Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  Some archaeologists think finds from the Bose Basin in south China support this thinking. About 800,000 years ago a huge meteor crashed here. It was a disaster on an epic scale, and intense fires burned millions of acres of forest. Before the impact, ape-men in the Bose Basin had used choppers, flakes, and (presumably) bamboo, like other East Asians; but when they returned after the fires they started making hand axes rather like the Acheulean ones—perhaps, the theory runs, because the fires had burned off all the bamboo, in the process exposing usable cobbles. After a few centuries, as the vegetation grew back, the locals gave up hand axes and went back to bamboo.

  If this speculation is right, East Asian ape-men were perfectly capable of making hand axes when conditions favored these tools, but normally did not bother because alternatives were more easily available. Stone hand axes and bamboo tools were just two different tools for doing the same jobs, and ape-men all lived in much the same ways, whether they found themselves in Morocco or Malaya.

  That makes reasonable sense, but, this being prehistoric archaeology, there are other ways of looking at the Movius Line too. So far I have avoided giving a name to the ape-men who used Acheulean hand axes, but at this point the name we give them starts to matter.

  Since the 1960s most paleoanthropologists have called the new species that evolved in Africa about 1.8 million years ago Homo erectus (“Upright Man”) and have assumed that these creatures wandered through the subtropical latitudes to the shores of the Pacific Ocean. In the 1980s, however, some experts began focusing on subtle differences between Homo erectus skulls found in Africa and those found in East Asia. They suspected that they were in fact looking at two different species of ape-men. They coined a new name, Homo ergaster (“Working Man”), for those who evolved in Africa 1.8 million years ago and then spread all the way to China. Only when Homo ergaster reached East Asia, they suggested, did Homo erectus evolve from them. Homo erectus was therefore a purely East Asian species, distinct from the Homo ergaster who filled Africa, southwest Asia, and India.

  If this theory is correct, the Movius Line was not just a trivial difference in tool types: it was a genetic watershed that split early ape-men in two. In fact, it raises the possibility of what we might call the mother of all long-term lock-in theories: that East and West are different because Easterners and Westerners are—and have been for more than a million years—different kinds of human beings.

  THE FIRST EASTERNERS: PEKING MAN

  This technical debate over classifying prehistoric skeletons has potentially alarming implications. Racists are often eager to pounce on such details to justify prejudice, violence, and even genocide. You might feel that taking the time to talk about a theory of this kind merely dignifies bigotry; perhaps we should just ignore it. But that, I think, would be a mistake. Pronouncing racist theories contemptible is not enough. If we really want to reject them, and to conclude that people (in large groups) really are all much the same, it must be because racist theories are wrong, not just because most of us today do not like them.

  Basically, we do not know whether there was just one kind of ape-man on earth around 1.5 million years ago—meaning that ape-men (in large groups) were all much the same from Africa to Indonesia—or whether there was one distinct species of Homo ergaster west of the Movius Line and another of Homo erectus east of it. Only further research will clear that question up. But we do know, without a shadow of doubt, that within the last million years distinct species of ape-men did evolve in East and West.

  Geography probably had a lot to do with this. The ape-men that drifted out of Africa around 1.7 million years ago were well adapted to subtropical climes, but as they wandered northward, deeper into Europe and Asia, they had to face longer and harsher winters. Living in the open air, like their African ancestors, became increasingly impractical as they advanced toward a line roughly 40 degrees north of the equator (running from the top of Portugal to Beijing; see Figure 1.1). So far as we can tell, building huts and making clothes were beyond their mental capacities, but they could figure out one response: take shelter in caves. Thus were born the cavemen we all heard about as children.

  Cave-dwelling was a mixed blessing for the ape-men, who regularly had to share space with bears and lion-sized hyenas whose teeth could crunch up bones. It was a godsend for archaeologists, though, because caves preserve prehistoric deposits well, allowing us to trace how the evolution of ape-men began diverging in the Eastern and Western parts of the Old World as different adaptations to the colder climates took hold.

  For understanding Eastern ape-men, the most important site is Zhoukoudian near Beijing, right on the 40-degree line, occupied on-and-off from about 670,000 through 410,000 years ago. The story of its excavation is an epic in its own right, and forms the backdrop to part of Amy Tan’s excellent novel The Bonesetter’s Daughter. While European, American, and Chinese archaeologists were digging here between 1921 and 1937, the hills around the site became the front line in a brutal civil war among Nationalists, Communists, and assorted homegrown warlords. The excavators often worked to the sound of gunfire and had to dodge bandits and checkpoints to take their finds back to Beijing. The project finally collapsed when Japan invaded China, Zhoukoudian became a Communist base, and Japanese troops tortured and murdered three members of the team.

  Matters then went from bad to worse. In November 1941, when war between Japan and the United States looked certain, a decision was taken to ship the finds to New York for safekeeping. Technicians packed them into two large crates to await collection in a car from the American embassy in Beijing. No one knows for sure if the car ever came, or where, if it did come, it took the crates. One story has it that Japanese soldiers intercepted the U.S. Marines escorting the finds at the very moment bombs started falling on Pearl Harbor, arrested them, and abandoned the priceless finds. Life was cheap in those dark days, and no one paid much attention to a few boxes of rocks and bones.

  But all was not lost. The Zhoukoudian team had published their finds meticulously and had sent plaster casts of the bones to New York—an early example of the importance of backing up data. These show that by 600,000 years ago Peking Man* (as the excavators dubbed the Zhoukoudian ape-men) had diverged from tall, lanky Africans like the Turkana Boy toward a stockier form, better suited to cold. Peking Men were typically around five feet three inches tall and less hairy than modern apes, though if you ran into one on Main Street it would certainly be disconcerting. They had short, wide faces, with low, flat foreheads, a heavy single eyebrow, and a big jaw with almost no chin.

  Conversation with Peking Man would be a challenge. So far as we can tell, the basal ganglia (the parts of the brain that allow modern humans to combine a small number of mouth movements into an infinite number of utterances) of Homo erectus were poorly developed. The well-preserved skeleton of the Turkana Boy also has a neural canal (holding the spinal cord) only three quarters as wide as a modern human’s, suggesting that he could not control his breathing precisely enough to talk anything like we do.

  That said, other finds suggest—indirectly—that ape-men in the Eastern Old World could communicate, after a fashion. In 1994 archaeologists on the little island of Flores near Java excavated what appeared to be 800,000-year-old stone tools. Eight hundred thousand years ago Flores was definitely an island, separated from the mainland by twelve miles of ocean; all of which seemed to mean that Homo erectus must have been able to communicate well enough to make boats, sail over the horizon, and colonize Flores. Other archaeologists, however, dismayed at the idea of boat-building Homo erectus, countered that perhaps these “tools” were not tools at all; maybe they were simply rocks bashed into misleading shapes by natural processes.

  The argument could easily have deadlocked, as archaeological debates so often do, but in 2003 Flores yielded up even more astonishing discoveries. A deep sounding exposed eight skeletons, all dating around 16,000 BCE, all belonging to adults, and all under four feet tall. The first of Peter Jackson’s fil
ms of The Lord of the Rings had just come out, and journalists immediately labeled these prehistoric little people “hobbits,” after J.R.R. Tolkien’s furry-footed halflings. When animal populations are isolated on islands where there are no predators they quite often evolve into dwarf forms, and this is presumably how the “hobbits” came to be so small. To have shrunk to hobbit size by 16,000 BCE, though, ape-men must have colonized Flores many thousands of generations earlier—perhaps even as long as 800,000 years ago, as the stone tools found in 1994 suggest. The implication, once again, is that Homo erectus could communicate well enough to cross the sea.

  The ape-men at Zhoukoudian, then, could probably make themselves understood much better than chimpanzees or gorillas, and the deposits from the cave suggest that they could also make fire at will. On at least one occasion Peking Men roasted a wild horse’s head. Cuts on the skull show they were after its tongue and brain, both rich in fats. They may have been fond of one another’s brains too: in the 1930s the excavators inferred cannibalism and even headhunting from bone-breakage patterns. A 1980s study of the plaster casts showed that most of the marks on the skulls were actually caused by the teeth of prehistoric giant hyenas rather than other Peking Men, but one skull—an additional fragment of which was excavated in 1966—definitely shows stone tool marks.

  If instead of bumping into a Peking Man on a modern Main Street you could take a time machine back to Zhoukoudian half a million years ago, you would have a disorienting and alarming experience. You would see the cavemen communicating, perhaps with grunts and gestures, but you would not be able to talk to them. Nor could you get through to them by drawing pictures; there is no good evidence that art made any more sense to Homo erectus than it does to chimpanzees. The Peking Men that evolved in the Eastern Old World were very different from us.

  THE FIRST WESTERNERS: NEANDERTHALS

  But were Peking Men also different from the ape-men that were evolving in the Western Old World? The oldest finds from Europe, made in 1994 in a chain of caves at Atapuerca in Spain, date back about 800,000 years (roughly to the time that Homo erectus may have taken to boats and colonized Flores). In some ways, the Atapuerca finds were rather like those from Zhoukoudian: many of the bones were crisscrossed with cut marks from stone tools exactly like those that butchery would produce.

  The hints of cannibalism grabbed headlines, but paleoanthropologists were even more excited by the ways in which Atapuerca differed from Zhoukoudian. The Atapuerca skulls had bigger brain cavities than those of Homo erectus and rather modern-looking noses and cheekbones. The paleoanthropologists concluded that a new species was emerging, which they called Homo antecessor (“Ancestral Man”).

  Homo antecessor helped make sense of a string of finds going back to 1907, when workmen had turned up a strange jawbone in a sandpit in Germany. This species, named Heidelberg Man after a nearby university town, looked much like Homo erectus but had heads more like ours, with high, rounded skulls and brains of about 1,000 cc—much bigger than the 800 cc average for Homo erectus. It looks as if the pace of evolutionary change accelerated all across the Old World after 800,000 years ago as ape-men entering the cold north encountered wildly different climates where random genetic mutations could flourish.*

  Here at last we have some incontrovertible facts. By 600,000 years ago, when Heidelberg Man came onto the scene and Peking Man ruled the roost at Zhoukoudian, there were definitely different species of Homo in the Eastern and Western parts of the Old World: in the East the small-brained Homo erectus and in the West the larger-brained Homo antecessor and Heidelberg Man.*

  When it comes to brains, size is not everything. Anatole France won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1921 with a brain no bigger than Heidelberg Man’s. Yet Heidelberg Man does seem to have been a lot smarter than earlier ape-men or contemporary Peking Man. Before Heidelberg Man showed up, stone tools had barely changed for a million years, but by 500,000 BCE Heidelberg Man was making thinner and therefore lighter versions, striking more delicate flakes using soft (probably wood) hammers as well as just banging rocks together. This suggests better hand-eye coordination. Heidelberg Men and Women also made more specialized tools and began preparing specially shaped stone cores from which they could strike further tools at will, which must mean that they were just a lot better than Homo erectus at thinking about what they wanted from the world and how to get it. The very fact that Heidelberg Man could survive at Heidelberg, well north of the 40-degree line, is itself evidence of a smarter ape-man.

  Zhoukoudian’s occupants changed little between 670,000 and 410,000 years ago, but Western ape-men continued evolving across this period. If you crawl several hundred yards into the dank Spanish caves at Atapuerca, mostly on your belly and sometimes using ropes, you come to a forty-foot drop into the aptly named Pit of Bones—the densest concentration of ape-man remains ever found. More than four thousand fragments have been recovered here since the 1990s, dated between 564,000 and 600,000 years ago. Most belong to teenagers or young adults. What they were doing so far beneath the earth remains a mystery, but like the older Atapuerca deposit, the Pit of Bones has remarkably diverse human remains. The Spanish excavators classify most of them as Heidelberg Man, but many foreign scholars think they look more like yet another species—the Neanderthals.

  These most famous of cavemen were first recognized in 1856, when quarry workers in the Neander Valley (Tal or Thal in German) showed a local schoolteacher a skullcap and fifteen bones they had found (excavations in the 1990s recovered a further sixty-two fragments from the workers’ waste dump). The teacher showed them to an anatomist, who, with impressive understatement, pronounced them “pre-Germanic.”

  The Atapuerca finds suggest that Neanderthals emerged gradually across a quarter of a million years. Rather than climate change or expansion into new areas providing conditions for a few mutants to outbreed and replace Heidelberg Man, this may have been a case of genetic drift, with many different kinds of ape-men developing alongside one another. “Classic” Neanderthals appeared by 200,000 years ago and within another hundred thousand years spread over much of Europe and east into Siberia, though so far as we know they did not reach China or Indonesia.

  Just how much did Neanderthals differ from Peking Men? They were typically about the same height as Eastern ape-men and were even more primitive-looking, with sloping foreheads and weak chins. They had big front teeth, often worn down from use as tools, set in forward-thrust faces with large noses, the latter perhaps an adaptation to the cold air of Ice Age Europe. Neanderthals were more heavily built than Peking Men, with broader hips and shoulders. They were as strong as wrestlers, had the endurance of marathon runners, and seem to have been ferocious fighters.

  Despite having much heavier bones than most ape-men, Neanderthals got injured a lot; the closest modern parallel to their bone-breakage patterns, in fact, comes from professional rodeo riders. Since there were no bucking broncos to fall off a hundred thousand years ago (modern horses would not evolve until 4000 BCE), paleoanthropologists are confident that Neanderthals got hurt fighting—with one another and with wild animals. They were dedicated hunters; analysis of nitrogen isotopes from their bones shows that they were massively carnivorous, getting an amazing proportion of their protein from meat. Archaeologists had long suspected that Neanderthals got some of their meat by eating one another, just like Peking Man, and in the 1990s finds in France proved this beyond a doubt. The bones of half a dozen Neanderthals were found mixed with those of five red deer. The ape-men and deer had been treated exactly the same way: first they were cut into pieces with stone tools, then the flesh was sliced off their bones, and finally their skulls and long bones were smashed to get at their brains and marrow.

  The details I have emphasized so far make Neanderthals sound not so different from Peking Men, but there is more to the story than this. For one thing, Neanderthals had big brains—even bigger brains than ours, in fact, averaging around 1,520 cc to our 1,350 cc. They also had wider neur
al canals than the Turkana Boy, and these thick spinal cords gave them more manual dexterity. Their stone tools were better made and more varied than Peking Men’s, with specialized scrapers, blades, and points. Traces of tar on a stone point found embedded in a wild ass’s neck in Syria suggest that it had been a spearhead attached to a stick. Wear patterns on tools suggest that Neanderthals used them mostly for cutting wood, which rarely survives, but at the waterlogged German site of Schöningen four beautifully carved seven-foot-long spears turned up near heaps of wild horse bones. The spears were weighted for thrusting, not throwing; for all their smartness, Neanderthals may not have been coordinated enough to use missile weapons.

  The need to get up close to scary animals may account for Neanderthals’ rodeo-rider injuries, but some finds, especially from Shanidar Cave in Iraq, hint at entirely different qualities. One skeleton showed that a man had survived with a withered arm and deformed legs for years, despite losing his right forearm and left eye (in her bestselling novel The Clan of the Cave Bear, Jean Auel based her character Creb—the disabled spiritual leader of a Neanderthal band living in Crimea—on this skeleton). Another man at Shanidar had crippling arthritis in his right ankle, but also managed to get by, at least until a stab wound killed him. Having bigger brains doubtless helped the weak and injured to help themselves; Neanderthals could definitely make fire at will and could probably turn animal skins into clothes. All the same, it is hard to see how the Shanidar men could have coped without help from able-bodied friends or family. Even the most austere scientists agree that Neanderthals—by contrast with all earlier kinds of Homo and their contemporaries at Zhoukoudian—showed something we can only call “humanity.”