Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

2

The Emergence of Language and the Conquest of Cold

The acquisition of language is perhaps the most controversial and interesting aspect of early humans’ intellectual life. It is, so far as we know, and together with mimetic cognition (if Merlin Donald is right), the most important characteristic that separates Homo sapiens from other animals. Since the vast majority of the ideas considered in the rest of this book were expressed in words (as opposed to painting, or music, or architecture, say), an understanding of the invention and evolution of language is fundamental.

Before we come to language itself, though, we need to consider why it developed. And this is where we return to the significance of meat-eating. As was outlined in Chapter 1, the brain size of Homo habilis showed a marked increase over what went before, and this was associated with an advance in stone tool technology. Important in the context of this chapter is the discovery of stone tools up to ten kilometres from the raw material source, which implies that, beginning with H. habilis, early man was capable of ‘mental maps’, planning ahead, predicting where game would be and transporting tools to those sites, presumably in advance. This is intellectual behaviour already far beyond the capacities of other primates. But we also know, from the archaeological remains at sites, that early man ate antelope, zebra, and hippopotamus. Searching for large animal prey would have pitted early humans against hyenas when scavenging, and against the prey itself when hunting. Some palaeontologists argue that this could not have been accomplished as solitary individuals or even, perhaps, as small groups. A relationship has been observed by some zoologists between brain volume and the average size of social groups among primates. There is even a view that brain size is correlated with what Steven Mithen calls social intelligence. According to one estimate, the australopithecines lived in groups with an average size of sixty–seventy individuals, whereas H. habilis groups averaged around eighty.¹ These provided the basic ‘cognitive group’ of early man, the group he had to deal with on an everyday basis, and the increasing size of this cognitive group would, say the palaeontologists, have stimulated the growth of man’s social intelligence. Distinguishing one group member from another, and one’s own kin within this wider group, would have become much easier once language had developed, and easier still once beads and pendants and other items of bodily adornment had been created, with which people could emphasise their individuality. Against this, George Schaller, who was mentioned at the beginning of Chapter 1, points out that lions hunt quite successfully in groups without language.

We do also see a marked change in technology in the Upper Palaeolithic, and in hunting technique, both of them changes that are difficult to imagine without language. In Europe at least a whole range of tools appear – including hafted tools, harpoons and spear throwers made of shaped antler and bone (the first ‘plastics’); at the same time we see the development of blades, produced as ‘standardised blanks’ that could be turned into burins, scrapers, awls or needles as required.²

In southern Africa we see a very different picture when comparing the remains excavated at Klasies River Mouth (120,000–60,000 BP) with the much younger Nelson Bay cave (20,000 BP). The latter contains more bones of large dangerous prey, like buffalo and wild pigs, and far fewer eland. By this time too, people had developed projectiles such as the bow and arrow that allowed them to attack prey at a distance. And there is an equivalent difference between the seal remains at Klasies and Nelson Bay. The age of the seals at Klasies indicates that ancient humans lived on the coast all through the year ‘including times when [food] resources were probably more abundant in the interior’.³ At Nelson Bay, however, the inhabitants timed their coastal visits to late winter/early spring when they could catch the infant seals on the beach, and then moved inland when it was more productive to do so.⁴ There is a final difference in these two sites as regards fishing. There are no fish among the debris at Klasies, while fish predominate at Nelson Bay. As we saw above, by now harpoons had been invented. Could such co-operation have been achieved without language? Could the concept of the harpoon barb be passed on without a word for it?

Still more deductions can be made about the origin of language from examination of the sudden appearance of early humans in difficult environments, in particular the very cold parts of the world, notably Siberia. Siberia is important because the conquest of cold was man’s greatest achievement before the invention of agriculture, and because it was the jumping-off point for what turned out to be the greatest natural experiment in mankind’s history – the peopling of America. And, we may ask, would any of this have been possible without language? Many sites in greater Siberia have been dated to at least 200,000 years ago and their very existence raises the question of fire (again) and of clothing. The climate was so harsh that many palaeontologists feel that the land could not have been occupied without man wearing ‘tailored’ clothing. However rough this tailoring would have been, it nevertheless implies the invention of the needle very early on, though nothing has ever been found. In 2004 it was reported by biologists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology at Leipzig, in Germany, that body lice are different from hair lice. Mark Stoneking and his colleagues infer that body lice ‘probably evolved from hair lice when a new ecological niche – clothing – became available’. Based on the rate of mutation, they date this to 75,000 BP.⁵

To conquer Siberia and Australia, early humans would have needed not only needles, to make clothes, but in the case of Australia rafting vessels, and in both places an elaborate social structure, involving kin and not-kin (and an appreciation of the differences). All of which would have required elaborate communication between individuals – i.e., language.⁶ Experiments show that group decision-making grows less effective in assemblies of more than six. Larger groups can therefore exist only with a hierarchy and this too implies language. By ‘communication’, we mean proto-languages, which probably lacked both tenses and subordinate clauses, where the action and thought is displaced from the face-to-face here-and-now.⁷

Some time between 25,000 and 10,000 years ago, the area of sea that now separates Siberia from America – the Bering Strait – was land, and ancient man was able to walk from Eurasia to Alaska. In fact, during the last ice age that part of the world was configured quite differently from the way it is now. Not only was the land that is now submerged above water but Alaska and parts of what is now Yukon and the Northwest Territories, in Canada, were separated from the rest of the Americas by two gigantic ice sheets. Beringia, as this area is known to palaeontologists and archaeologists, stretched as an unbroken landmass from deepest Siberia across the strait and for three or four hundred miles into north America. Then, around 10,000 BP (though it was of course a very gradual process), the seas rose again as the world warmed up and the glaciers melted, and what we now call the Old World was cut off from the New and from Australia. Earth was effectively divided into two huge landmasses – Eurasia and Africa on the one hand, the Americas on the other. Early man then set about developing on the two landmasses, each for the most part unaware of the other’s existence. The similarities and the differences in the course of that independent existence tell us a great deal about humanity’s fundamental nature.

Mys Dezhneva (or Uelen), the easternmost point of Siberia, is 8,250 miles from the Olduvai Gorge, as the crow flies. The route taken by early man was anything but straight, however, and a journey of 12,000 miles would be nearer the mark. It is a very long way to walk. Such archaeological and palaeontological remains as have been found place H. erectus in Asia from 800,000–700,000 years ago, associated with primitive tools of the Oldowan kind and, from 400,000–350,000 years ago, with the use of fire. H. erectus cave sites contained many charred bones of animals – deer, sheep, horses, pigs, rhinoceros – showing that s/he used fire for cooking as well as warmth. What is less clear is whether H. erectus knew how to start fires, or only preserved naturally occurring flames, though there are sites with deep charcoal deposits, which do suggest that hearths were kept burning continuously.

The latest evidence suggests that modern humans left Africa twice, first around 90,000 years ago, through Sinai into the Levant, an exodus which petered out. The second exodus occurred around 45,000 years later, along a route across the mouth of the Red Sea at the ‘Gate of Grief’ in Ethiopia. Humans reached the Middle East and Europe via the valleys of Mesopotamia, and south-east Asia by ‘beachcombing’ along the coasts. (This cannot quite be squared with the most recent evidence that early humans reached Australia around 60,000–50,000 BP.)⁸

Studies of H. erectus skulls found in China show around a dozen tantalising – and highly controversial – similarities with those of Mongoloids and native Americans. These similarities include a midline ridge along the top of the skull, a growth of the lower jaw which is especially common among Eskimos, and similar shovel-shaped incisors. Taken together, these traits suggest that Chinese H. erectus contributed some genes to later Asian and native American Homo sapiens, though this evidence is very controversial.⁹ At the same time, it is important to stress that no trace of H. erectus or H. neanderthalensis has ever been found in America or, for that matter, above the 53° north parallel. This suggests that only H. sapiens successfully adapted to very cold weather. Mongoloid people are adapted to cold, with double upper eyelids, smaller noses, shorter limbs, and extra fat on their faces. Charles Darwin, in his travels, encountered people at Tierra del Fuego who didn’t need much clothing.¹⁰

Excavations by Russian (Soviet) archaeologists tell us a little about what Homo sapiens was capable of at that time. Some Asian scholars claim that s/he was in the region as early as 70,000–60,000 years ago and that modern humans evolved independently and separately in Asia. However, the fossil evidence for both claims is very thin.¹¹ Most likely, modern humans arrived in Siberia between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago, after evolving in Africa. Certainly, traces of human settlement do not occur in north-east Siberia until around 35,000 years ago, when there is an ‘explosion’ of sites which record their presence. This may have had something to do with the changing climate.¹²

All over the world, and not just in Siberia, more sophisticated artefacts began to occur after about 35,000 years ago – new stone tools, harpoons, spear points and, most important perhaps, needles, for making sewn and therefore tailored garments.¹³ In Europe, north Africa and western Asia, Neanderthals made and used some sixty types of stone tools.¹⁴ These are referred to collectively as the Mousterian industry (after the site of Le Moustier in south-west France). Levallois-Mousterian tools have been found in Siberia but very few north of 50° and none at all above 54°. This could mean that during the time the Neanderthals were alive the climate was worse than later, or that they never managed to conquer the cold (or of course that their sites, which exist, have simply not been found). If they never managed to conquer the cold, whereas modern man did, this could be due to the invention of the needle, which resulted in tailored clothing, possibly similar to the modern Eskimo parka. (Three of the women depicted on Siberian art are shown wearing clothing which suggests this garment.) Bone needles have been dated back as far as 19,000 BP at least in Europe, and to 22,000–27,000 BP at the Sungir site near Moscow, where the decorations on the clothing, which had not disintegrated to the same extent as the skin on the remains, allowed archaeologists to reconstruct the shirts, jackets, trousers and moccasins that these people wore.

Homo sapiens’ move into Siberia may have had something to do with a change in climate: as was mentioned above, it was much drier in the last ice age, producing vast expanses of steppe-tundra (treeless plains with arctic vegetation) in the north, and taiga, or coniferous forest, in the south. This move to the north and east appears to have followed an explosion of sites in eastern Europe and the Russian plain, along three great rivers – the Dnestr, the Don and the Dnepr, and was associated with an increase in big game hunting. The migration reflected the development of portable blade blanks, artefacts that were light enough to transport over large distances and were then turned into tools of whatever kind were needed – knives, borers, spear heads as the case might be. At first these people lived in depressions scooped out of the soil but, around 18,000–14,000 years ago, they began to build more elaborate structures with mammoth bones as foundations, topped with hides and saplings. They decorated the mammoth bones with red ochre and carved stylised human and geometric designs on them. Many of the camp sites, most of which are in locations sheltered from the prevailing northern winds, were relatively permanent, which shows, say some palaeontologists, that these primitive societies could resolve disputes and had an emerging social stratification.¹⁵ The settlements, such as they were, supported populations in the thirty to one hundred range and, quite clearly, must have had language.

The taiga – the coniferous forest of Siberia – may have been so dense as to prevent human penetration, which would mean that Homo sapiens reached the Bering Strait by either a very northerly or a far more southerly trek.¹⁶ In the more northerly route, such sites as have been found, Mal’ta and Afontova Gora, for example, cover about 600 square metres and consist of semi-subterranean houses. Mal’ta was probably a winter base camp with houses built of large animal bones interlaced with reindeer antlers. Its ivory carvings depict mammoth, wildfowl and women. Arctic foxes were buried in large numbers, after skinning, which may indicate a possible ritual.¹⁷

The dominant culture of the area, however, appears to be that known as the Dyukhtai, first discovered in 1967 at a site close to the floodplain of the river Aldan (around the modern town of Yakutsk, 3,000 miles east of Moscow). Here were found the remains of large mammals, associated with distinctive bifacially flaked spear points, and with burins and blades made from characteristic wedge-shaped cores. Other very similar sites were found, first along the river valley, dated to between 35,000 and 12,000 years ago, though most scholars prefer a date of 18,000 years ago for the beginnings of this culture. Later, most exciting of all, Dyukhtai sites were found across the Bering Strait in Alaska and as far south as British Columbia. Many scholars believe that early man from Dyukhtai followed mammoths and other mammals across the (dry) strait into the New World. Berelekh, 71 degrees north, near the mouth of the Indigirka river, on the East Siberian Sea, is the northernmost Dyukhtai site. It is known for its mammoth ‘cemetery’, with more than 140 well-preserved mammoths which drowned in spring floods. Early man may have followed the river from Berelekh to the sea, then turned east along the coast.¹⁸

So far as we can tell, the land bridge between what is now Russia and Alaska was open between 20,000 and 12,000 years ago, after which the seas again rose and it was submerged.¹⁹ When it was exposed, however, it comprised arid steppe-tundra, covered by grasses, sedges, and wormwood, and littered with scattered shallow ponds. There would have been few trees but, especially in summer, this would have been attractive territory for grazing herbivores, and large mammals like mammoth and bison. Fossil insects found in Alaska and Siberia are those associated with hoofed animals.²⁰ The ponds would have been linked by large rivers in whose waters fish and shellfish would have been plentiful. A legend among the Netsi Kutchiri Indians of the Brooks range, in Canada’s Yukon Territory, has it that in the ‘original land’ there were ‘no trees’, only low willows.

Of course, early man may have sailed across the straits. No artefacts have actually been recovered from the land under the water, but mammoth bones have been brought up. We know that 60,000–55,000 years ago Australia was discovered, and that must have involved sailing or rafting over distances of about fifty miles, roughly the width of the Bering Strait. The general consensus is, however, that this far north, in very inhospitable waters, open ocean sailing would have been very unlikely. Coastal sailing, to the strait itself, and then across the land bridge, is more likely, if only because man would have followed the game. And the fauna is identical on both sides of the strait, proving that animals walked across. Naturally, early man did not realise that Beringia would eventually be submerged. As was mentioned earlier, there were at the time two huge ice sheets covering much of north America, the Laurentide and the Cordilleran, extending as far west as what is now the border between the Yukon and the Northwest Territories. To early man, the landmass to the west of the ice would have been one continuous area. Indeed, some archaeologists and palaeontologists say Beringia was ‘a cultural province unto itself’, showing a biotic unity, and that it may have had a higher population then than now.²¹

The evidence for a migration across the strait falls into what we may call the geological, the zoological, the biological or medical, the archaeological, and the linguistic. On both sides of the present strait there are identical features, such as raised beaches now some miles inland, showing that the two continents share a similar geological history. Zoologically, it has long been observed that the tropical animals and plants of the Old World and the New have very little in common, but that the nearer the strait one gets, the greater the similarities. Biologically, native Americans are closest to the Mongoloid people of Asia. This shows in the visible physical characteristics they share, from their coarse, straight black hair, relatively hairless faces and bodies, brown eyes and a similar brown shading to the skin, high cheek bones and a high frequency of shovel-shaped incisor teeth. Such people are known to biologists as sinodonts (meaning their teeth have Chinese characteristics, which separates them from sundadonts, who do not). Teeth found in the skulls of ancient man from western Asia and Europe do not display sinodonty (which is mainly a hollowing out of the incisors, developed for the dentally demanding vegetation in northern Asia).²² All native Americans show sinodonty. Finally, on the biological front, it has been found by physical anthropologists that the blood proteins of native Americans and Asians are very close. In fact, we can go further and say that native American blood proteins, as well as sharing similarities with Asians, fall into three dominant groups. These correspond to the palaeo-Indians of north, central and southern America, the Eskimo-Aleut populations, and the Athabaskans (Apache and Navaho Indians, situated in New Mexico). This, according to some scholars, may underlie other evidence, from linguistics and DNA studies, which indicate not one but three and even four migrations of early man into the New World. Some scholars argue that there was an ‘early arrival’ of the Amerinds (perhaps as early as 34,000–26,000 BP), a later arrival (12,000–10,000 BP) of the Amerinds, and a third wave (10,000–7000 BP) of the Eskimos and the Na-Dene speakers. But the awkward fact remains that there is no direct archaeological evidence to support these earlier dates. The remains of only thirty-seven individuals had been found in America by AD 2000 which dated to earlier than 11,000 BP.²³

The archaeological evidence for early man in the Americas suffers further because there are no securely dated sites in Alaska earlier than the Bluefish caves in the eastern Yukon Territory, which date to between 15,000 and 12,000 years ago.²⁴ Nevertheless, there is little doubt that there are many features common to both sides of the Beringia area. One element is the ‘Northwest Microblade’ tradition, a particular type of microblade, which was wedge-shaped and made from a distinctive core, found all over Beringia.²⁵ These cores have been associated with one site in particular, Denali, which, according to F. Hadleigh West, is the eastern outpost of Dyukhtai culture, with at least twenty locations in Alaska. (Denali is situated in and around Tangle Lakes in Alaska.) Dyukhtai culture is no older than 18,000 years ago and Denali was gone by 8000 BP.²⁶ That early man crossed the Bering land bridge between 18,000 and 12,000 years ago is also supported by details from the Meadowcroft rock shelter in western Pennsylvania, where remains have been calculated, on eight separate occasions, to between 17,000 and 11,000 BC. And by the fact that the presence of early man at Tierra del Fuego, ‘the end of the road’ at the southern tip of South America, has been dated to about 9000 BC. However, there are still doubts about the dating of Meadowcroft, where the remains are corrupted by the presence of coal, which may make it seem older than it is.

Early man’s discovery of the New World may not seem, on the face of it, to fall into the category of ‘ideas’. But there are three reasons for including it. One is because the conquest of cold was a major advance in early humans’ capabilities. Second, in being cut off for so long, and from such an early date (say 15,000 BP to AD 1492, 14,500 years, and ignoring the possibility of Norse contacts, which were abortive) the parallel development of the Old World and the New provides a neat natural experiment, to compare how and in what order different ideas developed. Third, as we shall now see, this separation throws crucial light on the development of language.

George Schaller, as mentioned before, has pointed out that lions hunt game in groups – fairly successfully – without the benefit of language. We cannot say, therefore, that as man turned to the hunting of big game he necessarily had more than the rudiments of language. On the other hand, it would seem highly unlikely that he could manufacture standardised tools, or cave paintings, or beads, without language. But these are all inferential forms of evidence. Is there anything more direct?

We have to remember that many of the skulls of ancient men and women, on which these studies are based, have been in the ground for as much as 2 million years, with rock and earth bearing down on them. Their present-day configuration, therefore, may owe as much to those millennia of pressure as to their original form. Nevertheless, with this (all-important) proviso in mind, we may say as follows. Modern studies, of people living today, show that two areas of the brain are chiefly responsible for language – what are called Broca’s area, and Wernicke’s area. Broca’s area is located in the left hemisphere, towards the front of the brain, and about halfway up. Individuals with damage to that area generally lose some of their facility with words. Wernicke’s area, slightly larger than Broca’s area, is also in the left hemisphere, but behind it, also about halfway up. Damage to Wernicke’s area affects comprehension.²⁷ There is much more to the brain than this, of course, in relation to language. However, studies of the skulls of H. habilis show that Broca’s area was present with the earliest of the hominids but not with the australopithecines. Pongids (apes), who lack Broca’s area, cannot produce any human speech sounds and they further appear to lack intentional voluntary control of vocal signals: for example, they cannot suppress food-barks even when it is in their best interest to do so.²⁸ On the other hand, several experiments in the late twentieth century show that chimps possess a nascent language ability in that, although they couldn’t speak, they could learn American Sign Language. This suggests (to some) that language ability is very old.²⁹

In line with such reasoning, each of the skulls unearthed at Skhul and Qafzeh in Israel and dated to 95,000–90,000 BP, had a completely modern supra-laryngeal vocal tract: ‘These fossil hominids probably had modern speech and language.’³⁰ Palaeontological anatomists also find no reason why early humans should not have had modern syntax.³¹ This suggests that H. habilis had a form of language, more sophisticated than the half-dozen or so calls that may be distinguished among chimpanzees and gorillas, but still not a full language in our sense of the term.

The only hyoid bone (important in speech, linked by muscle to the mandible, or lower jaw) to be found on a palaeontological site was discovered in the summer of 1983 in the Kebara cave on Mount Carmel in Haifa, Israel. The skeleton discovered there was dated to 60,000 BP and was labelled Mousterian – i.e., Neanderthal. According to B. Arensburg, of Tel Aviv University, the hyoid bone of this creature ‘resembles that of modern man in configuration and size’ and ‘casts a totally new light on the speech capability of [Neanderthals] . . . Viewed in anatomical terms, it would seem that Mousterian man from Kebara was just as capable of speech as modern man.’³² Neanderthal ear bones recovered in 2004 from excavations in Spain showed that ‘their hearing was attuned to pick up the same frequency as those used in human speech’.

There are a number of other inferences that may be made about early thought, stemming from the inspection of tools and the behaviour of early man and of primates and other mammals. One is the standardisation of stone tools. Is it possible for this to have happened, say some palaeontologists, without language? Language would have been needed, they argue, for the teacher to impress upon the student what the exact form the new tool should be. In the same way, the development of elaborate kin systems would also have required the development of words, to describe the relationships between various relatives. Some primates, such as chimpanzees and gorillas, have rudimentary kin systems: brothers occasionally recognise each other, and mothers their offspring. But this is not highly developed, is inconsistent and unreliable. Gorilla ‘family units’, for example, are not kin groups as we would recognise them.

One very different piece of evidence was unveiled in 2002 (this was mentioned earlier, in a different context). A team led by Svante Paabo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, announced in August that year that it had identified two critical mutations which appeared approximately 200,000 years ago in a gene linked to language, and then swept through the population at roughly the same time anatomically modern humans spread out and began to dominate the planet. This change may thus have played a central role in the development of modern humans’ ability to speak.³³ The mutant gene, said the Leipzig researchers, conferred on early humans a finer degree of control over the muscles of the face, mouth and throat, ‘possibly giving those ancestors a rich new palette of sounds that could serve as the foundation of language’. The researchers did not know exactly what role the gene, known as FOXP2, plays in the body, but all mammals have versions, suggesting it serves one or more crucial functions, possibly in foetal development.³⁴ In a paper published in Nature, the researchers reported that the mutation that distinguishes humans from chimpanzees occurred quite recently in evolution and then spread rapidly, entirely replacing the more primitive version within 500 to 1,000 human generations – 10,000 to 20,000 years. Such rapid expansion suggests that the advantages offered by the new gene were very considerable.

Even more controversial than the debate over when language began have been the attempts to recreate early languages. At first sight, this is an extraordinary idea (how can words survive in the archaeological record before writing?) and many linguists agree. However, this has not deterred other colleagues from pushing ahead, with results that, whatever their scientific status, make riveting reading.

One view is that language emerged in the click sounds of certain tribes in southern Africa (the San, for example, or the Hadzabe), clicks being used because they enabled the hunters to exchange information without frightening away their prey on the open savannah. Another view is that language emerged 300,000–400,000 years ago, and even 1.75 million years ago, when early man would sing or hum in a rhythmical way. Initially, these sounds were ‘distance calls’, by which males from one group attracted females from another group (as happens with some species of chimpanzee), but then the rhythmic chanting acted as a form of social bonding, to distinguish one tribe from another.

From such other anthropological evidence as exists, from contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes, we find that there is about one language for every thousand or two thousand people (there were around 270 Aboriginal languages in Australia when that continent was discovered by Europeans).³⁵ This means that, at the time man crossed from Siberia to Alaska, when the world population was roughly 10 million,³⁶ there may have been as many languages in existence then as there are today, which is – according to William Sutherland, of the University of East Anglia – 6,809.³⁷ Despite this seeming handicap, some linguists think that it is possible to work back from the similarities between languages of today to create – with a knowledge of pre-history – what the original languages sounded like. The most striking attempt is the work of the American Joseph Greenberg who distinguishes within the many native American languages just three basic groupings, known as Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dene and Amerind. His investigations are particularly noteworthy when put alongside the evidence, mentioned earlier, that there were three migrations into the Americas from Asia.^{38 2} The latest DNA evidence, however, suggests there were not three but five waves of migration from Siberia into America, one of which may have been along the coast.⁴⁰ This evidence suggests that the first Americans may have entered as early as 25,000 years ago – i.e., before the Ice Age, and meaning that these pioneers sailed across the Bering Strait.

More controversial still is the work of the Danish linguist Holger Pederson and the Russians Vladislav Illich-Svitych and Aron Dolgopolsky, who believe that all languages of Europe and Asia and even north Africa – the so-called Indo-European tongues, Semitic, Uralic, Altaic and even the Eskimo-Aleut languages across the Bering Strait in Canada – were descended from a remote ‘ancestor’, called Nostratic, from the Latin adjective nostras, meaning ‘of our country, native’.⁴¹ (And meaning that, of 6 billion people in the world today, 4 billion speak Nostratic languages.⁴²) This act of ‘linguistic palaeontology’ takes us back, they say, some 12,000–15,000 years. It has an even more controversial relationship with an equally contentious entity, known as Dene-Sino-Caucasian, which includes languages as diverse as Basque, Chinese, Sumerian and Haida (spoken in British Columbia and Alaska). The relationship between Chinese and Na-Dene has been recognised since the 1920s but, besides being further proof of the links between New World peoples and those of eastern Asia, it raises an even more controversial possibility. This is that, perhaps, proto-Dene-Sino-Caucasian was spoken by the original inhabitants of Eurasia, and the people who moved into the Americas, but then the earliest farmers, who spoke proto-Nostratic, overcame them, and displaced them and their language.⁴³ This theory is supported by the very latest evidence, which finds a particular mutation of mitochondrial DNA shared between India, Pakistan, central Asia and Europe.⁴⁴

This is highly speculative (at best), as – inevitably – are the claims of some linguists, Merritt Ruhlen chief among them, who claim to be able to distinguish a Proto-Global or Proto-World language. While Dolgopolsky has published etymologies of 115 proto-Nostratic words, Ruhlen and his colleagues have published 45 ‘global etymologies’ of words which, they believe, indicate a connection between all the world’s languages. Here are three of the etymologies – the reader may judge their credibility.⁴⁵

MANO, meaning man. This is found as follows: Ancient Egyptian, Min, the name of a phallic god; Somali, mun = male; Tama, an East Sudan language, ma = male; Tamil, mantar = people, men; Gondi, manja = man, person; Austric, whose people call themselves man or mun; Squamish (a native Canadian language), man = husband; Wanana (South American), meno = man; Kaliana, mino = man, person; Guahibo, amona = husband; Indo-European, including English, man.

TIK, meaning finger or one. Gur (Africa), dike = 1; Dinka (African), tok = 1; Hausa (African), (daya)tak = only one; Korean, teki = 1; Japanese, te = hand; Turkish, tek = only; Greenland-Eskimo, tik = index finger; Aleut, tik = middle finger; Tlingit, tek = 1; Amerind (Karok, tik = finger, hand; Mangue, tike = 1; Katembri, tika = toe); Boven Mbian (New Guinea), tek = fingernail; Latin, dig(-itus) = finger, decem = 10.

AQ’WA meaning water. Nyimang (Africa), kwe = water; Kwama (Africa), uuku = water; Janjero (Africa), ak(k)a = water; Japanese, aka = bilge water; Ainu, wakka = water; Amerind (Allentaic, aka = water; Culino, yaku = water and waka = river; Koraveka, ako = drink; Fulnio, waka = lake); Indo-European (Latin, aqua, Italian aqua = water).

Dolgopolsky’s construction of the actual words in proto-Nostratic shows, he says, that the speakers of the language ‘were not familiar with agriculture, animal husbandry and pottery’ but his claims that they used ‘bows and arrows and fishing nets’ were attacked by fellow linguists.⁴⁶ He was also able to reconstruct what foods were available (eggs, fish, honey), a variety of tools (flint knives, hooks, poles), leather footwear, parts of the body (spleen, the neck), kinship terms (father, mother, in-laws, members of the clan) and supernatural entities (casting of spells, magic).⁴⁷ He found no word for a large body of water and so, partly for this reason, located the original homeland of Nostratic speakers inland in south-west Asia.⁴⁸

Attempts have also been made to reconstruct the way and order in which languages formed. An experiment published in 2003 reported that a chimpanzee in Atlanta had suddenly started ‘talking’, in that he had made up four ‘words’, or stable sounds, standing for ‘grapes’, ‘bananas’, ‘juice’ and ‘yes’. Among humans, according to Gyula Décsy, of Indiana University, in Bloomington, Indiana, the various features of language developed as follows:

H and e, the first vocal sounds, and the sounds made by Neanderthals, say 100,000 years ago

‘Timbric sounds’ (nasal) – u, i, a, j, w = 25,000 years ago

w, m, p, b = 15,000 years ago

t/d, k/g = 12,000 years ago

I/you, here/there, stay/go, good/bad = 10,000 years ago

Third person = 9,000 years ago.⁴⁹

Some may feel that this speculation has been taken as far as it can go, the more so as other scholars have recently emphasised the levels of disagreement in this area. For example, Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist who specialises in linguistics, argues that language began ‘two to four million years ago’, and Robin Dunbar attracted a great deal of interest in the mid-1990s with his theory that speech developed from grooming in chimpanzees. In effect, sounds allowed early humans to ‘groom’ more than one person at a time.⁵⁰

No less intriguing and controversial than the emergence of language is the emergence of consciousness. The two were presumably related but, according to Richard Alexander, a zoologist from the University of Michigan, the key factor here would have been the development of early humans’ social intelligence. We have seen that one consequence of bipedalism was an increase in the division of labour between males and females, leading to the nuclear family. This in itself, say some palaeontologists, might have been enough to stimulate an awareness of human differences, between men and women and between self and not-self, at the least a rudimentary form of consciousness. Then, as humans came to live in larger groups, co-operating with each other and competing against other groups, the appreciation of human differences would have been all-important in developing a sense of self, and the prediction of the future – what other groups might do in certain circumstances – would have highlighted the present and how it should be organised. The recognition of kin would also have been significant in evolving a sense of self, as would the development of techniques of deception in one’s own self-interest.⁵¹ Alexander believes that these two factors – self/not-self and present/future – were the basis not just of consciousness but of morality (the rules by which we live) and that the scenario-building (as he puts it) which was required helped to evolve such social/intellectual activities as humour, art, music, myth, religion, drama and literature.⁵² It would have also been the basis for primitive politics.⁵³ This is another field where speculation is running ahead of the evidence.

Merlin Donald, mentioned in the last chapter, has a different view. It will be recalled that, for him, the first two modes of thought were ‘episodic’ (in apes), and ‘mimetic’ (in H. erectus). His second transition, to the third mode, was to ‘mythic’ thought. To begin with, he says (and this is based on an analysis of present-day ‘stone age’ tribes), language was first used to create conceptual models of the universe, grand unifying syntheses, as individual and group self-consciousness emerged with language. Language may eventually have been used in many other ways, he says, but this was its first use and purpose.⁵⁴

For Donald, the final transition was to theoretic thinking or culture. This is shown in the inventions and artefacts that suggest the existence of apparently analytic thought skills that contain germinal elements ‘leading to later theoretic developments’.⁵⁵ Examples he gives include fired ceramics at 25,000 BP, boomerangs at 15,000 BP, needles, tailored clothing, the bow and arrow, lunar records, rope, bricks at about 12,000 BP – and of course the domestication of plants and animals.⁵⁶ The final phase in the demythologising of thought came with the development of natural philosophy, or science, in classical Greece.

Many of the discoveries described above are piecemeal and fragmentary. Nevertheless, taken together they show the gradual development of rudimentary ideas, when and (in some cases) where they were first tried out. It is a picture full of gaps but in recent years some palaeontologists and archaeologists have begun to build a synthesis. Inevitably, this too involves speculation.

One aspect of this synthesis is to say that ‘civilisation’, which has traditionally been held to develop in western Asia around 5,000 years ago, can now be held to have begun much earlier. Many researchers have noticed that in the Upper Palaeolithic there are regional variations in stone tools – as if local ‘cultures’ were developing.⁵⁷ Cave art, Venus figurines, the existence of grinding stones at 47,000 BP and textiles at 20,000+ BP, together with various forms of notation, in fact amount to civilisation, they say.

One of the most important examples of early notation has recently been re-evaluated in a potentially significant way. This is the ‘La Marche antler’. Discovered in the cave of La Marche, in the Vienne department of western France, in 1938, this shows an engraving of two horses, with several rows of marks above them. The antler first came to prominence in 1972 when it was analysed by Alexander Marshack, who concluded that it was a record of lunar notation, accumulated over seven-and-a-half months.⁵⁸ In the 1990s, it was re-examined by Francesco d’Errico, referred to earlier in connection with the Berekhat Ram figurine and the so-called Slovenian flute. D’Errico examined the notches on the La Marche antler under a powerful microscope. He concluded that the marks had all been made at the same time, not accumulated over months, and that they had nothing to do with a lunar cycle. He wasn’t sure what, exactly, the notches represented, or measured, but he noted that they were not dissimilar from the notches used in cuneiform writing. Since, as we shall see in Chapter 4, cuneiform began as a way to record commercial transactions (counting bales of hay, or pitchers of wine, for example), d’Errico suggests that perhaps the La Marche antler may be understood in a similar fashion, as proto-writing.⁵⁹

Paul Bahn goes further. He has suggested that there appears to be a link between the decorated caves of the Pyrenees and eastern Cantabria and the many thermal and mineral springs in the vicinity of these sites. Perhaps, he says, these centres played a role in the mythology of Palaeolithic times. The widespread occurrence of serpentine and zig-zag lines, almost invariably associated with water, is no accident and, he speculates, may be associated with a mother-goddess cult. The zig-zag is a common motif, often associated with fish, and a human-like figure at Les Eyzies in France, a site dating back 30,000 years, shows a zig-zag inscribed on the figure’s torso.⁶⁰ A bone fragment discovered in 1970 at Bacho Kiro in Bulgaria suggests this sign may go back to the time of the Neanderthals. The same applies to M-shaped and V-shaped carvings, which recall feminine symbols, such as the uterus and vulva. These symbols were repeated well into the Bronze Age on water vessels.

Many specialists claim that carved or notched bones are tallies of hunters, others say that the signs can be divided into male (lines and dots) and female (ovals and triangles) and that Ice Age humans really were on the brink of an alphabet. This may be going too far but what does seem clear is that, in covering bones with carved images alongside a series of dots, in rows and columns, early humans were constructing what anthropologists call Artificial Memory Systems – and that, after all, is what writing is. Embryonic writing is perhaps the best description. The essential similarity of these signs is particularly intriguing, so much so that some archaeologists now believe that ‘a considerable number of the deliberate marks found on both parietal and mobile art from the Franco-Cantabrian region are remarkably similar to numerous characters in ancient written languages, extending from the Mediterranean to China’.⁶¹ (See Figure 2.) In rebuttal, it might be said that there are only so many signs the human mind can invent. But even if this is true, the similarities would still amount to something, implying that there is perhaps a genetically determined limit to our imagination in this field. At present we just do not know, although in 2005 a study of 115 different alphabets found that most languages average three strokes a character. This is no coincidence, says Mark Changizi, the researcher concerned. ‘Three happens to be the biggest number our brains can recognise without having to count.’⁶²

Figure 2: Similar signs among early forms of writing and proto-writing

[Source: Richard Rudgley, The Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age, New York: The Free Press, 1999, page 78]

For archaeologists, the term ‘civilisation’ generally implies four characteristics – writing, cities with monumental architecture, organised religion and specialised occupations. We cannot say that Palaeolithic humans got there fully – cities, for example, lay some way in the future. But the study of language, and writing, in civilisation – advanced though it now is – may still have some way to go. Merlin Donald, for example, has highlighted certain important stages in language development, in particular rhetoric, logic (dialectic) and grammar.⁶³ As he also points out, these comprised the medieval trivium in Christendom, which separated these basic skills, these rules of thinking, from the quadrivium – mathematics, astronomy, geometry and music, which were specific subjects.

In so far as ideographic, hieroglyphic and alphabetical systems of writing vary in their rhetorical, logistical and grammatical possibilities, does this difference help account for the different trajectories of the disparate civilisations around the world? Does the physical form of writing affect thinking in a fundamental way? The trivium was based on the idea that dispute – argument – was a trainable skill. Was it this which, at base, would provide the crucial difference between the West and the rest, which is the subject of Parts Three, Four and Five of this book, and did it encourage the assault on religious authority, the all-important break with mythic thinking? It is something to keep in the back of one’s mind as we proceed.