Ideas
Page 8
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 evi
dence, 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 half-way 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 half-way 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 lang
uages. 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* 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.