Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World

by Oppenheimer, Stephen

  But stop! What are we saying? Isn’t this a bit like a city slicker going to a small country village and announcing, ‘You country bumpkins are out-of-date biological primitives’, or a historian claiming that the invention of writing, the industrial and agricultural revolutions, and musical notation were each the result of new genes? Future historians comparing the sophistication of life and dominance of developed Western countries with that of stone-age cultures in Papua New Guinea would be unwise to attribute the contrast to anything biological.

  Many of us, perhaps most, nurture unspoken feelings that other groups are self-evidently inferior to ours. So much so that the American biologist Jared Diamond felt compelled to set the record straight. He wrote his best-selling Guns, Germs, and Steel3 to explain that inequalities of development and global power are more likely to be the result of historical accidents of opportunity rather than of any innate intellectual differences between different populations. He wanted to explain how it was, for instance, that small bands of conquistadors could destroy the populous pre-Columbian civilizations of the Americas.

  Yali’s question

  At the beginning of his book, Diamond poses his main question as it was put to him by a remarkable man and popular local leader, Yali, from one of the world’s last surviving Neolithic cultures, on the north coast of New Guinea (see Plate 10). Yali asked, ‘Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?’ (‘cargo’, in the context Yali used the word, literally means ‘imported goods’ such as sacks of Australian rice, and refrigerators and other luxury goods). Yali was no average villager. He was no average human, having spent much of his life actively grappling with the implications of this question from the magico-religious perspective of his own culture. Diamond came under his spell and clearly regarded him as an unusually perceptive, enquiring, and intelligent person.

  Yali was also at one time leader of the most successful cargo cult ever launched in New Guinea (cargo cults were centred around the belief that cargo can be created by ritual), and his magnetism extended beyond his fellow New Guineans and one curious biologist. His qualities of charisma and leadership found him pride of place in another book, Road Belong Cargo.4 Written by Australian anthropologist Peter Lawrence, this is the best known description of cargo cults, and three chapters are devoted to Yali and his own continuously evolving cults.

  I once received a personal account of Yali from someone who had known him better than most. In the early 1980s, I was working as a doctor in Yali’s home province of Madang, New Guinea. I had spent a short time as a patient myself, sharing a small cubicle in the provincial hospital with an ancient, craggy, and decrepit Australian planter. Mo Johnson was a diabetic who lived permanently in the ward, having discovered that, thanks to his veteran’s status, all his medical expenses and food were paid for. A charming but mischievous old man, he had no possession apart from his short-wave radio, with which he infuriated the Samoan ward sister. Mo told me his life story. Red-necked and foul-mouthed, he was incapable of referring to New Guineans except by using racist epithets. It seemed so at odds with the company he kept: there was a steady stream of friendly visitors to his bedside, all of them New Guinean.

  Mo was one of the few surviving members of the legendary band of ‘coast-watchers’ – human moles who had dug themselves into jungle hillsides all along the coasts of South Pacific islands during the Second World War. Mostly former planters, they had volunteered to stay behind after the Japanese invasion to report by radio on enemy troop, plane, and ship movements. They were credited with a major role in the Battle of the Coral Sea. Most of the coast-watchers were killed, died of disease, or were captured and perished in prison camps.

  Mo, the war hero, owed his life to Yali – which is the point of this short anecdote. Yali was Mo’s ‘native helper’ and kept him alive through the war, at one point springing him from a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp and then guiding him through 300 km (200 miles) of dense jungle and swamp back to Madang. After the war, Yali, now also a hero, was identified by the British colonial administrators as a charismatic leader, and nurtured by them. But the relationship broke down as soon as the administrators realized that they had a Messiah on their hands, not a puppet. As Mo told me, and as Peter Lawrence recounts in his book, they decided to humiliate him and make an example of him. So they put Yali in jail. And then Mo said something characteristic, unconsciously revealing the attitudes and language of his own culture yet showing deep personal sincerity. He said to me, ‘Steve, they broke his heart by jailing him. Yali was the best. He was better than them. He was a real white man.’ I have been assured since by Australians that this phrase carries no racist tag!

  Yali was no white man, nor was he an Australian. It is clear from both Diamond’s and Lawrence’s accounts that Yali possessed an abundance of intelligent enquiry; yet with little knowledge of an alien culture he was unable to answer the question he put to Jared Diamond. Refrigerators were not made on New Guinea, so why should he know how they were made? At the root of Yali’s question was all the luxury cargo for the white colonists that regularly arrived on ships docking at the Madang wharf. Cargo cultists, Yali foremost among them, were convinced that cargo was produced by secret magic possessed only by whites. In spite of all his personal qualities and clearly superior intellect, Yali’s magico-religious Neolithic cultural background and limited knowledge base made it impossible for him to comprehend the agricultural and industrial complex that lay far across the ocean. A phrase sometimes used to explain cargo belief is ‘lack of knowledge of the means of production’, but this oversimplifies Yali’s quandary since, as we all know, knowledge does not automatically overcome a belief in the ‘supernatural’.

  The people of the Madang coast are supreme horticulturists. Each gardener maintains up to thirty varieties of taro (a root vegetable) in their plot along with other products, an arrangement which incidentally protects plants against blight. Yet despite their skills, the New Guinean gardeners believe that their success is not simply a matter of learning and experience, but depends on the correct application of planting and growing magic. As Peter Lawrence noticed, they thought that if their crops failed it was down to incompetently applied magic rather than poor gardening skills. After all, everyone knows how to grow taro! This was the New Guinean view of all cultural skills: they were in the possession of ‘experts’ who knew the right magic. Such a view of the prime importance of magic over the means of production inevitably extended to exotic imported cargo, for which the means of production was unknown or only vaguely understood. The cargo had to be made by magic. Yali’s attempts to extract or duplicate the white man’s cargo magic were doomed, and he was unlikely to realize his error since he presumed that the colonists would hang on to their secret. For their part, the white colonists thought (and said) that Yali and his cultists were both fools and knaves. They too were wrong, on both counts.

  Do not judge a people by its culture

  What has all this to do with human origins and the first modern Europeans? Well, even some prehistorians continue to make the everyday human mistake of judging human potential by tools, products, and ‘cultural development’. They make the mistake when comparing the ‘modern’ Cro-Magnons with the ‘ancient’ Neanderthals because they focus on the great contrast in material culture between the newcomers and the established residents. Almost unconsciously, they make the mistake again when comparing Cro-Magnons with earlier Anatomically Modern Humans who had lived in Africa for the previous 100,000 years.

  As we have seen, modern humans had colonized Asia and Australia long before they got to Europe. Their descendants still live in those regions and have every reason to resent the Eurocentric implication that Europeans, who were the first into the industrial age, were also the first to become ‘really human’. The weakness in this idea is obvious: the reason why we have so much evidence for the glory of the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe is that Europe is prec
isely where people have looked for it. The greater difficulty of finding evidence of earlier art forms in Africa also relates to time, preservation, and specific cave types. All art is ultimately perishable, and art on exposed surfaces might not have survived as well from earlier ages.

  So just how ‘dumb’ were the Neanderthals, and is the technology comparison fair? We can ask first whether, given the same cultural advantages, they could have matched the achievements of modern humans. The usual view is that they were inflexible losers. They had been around in Europe, adapting to local hardships and cold for well over 200,000 years, yet they failed to advance into the coldest places. By contrast, the newly arrived but tropically adapted moderns were supremely successful at establishing themselves in all sorts of cold places, and they did so within a short space of time. However, it could be argued that the moderns were fortunate enough to have developed technical and cultural advantages elsewhere. Have modern humans always made tools differently from or better than Neanderthals? In other words, if we look at modern humans before they entered Europe, and at their colonization of the rest of the world, do we find the same clear-cut advantage between Anatomically Modern Humans and other contemporary pre-modern humans in the same regions? The answer is, mostly, no.

  Anatomically Modern Africans and stone technology modes

  Anatomically Modern Humans have been around for at least 160,000 years. For perhaps the first 100,000 of those years, most of them made and used the same general class (or ‘mode’) of tools as did the Neanderthals. The technology of these tools was already a sophisticated multistage process. Generally called Middle Palaeolithic technology, they were probably first invented well over 200,000 years ago by African Homo helmei, possibly our common ancestor with Neanderthals (see Chapter 1). Confusingly, Middle Palaeolithic stone tools from different places are known by different terms. Such tools from Europe, North Africa, and the Levant are called Mousterian, after a site in France where specific examples were found associated with Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthal remains. Those tools from sub-Saharan Africa are known as Middle Stone Age.5

  Perhaps the most characteristic features of the Middle Palaeolithic period were a reduction in tool size, hafting, and use of the prepared stone core from which tools were struck out. During the previous period of over a million years, African Homo erectus typically made large hand-axes by shaping a flat core or flake on both sides; what was left of the core or flake became the finished axe. By contrast, the Middle Palaeolithic technologists first carefully prepared a specially shaped core (a technique that had emerged earlier, perhaps 350,000 years ago) and then struck a series of flake tools from it. A final touching-up shaped the final product but preserved the sharp edge of the carefully designed flake.6 The flake could be hafted to make a more useful implement.

  With a couple of exceptions (discussed on pp. 116–18), modern Africans both north and south of the Sahara continued to make and use Middle Stone Age (and earlier) types of tool until around 50,000 years ago. As we saw in Chapter 1, the first modern Africans to leave the continent set up their ill-fated and short-lived colony north of the Sahara, with outposts in the Levant, between 90,000 and 125,000 years ago. As should have been expected of immigrants from North Africa, they were using Middle Palaeolithic tools just like those used by the Neanderthals who had preceded them out of Africa, and of course like the tools used by other Neanderthals who were soon to reoccupy the Levant.

  Human migrants using similar technology

  I stress that we should expect the first modern humans emigrating from Africa over 100,000 years ago to have been using mainly Middle Palaeolithic technology, since there is no evidence for any dramatically newer tradition around in North and East Africa at the time. The 125,000-year-old tools at the beachcombing site near the mouth of the Red Sea – the latter being, in my view, the definitive site of the modern human exodus – were Middle Palaeolithic, though no human remains were found that could identify their makers.

  The same argument can be made for the tools used by their immediate ancestors, who migrated to Asia. Middle Palaeolithic tools first appeared in India about 150,000 years ago, but are most clearly associated there with the last warm interglacial, 125,000 years ago. Such dates could mean either that these tools were brought in by Homo helmei, or that modern humans reached India earlier than has been thought. At any rate, the only skeletal evidence for humans in India between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, the Narmada skull, was definitely not modern and so suggests the former.7

  The oldest incontrovertible evidence for modern humans in Southeast Asia, at Niah Cave in Borneo, includes a modern skull dated to 42,000 years overlying a Middle Palaeolithic flake industry said to be typical of the Indian ‘Soan’ Middle Palaeolithic.8 Since the genetic evidence tells us that a single migration gave rise to all modern non-African humans, this all supports the general principle that the first modern human emigrants from Africa were still making Middle Palaeolithic tools (i.e. similar to those of the Neanderthals) when they crossed the Red Sea. What is curious about Southeast Asia – and serves again to warn against laying too much store by technology – is that apart from that single report of a Middle Palaeolithic flake industry in Niah Cave and several other examples, most of the Southeast Asian Palaeolithic record shows a regression. After that, Southeast Asians generally stopped using prepared cores for a long period. In other words, it could be argued that they reverted to more old-fashioned stone technology.

  The European Upper Palaeolithic: why did blades make it so different? Modern humans such as Cro-Magnons are credited with inventing the next technological stage after the Middle Palaeolithic – the Upper Palaeolithic. As far as stone tools are concerned, what was the main technical advance of the European Upper Palaeolithic? On the whole it was diversity, but a major feature was the development and use of blades. Like many people, I find the esoteric technical terms used by archaeologists to describe chipped stone tools dry and difficult to get my mind around. So I went to see an expert on the Palaeolithic: Professor Derek Roe, director of the Oxford University Quaternary Research Unit, a few streets away from my home.

  Over some excellent coffee, this charming and knowledgeable expert got my hands around some real flakes and blades. In crude terms, blades are knapped or struck off a prepared stone core just as flakes are; but the exact way this is done results in a longer, slimmer flake, leaving behind a prismatic core from which numerous further blades can be knapped (Figure 2.1). The blade, instead of being oval or triangular like a flake, is a long, slender, parallel, slightly curved, double-edged sliver of stone that can be retouched to produce a wide range of secondary tools such as knives, awls, points, and scrapers. The potential advance opened by that slightly different way of chipping the core is huge. First, you get many tools from one prepared core, not just one. This reduces labour enormously, and if the source of good stone is inaccessible or rare it cuts down on fetching and carrying. Second, a huge range of different products can be made from one core. In other words, the inventors of blades began a revolution that had its own inbuilt acceleration.

  I then asked Professor Roe which, in his view, was the greater conceptual leap: in the Middle Palaeolithic, the further development and use of prepared cores from which to strike tools; or in the Upper Palaeolithic, the invention of the struck blade. He thought for a moment. His considered answer was the earlier Middle Palaeolithic achievement, because the use of prepared cores was a multistage process that required the final product to be fixed in the maker’s mind throughout. Any mistake in preparation, and the artisan would have to start again. Striking a blade rather than a flake off the core, although opening tremendous opportunities, was still a single knack at the end point of an existing sequence. In other words, older humans making prepared cores by the time of the Middle Palaeolithic was a more significant conceptual advance than modern humans developing blades in the Upper Palaeolithic, several hundred thousand years later.9

  Figure 2.1 Prepared cores, flakes
and blades. Simplified view of classification of stone tool-making advances (Modes 1–5 from top down), shown in relative, not absolute, chronological order. An advance does not necessarily imply that older modes are discarded – rather, the progress was cumulative.

  Robert Foley takes this ‘hallmark’ view further, arguing that the prepared core technologies of the Middle Palaeolithic mark the appearance of Homo helmei and are also better general markers for the worldwide spread of modern humans than the blades of the Upper Palaeolithic.10

  To explain the ‘conceptual’ paradox of the blade revolution to myself, I tried to think of an everyday example of a rather simple technical insight that resulted in an explosion of diverse useful results, and eventually I thought of Velcro patches. With all due respect to the insight (or foresight) of the inventor, the invention had already been made by plants, in the burr seed that hitches a ride on sheep’s wool. While the inventive originality of the Velcro patch was humdrum, the diverse applications have been revolutionary in many aspects of everyday life.

  Neanderthals were behind the times, but could they catch up?

  So, before 50,000 years ago modern humans were at the same stage as Neanderthals in their use of stone tools – that’s one side of the argument. What about the period from 28,000 to 40,000 years ago, when Neanderthals came into contact with moderns? We might be able to test the opposing hypotheses of better brains versus same brains by looking at what happened when the two groups interacted. If the Neanderthals, with their large brain volume and close evolutionary relationship to the moderns, had simply missed out on a good idea, then they should easily have picked up the new skills of the invaders. If, on the other hand, they really were dumb and these techniques were beyond them, they should have learnt nothing. In the event they did adapt, and in some places they even developed their own versions of some of the new Upper Palaeolithic technologies. But this adaptation was clearly not fast enough.