Ideas
Page 5
Steven Mithen, an archaeologist at the University of Reading, in Britain, has conceived the primitive mind as consisting of three entities: a technical intelligence (producing stone tools), a natural history intelligence (understanding the landscape and wildlife around him/her), and a social intelligence (the skills needed to live in groups). At the level of H. habilis, says Mithen, there is no evidence that social intelligence was integrated with the other two. The stone tools are associated with animal bones–the victims of early hunters. But from the evidence so far obtained there is no social separation of tools and food, no evidence at all of organised group activity–the earliest archaeological sites are just a jumble of tools and bones.18
From this faltering beginning, a major step forward was taken some time between 1.8 and 1.6 million years ago, with the appearance of another new species, Homo erectus–upright man–found first at Koobi Fora and then in Java. With his ‘sad, wary face and flat nose’, H. erectus was the first human to leave Africa, other remains having been found in Dmanisi in Georgia, and in mainland Asia: in October 2004 stone tools believed to have been made by H. erectus were reported as having been found in Majuangou, west of Beijing, and dated to 1.66 million years ago.19 He or she shows a further increase in brain size, the second-most sizeable jump–but perhaps the most important of all–to 750–1,250 cc, though the skulls were also marked by robust brow ridges.20 After what we may call a ‘technology lag’ of about 400,000 years, we find that at around 1.4 million years ago, the earliest true hand-axes appear. These, the third type of hand-axe, are ‘true’ in the sense that they are now symmetrical, formed by knocking flakes off the core alternately from either side, to produce an elegant long point and a stone with a pear shape. These are known to professionals as Acheulian because they were first discovered by French archaeologists in the Amiens suburb of St Acheul. (Much stone-age terminology is based on the place names of French sites–Cro-Magnon, Mousterian, Levallois–where French archaeologists were the first to make the discoveries.) These hand-axes appear abruptly in the archaeological record in Africa, Europe and parts of Asia (though much less so in south-west Asia and not at all in south-east or east Asia). Some palaeontologists believe that H. erectus was a hunter, the first true hunter, rather than a scavenger, and that his better tools enabled him to spread across Eurasia, what is sometimes called the Old World.
Homo erectus may also have invented cooking. This is inferred because, although he was 60 per cent larger than his predecessors, he had a smaller gut and teeth. This could be accounted for by cooking which, in breaking down the indigestible fibre of plants into energy-giving carbohydrate, puts fewer demands on the teeth and alimentary canal. For this reason, the most interesting H. erectus site is probably Zhoukoudien (literally ‘Dragon Bone Hill’), a cave situated about twenty-five miles south-west of Beijing in a range of limestone hills. In a series of excavations carried out mainly in the 1930s, the site was dated to about 400,000–300,000 years ago. The significance of Zhoukoudien is that it appears to have been a base camp from which H. erectus hunted and brought back their kills to be cooked and eaten. But were the animals (again, large mammals such as elephants, rhinoceros, boars and horses) actually cooked? A quantity of hackberry seeds was found at Zhoukoudien, making them the earliest plant remains known, and they probably survived only because they had been burnt. The consensus now appears to be that this wasn’t the purposeful use of fire, as we would understand it, but the issue–like so much else at that period–remains unresolved.21
Claims have been made for the use of fire as far back as 1.42 million years ago. At least thirteen African sites provide evidence, the earliest being Chesowanja in Kenya, which contained animal bones alongside Oldowan tools and burnt clay. As many as fifty pieces of burnt clay were found and, to some palaeontologists, the layout of certain stones suggested a hearth. Tantalisingly, no burnt clay was found outside this narrow area and tests on the clay itself showed it to have been fired to about 400°, roughly typical of campfires.22 Stone tools have been found in association with burnt animal remains at several sites in China dating from before one million years ago. Johan Goudsblom has pointed out that no animal species controls fire, as humans do. Some prehistorians believe that early humans may have followed fire, because roasted animal flesh is better preserved (chimpanzees have been observed searching for afzelia beans after bush fires; normally too tough to eat, after a fire they crumble easily).23 The archaeologist C. K. Brain advanced the idea that it was man’s control of fire which helped convert him from being the prey of the big cats to being a predator–fire offered protection that earlier man lacked. And in Spain there is evidence of the use of fire as a way to corral elephants into a bog, where they were butchered. Later, keeping a fire alive continuously would have encouraged social organisation.24 The latest evidence reports a campfire, with burnt flint fragments, in tiny clusters, suggesting hearths, dated to 790,000 years ago, at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in northern Israel. The control and use of fire may therefore count as one of primitive man’s three earliest ideas.
From such ancient skulls as have been unearthed, we may conclude that there were two early spurts in brain growth, the first being the larger, each of which was associated with a change in stone technology: these were the first tools, associated with H. habilis, and bifacial Acheulian tools, associated with H. erectus. After this, apart from the use of fire, only one thing seems to have happened for nearly a million years. This was the ‘standardisation’ of the hand-axe, around 700,000 years ago. Allowing for individuality, and for the fact that, about a million years ago, H. erectus spread out over much of Eurasia(i.e., not the northern latitudes, Australia or the Americas)–and therefore had to deal with very different forms of stone–hand-axes everywhere nevertheless began to show an extraordinary degree of uniformity. Thousands of hand-axes have now been examined by palaeontologists from all over the world, and they have shown that, although of different sizes, most axes are constructed in almost identical proportions. This is not chance, say the experts. V. Gordon Childe, the eminent Australian archaeologist, actually went so far as to say that the standardised tool was ‘a fossil idea’ and that it needed a certain capacity for abstract thought on the part of H. erectus. In order to produce a standardised tool, Childe argued, early man needed some sort of image of tools in general. Others have gone further. ‘Hand-axes from many…sites, show that…the mental apparatus already existed for [early man to make] basic mathematical transformations without the benefit of pen, paper or ruler. It was essentially the same operation as Euclid was to formalise hundreds of thousands of years later.’25
A third spurt in brain size occurred around 500,000–300,000 years ago, with a jump from 750–1,250 cc (for H. erectus), to 1,100–1,400 cc. In Africa, this new, larger-brained individual is known as archaic H. sapiens, and it would later give rise to the Neanderthals. After another ‘technology lag’, and beginning around 250,000 years ago, we see the introduction of the fourth type of stone tool, produced now by the so-called Levallois technique. Crude hand-axes die out at this point, to be replaced by stone nodules much more carefully prepared. Levallois-Perret is a suburb of Paris and it was during an excavation in the French capital that archaeologists first recognised that, instead of relying on chance, which involved striking a stone to produce a flake, early man of 250,000 years ago knew enough about stone fracture dynamics (‘early physics’) to be able to predict the shape of the tool he was producing. Pebbles about the size of a hand were selected, vertical flakes were knocked off the edges until a crown was produced roughly the size of the palm of a hand. Then, with a swift horizontal blow, a bevelled flake was dislodged, with a sharp edge all around. As a result of this, stone tools took many different forms (up to sixty-three different types, according to one expert), and could even be hafted, to become spear points. Not surprisingly, the technique spread quickly throughout Africa, Asia and Europe.
At much the same time, possibly earlier, around 420,000 years ago, th
e first hunting spears appear. What is almost certainly one of the oldest wooden artefacts ever found is the Clacton spear point, unearthed at Clacton, Essex in England in 1911 and dated to between 420,000 and 360,000 years ago. Even more impressive were three javelin-like spears found in a coal mine at Schöningen, south-west of Hanover in Germany, which date back 400,000 years. The longest is 2.3 metres (7 feet, 7 inches) in length. They are shaped like a modern javelin (with a swelling towards the front), meaning they were throwing rather than thrusting spears.26 Ochre was also used for the first time around then. The Wonderwerk cave in South Africa may have been the earliest mine we have evidence of, for lying among the many hand-axes found in the cave are pieces of ochre chipped off local rock.27 At Terra Amata, in the south of France–a site dated to 380,000 years ago–ochre has again been found associated with Acheulian tools, and this time the lumps show signs of wear. Does this mean they were used as ‘crayons’ and does that imply symbolic behaviour on the part of early man? Tantalising, but there are tribal peoples alive today who use ochre either as a way to treat animal skins or else as an insect repellent, to staunch bleeding, or as protection from the sun. Ochre may have been the first medicament.28
Moving forward, to 350,000–300,000 years ago, we find at the Bilzingsleben site, near Halle in Germany, three round dwelling places, each comprising, mainly, piles of stones and bones though there is also evidence for the existence of hearths, and special tool-making areas. These early workshops still had ‘anvil’ stones in place.29 In 2003 it was announced that the skulls of two Homo sapiens adults and a child, unearthed at the village of Herto, 140 miles north-east of Addis Ababa, had enigmatic cut-marks made with stone tools, suggesting that flesh was stripped away from their heads after death. Was this a funerary ritual of some kind?
The first signs of undisputed intentional burial date to 120,000 to 90,000 years ago, at the Qafzeh and Skhul caves in Israel.30 The bones contained in these ‘graves’ were very similar to modern humans but here the picture becomes complicated by the arrival of the Neanderthals. From about 70,000 years ago, both the Neanderthals (whose remains have never been found in Africa or the Americas) and Homo sapiens were, at least sometimes, burying their dead. This of course is a very significant development, perhaps the next purely abstract idea after the standardisation of tools. This is because intentional burial may indicate an early concern with the afterlife, and a primitive form of religion.
The old image of the Neanderthals as brutish and primitive is now much outmoded. Quite a lot is known about their intellectual life and although it was simple compared with our own, the advance it represented on life forms that went before is clear. While they were alive, the Neanderthals developed more or less in parallel with modern humans. The latest excavations in Spain show that Neanderthals for example knew enough to ‘settle’ in areas of greatest biotic diversity.31 The picture is, however, muddied by the emergence of anatomically modern humans, who seem to have arisen in Africa between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago and then spread out across the globe. They are believed to be descended from archaic H. sapiens, or H. heidelbergensis, with smaller teeth, no brow ridges, and a brain size of between 1,200 and 1,700 cc. And so from then, until around 31,000 years ago, when we find the last traces of the Neanderthals, these two forms of humanity lived side-by-side, and such artefacts as remain could belong to either. The French palaeontologist, Francesco d’Errico, concludes that both Neanderthals and H. sapiens showed evidence of ‘modern behaviour’.32
Until about 60,000 years ago, for example, we find thick ash deposits, burnt bone and charcoal becoming very common in both open and cave sites.33 Middle Palaeolithic people had fire, it appears, but they did not yet build elaborate hearths. (Middle Palaeolithic applies to the period of the Neanderthals and the fifth kind of stone hand-axe–blade tools, dating to 250,000–60,000 BP–years before the present.) Only at around 60,000 years ago do we find controlled fire, proper hearths–at Vilas Ruivas in Portugal and at Molodova on the Dnestr river in Russia–significantly associated with windbreaks made from mammoth bones. In fact, it seems that here the first undisputed use of fire may have been less for cooking, but rather for defrosting the huge carcasses of large mammals frozen in winter, and which other scavengers, like hyenas, would have been unable to touch.34
Some of the Neanderthal sites, especially in the Middle East, seem to show individuals who have been buried, and one was associated with flower pollen. This is disputed, however, and it is not at all clear whether these are ritual burials. In these so-called Neanderthal graves, more than one individual lies with his or her head resting on his or her arm, so in theory these people could have died in their sleep and just have been left where they were (though the practice has not been found among earlier hominids). Other burials have been accompanied by the remains of red ochre, or with goat horns stuck into the ground nearby. Though many archaeologists favour naturalistic explanations of these discoveries–i.e., the apparent association is accidental–it is quite possible that the Neanderthals did bury their dead with an associated ritual that implies some form of early religion. Certainly, at this time there is a sudden increase in the recovery of complete or nearly complete skeletons, which is also suggestive.35
In assessing the significance of these burials it is important to say first that the sample size consists of about sixty graves only and so, given the time-frame involved, we are talking about an average of two burials per thousand years. With that qualification in mind, there are three further factors worth discussing. One is the age and sex of the bodies buried. Many were children or juveniles, enough to suggest that there was a ‘cult of the dead’, in particular of children, who were buried with more ceremony than adults, designed perhaps to ensure their rebirth. At the same time, more males than females were buried, hinting that males enjoyed higher status than females. A third factor is that in one case of a Neanderthal discovered in the Shanidar caves in northern Iraq the man was blind, suffered from arthritis and had his right arm amputated just above the elbow. This individual lived till he was forty, when he was killed by a rock fall; so until this point, his colleagues had evidently looked after him.36 The amputation of his arm also implies some medical knowledge, and this idea was further fuelled by the discovery of a second individual at Shanidar, dated to around 60,000 BP, who had been buried with no fewer than seven species of flower, all of which had medicinal properties. These included woody horsetail (Ephedra), which has a long history of use in Asia to treat coughs and respiratory disorders, and as a stimulant to promote endurance on protracted hunting forays.37 Were these medicinal herbs/flowers placed in the graves as substances to help the dead on their journey to the next world, or were they, as critics claim, simply used as bedding, or, even more prosaically, blown into the caves by the wind, or buried by rodents?
The consensus now among palaeontologists and archaeologists is that, prior to about 60,000–40,000 years ago, archaic H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis did not show symbolic behaviour and had a fairly limited capacity to plan ahead. Paul Mellars, of Cambridge, distinguishes three major changes at the transition to the Upper Palaeolithic. There was first a distinct shift in stone technology–in the Middle Palaeolithic ‘tools do not appear to have been produced with clearly defined preconceived “mental templates” about the final, overall form of the finished tools’, whereas in contrast the Upper Palaeolithic tools, the fifth kind, besides being smaller and better controlled, are far more standardised, their shapes conforming to ‘clearly preconceived morphological “norms”.’38 Mellars also distinguished a change in bone technology, from the use of random fragments to the shaping of bone. And, third, from unstructured to highly structured–even rectangular–settlements. He argues that all this amounted almost to a ‘culture’ with ‘norms’ of behaviour. By and large, he says, these changes reflect the growth of long-term planning, strategic behaviour on the part of early humans of this period, in which individuals are anticipating behaviour in the future.39 He says
that he does not think this could have been accomplished without language.
Other palaeontologists believe that the emergence of complicated tool-making is, in brain terms, analogous to speech and that the two activities emerged at the same time. In modern experiments, for example, James Steele and his colleagues found that, on average, 301 strikes were needed to form Acheulian biface hand-axes (the third kind, associated with H. erectus), taking 24 minutes. Such a sequence, they argue, is like constructing sentences, and they point out that damage to Broca’s area in the brain results in impairment to both language and hand and arm gestures.40 Language is considered more fully in the next chapter.
The period we have been covering, say 400,000–50,000 years ago, has been identified by Merlin Donald, professor of psychology at Queen’s University in Toronto, as possibly the most momentous stage in history. Donald has identified four stages in the development of the modern mind, involving three transitions. The first mode he calls ‘episodic’ thinking, as is shown in the great apes. Their behaviour, he says, consists of short-term responses to the environment, their lives are lived ‘entirely in the present’, as a series of concrete episodes, with a memory for specific events in a specific context.41 The second form of thinking/behaving, typified by H. erectus, is ‘mimetic’. For Donald, the world of H. erectus is qualitatively different from all that went before and this is what makes it so important. Erectus lived in a ‘society where cooperation and social coordination of action were central to the species’ survival strategy’.42 Without language, Erectus nonetheless slowly developed a culture based on mimetics–intentional mime and imitation, facial expression, mimicry of sounds, gestures etc. This was a qualitative change, says Donald, because it allowed for intentionality, creativity, reference, co-ordination and, perhaps above all, pedagogy, the acculturation of the young. It was a momentous change also because minds/individuals were no longer isolated. ‘Even highly sophisticated animals, such as apes, have no choice but to approach the world solipsistically because they cannot share ideas and thoughts in any detail. Each ape learns only what it learns for itself. Every generation starts afresh because the old die with their wisdom sealed forever in their brains…There are no shortcuts for an isolated mind.’43 Even so, mimesis was slow–it probably took Erectus half a million years to domesticate fire and three-quarters of a million to adapt to the cold.44 But Donald is in no doubt that many cultural artefacts had been produced by Erectus before language and the next transition, to ‘mythic’ thinking, which necessitates language. The shift to mimesis was the great divide in history, Donald says–it was, as he puts it, ‘The Great Hominid escape from the nervous system.’45 The later transitions are considered below.