sediments dropped them some twenty meters deeper into the cave system and dramatically increased their chances of long-term preservation, in the cooler location where they were ultimately discovered. This also greatly improved the potential for DNA preservation; the Sidrón Neanderthals are now one of the most important contributors to the Neanderthal Genome Project, as I will discuss in chapter 7, along with the main DNA donors, other probably cannibalized Neanderthal from Vindija Cave in Croatia. There are other finds, however, that give a different and more positive perspective on the Neanderthals than this image of cannibalism, and one of the most significant of these was made about thirty years ago, in the French site Saint-Césaire.

  The discovery of a partial skeleton in the collapsed rock shelter of Saint-Césaire remains one of the most important of all Neanderthal finds—not just because it was fairly complete by the usual standards, and not because it seemed to be a burial—there were quite a few of those already known for the Neanderthals. Its importance lay in its archaeological associations: stone tools belonging to the Châtelperronian industry. This enigmatic industry from southwestern France seemed to represent a transition from the local Middle Paleolithic (Mousterian) to the Upper Paleolithic Gravettian. The local Mousterian and the Châtelperronian had many types of stone tools in common, but the way they were made had seemingly switched from typical Neanderthal flaking to the systematic striking of thin flakes—blades—something characteristic of the Upper Paleolithic, and thus of Cro-Magnons like the Gravettians. Unfortunately, there were no human fossils reliably associated with the Châtelperronian, which is why its real significance remained a puzzle. Many archaeologists and anthropologists in the 1960s and 1970s expected that the manufacturers of the Châtelperronian would, when eventually discovered, turn out to be evolutionary intermediates between the Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnons, hence finally proving the Neanderthal Phase and Multiregional models of modern human origins. The archaeologist Richard Klein and I shared a different view. We thought that Neanderthals were probably capable of making Upper Paleolithic–style tools and, considering the local ancestry of the Châtelperronian, that the manufacturers were likely to have been Neanderthals and not transitional forms.

  So when I heard of a brief French report in 1980 that a human skeleton had finally been recovered with Châtelperronian artifacts, I realized that this could be a crunch discovery that might completely invalidate my doctoral conclusions that there was unlikely to have been evolutionary continuity between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons in Europe. I waited for news of the nature of the skeleton with bated breath, and I must admit to considerable relief when it was identified as a rather typical Neanderthal! However, to my chagrin, many researchers seemed reluctant to abandon ideas of continuity. Some, like Milford Wolpoff, argued that the Neanderthal features of the Saint-Césaire skeleton had been overemphasized and that it was, in fact, “transitional,” while others, like the archaeologist Randy White, suggested that (in line with Loring Brace’s Neanderthal Phase model) cultural change had probably preceded, and driven, morphological changes toward modern humans. Thus this Neanderthal had not yet undergone the evolutionary transition that must have followed.

  Map showing early human sites in Europe.

  For a few years the significance of Saint-Césaire was a hot topic of debate, but gradually, as its Neanderthal nature was generally accepted, it became an important piece of evidence supporting the Replacement model, at least in western Europe. This was because the Châtelperronian had been dated by radiocarbon to about 35,000 years—the same age as the other early Upper Paleolithic industry, the Aurignacian—which seemed to be associated with modern-looking Cro-Magnons. Hence several of us, including the archaeologists Richard Klein and Paul Mellars and the anthropologist Bernard Vandermeersch (who had described the new find), favored a model with two parallel but distinct strands within the early Upper Paleolithic of western Europe. One, the Châtelperronian, was a local Neanderthal development. The other, the Aurignacian, was the product of modern humans (Cro-Magnons), who had brought it with them when they entered western Europe, an event now dated to about 40,000 years ago. But now I’d like to discuss a remarkable site in eastern Europe where modern human fossils have turned up alongside the remains of thousands of cave bears, which suggests a previously unknown and perhaps even earlier arrival of modern humans in Europe.

  The Danube is, at some 2,900 kilometers, Europe’s second-longest river (after the Volga). Originating in Germany, it flows eastward until it reaches its delta, which spreads between Romania and Ukraine on the Black Sea. It had been a hugely important waterway in historic times, and it must also have provided a route through the landscape for early humans, whether they trekked along its banks or (later on) used rafts or boats to navigate it. A number of key sites in the Neanderthal and early modern story lie close to the Danube, and one of the newest and most fascinating of these is Peştera cu Oase (“Cave with Bones”). Oase was discovered by cavers in 2002, and its loca
tion is still a closely guarded secret, although it lies in the Carpathian Mountains of western Romania, whose rivers drain into the Danube.

  One of those rivers is the Ponor, which runs for about 750 meters underground, and above it are networks of caves through which it formerly flowed. These cannot be reached through their original entrances, which have long since been blocked by sediments and collapses. Instead, a lower entrance has been opened up by speleologists, and, for those brave and capable enough, a trip up and down long shafts, with a scuba dive in the dark through a sixteen-meter siphon of chilling water thrown in for good measure, eventually leads to a cave floor littered with an astonishing collection of thousands of fossil bones. Among these are circular hibernation nests of cave bears, the former winter inhabitants of this part of the cave, represented by over a hundred of their skulls alone. Other occasional residents such as cave lions and wolves are also recorded, but it was a chance discovery in a neighboring chamber in 2002 that showed ancient humans had also been in the vicinity. This was a human lower jaw, containing only the back teeth, with the presence of erupted wisdom teeth showing that the individual was an adult, and from its overall size probably a young man.