The Human Journey, Volumes 1 - 2

by Kevin Reilly

  Cave Paintings and Female Figurines . The full flowering of this human creativity can be seen in the cave paintings and female figurines that date from about 30,000 to 12,000 years ago. These works, discovered in areas of Europe that have undergone extensive excavation, have led many archaeologists to speak of a late or “Upper Paleolithic Cultural Revolution” during this period. Clearly, these Stone Age ancestors had become talented artists, innovative toolmakers, symbolic thinkers, and reflective human beings. All this occurred as they became the effective hunters and voracious meat eaters that swept through the herds of big game that roamed the planet and as they migrated throughout the glacially cold world at the height of the last ice age. Their need to adapt to new environments as they moved and their need to confront conditions of sometimes bitter cold may, in fact, have been challenges that pushed their cultural development. They invented techniques like sewing close-fitting fur garments, weaving fibers and firing pottery, and creating tools like bows and arrows, spear throwers, nets, traps, and multipurpose flint blades.

  The best evidence of this “Upper Paleolithic,” or late Stone Age, revolution is in the female figurines and animal cave paintings that can be found from Spain to Mongolia, heralding a mature artistic ability, religious rituals, long-range cultural contact and trade, and a considerable increase in population density.

  Cultural Adaptation . The changes that occurred to our human ancestors between 100,000 and 10,000 years ago were not only the most extensive changes that had ever occurred in such a short time but also changes in the way in which change occurred. These were not physical changes. The human brain and facial features that typify Homo sapiens sapiens reached their current form 100,000 years ago. The changes that occurred after that were cultural: changes in behavior and thought. And they were so critical that they altered the way humans were to change forever after. From then on, cultural changes far outpaced the slow process of physical evolution.

  To the extent that the fittest humans survived the past thousands of years, it was because of culture. Warm clothes, better weapons and tools, social support, and the ability to communicate—these cultural attributes of humans provided more leverage in surviving than would any random mutation in genes or physical condition. Even at the height of the last ice age, 18,000 to 20,000 years ago, the human ability to control fire, make warm clothing and housing, and thus stay warm by cultural means far outweighed any potential physical change. It is difficult to imagine a physical change that would have been as effective. The development of a thick coat of furlike hair would have been a successful adaptation to the ice age but to little else, especially not to the warming that began 12,000 years ago. A far more effective adaptation was the development of the ability to make a fur coat that could be worn or taken off. Physical changes are limiting because they address a single problem. The key adaptation that humans experienced was the ability to think and express themselves with complex language; the special function of culture was the ability to solve new problems as they arose.

  Human Differences:

  Race and Culture

  The overwhelming changes that have occurred to humans over the past few hundred thousand years occurred to them all. The physical changes were species wide and very slow; the cultural changes spread rapidly. But there were some changes, both physical and cultural, that occurred separately or in varying degrees. Oddly, humans have often been more preoccupied by these differences. From the vantage point of a Martian, all humans were changing in the same way, but to human eyes on the ground, it sometimes looked like people were going their separate ways.

  The most obvious physical differences among humans are those that are popularly lumped under the heading of race. Skin pigmentation is one of these. Dark pigmentation is obviously an adaptation to bright sun (actually ultraviolet light) in a tropical climate. However, that does not mean that all our African ancestors had dark skin. Today’s Africa has an enormous variety of climates and peoples, and all these have changed over the past 100,000 years. But it is likely that one successful adaptation by humans who came from Africa to the cloudy skies of northern Europe was a lightening of skin pigmentation. This is because sunlight supplies necessary vitamin D, and light skin can compensate for limited sunlight. Fish are also a good source of vitamin D, so Inuit (Eskimo) adaptation to Arctic winters over the past 50,000 years has not required white skin. Each natural adaptation may have a single function, but there are numerous possible adaptations to any problem. Recent DNA evidence suggests, for instance, that the light skin of Europeans is a different genetic adaptation than the light skin of Asians.12

  Human body sizes and shapes also varied as adaptations to climate and environment. In a hot dry climate, like that of North Africa and the Middle East, a successful adaptation enabling the rapid release of body heat resulted in a small head, long legs with short torso, and a generally tall stature (providing a high ratio of skin surface to body mass). Initial human settlements outside of Africa were limited to the lower, warmer latitudes. But when humans began to move into northern cold and dry climates, the opposite adaptation—large heads, short legs, long torso, and short overall stature—then evolved.

  When did these changes occur? Since different species of our human ancestors have traveled out of Africa on numerous occasions over the course of the past 2 million years, there is some debate about when and how modern humans evolved into their current appearances. Some, called “out-of-Africa” theorists, believe that the latest African emigrants, Homo sapiens sapiens, who left Africa less than 100,000 years ago, replaced all previous humans in the world without interbreeding with them. According to this theory, all physical differences among human beings would therefore have occurred within the past 100.000 years. Another theory, called “multi-regional,” associated with Milford Wolpoff,13 argues that Homo sapiens sapiens likely interbred with the descendants of earlier travelers from Africa, possibly including the descendants of Homo erectus. According to this view, modern humans evolved differently in different parts of the world even though all mixed with the late-arriving Homo sapiens sapiens out of Africa. If Wolpoff is right, human differences evolved over the millions of years of human settlement around the globe. The debate continues: a recent DNA study argues that all modern humans are descended from an Africa migration 65,000 years ago.14 But another recent study suggests interbreeding: it reveals that Neanderthal DNA is 99.5 percent similar to the human genome.15

  What about cultural differences? They are more recent than biological differences. For most of the past 5 million years, cultural changes were monotonously uniform throughout the world. Wherever humans went, they took many of the same tools. Homo erectus in East and South Asia used more bamboo and less stone for projectile points than did the stone toolmakers of Africa, Europe, and Central Asia. Stone axes that could be thrown like lethal Frisbees were widely produced west of India, but not, it used to be thought, in East and South Asia.16 Recently, however, archaeologists have unearthed similar axes made 800.000 years ago in South China, suggesting that the technologies of early humans were quite similar.

  Certainly in the past 100,000 years, cultural differences in the world have increased. In this period, the tool kit of central Africa was very different from that of southern Africa. Two areas of France produced different sets of tools. The cave paintings of the Mediterranean were vastly different from those of the Sahara or Australia.

  Nevertheless, the emergence of separate cultural zones did not prevent one culture from influencing another. Especially during the Upper Paleolithic era (40,000 to 12,000 years ago), as cultural contacts increased, toolmakers and artists learned to borrow and adapt styles or techniques from others. Thus, the caves of Chauvet, France, were unique in their depiction of rhinos, but that was a minor variation in an animal cave art that spread throughout settled Eurasia. Strikingly similar Venus figurines were carved from 27,000 to 20,000 years ago in Lespuge, France; Willendorf, Austria; and Kostenski, Russia. They all emphasize the breasts
, belly, thighs, and vulva of the female figure, suggesting a common religious attention to fertility. They are also similar in their depiction of woven string material or textiles, a testament not only to a common style but perhaps also to the common activity of Paleolithic women. Is the similarity of these works a result of imitation or common development? We do not know. Certainly, no one would presume to identify a “French” or “Russian” style in any of these works. The world of national style was still far in the future.

  Did all these Upper Paleolithic peoples speak the same language? We do not know that either. Some scientists postulate an original language at the time of leaving Africa, whether by Homo erectus 2 million or Homo sapiens sapiens 100,000 years ago. But because Africa contains 25 percent of the world’s languages, it is likely that there were many languages in Africa before humans left to colonize the world. The current distribution of the world’s language groups may only be as old as the spread of agriculture (a theory we examine later). In any case, languages change much faster than genes. Certainly, the languages we know are very recent, none of them more than a few thousand years old and most of them only a few hundred years old in recognizable form. A shaved Shakespeare in jeans would go unnoticed until he opened his mouth.

  Do Numbers Count?

  Patterns of Population Growth

  If you had been viewing Earth from Mars with a good telescope for the past 100,000 years, you would likely be impressed by how humans took over the planet. From a population of about 10,000 at the beginning of the last glacial expansion about 100,000 years ago, humans increased to about 6 million by its end, 10,000 years ago. But you would also be struck by how humans replaced other animals. With the help of a technique of modern archaeology, it would be tempting to conclude that humans multiplied by eating everything in sight. The archaeological technique is the examination of ancient coprolites or fossilized excrement to determine what was eaten.17 A team of archaeologists studied the coprolites of three long-term human settlements around the Mediterranean Sea in Italy and Israel. All these communities consumed shellfish, tortoises, partridges, hares, and rabbits from almost 200,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago. The archaeologists discovered that the food remains from the early years of settlement showed a diet made up almost entirely of the slow-maturing, slow-moving, and easy-to-catch tortoises and shellfish. By 50,000 years ago, this easy prey had declined to about three-fourths of local meat intake, and about 20,000 years ago, they fell to less than a quarter. Humans increased their numbers at the expense of the abundant, easy-to-capture prey, forcing their descendants to run ever more quickly for the hares and rabbits.

  Most of Human History:

  Foraging Societies

  What were the lives of these first humans like? We call them foragers because that is how they obtained their food. Before the agricultural revolution, 10,000 years ago, all humans foraged for their food: gathering available plants and animals, fishing, and hunting. Some combination of hunting, fishing, gathering, or foraging for whatever was available in nature has been the primary means of subsistence for most of humanity for most of our history: for all primates up to 10,000 years ago and for many since. Even today, there are isolated pockets of people who engage in little or no agriculture but live on what nature provides. Agriculture has spread so far and wide that today’s foragers are relegated to some of the most remote and uninviting environments in the world. We find the Khoisan in the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa, the aboriginal inhabitants of Australia in the arid Outback, the Inuit (Eskimos) in the northern Arctic, the Mbuti Pygmies in the rain forests of central Africa, and many foragers deep in the Amazon rain forest.

  Lifestyles of Foragers . It is tempting to think that these contemporary hunters and gatherers live as all our ancestors did before the agricultural revolution. No doubt there are some ways in which a foraging lifestyle shapes how people think and behave. But before we try to figure out what these are, we must issue a couple of warnings. First, we must recognize that the lives of today’s foragers may be very different from that of their parents, grandparents, or ancestors. Their society has had its own history; it has not been static. Today’s hunters and gatherers have not emerged from a pristine preagricultural world as if from a time machine. This lesson has been brought home to anthropologists and historians by a series of recent studies of foragers in the world today, beginning with a study of the Khoisan people of the Kalahari Desert.18 Since the Khoisan are foragers today, it was assumed that their lives were continuations of ancient traditions and that they could consequently be used to speak for all of our past ancestors before the agricultural revolution. On closer inspection, however, it turned out that the Khoisan living today were actually descended from a pastoral people who had known agriculture as well as domesticated animals. Similarly, a recent study of a foraging people in the interior of Borneo revealed that their ancestors had been farmers who became gatherers hundreds of years ago in order to supply forest products to Chinese traders.19 We can still call these people foragers or hunter-gatherers, but we cannot use them as stand-ins for the human population before agriculture.

  Another warning—and one for which this chapter has already prepared the ground—is that the lives of our hunter-gatherer ancestors also changed, sometimes radically, in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and millions of years before the agricultural revolution. In time and space, the lives of foragers varied too much for us to ask “what was it like?” Changes in climate, tool capacity, speech, organizational ability, population density, geographical position, environment, and knowledge changed our ancestors’ lives radically.

  With those reservations in mind, however, we can use examples from contemporary foragers when they correspond to what we know from archaeological excavations. We have already alluded to their diet, a matter of concern to some modern nutritionists who reason that whatever worked for the first hundreds of thousands of years should be good enough for us today. Vegetarian nutritionists who hoped to find evidence of a meatless Paleolithic diet have continually been disappointed by evidence that the Upper Paleolithic diet always contained meat, but modern critics of animal fat, milk products, and grains have found support for their contention that the modern diet is a radical departure from that of our ancient ancestors. Food remains of ancient hunter-gatherers show a heavy reliance on lean game animals, fish and crustaceans, nuts, fruits, berries, and leaves. It was a diet high in protein and low in carbohydrates and fats, especially when compared to the dietary changes that came about as a result of the agricultural revolution. It was also a varied diet, consisting of a wider-than-modern variety of plants and animals, many of which no longer exist.

  What of their social life? Like modern foragers, our preagricultural ancestors probably lived in groups of families or “bands” of a couple dozen to a couple hundred individuals. Bands were further divided into families and groups of relatives. Like modern foragers, many were nomadic, following game seasonally, returning periodically to familiar places, but building homes from available materials (leaves, grasses, mud, or ice) quickly for stays of a few nights to a few months. Not all hunters and gatherers were nomadic, however. Some of our foraging ancestors lived in almost permanent communities, and some Paleolithic sites were inhabited continually. Whether nomadic or settled, they carried few possessions with them, owned little in the way of personal or family property, shared the bounty of a hunt, and made sure that everyone had an adequate and roughly equal supply of food.

  Sexual Division of Labor . In most cases, men hunted, usually in small groups, while women gathered plants and small animals with the children, closer to home. This sexual division of labor is typical of modern foragers, but few today live in regions of abundance as they once did. Modern hunters sometimes travel for days, even weeks, at a time, bringing back the kill for a special feast. The richer natural environment of the Upper Paleolithic tropical and temperate world might have made meat more frequent, man’s work easier, the male presence greater,
and men’s social role more prominent. In modern foraging societies, especially those in which plant life provides the bulk of the food source, the women’s role is correspondingly important. Nevertheless, the Venus figurines of the Upper Paleolithic suggest that the woman’s role as provider of life was a matter of considerable concern, perhaps even veneration. Kathleen Gough, an anthropologist who studied foragers in India, wrote that women in hunting societies are “less subordinated in crucial respects” than are women in almost all other societies. “Especially lacking in hunting societies,” she writes, “is the kind of male possessiveness and exclusiveness regarding women that leads to such institutions as savage punishment or death for female adultery, the jealous guarding of female chastity and virginity, the denial of divorce to women, or the ban on a woman’s remarriage after her husband’s death.”20

  Whether or not women were worshipped as life givers, fertility goddesses, or food providers, they played many important roles in Paleolithic society. Besides bearing children and providing what was likely the most reliable source of food by gathering, women were also the ones who cooked the food and distributed it to the family.

  Women also probably invented fabric. Paleolithic figurines show that women have learned to make string by twisting fiber and wear garments like skirts from dangling string tied to a band. A recently excavated site in the Czech Republic shows evidence of both weaving and pottery, dating from 28,000 years ago. Both of these activities were traditionally women’s work, performed almost exclusively by women in agricultural societies. That these skills developed long before the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago may be an indication that some Upper Paleolithic societies were much more sophisticated than we have thought.