The Incredible Human Journey

by Alice Roberts

  And there were still some sites that seemed to hold up that association between modern humans and the Aurignacian. The site of Ksar ‘Akil in Lebanon is important in this respect, as it produced a modern human skeleton alongside that ‘transitional’ half-Middle, half-Upper Palaeolithic ‘pre-Aurignacian’ industry. The burial dated to 40,000–45,000 years ago, and the layers overlying the skeleton were full of classic Levantine Aurignacian tools.4,5

  The site of Mladeè in the Czech Republic, which was first excavated in the nineteenth century, has produced over one hundred modern human fossils, in association with classic Aurignacian tools, including bone points. In 2002, a date was published for the calcite overlying the skeletal remains: 34,000–35,000 years ago.6 This looked like a good candidate for reaffirming the link between moderns and the Aurignacian, but a direct date on the bones themselves was needed to clinch it. A few years later and a radiocarbon date for the fossils themselves was published, placing them at around 31,000 (uncalibrated radiocarbon) years old.7 Although less well dated than Mladeè, there are also several French sites where modern human remains and Aurignacian tools have been found together: Les Rois and La Quina in the Charente, and Brassempouy in the Pyrenees.5

  Palaeolithic archaeologists everywhere must have breathed a huge sigh of relief. Once again – and actually even more surely than before the Cro-Magnon and Vogelherd redating upset, now that it was based on direct dating of human remains – the assumption that the Aurignacian – everywhere – was made by modern humans seemed well founded.

  ‘We don’t have Neanderthal bones, or modern human bones, here,’ said Nick. ‘We have dates that correspond to the period of the last Neanderthals and the first modern humans – in theory, it could be either. But the most plausible explanation is that it’s modern humans.’

  Having seen the beautiful artefacts from Vogelherd, I left the dig and Nick Conard, and drove a mile or so down the valley to meet experimental archaeologist Wulf Hein for a practical lesson in the differences between Middle and Upper Palaeolithic technology. I wanted to get to grips with the Mousterian and the Aurignacian – literally.

  Wulf Hein was an expert flint knapper and aficionado of all things Palaeolithic. His car was full of crates of flint, various spears, spear-throwers, bows and arrows. The finished objects were beautiful, but I really wanted to know how the flint tools were made, and to see the Levallois and prismatic core techniques in action.

  We sat in a field in the idyllic Lone Valley, having spread out a blanket to catch any stray bits of flint. In this archaeologically rich area, Wulf was very concerned that he didn’t confuse any archaeologists in the future by adding new, twenty-first century flint tools to the archaeological record. He took a Levallois core out of a crate; it was flattish and he had made it into the shape of a tortoise shell by knocking flakes off the periphery – making it into a ‘prepared core’. He struck it with a pebble – expertly – and a large flake detached itself from the middle of the disc-like core. Middle Palaeolithic technology starts off with simple flakes struck from cobbles. The Mousterian industry of the Middle Palaeolithic takes this a stage further, with flakes produced from a prepared (Levallois) core, just as Wulf Hein had demonstrated. It is named after the site of Le Moustier in the Dordogne, where Neanderthal fossils were found alongside their characteristic tools.

  Wulf then took a stone that had been carefully prepared into a cone shape out of the crate, and handed it to me: I was to make a blade from this prismatic core. Under his expert guidance, I gripped the core between my knees, held the tip of a piece of antler close to the edge of the stone, and struck the antler with a pebble. A long, thin and extremely sharp blade detached itself from the side of the core and fell to the ground.

  ‘Oh, nice one!’ exclaimed Wulf.

  ‘Are you proud of my work?’

  ‘Yes, I am. I’m astonished. It took me forty years.’

  I think my success had more to do with beginner’s luck – and having a good teacher.

  There it lay, a blade, the hallmark of the Upper Palaeolithic, the foundation of the classic Aurignacian industry. This technology was named after the site of Aurignac in the lower Pyrenees, excavated in 1860. The sort of tools that characterise the Aurignacian include long, thin slivers of flint called lames Aurignaciennes (Aurignacian blades) – like my blade but retouched all around the edges, as well as end-scrapers and burins, carinate (keeled) scrapers and tiny bladelets. The functions of these tools are being debated – especially the carinate ‘scrapers’ and the bladelets that are made from them. Are the unretouched bladelets waste products from making such a scraper? Or are the bladelets really what the maker was after, and the ‘scraper’ is actually just a small core – not a tool in itself?5 Even though the precise functions of all these pieces of flint aren’t yet understood, the shapes are very characteristic.

  Archaeologists have long believed that knapping blades from a prismatic core was much more efficient than the old-fashioned Levallois technique: the manufacturer can produce many blades from one prismatic core. In comparison, the Middle Palaeolithic Levallois technique just gives you a few flakes from one tortoise-shaped core. However, I later met up with experimental archaeologist Metin Eren, in Exeter, who had spent years making and comparing Middle and Upper Palaeolithic flakes and blades. His results had been surprising: the initial preparation of the prismatic cores actually produced more waste than discoidal cores, and thin blades didn’t last as long as flakes. So, in terms of producing usable cutting surfaces, it seems that there actually wasn’t much to choose between discoidal and prismatic cores, flakes and blades, in terms of efficiency.8

  Now I had seen very early evidence of (small) blade production, in Africa, Europe and Arabia, going right back into the Middle Palaeolithic. But there’s more to the Upper Palaeolithic than prismatic cores and long blades. Bone and antler tools are also seen to be characteristic of this culture. These materials do (rarely) pop up in other Middle Palaeolithic contexts – like Blombos Cave and Howiesons Poort in South Africa. Perhaps this isn’t surprising for those are modern human sites.9 (Just to throw a spanner in the works, there’s some evidence of Neanderthals making bone points as well.) Other elements that are considered particularly characteristic of the Upper Palaeolithic are grinding and pounding stones, suggesting more processing of vegetables was going on, and widespread use of body decorations like shell, tooth and ivory beads. (Now, I had seen evidence of much earlier use of ochre and ornamentation, but before the Upper Palaeolithic it is very patchy.) There appears to have been much more long-distance transport of raw materials, sometimes over hundreds of kilometres, compared with generally shorter distances in the Middle Palaeolithic. Carved figurines – as I had seen from Vogelherd and Hohle Fels – appear in the Upper Palaeolithic, along with cave painting (more of which later). It’s not straightforward, but, as a package, the Upper Palaeolithic does seem to be something special: it is still a useful category.

  Moving beyond the Aurignacian, improved hunting tools appear, like spear-throwers in the Gravettian, and, eventually, bows and arrows and boomerangs.9 Wulf had brought some of these along with him. The atlatl – or spear-thrower – was a very simple tool, essentially a stick, about half a metre in length, with a hooked end that fitted into a recess in the end of the spear.

  ‘This spear-thrower has a beautiful carved antler end. We don’t know what the original shaft looked like, but this is a reconstruction. It’s interpretation, but it works.’

  ‘I’d like to see how far you can throw these slender spears, with and without a spear-thrower,’ I challenged him.

  ‘OK, and you will be astonished.’ Wulf took up the gauntlet.

  He threw a spear without the spear-thrower first. ‘That was 220 grams thrown by hand,’ he said. Then he got ready to throw another spear, fitting it into the hook and laying it above the spear-thrower, gripping them both with one hand. ‘And this is 220 grams thrown with a spear-thrower – with the same power.’

 
; He threw it – rotating the spear-thrower so that it became like an extension of his arm – and the spear flew off …

  It was extraordinary: it had double the range. I had a go as well and amazed myself by how much further I could throw the spear with the atlatl. It was such a simple but impressive piece of kit.

  ‘If you’re trained you can get it even further. The record is 180 metres,’ said Wulf.

  Wulf had more examples of Stone Age projectile weaponry with him.

  ‘At the end of the line stands the bow and arrow,’ said Wulf. He had a beautiful replica of a Mesolithic bow with him. It was found in Denmark, preserved in a bog called Holmegaard, near Copenhagen. ‘The original is about 8,600 years old. It’s the oldest bow we’ve ever found.’

  Even earlier arrows have been found, dating to more than 11,000 years ago, and some archaeologists argue that there is evidence, albeit fragmentary, going even further back, into the Upper Palaeolithic. It seems that the development of bows and arrows was related to ecological changes: they appear as the world was warming up after the Ice Age, and Europe was becoming wooded. ‘If you’re hunting in the woods, a bow and arrow is much more effective than a spear-thrower. And it’s easier to aim,’ said Wulf.

  I enjoyed playing with Wulf’s ‘Mesolithic’ bow and flint-tipped arrows, and I am very sorry to say that two were left behind – somewhere in the long grass by the stream in that field; after so much time had been spent looking for them, we had to accept that the arrows were gone. Perhaps they will be found by archaeologists one day.

  Neanderthals, as far as we know, never made spear-throwers or bows and arrows, although they did progress from using thrusting spears to throwing spears. But does that really indicate an innate technological superiority of modern humans? Stone Age weapons expert John Shea has argued that the development of true projectile technology was key to our species’ ecological success, giving our ancestors an advantage in hunting and even providing them with long-range weapons that could be used to eliminate rivals, of our own species and perhaps others as well.10 But there’s no direct evidence to suggest that spear-throwers were ever used against Neanderthals. And the first sign of the bow and arrow is well after the LGM, when Europe was warming up and woodland was returning – long after Neanderthals had disappeared from the landscape.

  But I’m getting diverted here by later developments of the Upper Palaeolithic. Sticking with the Aurignacian, which was contemporary with the Mousterian, there is still a distinct difference between Middle and Upper Palaeolithic. Bar-Yosef 9 argued that the characteristic elements of the Upper Palaeolithic are ‘evidence for rapid technological changes, emergence of self-awareness and group identity, increased social diversification, formation of long distance alliances, [and] the ability to symbolically record information’.

  Across Europe, then, the change from Middle to Upper Palaeolithic cultures, between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago, is taken to represent the replacement of Neanderthals – bearing Middle Palaeolithic technology – with modern humans, carrying with them Upper Palaeolithic tools and artefacts. It has been called the ‘Upper Palaeolithic Revolution’, but this is a problematic label as it suggests that the late Pleistocene, in Europe, is the time and place of some kind of emergence of ‘fully modern’ behaviour. This is difficult to argue, as this pits modern humans in Europe not only against the Neanderthals but also against modern humans elsewhere. Were the people in Africa and Asia, still making Middle Palaeolithic stone tools, cognitively inferior to the Europeans? This is obviously a very divisive and Eurocentric viewpoint, and recalls that comment by Movius about Eastern Asia being an area of ‘cultural retardation’. It seems much more likely that modern behaviour was essentially born at the same time as our species, and that modern humans came out of Africa, as Oppenheimer puts it ‘painting, talking, singing, and dancing’.11 And, as we have seen, the African evidence supports this idea.

  But there is no doubt that the Aurignacian represents a new sort of culture. So how can we explain it? Well, culture is something that represents human interaction with the environment, and with other humans, so changes in culture can be seen as being driven by changes in climate and environment, as well as changes in society – and rather than a biological change. The Aurignacian didn’t require a new brain, or a few new genes. It was a new product of a brain that was already well equipped to develop behavioural solutions to environmental challenges. We have seen that the hallmark of modern humans elsewhere was ingenuity, adaptability and inventiveness. So it seems utterly reasonable to suggest that, in Europe, the new, modern human culture of the Aurignacian represented adaptations to a new environment – perhaps including the existence of a competitor in the landscape.

  The Aurignacian objects that have been passed down to us from our earliest ancestors in Europe show us that much more was going on on top of the change to a new method of tool manufacture. They show us that those people were flexible and adaptable, and forming complex social networks. They seem to indicate that these people felt part of something which extended far beyond their immediate families and familiar landscapes. Archaeologists argue endlessly about classification and naming of toolkits. The arguments can seem – especially to someone more schooled in bones than stones – incredibly complicated and esoteric. But the arguing itself means that this was an interesting time: several things are happening all at once: new stone tools are appearing in Europe, and at the same time there are new social structures emerging.9 Maybe the new styles of stone tools are part of a badge of identity, a fashion, for those early modern humans in Europe.8

  The Aurignacians spread inexorably across Europe. Perhaps at times the Neanderthals regained territory, but, ultimately, they were to disappear from the landscape. Their traces gradually contract and disappear, and the last Neanderthals seem to have occupied a lonely outpost in the very south-west corner of Europe: Gibraltar.

  Tracking Down the Last Neanderthals: Gibraltar

  The first Neanderthal fossil to be found was in Gibraltar – a skull blasted out of Forbes Quarry, in 18481 – but no one recognised it at the time, so the German find, six years later, had the honour of giving the species its name.

  The Gibraltar skull, probably that of a female, remains one of the best-preserved Neanderthal fossils. In 1926, another Neanderthal fossil – parts of the skull of a four-year-old child1 – was excavated from the Devil’s Tower site on Gibraltar. So Neanderthals certainly lived on the Rock – and more recent excavations have revealed quite challenging details about their way of life, and even why they might have died out.

  As I flew into Gibraltar, it was much smaller than I expected it to be: a 6km-long rocky headland sticking off the south-west corner of Spain into the Mediterranean. The runway of the airport was crossed by the main road into Gibraltar. From the plane window I could see the white cliffs of the limestone outcrop, dotted with square caves. The Rock is riddled with caves and tunnels, some natural, but many man-made. A great deal of them date from the Second World War, when civilians were evacuated and Gibraltar became a military fortress. The military presence on Gibraltar is still very evident today, but the Rock is also home to nearly 30,000 people. Sheer cliffs, more than 400m tall, rise out of the sea on its east side, but on the west the houses and hotels of the town cluster at the foot of a more gentle slope.

  I had travelled to Gibraltar to see Clive and Gerry Finlayson, and we met up on the terrace of the Rock Hotel, looking out over the harbour. They had studied the Gibraltar Neanderthals for years, and were keen to set the record straight when it came to perceptions of these ancient people as brutish, cold-adapted savages. In fact, the evidence emerging from Gibraltar seemed to indicate people much more like ourselves.

  Clive’s background as a zoologist and ecologist informed his approach to Palaeolithic archaeology. He wasn’t into constructing theories based on stone tool typologies, but favoured a landscape-first view where humans (modern and Neanderthals) were firmly placed in their environmental context. He
saw differences in technology as very much driven by ecological and social changes – not the other way around. From this perspective, technological and cultural differences represented quantitative rather than qualitative differences between the people making them. He was clearly not a supporter of the Upper Palaeolithic revolution, and argued that there was no sudden appearance of ‘modern behaviour’. He wasn’t suggesting that there were no differences between modern humans and Neanderthals, but rather that those differences were shaped by the environments in which cultures emerged, and by the social structures adopted by each population.2 The Finlaysons’ research in Gibraltar had provided evidence not only for late survival of the ancients in this corner of Europe, but for something which I had, perhaps naively, previously thought of as being exclusively ‘modern’ behaviour: the Neanderthals had beachcombed.

  Early the following morning, I met up with Clive down at the marina, and we took a boat out, heading around the point to the cliffs on the east. As we set out, the sea was as smooth as glass, and we seemed to glide along, the Rock bathed in golden sunlight and looking magnificent. There were natural caves, half in, half out of the water, all along the east side of the Rock.

  ‘There are over a hundred and forty caves in the whole of the Rock, and there’s probably twenty or thirty just along this cliff,’ Clive told me. ‘We get the feeling this was almost like a “Neanderthal city”. On Gibraltar, we’ve got ten sites, two with fossils and the other eight with tools: occupation sites. That’s probably the highest density that’s been recorded anywhere. And bear in mind, that’s just the sites where the archaeology has been preserved to today. It’s difficult to say how many people were living here, but I imagine the Rock would have had maybe a hundred Neanderthals living on it.’