by Paul Jordan
At all events we can say that the art, in particular, of the Upper Palaeolithic peoples and their relatives around the world constitutes proof that the modern mind had evolved by at least thirty thousand years or more before the present. Once evolved, the modern mind – with all its advantages of perception and invention – was indispensable and there was no going back on it. Close competitors without it were ultimately doomed. The modern sort of humanity spread all over the world, into areas previously peopled by older forms of human being like the Neanderthalers of Europe or late Homo erectus descendants in the Far East. It is possible that populations of these older sorts of humanity, never large in numbers, were recently depleted at the time of the spread of the moderns by adverse conditions associated with heavy volcanic activity and climatic deterioration. In some parts of the world, like inhospitable Siberia, the moderns were the first people ever to take up residence – even the hardy, long-suffering, cold-adapted Neanderthalers had never done it. From Siberia the Americas were colonized, perhaps in a small way from about 20,000 BP and then more intensively after about 12,000 BP.
The spectacular triumph of the modern human species, Homo sapiens sapiens, is owed to the unprecedented cleverness of the human brain, a Darwinian adaptation that has proved so successful over the past forty thousand years or so. There are times today when the cleverness of the brain of Homo sapiens sapiens is apt to look about to become terminally non-adaptive. Only a creature as clever as Homo sapiens sapiens could have devised runaway population explosion, pollution, the hydrogen bomb. Homo sapiens neanderthalensis had no such problems, only a very hard life and a – perhaps mercifully – limited awareness of it. Left to themselves, the signs are that the Neanderthalers would never even have achieved the Chatelperronian. So like us in general physique and even brain size, so unlike us in behaviour, the Neanderthal folk stand as the last and most vivid representatives of all the former sorts of evolving humanity, inviting us to go on reflecting on the real nature of our own very evidently different mental processes, unique in the long history of life on earth. Every dog will have his day and the Neanderthalers’ day was a respectably long one – our own, in our fully modern form, has so far lasted for only a quarter of their span. If we think of what might come after us in terms of further biological evolution or, more likely, hybrid biological and artificial intelligence then we may be sure that our successors’ minds will be as unknowable to us as ours must have been to the Neanderthalers.
Further Reading
Bahn, Paul G. Journey through the Ice Age, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997
Bradshaw, John L. Human Evolution, A Neuropsychological Perspective, Hove, Psychology Press, 1997
Cavalli-Sforza, Luca and Francesco. The Great Human Diasporas, Reading Massachusetts, Addison Wesley, 1995
Conroy, Glenn C. Reconstructing Human Origins, New York and London, W.W. Norton & Co., 1997
Deacon, Terence. The Symbolic Species, London, Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1997
Dennett, Daniel. Consciousness Explained, London, Penguin Books, 1993
Foley, Robert. Humans before Humanity, Oxford, Blackwell, 1997
Gamble, Clive. Timewalkers: The Prehistory of Global Colonization, Cambridge Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1994
Gowlett, John A.J. Ascent to Civilization, New York and London, McGraw-Hill, 1993
Johanson, Donald and Edgar, Blake. From Lucy to Language, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1996
Jones, S., Martin, R., Pilbeam, D. (Eds) Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Human Evolution, Cambridge University Press, 1992
Kingdon, Jonathan. Self-made Man and His Undoing, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1993
Klein, Richard G. The Human Career, Chicago University Press, 1989
Lewin, Roger. Principles of Human Evolution, Oxford, Blackwell, 1998
——. Human Evolution, An Illustrated Introduction, Oxford, Blackwell, 1999
Mellars, Paul. The Neanderthal Legacy, Princeton University Press, 1996
Mithen, Steven. The Prehistory of the Mind, London, Thames & Hudson, 1996
Moser, Stephanie. Ancestral Images, Stroud, Sutton Publishing Ltd, 1998
Pinker, Steven. How the Mind Works, New York, W.W. Norton, 1997, and London, Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1998
Renfrew, Colin, and Zubrow, Ezra (Eds) The Ancient Mind, Cambridge University Press, 1994
Shreeve, James. The Neanderthal Enigma: Solving the Mystery of Modern Human Origins, London, Penguin Books, 1997
Stringer, Christopher and Gamble, Clive. In Search of the Neanderthals, London, Thames & Hudson, 1993
Stringer, Christopher and McKie, Robin. African Exodus, London, Jonathan Cape, 1996
Tattersall, Ian. The Fossil Trail, Oxford University Press, 1995
Trinkaus, Erik and Shipman, Pat. The Neanderthals: Changing the Image of Mankind, London, Jonathan Cape, 1993
Walker, Alan and Shipman, Pat. The Wisdom of Bones, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1996, and London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1996
Wolpoff, Milford H. Paleoanthropology (2nd edn) USA, McGraw-Hill Inc., 1999
Wymer, John. The Palaeolithic Age, London, Croom Helm Ltd, 1982
Dardé’s imaginative statue of Neanderthal Man at the museum of les Eyzies in France.
A modern reconstruction of a Neanderthaler in the new Neanderthal Museum at Mettman in Germany.
Neanderthal home-life at the Mettman museum.
The bellowing, drinking mammoth of le Thot near Lascaux in the Dordogne.
The woolly rhino at Préhisto-Parc, near les Eyzies in the Dordogne.
Reindeer and wolves at Préhisto-Parc.
European bison at le Thot.
Przewalski’s horse — the ice age type with distinctive mane — at le Thot.
Préhisto-Parc’s fearsome cave-bear.
A cave lion menaces a Neanderthaler at Préhisto-Parc.
Neanderthal Man looks out at dusk from the museum terrace of les Eyzies in France.
The Vézère river near le Moustier, with limestone cliffs and caves.
Caves at Mount Carmel in Israel.
Neanderthalers in at the kill at Préhisto-Parc.
Coming home from the hunt through the woods of Préhisto-Parc.
Neanderthalers at home in Préhisto-Parc.
A Neanderthal hunting band trap a mammoth at Préhisto-Parc.
Neanderthalers take on a giant elk in a glade of Préhisto-Parc.
The site of the burials at Regourdou.
Brown bears are still in residence at Regourdou.
A Neanderthal family faces up to a cave-bear in a reconstruction at Roque Saint-Christophe in the Dordogne.
Horses were frequently painted and carved in the Upper Palaeolithic art.
Neanderthal man gazes from the terrace of the les Eyzies museum at gathering autumn mists across the Vézère Valley.
