The cultural evidence
Two well-known teams of anthropologist and archaeologist have recently examined the tools, technology, and lifestyle of our ancestors to measure their potential. Their approaches and discussion frameworks were very different but to my reading, their conclusions were broadly the same. While looking at their work we need continually to put archaeological evidence of variations in technology between different groups back into the perspective of Yali’s question. Conventional writing and reading were invented over 4,000 years ago in the West, but no one argues for a writing gene; the same goes for the dramatic developments of the past century – radio, television, computers, computer language, spacecraft, and so on. In other words, we cannot use the sophistication of any particular recent human technical invention as a biological milestone. Also, much evidence of technical and symbolic culture, such as wood-carving and art painted on wood, is perishable, so there may be less evidence of earlier manifestations in a wood-using culture.
This means that, without adequate context, we cannot assume that evidence of technical innovations points to a biological evolution. From our knowledge of how cultural innovations have spread during our own, recorded, history, we would expect a generally slow cultural improvement to be punctuated by apparent local revolutions, which would then diffuse farther afield and eventually result in an overall acceleration. What is perhaps most important when examining the origins of the Upper Palaeolithic revolution is to look for the geographical location of the immediate precursor culture: North Africa, or South Asia?
Using stone trails to follow people round the world
We should of course start with that most abundant and durable record: stone tools. The Cambridge team of Robert Foley, anthropologist, and Marta Lahr, palaeontologist, have carried out an in-depth review of stone and bone evidence from around the world to see if one really can fit stone technology types to different human species, ancient and modern. Their main conclusion was that the worldwide spread of modern humans is most comprehensively defined by the dated appearance of so-called Mode 3 technology (Figures 2.1 and 2.3) – a technical threshold that was passed by our ancestors Homo helmei in Africa around 300,000 years ago. Originally defined as the use of a specially prepared stone core from which flake tools could be struck off, Mode 3 is really the Middle Palaeolithic under another name. Another way of looking at Mode 3 is not just as a change in knapping technique, but more in terms of the advance from large, heavy hand-axes to smaller stone tools, including sharp flakes, that could be hafted.19 Mode 3 thus coincides with the earliest appearance of the large-brained Homo helmei, who in Foley and Lahr’s view were the common ancestor for both ourselves and Neanderthals. Mode 3 became the main technology used by all members of this latest human family – including moderns – until after 50,000 years ago. The use of prepared cores to generate flakes was conceptually the most complex development, and occurred in the Lower Palaeolithic. If these people were smart enough to make prepared cores, they were probably smart enough to make blades.
Blade production from prepared prismatic cores is the second hallmark technique. However, it is much less useful as a marker of the spread of modern humans, being a late and local event in Europe and around the Mediterranean (and later still in Africa and Asia, though not in Australia). And it is perhaps not reliable as a specific marker for fully modern humans outside Africa, because there is evidence for blade production by others, including contemporary non-moderns (such as the Chatelperronian industries, mentioned in note 11) and earlier modern Africans (such as in Howieson’s Poort, South Africa, 60,000–90,000 years ago), in what are otherwise Middle Stone Age settings. As a final twist, these short-term African appearances of ‘smart’ blades were later replaced again by typical Mode 3 industries. Some archaeologists speculate that blades were invented several times before the Upper Palaeolithic and then forgotten.20 Perhaps the two main practical advances of the Upper Palaeolithic were in blade use: diversity of tools and economy of raw material.
Figure 2.3 The worldwide spread in space and time of stone technology. Increasingly dark shading with time indicates successive spreads of Modes 1–5 (moving from Africa to Europe on the left; and to the Far East on the right). The human species associated with the spread of individual modes are superimposed as a branching tree.
American anthropologist–archaeologist duo Sally McBrearty and Alison Brooks have taken the argument of ancient African Middle Stone Age skills much further. In an in-depth interpretation of the origin of modern human behaviour entitled ‘The revolution that wasn’t’,21 they challenge the orthodoxy of the 40,000–50,000-year-old ‘human revolution’. Instead, in parallel with but using a contrasting approach to Foley and Lahr, who see Mode 3 (Middle Palaeolithic) technologies as defining features of modern human behaviour, McBrearty and Brooks discuss the evolution of modern cultural behaviour in terms of the African Middle Stone Age. The latter ran roughly contemporary with the European Middle Palaeolithic up to the African Late Stone Age, with a prolonged fitful changeover starting sometime after 70,000 years ago. They see the African Middle Stone Age, starting with Homo helmei 250,000–300,000 years ago, as a more dynamic and inventive cultural evolutionary sequence than its Middle Palaeolithic neighbour in Europe, anticipating many behaviours more characteristic of the European Upper Palaeolithic. Over several hundred years, they argue, humans in Africa had gradually assembled, by invention, an increasingly sophisticated cultural and material package of skills. Looking at the African record, only a few of these technical and social advances could be linked to biological milestones as Homo helmei were replaced by modern humans. Much more could be attributed to purely cultural evolution, which has its own accelerating tempo.
Smart African tools
McBrearty and Brooks show that, in contrast to Europe, where the much-vaunted blade tools were a defining feature of the modern human arrival 40,000–50,000 years ago, blades were used off and on during the African Middle Stone Age for as much as 280,000 years, thus predating modern humans by almost a quarter of a million years.22 Another type of stone tool that flourished in the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic was the stone point. Points are basically flakes that have been retouched along both faces to make a point suitable for a spear tip. They have a 250,000-year history in Africa – much longer than that in Europe – and, as McBrearty and Brooks point out, show great regional diversity and sophistication there (Figure 2.4).
One specialized and precise type of stone tool that was first made in Africa turned up rather late in European prehistory: the microlith. Less than 25 mm (1 inch) long and blunted like a penknife along one edge, these tiny but accurately fashioned tools were made from small blades or segments of blades. They had a wide range of uses, particularly when set in complex hafted tools and weapons such as spears, knives, and arrows. A damaged individual microlith on such a weapon could easily be repaired or replaced. Regarded as Mode 5 – the ultimate in stone tool sophistication – they are the hallmark of the African Late Stone Age, turning up first in Mumba Rock Shelter, Tanzania, around 70,000 years ago. However, they appeared in Europe much later – mostly from after the last glaciation 8,000 years ago. The earliest consistent non-African record of microlith industries comes not from Europe but, significantly, from Sri Lanka, around 30,000 years ago, suggesting direct fertilization from Africa via the southern route (see Chapter 4).23
The use of non-stone materials such as bone and antler to make tools and weapons was another novel skill claimed as a European first from 30,000–40,000 years ago. McBrearty and Brooks, however, point to ample evidence for bone tools in Africa up to 100,000 years ago. Not only that, but some of the first African bone tools were barbed points looking like harpoon tips (see Figure 2.4).
Figure 2.4 Map of the distribution of stone point styles found from the African Middle Stone Age. Note also barbed ‘harpoon tips’ from Katanda.
Another fascinating item in the human toolkit that dates back 280,000 years to the time of our gran
dparents Homo helmei is the grindstone. Grindstones have nearly always had two completely different functions: to grind food, and to grind mineral pigments such as red and yellow ochre from lumps of rock. The latter application is much more relevant to the story of our intellectual evolution.24
African artists
Pigment use has been regarded as another hallmark of the European Upper Palaeolithic,25 so its appearance up to 280,000 years ago, in Africa, shows that the overemphasis on the beautiful Chauvet paintings as a first sign of symbolic behaviour has blinded us to the same stirrings of the mind in our more distant ancestors. Pigment was used so heavily in Africa up to 100,000 years ago that mining for minerals such as haematite was on what might be called an industrial scale. Quarrying began in Europe only 40,000 years ago. At one African mine, at least 1,200 tonnes of pigment ore had been extracted from a cliff face.26 Some anthropologists and archaeologists get excited about the systematic use of pigment because they believe it to be early evidence, along with burials, for symbolic behaviour. Pigments were used for painting of walls and objects, for body painting, for use in burials, and to cure hides. Neanderthals used pigment, although the dating of finds seems to indicate that they acquired the use by cultural diffusion from early moderns. Sadly, we shall never know how much body hair Neanderthals evolved to combat the cold, but this could have reduced the ease and practicality of body-painting.
Both vegetable and mineral pigments were used by Upper Palaeolithic humans, but much of the clear evidence for vegetable pigments during the African Middle Stone Age will have decayed over time. Actual evidence of representational painting is also limited by time, particularly in Africa, which possesses far fewer limestone caves of the sort in which the Lascaux and Chauvet paintings have been preserved. A curious point about Chauvet Cave, the earliest of European artistic canvasses, is that it represents the best we know of Palaeolithic art. With its extraordinarily realistic and imaginative action paintings, some of which exploit pre-existing physical features such as rocky outcrops for dramatic effect, Chauvet does not look like the first faint glimmerings of symbolic consciousness. What we see is a fully mature style, a confident peak from which later cave painting could only go downhill.27
However, the first clear evidence of representational painting was not found in Europe but in a cave in Namibia, in southern Africa, dated by its Middle Stone Age context to between 40,000 and 60,000 years ago, thus preceding European painting (see Plate 11). Haematite ‘pencils’ with wear facets have also been found in various parts of southern Africa, dating from more than 100,000 years ago. This sort of evidence in itself again contradicts the European location for the ‘Human Symbolic Revolution’. As McBrearty and Brooks point out, painting could have an even greater antiquity in Africa, but the direct evidence has now perished or remains to be found when the same intensity of European research is applied to African sites.28
Recognizable pictures of people, animals, and things need not be the first evidence for symbolic representation in any case. Regular scratches, cross-hatching, and notching of pieces of stone or mineral pigment blocks are likely to have had some symbolic purpose. Such artefacts appear in the African record from 100,000 years ago. Arguably the earliest evidence of such deliberate patterning of stone comes from sandstone caves in India around the Lower–Middle Palaeolithic transition, anywhere between 150,000 and 300,000 years ago. Australian archaeologist Robert Bednarik argues, controversially, that a number of meandering scored lines and cupules (shallow depressions on a rock face) in the Bhimbetka caves near Bhopal are the earliest evidence of symbolic art anywhere.29
African ornaments
Personal ornamentation, for instance with beads and pendants, is claimed by archaeologists to show the novel sophistication of ritual and symbolic practices in the European Upper Palaeolithic. There is evidence for body ornamentation in Europe used by fully modern humans from about 40,000 years ago, but it was a particular feature of the Gravettian cultures that emerged about 30,000 years ago although there is evidence for it from 40,000 years ago. One of the most dramatic examples of such body decoration was found in a grave site 200 km (125 miles) east of Moscow at Sunghir. Here, 24,000 years ago, very close to the approaching ice sheets of the imminent glacial maximum, two graves were dug for three occupants, an old man and two children. They were all dressed in garments richly decorated with thousands of ivory beads (see Plate 12). Ivory bracelets, wands, animal figurines, and pendants completed the adornment.30
McBrearty and Brooks have shown that personal ornamentation in Africa predated that in Europe by tens of thousands of years. They cite a perforated shell pendant, buried with an infant, dated to 105,000 years ago in South Africa, and other decorations and drilled pendants dated back to at least 130,000 years ago in the African Middle Stone Age. Ostrich-shell drilled beads are a feature of the African Late Stone Age and may go back to 60,000 years.31
As we can see from Figure 2.5 (which summarizes the evidence for the rather gradual acquisition of the elements of ‘modern’ culture over the past 300,000 years), using pigment, making symbolic marks on rocks, and fashioning blades and points were not actually inventions of modern humans at all. These skills and symbolic behaviours originated over 250,000 years ago – rather early on in the history of our archaic ancestor. More perishable evidence of complex culture, such as painting and beads, are still found in Africa from tens of thousands of years before the first such signs in Europe. Mining, bone tools, and bone harpoons appear from 100,000 years ago. In all these later instances the skills were chronologically and clearly associated with moderns.
Figure 2.5 Modern behaviours and evidence of their time depths of acquisition in Africa over the past 300,000 years. Four out of fourteen are present before modern humans, and the majority before the European Upper Palaeolithic.
African fishers
These ‘modern’ innovations were all things people made. When we look at what they did, we find an even more fascinating horizon of behaviour apparently starting between 110,000 and 140,000 years ago – just after the period of our emergence in the fossil record as a modern African species. While we should still not fall into the trap of automatically attributing new skills to any unique genetic change, it is worth looking at new behaviours that might have given us the edge over our large-brained ancestor, Homo helmei. Adapting to new and varied foods such as fish and shellfish may have been the key 150,000 years ago. Not to be outdone, Neanderthals also practised beachcombing 60,000 years ago on the Mediterranean.32
Arguably the most important animal behaviour is obtaining food. The last 2 million years have seen more and more of Africa turn into desert, making it increasingly difficult to find food. Humans had to become more ingenious in order to stay alive, and moulded themselves into the highly evolved savannah hunter-gatherers that we became. Archaic humans were capable of hunting large and dangerous herbivores from the early Middle Stone Age.33 A severe glacial period lasting from 130,000 to 170,000 years ago nearly wiped out the game on which human populations depended for calories and protein. It may therefore be no coincidence that from 140,000 years ago the African Middle Stone Age shows a new subsistence type – beachcombing – gathering shellfish on the seashore to supplement game as a source of protein.
Beachcombing was also seen in South Africa, at Klasies River mouth, but it is the Eritrean Red Sea coastal beachcombing site of Abdur that is most interesting for our story. This is, after all, where the Australian beachcombing trek may have started (see Chapter 1). Here, around 125,000 years ago, at the sea-level highpoint of the last interglacial we see Middle Stone Age tools and shellfish remains jumbled together with the butchered remains of large African game (see Plate 8). McBrearty and Brookes argue that extension from beachcombing to actual fishing had occurred in Africa by 110,000 years ago.34
I recently had the privilege of being shown the famous Abdur reef by its discoverer, Eritrean geologist Seife Berhe. Driving down steep escarpments, we left the cool watered highla
nds surrounding the capital, Asmara, 2,200 metres (7,200 feet) above sea level, and soon came to the baking coast of the Red Sea at the war-scarred, Arabflavoured port of Massawa. Stopping briefly for water and ice, we travelled south for three hours along a ribbed, dusty, all-weather coastal road. Stunning young volcanic scenery and high folds of mountains alternated with dry, silted alluvial plains. We were held up only briefly, by a puncture caused by a sharp volcanic rock.
This was the end of the dry season, and stunted bushes, mainly acacia, were the only green. The occasional gazelle, jackal, hare, bustard, or eagle were the only remnants I saw of the larger game that abounded here before the recent war. Everywhere we saw herds of camels, goats, cattle, and fat-tailed desert sheep. Apart from some nomadic herdsmen, the Afars are the only indigenous population on this part of the coast, and they stretch right down to Djibouti. Living in simple airy brushwood huts, the Afars were mutually dependent on their herds, and drew water for the entire flock every day from wells dug in dry river beds. We camped on the edge of one of these dry estuaries on a flat sandy plain, raised 10 metres (about 30 feet) above the beach.
I soon discovered that we were in fact camped on the famous raised 125,000-year-old reef. When the climate had started to worsen 120,000 years ago, the sea level had dropped, leaving this reef dry with all the different types of coral and shells beautifully preserved right up to the surface of the ground under our feet. A steady tectonic uplift had continued to raise the entire coastal reef another 5 meters (15 feet), creating a cliff that runs along the coast for 10 km (6 miles). This extra uplift had protected the reef from the erosional effects of another high sea level 5,500 years ago.
Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World Page 13
