Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

1

Ideas Before Language

George Schaller, director of the Wildlife Conservation Division of the New York Zoological Society, is known to his fellow biologists as a meticulous observer of wild animals. In a long and distinguished career he has made many systematic studies of lions, tigers, cheetahs, leopards, wild dogs, mountain gorillas and hyenas. His book, The Last Panda, published in 1993, recorded many new and striking facts about the animal the Chinese call the ‘bear-cat’. He found that on one occasion a sick panda had gone freely to a human family in the Wolong area, where it was fed sugar and rice porridge for three days, until it recovered and returned to the forest.¹

In the late 1960s Schaller and a colleague spent a few days on the Serengeti plain in Tanzania, East Africa, where they made a simple observation which had escaped everyone else. In the course of those few days, they stumbled across quite a lot of dead meat ‘just lying around’. They found dead buffalo, the butchered remains of lion kills, and they also came across a few incapacitated animals that would have been easy prey for carnivores. Smaller deer (like Thompson’s gazelles) remained uneaten for barely a day but larger animals, such as adult buffalo, ‘persisted as significant food resources’ for about four days.² Schaller concluded from this that early humans could have survived quite easily on the Serengeti simply by scavenging, that there was enough ‘ruin’ in the bush for them to live on without going hunting. Other colleagues subsequently pointed out that even today the Hadza, a hunter-gathering tribe who live in northern Tanzania, sometimes scavenge by creeping up on lions who have made a kill and then creating a loud din. The lions are frightened away.

This outline of man’s earliest lifestyle is conjectural.³ And to dignify the practice as an ‘idea’ is surely an exaggeration: this was instinct at work. But scavenging, unromantic as it sounds, may not be such a bad starting-point. It may even be that the open African savannah was the type of environment which favoured animals who were generalists, as much as specialists, like a hippopotamus, for example, or a giraffe, and it is this which stimulated mankind’s intelligence in the first place. The scavenging hypothesis has, however, found recent support from a study of the marks made on bones excavated at palaeontological sites: animals killed by carnivores do show tool marks but fewer than those butchered by humans. It is important to stress that meat-eating in early humans does not, in and of itself, imply hunting.⁴

There are two candidates for humankind’s first idea, one rather more hypothetical than the other. The more hypothetical relates to bipedalism. For a long time, ever since the publication of The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin in 1871, the matter of bipedalism was felt to be a non-issue. Following Darwin, everyone assumed that man’s early ancestors descended from the trees and began to walk upright because of changes in the climate, which made rainforest scarcer and open savannah more common. (Between 6.5 million and 5 million years ago, the Antarctic ice-cap sucked so much water from the oceans that the Mediterranean was drained dry.) This dating agrees well with the genetic evidence. It is now known that the basic mutation rate in DNA is 0.71 per cent per million years. Working back from the present difference between chimpanzee and human DNA, we arrive at a figure of 6.6 million years ago for the chimpanzee–human divergence.⁵

Several species of bipedal ape have now been discovered in Africa, all the way back to Sahelanthropus, who lived six to seven million years ago in the Djurab desert of Chad and was close to the common ancestor for chimpanzees and humans.⁶ But the human ancestor which illustrates bipedalism best is Australopithecus afarensis, better known as ‘Lucy’, because on the night she was discovered the Beatles’ song ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ was playing in the palaeontologists’ camp. Enough of Lucy’s skeleton survives to put beyond doubt the fact that, by 3.4 to 2.9 million years ago, early humans were bipedal.

It is now believed that the first and most important spurt in the brain size of man’s direct ancestors was associated with the evolution of bipedalism. (Most important because it was the largest; there is evidence that our brains are, relative to our bodies, slightly smaller now than in the past.)⁷ In the new, open, savannah-type environment, so it is argued, walking upright freed the arms and hands to transport food to the more widely scattered trees where other group members were living. It was bipedalism which also freed the hands to make stone tools, which helped early man change his diet to a carnivorous one which, in providing much more calorie-rich food, enabled further brain growth. But there was a second important consequence: the upright posture also made possible the descent of the larynx, which lies much lower in the throat of humans than in the apes.⁸ At its new level, the larynx was in a much better position to form vowels and consonants. In addition, bipedalism also changed the pattern of breathing, which improved the quality of sound. Finally, meat, as well as being more nutritious, was easier to chew than tough plant material, and this helped modify the structure of the jaw, encouraging fine muscles to develop which, among other things, enabled subtler movements of the tongue, necessary for the varied range of sounds used in speech. Cutting-tools also supplemented teeth which may therefore have become smaller, helpful in the development of speech. None of this was ‘intended’, of course; it was a ‘spin-off’ as a result of bipedalism and meat-eating. A final consequence of bipedalism was that females could only give birth to relatively small-brained offspring – because mothers needed relatively narrow pelvises to be able to walk efficiently. From this it followed that the infants would be dependent on their mothers for a considerable period, which in turn stimulated the division of labour between males and females, males being required to bring back food for their mates and offspring. Over time this arrangement would have facilitated the development of the nuclear family, making the social structure of the cognitive group more complex. This complex structure, in which people were required to predict the behaviour of others in social situations, is generally regarded as the mechanism by which consciousness evolved. In predicting the behaviour of others, an individual would have acquired a sense of self.

This is all very neat. Too neat, as it turns out. Whereas early humans began walking upright six million years ago, the oldest stone tools are about 2.5 to 2.7 million years old (and maybe even three million years old) – too long a time-lag for the developments to be directly linked. Second, modern experiments have shown that bipedalism does not increase energy efficiency, and as more fossils have been found we now recognise that early bipedal apes lived in environments where trees were plentiful.⁹ In these circumstances, Nina Jablonski and George Chaplin, of the California Academy of Sciences, have suggested that the real reason humans became bipedal was as a way to appear bigger and more threatening in contests with other animals, and in so doing avoid punishing conflicts and gain access to food. The idea behind this is taken from observations of gorilla and chimpanzee behaviour in the wild. Both types of ape stand upright, swagger, wave their arms about and beat their chests when threatening others in contests over food or sexual partners. Such displays are not always effective but they are often enough for Jablonski and Chaplin to suggest that ‘individuals who learned to defuse tense situations with bipedal displays could have reduced their risk of injury or death and thus, by definition, improved their reproductive chances’. On this scenario, then, bipedalism, though a physical change to the body frame of early humans, developed because it had behavioural – psychological – consequences of an evolutionary kind. Almost certainly, however, it too had a large instinctive element, and for that reason can at best be called a proto-idea.¹⁰

The second candidate for man’s earliest idea is much better documented. This is the emergence of stone tools. As we shall see, the manufacture of stone tools went through at least five major phases in pre-history, as early man’s handling of raw stone became more sophisticated. The most important dates to remember, when major changes in technology occurred, are 2.5 million years ago, 1.7 million, 1.4 million, 700,000, and 50,000–40,000 years ago.¹¹ The oldest artefacts yet discovered come from the area of the river Gona in Ethiopia. They consist mainly of selected volcanic pebbles from ancient streambeds and are often difficult to distinguish from naturally occurring rocks. At some point, about 2.5 million years ago, ancient man learned that if he struck one stone against another in a particular way, a thin, keen-edged flake could be knocked off which was sharp enough to pierce the hide of a dead zebra, say, or a gazelle. To the untutored eye, a primitive stone axe from Gona looks little different from any pebble in the area. Archaeologists have noticed, however, that when a flake is deliberately manufactured by another rock being struck against it, it usually produces a distinctive swelling, known as a ‘bulb of percussion’ immediately next to the point of impact. This is used by professionals to distinguish human artefacts from mere broken stones arising from natural ‘collisions’ as a result, for example, of water action.¹²

Although a cultural artefact, the link between stone tools and man’s later biological development was momentous. This is because, until 2.5 million years ago, early man’s diet was vegetarian. The invention of stone tools, however, enabled him to eat meat – to get at the muscles and internal organs of big and small game – and this had major consequences for the development of the brain. All mammals – primates, and especially humans – are highly encephalised: they have brains that are large when compared with their body mass. Compared with reptiles of the same size, for example, mammals have brains that are, roughly, four times as big.¹³ In modern humans, the brain comprises only 2 per cent of body weight, but it consumes 20 per cent of the body’s metabolic resources. As we shall see, each major change in stone technology appears to have been accompanied by an increase in brain size, though later increases were nowhere near as large as the first spurt.¹⁴

That some major change in brain structure – in size and/or organisation – occurred about 2.5 million years ago is not in doubt. At one stage it was thought that tool-making was a defining characteristic of ‘humanity’ but that was before Jane Goodall in the 1960s observed chimpanzees pulling the leaves off twigs so they could insert the twigs into termite mounds, and then withdraw them – by now suitably coated with termites – to be eaten at leisure. Chimpanzees have also been observed cracking open nuts using stones as ‘hammers’ and, in Uganda, using leafy twigs as fans, to keep insects away. However, palaeontologists recognise two important ways in which early hominid stone tools differ from the tools produced by other primates. The first is that some of the stone tools were produced to manufacture other tools – such as flakes to sharpen a stick. And second, the early hominids needed to be able to ‘see’ that a certain type of tool could be ‘extracted’ from a certain type of rough rock lying around. The archaeologist Nicholas Toth of Indiana University spent many hours trying to teach a very bright bonobo (a form of pygmy chimpanzee), called Kanzi, to make stone tools. Kanzi did manage it, but not in the typical human fashion, by striking one stone against another. Instead, Kanzi would hurl the stones against the concrete floor of his cage. He just didn’t possess the mental equipment to ‘see’ the tool ‘inside’ the stone.¹⁵

Early stone tools similar to those found on the Gona river have also been found at Omo in southern Ethiopia, at Koobi Fora, on lake Turkana just across the border in Kenya and, controversially, in the Riwat area of northern Pakistan. In some circles these tools are referred to as the Omo Industrial Complex. The Omo industry is followed by the second type of stone tool, called Oldowan, after the Olduvai gorge, and dating to between 2.0 and 1.5 million years ago. Olduvai, in Tanzania, near the southern edge of the Serengeti plain, is probably the most famous location in palaeontology, providing many pioneering discoveries.

Stone tools, in general, do not occur in isolation. At several sites in Olduvai, which have been dated to about 1.75 million years ago, the tools were found associated with bones and, in one case, with larger stones which appear to be fashioned into a rough semi-circle. The feeling among some palaeontologists is that these large stones formed a primitive wind-break (man’s second idea?), offering shelter while animals were butchered with the early hand-axes. The stone tools in use 1.7 million years ago were already subtly different from the very earliest kinds. Louis and Mary Leakey, the famous ‘first family’ of palaeontologists, who excavated for many years at Olduvai gorge, carefully studied Oldowan technology and although by later standards the stone tools were very primitive, the Leakeys and their colleagues were able to distinguish four ‘types’ – heavy-duty choppers, light-duty flakes, used pieces and what is known as débitage, the material left over after the tools have been produced. There is still much discussion as to whether the early hominids at Olduvai were passive scavengers, or confrontational scavengers, as the Hadza are today.¹⁶

Who made these early tools? Nothing of the kind has ever been found associated with A. afarensis remains. By the time tools appear, various species of hominid co-existed in Africa, two or three of which are given the family name Paranthropus (‘alongside man’), also known as A. robustus and A. boisei, with the others belonging to Homo – these are H. habilis (‘Handy man’), H. rudolfensis and H. ergaster. These different hominids varied in interesting ways that make the exact line of descent to ourselves difficult to fathom. All had bigger brains than ‘Lucy’ (500–800 cc, as compared with 400–500 cc), but whereas H. habilis had an ape-type body with more human-like face and teeth, H. rudolfensis was the other way round – a human-type body and more ape-like face and teeth.¹⁷ In theory, any of these species could have produced the tools but two reasons seem to rule out Paranthropus. The first reason relates to the thumb of primitive man. The anthropologist Randall Susman has noticed that chimpanzees have very different thumbs from human beings. Chimps have curved, narrow-tipped fingers and short thumbs – ideal for grasping tree limbs. Humans, on the other hand, have shorter, straighter fingers with squat tips, and larger, stouter thumbs. This is a better arrangement for grasping things like stones. On examination, it turns out that A. afarensis had chimpanzee-like thumbs and so, probably, did Paranthropus. A second reason is that, if Paranthropus had manufactured tools, in addition to the Homo family, we should almost certainly find two separate tool traditions in the fossil record. We don’t.

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 Yaʾaqov 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, the 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 not so much for cooking as 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.

The re-creation of the first ideas of early man, inferring his mental life from the meagre remains of crude stone tools and assorted remains, is itself an intellectual achievement of the first order by palaeontologists of our own day. The remains tell – or have been made to tell – a consistent story. At about 60,000–40,000 years ago, however, the agreement breaks down. According to one set of palaeontologists and archaeologists, at around this time we no longer need to rely on unpropitious lumps of stone and bone fragments to infer the behaviour of our ancient ancestors. In the space of a (relatively) short amount of time, we have a quite fantastic richness of material which together amply justify historian John Pfeiffer’s characterisation of this period as a ‘creative explosion’.⁴⁶

In the other camp are the ‘gradualists’, who believe there was no real explosion at all but that man’s intellectual abilities steadily expanded – as is confirmed, they say, by the evidence. The most striking artefact in this debate is the so-called Berekhat Ram figurine. During excavations at Berekhat Ram in Israel, in 1981, Naama Goren-Inbar, of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, found a small, yellowish-brown ‘pebble’ 3.5 centimetres long. The natural shape of the pebble is reminiscent of the female form but microscopic analysis by independent scholars has shown that the form of the figure has been enhanced by artificial grooves.⁴⁷ The age of the pebble has been put at 233,000 BP but its status as an art object has been seriously questioned. It was the only such object found among 6,800 artefacts excavated at the site, and sceptical archaeologists say that all it represents is some ‘doodling’ by ancient man ‘on a wet Wednesday’.⁴⁸ The gradualists, on the other hand, put the Berekhat Ram figurine alongside the spears found at Schöningen (400,000 BP), a bone ‘dagger’ found at a riverside site in the Zemliki valley in Zaire, dated to 174,000–82,000 BP, some perforated and ochred Glycymeris shells found at Qafzeh in Israel (100,000 BP), some ostrich shell perforated beads found in the Loiyangalani river valley in Tanzania (110,000–45,000 BP), a carved warthog tusk, recovered from Border cave, in South Africa, and dated to 80,000 BP, and some mollusc beads from Blombos cave, also in South Africa, dated to between 80,000 and 75,000 BP (the beads were brought from twenty kilometres away and appear to have ochre inside them). These show, they say, that early humans’ mental skills developed gradually – and perhaps not in Europe. They imply that Europe is ‘the cradle of civilisation’ only because it has well-developed archaeological services, which have produced many discoveries, and that if African or Asian countries had the same facilities, these admittedly meagre discoveries would be multiplied and a different picture would emerge.

The debate has switch-backed more than once. The gradualists certainly suffered a setback in regard to one other important piece of evidence, the so-called Slovenian ‘flute’. This was unveiled in 1995, amid much fanfare, as the world’s oldest musical instrument. Dated to 54,000 years ago, it consisted of a tubular piece of bone, found at Divje Babe near Reke in western Slovenia, containing two complete holes, and two incomplete ones, in a straight line. It comprised the femur of a young bear and was the only femur among 600 found in the same cave that was pierced in this way. What drew the archaeologists’ attention was the discovery that the holes were roughly 1 centimetre across and 2.5 centimetres apart, a configuration that comfortably fits the dimensions of the human hand. According to some scholars, the instrument was capable of playing ‘the entire seven-note scale on which Western music is based’.⁴⁹ However, Francesco d’Errico and a group of colleagues at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Bordeaux were able to show that this suggestive arrangement was in fact an entirely natural occurrence, the result of the bone being gnawed by other carnivores, possibly cave bears. Similar puncture holes were discovered on bones in several caves in the Basque region of Spain.⁵⁰

Over the last few years, however, the gradualists have been making a strong comeback. Stephen Oppenheimer, of Green College, Oxford, has collected the evidence in his book, Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World.⁵¹ There, he shows that ‘Mode 3’ hand-axes, capable of being hafted, were produced in Africa by archaic H. sapiens from 300,000 years ago. These early humans were also producing bone tools looking like harpoon tips, were quarrying for pigment at 280,000 years ago, used perforated shell pendants in South Africa at 130,000–105,000 years ago, and crafted haematite ‘pencils’ at 100,000 years ago. Figure 1 shows his chronology for the advent of various cognitive advances. Oppenheimer concludes that, by 140,000 years ago, ‘half of the important clues to cognitive skills and behaviour which underpinned those that eventually took us to the Moon were already present’.⁵²

Despite this strong showing recently by the gradualists, it remains true that it is the sudden appearance, around 40,000 years ago, of very beautiful, very accomplished, and very modern-looking art that captures the imagination of all who encounter it. This art takes three main forms – the famous cave paintings, predominantly but not exclusively found in Europe, the so-called Venus figurines, found in a broad swathe across western and eastern Europe, and multicoloured beads, which in some respects are the most important evidence of all. What stands out is the sudden appearance of this art, its abundance and its sophistication. In northern Spain the art consists mainly of engravings but the paintings extend from south-west France to Australia. When the first cave art was discovered in the nineteenth century, it took many years before it was accepted as truly ancient because so many of the images were realistic and lifelike, and modern-looking. It was felt they must be forgeries. But it is now generally accepted (there are still doubters) that, with the paintings spread so far across Eurasia, and with the dating being so consistent, something very important was going on around 40,000 years ago (although this art should probably not be treated as a single phenomenon). This, the Middle/Upper Palaeolithic transition, as it is known to professionals, is probably the most exciting area of study in palaeontology now, and for three reasons.

The advent of art is so sudden (in palaeontological terms), and so widespread, that many scientists think it must reflect an important change in the development of early man’s mental state. It is, as Steven Mithen puts it, ‘when the final major re-design of the mind took place’.⁵³ Once again there was a time lag, between the appearance of anatomically modern humans, around 150,000–100,000 years ago, and the creative explosion, at 60,000–40,000 years ago. One explanation is the climate. As the glaciers expanded and retreated, the available game changed in response, and a greater variety of equipment was needed. Also needed was a record of the animals available and their seasonal movement. Perhaps this is, again, too neat. A second – and more controversial – climatic explanation is that the eruption of the Mount Toba volcano at 71,000 years ago led to a worldwide volcanic winter, lasting ten thousand years and drastically reducing both the human and animal population. This would have been followed by a period of severe competition for resources, resulting in rapid development among very disparate groups, fuelling innovation. Another explanation for the ‘creative explosion’ derives from the art itself. In north-eastern Spain and south-western France (but not elsewhere) much is contained in highly inaccessible caves, where the superimposition of one image over another implies that these subterranean niches and crevices were returned to time and again – over centuries, over thousands of years. The suspicion is, therefore, that cave art is in fact to be understood as writing as much as art, a secret and sacred recording of the animals which early man relied upon for food. (This is an idea supported by the fact that many contemporary tribes who create rock paintings have no word for art in their language.⁵⁴) The cave paintings and engravings were in effect a record, possibly of what animals were in the area, when, in what numbers, and showed what routes they followed. These records, which may have been kept outside to begin with, would have been transferred to inaccessible places partly out of concerns for security – so rivals would never find them – and partly out of ritual. The animals may have been worshipped – because life depended on them and their abundance – and reflect what early man knew about their movements, a record, in effect, of his ability to plan ahead. The caves may also have been ritual temples, chosen not only for inaccessibility but because they were thought to be in some sense gateways to and from the underworld. According to the French prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan, the cave art of Europe comprises a ‘single ideological system’, a ‘religion of the caves’.⁵⁵

Year before present

Figure 1: The chronology of early cognitive skills

[Source: Stephen Oppenheimer, Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World, London: Constable, 2003, page 123]

There are two important questions to be asked of this art. Why, in the first place, did it emerge ‘fully formed’, as it were, why was there no primitive version? And what does it mean? One reason it emerged ‘fully formed’ may simply be that early versions were produced on perishable materials, which have been lost. Steven Mithen, however, has a ‘deeper’ reason for why this art emerged fully formed. He believes that the three different types of intelligence that evolved in man’s primitive brain – the natural history intelligence, the technical intelligence, and the social intelligence – finally came together some time between 100,000 and 40,000 years ago, to form the modern brain as we know it. Indeed, he says that the very fact that early art shows so much technical skill, and is so full of emotive power, is itself the strongest argument for this latest restructuring of the mind. This is speculative, of course; there is no other evidence to support Mithen’s view.

Richard Klein, professor of anthropological sciences at Stanford University in California, offers a different theory. He believes that humanity’s cultural revolution began with one or more genetic mutations that ‘transformed the ability to communicate’.⁵⁶ Professor Klein argues that ‘a suite of language and creativity genes, perhaps as few as ten or as many as 1,000, developed as a result of random mutation’, giving rise to a new pattern of human culture. He cites as an example the gene FOXP2, which was discovered in 2001 among the fifteen members of a large London family (the ‘KE’ family), three generations of which have severe speech and language impediments. Researchers have since shown that the human version of this gene differs by only three molecules, out of 715, from the version carried by mice, and by just two molecules from the version carried by chimpanzees. The German researchers who identified the mutation say that it occurred about 200,000 years ago and spread rapidly, in 500–1,000 human generations, or 10,000–20,000 years. ‘A sweep that rapid indicates to biologists that the new version of the gene must have conferred a significant evolutionary advantage on the human ancestors lucky enough to inherit it.’⁵⁷ Another explanation of the cultural explosion arises from demography. Until around 70,000 years ago, the population density of humanity was fairly thin. We know this because the main animals used as food were both adults of the species and examples of species that took a long time to mature (tortoises, for example). After that, there was a switch to deer etc., which replaced themselves more quickly. This increased competition may well have stimulated both new forms of hand-axe and the efflorescence of art, to be understood as secret records of game movements.⁵⁸ There was also a switch to marine foods at this time.

The gradualists say this is all illusion, that art and other symbolic behaviour was developing for perhaps 100,000 to 250,000 years before the apparent ‘explosion’ but has either perished or is still waiting to be found. This, they say, explains why the art is ‘fully formed’ in the European caves – there had been generations for techniques to improve. They also point out that art appeared in Australia fully formed as soon as early humans arrived there. It stands to reason, on this account, that the ability to produce such art had already evolved before the migrants left Africa.⁵⁹

The meaning of the art is more complex. Between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago we see a huge number of developments – not just the striking cave paintings of Lascaux, Altamira and Chauvet that have become famous, but the first production of items for personal decoration such as beads, pendants and perforated animal teeth, carved ivories which have the body of a man and the head of different animals, such as lion and bison, and scores of V-shaped signs etched on rocks. There is little doubt among palaeontologists that these images are intentional, conveying information of one kind or another. Among contemporary Australian tribes, for example, a simple circle can – in different circumstances – be held to represent a fire, a mountain, a campsite, waterholes, women’s breasts, or eggs. So it may never prove possible to recover completely the meaning of ancient art. Yet we can decipher in a broad sense the idea of art as stored information.⁶⁰ Many of the new bone and antler tools found in the Upper Palaeolithic are decorated and John Pfeiffer has called these, together with the cave paintings, ‘tribal encyclopaedias’. The basic fact to remember, perhaps (since nothing is certain in this field), is that most Palaeolithic art was created in the last ice age, when environmental conditions were extremely harsh. Therefore the art must, at least in part, have been a response to this, which should help us understand its meaning.⁶¹ We may draw some inference, for example, from the fact that, while many animals were painted in profile, so far as their bodies were concerned, their hooves were painted full on, which suggests that the shape of the hooves was being memorised for later, or being used to instruct children.⁶² Even today, among the Wopkaimin hunter-gatherers of New Guinea, they display the bones of the animals they catch against the rear wall of their houses – with the remains arranged as a ‘map’ so as to aid the recall of animal behaviour.⁶³

The widespread depiction of the female form in Palaeolithic art also needs some explanation and comment. There are the so-called ‘Venus pebbles’, inscribed stones, which appear to show breasts and skirts, found in Korea and dated to 12,165 BP; there is the ‘Venus of Galgenberg’, found near Krems in Lower Austria, showing a large-breasted woman who appears to be dancing, and dated to 31,000 years ago; most important of all there are the ‘Venus figurines’, found in a shallow arc stretching from France to Siberia, the majority of which belong to the Gravettian period – around 25,000 years ago. There has been, inevitably perhaps, much controversy about these figures. Many of them (but by no means all) are buxom, with large breasts and bellies, possibly indicating they are pregnant. Many (but not all) have distended vulvas, indicating they are about to give birth. Many (but not all) are naked. Many (but not all) lack faces but show elaborate coiffures. Many (but not all) are incomplete, lacking feet or arms, as if the creator had been intent on rendering only the sexual characteristics of these figures. Some, but not all, were originally covered in red ochre – was that meant to symbolise (menstrual) blood? Some critics, such as the archaeologist Paul Bahn, have argued that we should be careful in reading too much sex into these figures, that it tells us more about modern palaeontologists than it does about ancient humans. Nevertheless, other early art works do suggest sexual themes. There is a natural cavity in the Cougnac cave at Quercy in France which suggests (to the modern eye) the shape of a vulva, a similarity which appears to have been apparent also to ancient man, for they stained the cave with red ochre ‘to symbolise the menstrual flow’.⁶⁴ Among the images found in 1980 in the Ignateva cave in the southern Urals of Russia is a female figure with twenty-eight red dots between her legs, very likely a reference to the menstrual cycle.⁶⁵ At Mal’ta, in Siberia, Soviet archaeologists discovered houses divided into two halves. In one half only objects of masculine use were found, in the other half female statuettes were located. Does this mean the homes were ritually divided according to gender?⁶⁶

Whether some of these early ‘sexual images’ have been over-interpreted, it nonetheless remains true that sex is one of the main images in early art, and that the depiction of female sex organs is far more widespread than the depiction of male organs. In fact, there are no depictions of males in the Gravettian period (25,000 years ago) and this would therefore seem to support the claims of the distinguished Lithuanian archaeologist, Marija Gimbutas (discussed in detail in Chapter 3), that early humans worshipped a ‘Great Goddess’, rather than a male god. The development of such beliefs possibly had something to do with what at that time would have been the great mystery of birth, the wonder of breastfeeding, and the disturbing occurrence of menstruation. Randall White, professor of anthropology at New York University, adds the intriguing thought that these figures date from a time (and such a time must surely have existed) when early man had yet to make the link between sexual intercourse and birth. At that time, birth would have been truly miraculous, and early man may have thought that, in order to give birth, women received some spirit, say from animals (hence the animal heads). Until the link was made between sexual intercourse and birth, woman would have seemed mysterious and miraculous creatures, far more so than men.

Olga Soffer, of the University of Illinois, also points out that some of the Venus figurines appear to be wearing caps that are woven. She thinks that textiles were invented very early on: she has, she says, identified impressions of netting on fragments of clay from Upper Palaeolithic sites in Moravia and Russia that suggest the possibility of net hunting. She also believes that cordage – ropes made of plant fibres – extends back 60,000 years and helped early humans construct sailing vessels, with the aid of which they colonised Australia.⁶⁷

Beads first appeared at Blombos cave in South Africa 80,000–75,000 years ago. They are common by 18,000 years ago, but their most dramatic arrival is seen towards the end of the ‘creative explosion’ in a series of burials in the 28,000-year-old site at Sungir in Russia. Randall White, the archaeologist who has studied these beads, reports on three burials – a sixty-year-old man, a small boy and a girl. The figures were adorned with, respectively, 2,936, 4,903 and 5,274 beads plus, in the case of the adult, a beaded cap with fox teeth and twenty-five mammoth-ivory bracelets. Each bead, according to experiments White carried out, would have taken between an hour and three hours to produce – 13,000–39,000 hours in total (somewhere between eighteen and fifty-four months). So the word ‘decoration’ hardly applies and we need to ask whether these beads are evidence of something more important – social distinctions, maybe, or even primitive religion. White certainly thinks social divisions were already in existence 28,000 years ago; for one thing, it is unlikely that at Sungir everyone was buried with thousands of beads that took so long to make – there would hardly have been time for real work. It is possible, therefore, that the people who were buried with beads were themselves religious figures of some kind. The differences in decoration between individuals also imply that early humans were acquiring a sense of ‘self’.⁶⁸

The very presence of grave goods, of whatever kind, suggests that ancient people believed at least in the possibility of an afterlife, and this in turn would have implied a belief in supernatural beings. Anthropologists distinguish three requirements for religion: that a non-physical component of an individual can survive after death (the ‘soul’); that certain individuals within a society are particularly likely to receive direct inspiration from supernatural agencies; and that certain rituals can bring about changes in the present world.⁶⁹ The beads at Sungir strongly suggest that people believed in an afterlife, though we have no way of knowing how this ‘soul’ was conceived. The remote caves decorated with so many splendid paintings were surely centres of ritual (they were lit by primitive lamps, several examples of which have been found, burning moss wicks in animal fat, another use of fire). At the caves of Les Trois-Frères in Ariège in southern France, near the Spanish border, there is what appears to be an upright human figure wearing a herbivore skin on its back, a horse’s tail and a set of antlers – in other words, a shaman. At the end of 2003 it was announced that several figures carved in mammoth ivory had been found in a cave, near Shelklingen in the Jura mountains in Bavaria. These included a Löwenmensch, a ‘lion-person’, half-man, half-animal, dating to 33,000–31,000 years ago, suggesting a shamanistic magical or religious belief system of some sophistication.

David Lewis-Williams is convinced of the shamanistic nature of the first religions and their link to the layout of cave art. He puts together the idea that, with the emergence of language, early humans would have been able to share the experience of two and possibly three altered states of consciousness: dreams, drug-induced hallucinations, and trance. These, he says, would have convinced early humans that there was a ‘spirit world’ elsewhere, with caves – leading to a mysterious underworld – as the only practical location for this other world. He thinks that some of the lines and squiggles associated with cave art are what he calls ‘entoptic’, caused by people actually ‘seeing’ the structures of their brains (between the retina and the visual cortex) under the influence of drugs.⁷⁰ No less important, he notes that many paintings and engravings in the caves make use of naturally occurring forms or features, suggesting, say, a horse’s head or a bison. The art, he suggests, was designed to ‘release’ the forms which were ‘imprisoned’ in the rock. By the same token, the ‘finger flutings’, marks made on the soft rock, and the famous hand prints, were a kind of primitive ‘laying on of hands’, designed again to release the forms locked in the rock.⁷¹ He also notes a form of organisation in the caves. Probably, he thinks, the general population would have gathered at the mouth of the cave, the entrance to the underworld, perhaps using forms of symbolic representation that have been lost. Only a select few would have been allowed into the caves proper. In these main chambers Lewis-Williams reports that the resonant ones have more images than the non-resonant ones, so there may have been a ‘musical’ element, either by tapping stalactites, or by means of primitive ‘flutes’, remains of which have been found, or drums.⁷² Finally, the most inaccessible regions of the caves would have been accessed only by the shamans. Some of these areas have been shown to contain high concentrations of CO₂, an atmosphere which may, in itself, have produced an altered state of consciousness. Either way, in these confined spaces, shamans would have sought their visions. Some drugs induce a sensation of pricking, or being stabbed, which fits with some of the images found in caves, where figures are covered in short lines. This, combined with the shamans’ need for a new persona every so often (as is confirmed today, among ‘stone age’ tribes), could be the origin of the idea of death and rebirth, and of sacrifice which, as we shall see, looms large in later religious beliefs.⁷³

Lewis-Williams’ ideas are tantalising, but still speculative. What we can be certain of, however, is that none of the complex art, and the ancient ceremonies that surrounded the painted caves, could have been accomplished without language. For Merlin Donald the transition to mimetic cognition and communication was the all-important transformation in history, but the arrival of spoken language was hardly less of a breakthrough.

It is too soon to say whether the picture given above needs to be changed radically as a result of the discovery of Homo floresiensis, on the Indonesian island of Flores, and announced in October 2004. This new species of Homo, whose closest relative appears to be H. erectus, lived until 13,000 years ago, was barely one metre tall, and had a brain capacity of only 380 cc. Yet it appears to have walked upright, to have produced fairly sophisticated stone tools, may have controlled fire, and its predecessors must have reached Flores by rafting, since there is no evidence that the island was ever attached to the mainland of Asia. The new species’ small size is presumably explained by adaptation to an island environment, where there were no large predators. But, on the face of it, H. floresiensis shows that brain size and intelligence may not be as intimately linked in early species of man as previous scholarship had suggested.⁷⁴