Lone Survivors

by Chris Stringer

  In the last fifteen years there have been some remarkable discoveries that emphasize the complexity of early modern human behavior in Europe and elsewhere. Can any of these provide clues as to what triggered the changes that led to our modern minds and patterns of behavior? To understand this, we need to address the important question of symbolism, which many people think is a key to understanding what made us different from any creatures that came before us. We use symbols in so many ways today that they are a part of our lives, taken for granted, but without which we could hardly function. They may be pictorial, such as a drawing which, though small, black, and two-dimensional, resembles the larger solid object it represents—say, a picture of a stick-man or stick-woman, or a plane. Or it could be a written word, which does not resemble at all the object or action that it stands for—like the word computer. Or perhaps it could be a series of musical notes, which can only transform into sounds when interpreted through the eyes, brain, and actions of a musician. Symbols may equally represent social signals about group identity, wealth, or status; here I don’t just mean bundles of banknotes, which are, of course, merely pieces of paper with some printing on them. Equally symbolic are fashions in clothing, hairstyles, cosmetics, tattoos, and necklaces, which are used to send signals about the wearer to other individuals in the group.

  Symbols are meant to transmit messages and usually require the recipient to be able to interpret them in the same terms as they were originally intended, although they can, of course, equally be used to exclude those who cannot receive and interpret them—a secret code or a ritual handshake, for example, the meaning of which is known only to members of a privileged group. The archaeologist Clive Gamble, following the primatologist Lars Rodseth, emphasized that one of the most distinct things about modern humans compared with our primate relatives is our “release from proximity.” Probably all humans before us, like the apes they evolved from, could only work through face-to-face encounters, but with the rise of symbolism (and the associated development of language), people were liberated from proximity and could communicate through time and space. Thus a message with social meaning could be transmitted remotely on behalf of a person or group, provided the recipients could decode it in the same terms.

  About twenty-five years ago, the concept of a 35,000-year-old Human Revolution emerged. This revolution considerably preceded, but matched in significance, other transformations such as the domestication of plants and animals, the discovery of metalworking, and the development of industrialization. This revolution seemed to be associated with the arrival of the modern-looking Cro-Magnons in Europe; they had imported or rapidly developed a package of modern human behaviors, such as complex language, art, and specialized technologies, enabling them to replace the behaviorally inferior Neanderthals. In 1987 I was fortunate to co-organize an influential conference in Cambridge that became known as the “Human Revolution” meeting, where this view really took off. Many have since criticized the Eurocentric focus of those debates about the origins of symbolism and modernity. Certainly the European evidence for early symbolism still dominates the Paleolithic record, not only because of the large number of accessible sites that preserve the finds, but also because of the large number of trained archaeologists who are working on those sites. Thus Europe continues to surprise us in the richness of its record: so let’s now look at some old and new finds that illustrate this.

  Shortly before Christmas in 1994, three cavers decided to explore a small opening in the limestone cliffs in the Ardèche region of southern France. Clearing rock falls, they reached a shaft and, descending with a caving ladder, entered a huge chamber, richly adorned with stalactites. Moving on to another large chamber, they started to see fossil animal bones on the floor and, after some time, decided to head back. Quite by chance, the beam of one of their lamps fell on a small red ocher drawing of a mammoth; at that moment they knew they were on the brink of a great discovery. They were astounded at the galleries of hundreds of paintings and engravings in charcoal and red ocher that they and the prehistorians who joined them over the next few weeks were to discover in the cave now named after one of them: Chauvet. About 36,000 years ago, several artists must have walked deep into the cave with flaming torches and squatted down to draw two rhinos locked in combat in charcoal. Just to the left they then outlined the heads of three aurochs (wild cattle), and, in the center, one of them picked out outlines in the rock and drew four beautiful horses’ heads. Each of the horse’s heads seems to show a different mood or character, as though depicting the passage of time or some inner narrative.

  In the year 2000, six years after the discoveries at Chauvet, an amateur caver found another long series of galleries not far from the famous painted caves of Lascaux, and this time the site was dominated by engravings of bison, horse, rhino, mammoth, and deer, with some human figures. This site at Cussac may be 10,000 years younger than Chauvet (dating work is ongoing), but its importance is increased by the discovery, below some of the decorated walls, of seven human burials, tucked into “sleeping nests” made in the floor of the cave by bears.

  The Chauvet and Cussac art mirrors the much earlier find, which, in the face of tremendous opposition from the archaeological establishment of the time, finally proved that cave paintings really were the work of “Stone Age savages,” as they were then termed. In 1879 the Spanish nobleman and amateur prehistorian Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola and his nine-year-old daughter Maria climbed up to investigate the small opening of a cave in the Altamira hills, near Santander in northern Spain. After entering, de Sautuola decided to carry out a small excavation; Maria, bored, wandered off with a lamp to explore. Moments later she cried out to him, “Papa, look—oxen!” She was probably the first human to have set eyes on the beautiful painted galleries of Altamira Cave for 13,000 years, but for de Sautuola this encounter was to lead to a nightmare of scorn and rejection, as he tried to get the results of his research in the cave accepted as evidence that the art was indeed Paleolithic, and not recently forged. Sadly, he died in 1888, fourteen years before his arguments were finally vindicated.

  Once cave art like that from Altamira was accepted as the work of the ancient Cro-Magnons, serious debate soon followed about its meaning. The art mainly consisted of representations of Ice Age animals, dominated by bison, horse, auroch (as seen by the young Maria), and deer, but there were also rarer, less elaborate, depictions of people, as well as patterned or abstract designs. Early explanations for the art ranged from “art for art’s sake,” to animal worship, to hunting magic. Later, more elaborate theories suggested that the components of the art were patterned like a code and were symbolic of such things as maleness, femaleness, conflict, and death.

  Going back to the time of decorated caves like Chauvet and Cussac, but farther north in what is now Germany, somebody carved an extraordinary object from one of the most recalcitrant of materials: a mammoth tusk. The object, about six centimeters long and three centimeters deep and wide, is a statuette of a large-shouldered and generously proportioned woman—but who completely lacks her head. The head is not missing because of damage; it was never there, and just off-center from where the neck would have been, the carver instead made an ivory ring from which it must have been suspended as an amulet. Because of its large breasts and clearly marked vulva, the statuette has even been called pornographic, but it seems to my eyes much more about fertility, with its prominent belly and breasts perhaps swollen with milk, than pure sex. The cave of Hohle Fels is one of four in a region near the Danube that has now produced over twenty ivory figurines of horse, mammoth, lion, bison, and bird, as well as two statuettes, one tiny and one about thirty centimeters long, representing male human bodies with a lion’s head. There are also many hundreds of ivory beads, which must have been strung as pendants, necklaces, or bracelets. All required skillful manufacture and probably date from 35,000 to 40,000 years old.

  Three of the German sites have also produced the oldest-known musical instruments: four flu
tes made from the perforated wing bones of swans and vultures, and four manufactured from carefully refitted segments of mammoth ivory. The most complete would have originally been about thirty-four centimeters long and was made from the radius of a massive griffon vulture, in which five finger holes had been carved with stone tools. At the playing end, the maker also carved two deep notches, into which the musician would have blown. This flute was found only seventy centimeters from the astonishing ivory figurine described earlier, although it is not possible from the cave sediments to know how closely they were associated in the lives of the people who made and used them; they could have been exactly contemporary or centuries apart. Even more impressive in terms of manufacturing skills are the smaller surviving fragments of flutes made from ivory, where the curved form of the mammoth tusks had to be worked into long straight segments, which were drilled with playing holes and then fitted back together precisely with airtight seals. A modern replica of one of the bird-bone flutes with only three holes in it shows that it could produce four notes and three more overtones, so it seems that all of these instruments would have had the range of modern equivalents, though between them they would have differed in pitch.

  Not only are these skillfully made flutes the world’s oldest known musical instruments, but they and the female figurine also date from the very beginning of the Aurignacian occupation in these German caves, implying that such traditions must go back even farther in time, in Europe or in an even earlier homeland. There seems little doubt that they and the paintings in sites like Chauvet are the handiwork of modern humans, although Neanderthals must still have survived in some parts of Europe at this time. There has been much debate about how modern the Aurignacians actually were in their behavior, with some experts doubting the great ages assigned to the Chauvet art and the ivory statuettes from Germany. Others have even speculated that it could be the handiwork of Neanderthals or of a hybrid population, citing claims for an even older flute in a Neanderthal cave called Divje Babe in Slovenia. There, dating from perhaps 50,000 years ago, a cave bear femur was discovered with two clear holes in it, and possible signs of two further holes, where it was broken at each end. However, three separate studies showed that the bone was gnawed by carnivores at each end, and it was argued that the holes did not demonstrate human workmanship and were more likely to have been punctures from the canine tooth of a large mammal, such as a cave bear or wolf. Arguments continue about this object, but until further confirmatory finds are made in Neanderthal occupation sites, I do not think we yet have evidence that Neanderthals made music—though some reconstructions of their vocal tract suggest they might have been good, if rather high-pitched, singers!

  Objects from Hohle Fels Cave, Germany: (top left) “Lion Man”; (top right) flute; (bottom left) the astonishing “headless Venus”; (bottom right) waterbird.

  Music in the form of singing and clapping seems to be universal among humans today, even if accompanying instruments may be as simple as tree-trunk drums, rattles, or sticks that are banged together. In The Descent of Man, Darwin was puzzled by this universality, saying, “As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man in reference to his daily habits of life, they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed.” For some scientists, music is just a by-product of our language capacity and our ability to recognize patterns even in sounds such as a howling wind, running water, or human chanting. For others, despite Darwin’s negative views about its usefulness, music is closely linked to the evolution of language and of complex modern human societies, where it would have played a critical role in cementing social relationships and in group rituals and ceremonies. In conveying meaning, music as a form of communication would then have formed an important part of the symbolic revolution. Its importance to humans seems to be confirmed by neuro-imaging of the human brain, where areas of importance in language, memory, and emotion are activated, and endorphins—feel-good hormones—are released.

  Excavations in deposits outside Vogelherd Cave, Germany, which have produced several Aurignacian figurines.

  To many researchers in the last century, the astonishing evidence of the complexity of Cro-Magnon behavior in Europe seemed to materialize out of nowhere—there were no antecedents anywhere else. Even in the late 1980s and 1990s many people, including me, seriously considered the idea that there could have been a sudden origin of the suite of modern features, both physical and behavioral, but it was unclear whether these coincided or were separated in time by as much as 100,000 years. As data continued to emerge from Africa that modern humans had indeed originated there, for many archaeologists the concept of a Human Revolution moved there too, and the timing of the revolution was moved back with new dating to the beginning of the African Later Stone Age, about 45,000 years ago. That is somewhat of a minority view now, although espoused by the archaeologist Richard Klein. In his opinion, about 50,000 years ago there were mutations in African early modern humans that enhanced brain functions, producing changes in cognition or language. In turn, these changes would have generated new opportunities for further behavioral changes or innovations, which would have catalyzed the emergence of the fully modern pattern through feedback effects, eventually settling into the pattern we recognize today as behavioral modernity. This reshaping led to the successful expansion of modern humans and now-modern behavior beyond Africa, and the replacement of remaining archaic populations such as the Neanderthals. Thus morphological evolution and behavioral evolution were decoupled, since morphological modernity evolved before behavioral modernity.

  This pattern is counterintuitive for people who favor the idea that behavioral changes lay behind the transformation of the archaic skeletal pattern into that of modern humans, where the use of increasingly sophisticated tools removed the necessity to maintain the robust bodies of our ancestors. If that were so, the behavioral changes should have preceded the physical ones, not the other way around, since they were driving the process of modern human evolution. However, Klein’s view is based on the fact that, despite their morphological “modernity,” 100,000-year-old fossil samples from sites such as Klasies River Mouth in Africa and Skhul or Qafzeh in Israel are associated with Middle Paleolithic artifacts, in many ways comparable with those made by Neanderthals. And, according to Klein, they apparently lacked many other aspects of “modern” behavior as well, though, as we shall see, that viewpoint is increasingly under attack. Klein argues that after about 50,000 years ago modern human morphology essentially stopped evolving, while cultural changes accelerated rapidly, even exponentially, from that point on.

  Brain size had achieved essentially modern levels at least 200,000 years ago and was actually larger in the earliest modern humans and the late Neanderthals than the average today (though we need to remember that their bodies were also somewhat heavier and more muscular). So, Klein argues, the brain changes that occurred around 50,000 years ago must have been in organization, not size—something which we are very unlikely to pick up from the fossil evidence. However, ongoing work on modern human and Neanderthal DNA might eventually be able to compare elements of brain function in these two species, although we are unlikely ever to have well-enough-preserved DNA from our ancient African ancestors for such studies in their case.

  A more gradual “revolution” position is now held by one of the people who was in the vanguard of the debates we had in Cambridge in 1987: my conference co-organizer Paul Mellars. He argues for a period of accelerated change in Africa between about 60,000 and 80,000 years ago, as shown by the following developments recorded in South African cave sites: new and better-controlled techniques for producing long thin flakes of stone blades; specialized tools called end scrapers and burins, which were probably used for working skins and bones; the production of tiny stone segments that must have been mounted on handles of wood or bone to make composite tools; complexly shaped stone tools such as “leaf points”; relatively complex bone tools;
marine shells perforated to make necklaces or bracelets; red ocher (natural iron oxide) engraved with geometric designs suggesting early artwork; greater permanence and differentiated occupation areas in caves; new subsistence practices such as the exploitation of marine fish as well as shellfish; and perhaps intentional burning of undergrowth to encourage the growth of underground plant resources such as tubers. Mellars suggests that a neurological switch to modernity in the brain, alongside rapid climatic fluctuations, could have been the driving forces behind this period of heightened cultural innovations, of which the Toba eruption of about 73,000 years ago might have been a part.

  The concept of a Human Revolution in the arrival of behavioral modernity during the last 50,000 years, as argued by Klein, or between 60,000 and 80,000 years, as argued by Mellars, has been strongly challenged by archaeologists like Sally McBrearty and Alison Brooks, who consider that such views display a Eurocentric bias, even if the original Human Revolution model has now been transferred to Africa. This is because by focusing on changes that occurred at the Middle Paleolithic/Upper Paleolithic or Middle Stone Age/Later Stone Age transitions (in Europe and Africa, respectively), there is a failure to appreciate the depth and breadth of the African Middle Stone Age record that preceded the time of the supposed revolution by at least 100,000 years. In their view, “modern” features such as advanced technologies, increased geographic range, specialized hunting, fishing, and shell-fishing, long-distance trade, and the symbolic use of pigments had already developed in a broad range of Middle Stone Age industries right across Africa between 100,000 and 250,000 years ago. This suggested to them that an early assembly of the package of modern human behaviors occurred in Africa, followed by much later export to the rest of the world.