It is unlikely that the people who lived in the huts killed any of these mammoths. Instead they scavenged the bones from what must have been the remains of thousands of animals lying about the landscape. In fact, such bones are still part of the landscape in remote areas. There are villages in Siberia where carving mammoth ivory into delicate figurines and filigreed boxes is a cottage industry even today. One naturally assumes that such ivory is rare, but it comes from the remains of millions of mammoths still frozen beneath the Siberian wastes.
About 40,000 years ago Homo sapiens walked into this vast domain where animals ruled. The new arrivals were identical in every respect to modern people except that they were probably slightly taller on average than people in the West today. And they behaved like modern people. They had powerfully developed intellects and a rich imaginative life. They cared about appearances and decorated their bodies and their clothes with signs of wealth, rank, and kinship. And they spoke a complex language. The old cliche is actually true. An Ice Age couple with the man wearing a coat and tie and the woman a contemporary dress would be indistinguishable from their fellow passengers on the New York subway or Paris Metro, and, given enough time to become accustomed to the modern world, the couple would get along as well as anyone else.
The new arrivals appeared only after many generations of migration up from Africa, through the Levant, and then, always moving east to west, across the Balkans and the rest of Europe until they reached the Atlantic Ocean, an insuperable barrier to any further westward migration. Only then, after they had arrived at the end of the trail in what was at that time an isolated corner of the world, did the painting in caves commence.
The word “migration” is misleading because there weren't many people. The population of Homo sapiens was minuscule. Forty thousand years ago there were probably no more than five thousand people in all of what is present-day France.
These new arrivals were, like every other animal, the result of millions of years of evolution. The long saga of human evolution is filled with subtleties, uncertainties, and yawning abysses in our knowledge. Fortunately, though, for understanding the cave paintings, the saga can be summarized using just five approximate but important dates. The first is somewhere between 5 and 7 million years ago. That is the last time that humans and chimpanzees—our closest relative among animals living today—had a common ancestor. At that time a species of ape living in Africa south of the Sahara desert exhibited an abrupt evolutionary change and became the first hominid—a term for a group of species related to but distinct from apes. This first hominid still looked like an ape and probably spent much of its life in trees as apes do; but when it was on the ground, it walked upright on two legs. The erect posture freed the hands for carrying food, but otherwise no one knows exactly why walking upright was an evolutionary advantage. Early theories that walking upright required less energy or exposed less body area to the sun have been disproved, and later theories have not attracted much interest or support.
Whatever the reason may be, walking on two legs was an evolutionary advantage or we wouldn't be here today. And its success was evident even in those remote times. As millennium after millennium dragged on, other species of hominids appeared in central and eastern Africa until one of these species that lived in what is now central Ethiopia began making crude stone tools— and this is the second crucial date—about 2.5 million years ago.
These oldest known tools were found conveniently deposited in a layer of volcanic ash that was easy to date precisely, but there were no hominid bones along with the tools. Consequently, it's impossible to tell which species made this brilliant breakthrough. It may well have been one still unknown to science. But one thing is certain: the species that made the tools is our distant but direct ancestor.
These stone tools were not very impressive, being nothing more than chips cobbled by knocking one stone against another. Still, making even these rudimentary tools required some judgment about where to strike the stone to obtain a flake. The need for such judgment put making stone tools beyond the ability of any ape or chimpanzee, as modern experiments in trying to train chimps have shown. In general the toolmakers put a long edge on large, hefty stones and used them for smashing bones or ripping apart a carcass. And they chipped off flakes of quartz or lava and used them to cut into hides, something the flakes did surprisingly well. The appearance of the long-edged stones or of the flakes hardly concerned their makers at all. They were concerned only with creating an edge. These tools, once invented, did not improve—or even change—for a million years. Our lost and distant ancestor who began making tools apparently had one very good, revolutionary idea, and that was all.
After many years of sameness, a change came at last about 1.5 million years ago—the third important date. That was when the hand axe first appeared. Its inventor, a species of hominid whose scientific name is Homo ergaster, had first appeared 1.8 to 2 million years ago. The brain of ergaster was small compared to ours, but it was half again larger than the brain of any previous hominid. Except for the size of the brain, ergaster looked eerily like us. Unlike its forebears, it was more human than ape. Its arms were shorter than its legs, which must mean that it lived always on the ground and not in trees. Its pelvis and hips had developed to enhance the ability to walk upright, and anthropologists speculate that ergaster was the first primate to have a nearly hairless body. Its nose, instead of being flat and internal to the skull like an ape ‘s, stuck out like a human's.
We call ergaster‘s signature tool the hand axe, but that simple name hides a nagging uncertainty. We don't know what hand axes were used for. Inevitably described in anthropology textbooks as “tear shaped,” hand axes had a curved top and two straight sides that ended in a point. They were flaked to an edge on both sides and the sharp edge usually ran all the way around the perimeter of the tool. This means that a man who used such an axe to chop something would cut his own hand in the process. Nor would hand axes have been much good for hunting. If thrown, the axes would have been little more than an annoyance to a game animal, and the technological advance of putting a shaft on a point was still more than a million years in the future. In addition, all the tasks hand axes might have been used for—chopping, cutting, slicing, and so on—can be accomplished by simpler tools that require far less time to make. Why should our ancient relatives have, as it were, overinvested their time in hand axes? Some sites have hundreds of hand axes with no signs of wear, while other sites have just two or three well-worn axes. Some sites have no hand axes at all, while other sites in the vicinity from the same time and the same culture do have them. All these anomalies led two well-regarded scholars, Marek Kohn and Steven Mithen, to propose in 1999 that hand axes weren't really tools at all but were created and horded by males as a kind of sexual display.
That theory, which cannot be proved or disproved, is at least in keeping with the significance of the hand axe for us. Previously, as we have seen, tools had a random appearance depending on how the chips broke off the rock. But to make a hand axe, Homo ergaster must have had the classic tear shape in mind before beginning. Then he shaped the rock until it conformed to that image. This brilliant leap, a million years in the making, was even more revolutionary than the original idea of making tools at all. The purpose of the hand axe may be confusing to us, but its shape is not. Symmetrical, classical in that it combines a curve with straight lines in a simple composition, a well-made hand axe is as aesthetically pleasing to us today as it must have been when it was made. In fact, if Kohn and Mithen are right in their conjecture, the aesthetics of hand axes were their whole value and purpose. The shape of the hand axe was an abstract idea. In all history, the hand axe itself was the first abstract idea to be made real. And humble Homo ergaster, who looked like us but had a much smaller brain, was the first living being to transform a vision into an object.
The last two dates necessary for understanding the art in the caves are 150,000 and 47,000 years ago. They are more precise than
the previous three dates because there is more archaeological evidence associated with them. If only that made things simpler! Instead there is continuing controversy about what the evidence means.
As befits a visionary, ergaster was the first hominid species to migrate out of Africa. Starting no later than 1.8 million years ago, members of the species spread from the Horn of Africa across to Asia, where their descendants were a species known to us as Homo erectus, which includes the famous Java man and Peking man. Ergaster also moved up through what is present-day Egypt to Israel and far beyond into Europe, where ergaster and its descendants survived until 150,000 years ago. Their hand axes are found as far north as the British Isles. The descendants of ergaster in Europe eventually evolved into the Neanderthals.
In Africa the descendants of ergaster developed increasingly large brains until about 150,000 years ago, when the first modern humans, Homo sapiens, finally appeared. No one knows exactly where or how this occurred. East Africa is one likely setting for this momentous event because at the time it had a varied terrain with cul-de-sacs and cutoff regions that could have created the isolation necessary for a small population of one species to evolve into another. We may never find any evidence of the first true humans, since the original breeding population could have been very small—fifty people or even fewer—so that evidence of their existence might not have survived.
The appearance of these early Homo sapiens should be comforting, in a way. Here at last, after millions of years, we see ourselves present in the world. Instead the early Homo sapiens seem peculiarly distant from us. These early humans, who were anatomically identical to us, did not act like us. They were like characters in a science fiction novel whose souls have been leached away by some alien power, leaving them mere automatons.
They were cleverer than any of their ancestors. They had better tools, they could successfully hunt a wider variety of game, and they even on rare occasions made decorative objects or grooved a pattern of lines on a rock. But according to the evidence, they didn't think, create, or imagine as we do. Instead, apart from the most rare exceptions, everything they made was simply utilitarian.
Then, about 47,000 years ago, Homo sapiens, who had always looked like us, now began to behave like us as well. After that time, their sites are flush with carvings, figurines, and other art. They performed elaborate burials. They decorated their bodies and clothes with shells, beads, and the teeth of animals. All of this implies a rich culture, a focused intelligence, and a probing, seeking imaginative life, none of which had been present before.
There is no apparent reason for this sudden change. Richard G. Klein of Stanford University believes that the change was the result of a neurological change in the brains of Homo sapiens that occurred about 47,000 years ago. Specifically, he believes that this sudden neural alteration created the ability to speak a complicated language. Without language, symbolic thinking would have been impossible. With language, people did begin to think symbolically, and all our art and culture, our music and myths and tales, and all our religions are the result.
Of course, a change inside the brain could not and did not leave any archaeological record. Klein's theory will always remain an informed speculation, and Klein believes in it almost by default, thinking that nothing else but the sudden appearance of language could account for such a radical change in behavior.
Scientists who disagree with Klein say that there was no sudden change and that the symbolic behavior was present from the moment modern anatomy appeared. However, these arguments depend on a handful of carved or engraved objects in a few sites widely separated by time and space. Accidents of nature, rather than human hands, may have created some of the supposed symbolic objects. Even if all the objects are real human artifacts, they are so rare compared with the symbolic richness of sites after 47,000 years that they could be mere anomalies rather than the precursors of a revolution. Thus the debate over human origins has become distilled to unpersuasive arguments versus Klein's unprovable hypothesis. Welcome to modern anthropology.
However this came to be, by 47,000 years ago Homo sapiens had abilities beyond those of any other hominid then living. Numbers of them began to leave Africa looking for new territory, and they fanned out across the globe. Some moved north through the Levant, and then farther north to Eastern Europe. Some then turned west across central Europe and continued west until they reached the valleys of the Pyrenees. All along their westward journey they encountered another hominid, distinct in both appearance and behavior but still uncomfortably similar, who had been living in these territories for at least 100,000 years. This must have been one of the most dramatic confrontations in all history, the moment when modern humans who arrived in Western Europe laid eyes on the Neanderthals. And, of course, that same moment was when the Neanderthals of Western Europe, isolated and unsuspecting, laid eyes on us.
Scholarly writing by anthropologists is supposed to be scientific and therefore completely unemotional. But during the last thirty years or so, papers in the leading journals have often been infused with sentimentality about the Neanderthals. Throughout the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, Neanderthals were considered to have been thick, hairy, brutish creatures that walked in a stooped shuffle. Their short foreheads and large, jutting jaws made them look like the cretins they were thought to be. That image turns out to be completely wrong, and careful scholarship and inspired rethinking have been able to correct it. But now the view threatens to become just as misleading in the opposite way. Papers keep appearing in which the slightest wisp of evidence is paraded as proof of the Neanderthals’ compassion, tenderness, and intelligence. One scholar, evidently enthralled by his visions of Neanderthals dancing hand in hand in a circle, described them as “the first flower children.”
In most cases the sentimentality is more muted than that, but there is a subtle reason why it persists. It is not simply a matter of the pendulum's swinging too far in the effort to correct the mistaken brutish image. Anthropologists study indigenous people around the globe, especially those who may still be living in Stone Age societies and who are often treated badly by the governments and other institutions that are more powerful than they. Anthropologists are hardly the only ones who are sympathetic toward these unfortunate people and accurately see them as victims. And, consistent with the political climate in universities for the past thirty years or so, there is an emphasis on seeing a pattern of exploitation and even extermination repeated again and again, beginning with Columbus arriving in the Americas and continuing through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as Western imperialists advanced around the globe.
With such a view of the modern world and of recent history, it is inevitable that some researchers would come to see the Neanderthals as victims, too—to see them, in fact, as the very first victims of imperialism and to see our ancestors, the advancing modern humans, as history's first merciless and greedy conquerors.
It soon becomes clear that this analogy with imperialism is an attempt to fit a template from the modern world over the remote past, a mistake anthropologists usually recognize and reject. There were no empires in the Stone Age; neither did the new arrivals have an overwhelming advantage in arms and technology. Their contact may even have been friendly or, more likely, rare to nonexistent, since the two groups coexisted in the same territory for thousands of years before the Neanderthals finally disappeared. And that territory—the place where the Neanderthals and the modern humans lived together the longest—was in southern France, precisely where today we find the painted caves.
Hominids are by origin and by nature best suited for tropical and temperate climates. But the Neanderthals survived for 100,000 years or more in Europe in a climate that varied in intensity as the eons rolled on but was basically very, very cold.
Isolated in their forbidding world, they evolved, adapted, and survived. Neanderthals were short, and they had stout legs, hips, and arms, along with a tremendous round chest. Their bon
es were thick and heavy enough to withstand tremendous tension and to support an immense muscle mass. Consequently, they were unimaginably strong. In a wrestling match, a Neanderthal could crush even the strongest person of today simply by breaking his back with a bear hug. Lifting a 250-pound opponent would not have strained a Neanderthal in the least. Also, their hand was constructed in a way that gave the thumb tremendous leverage when it pressed in opposition to the fingers. That meant their grip was unbreakable. Once caught, our modern wrestler could never escape.
A ridge of bone went across their forehead just above the eyes. The rest of their face slanted forward toward a protruding jaw with practically no chin. Their teeth were generally worn to the nub, even in adolescents, as fossils show. Perhaps they chewed hides to soften them or perhaps they held one side of a hide in their teeth and then used a hand to pull the other side, thus holding the hide taut for scraping. That would have worn down their teeth and would fit with the way their jaws were pushed forward.
All in all, their heads were quite large and had a bony knob on the back. Their brain capacity was one hundred cubic centimeters larger than ours, and apparently they could plan for the future concerning food and shelter. There is little proof—and what proof exists is disputed—that they had any intellectual abilities beyond that.
Most Neanderthals died before they were thirty, and, by evidence of the skeletons that have been found, none lived past forty. Those skeletons also show that the Neanderthals often went hungry. By contrast, the life expectancy of the modern humans who lived at the same time was fifty years.
The Neanderthals lived in small groups, moved camp often, worked incessantly, and seldom encountered Neanderthals in other groups. There are fossil remains of Neanderthals who lived for several years with crippling disabilities. For those cripples to have survived, others in the group must have shared food with them and helped them move from camp to camp, clear evidence of pity and affection, so they did have an emotional life.
The Cave Painters Page 3
