Masters of the Planet

by Ian Tattersall

  The most striking thing of all, though, is the astonishing contrast between the impressive but prosaic material record bequeathed us by the Neanderthals, and the symbol-drenched lives of the fully modern people who succeeded them in Europe. These new people, colloquially known as the Cro-Magnons, entered the subcontinent around 40 thousand years ago, bringing with them so-called Upper Paleolithic material cultures that, however distant from us, provide abundant evidence that these people viewed and experienced the world in essentially the same way that we do. Such evidence includes the astonishingly powerful art of the Lascaux, Chauvet, and Altamira caves that we encountered in chapter 1. And the Cro-Magnons’ arrival on the Neanderthals’ territory heralded an equally telling acceleration in the tempo of technological change, as the artists or their fellows explored the imaginative possibilities opened to them by the new form of reasoning. Clearly, for all the Neanderthals’ formidable resourcefulness and skills, the Cro-Magnons were creatures of an entirely new order.

  One of the world’s earliest artworks: a carving of a horse in mammoth ivory, probably around 34 thousand years old. This is a supremely symbolic object: in its flowing lines it is not merely a representation of the chunky horses that roamed the Ice Age steppes of Europe, but an abstraction of the graceful essence of the horse. Vogelherd, Germany: drawing by Don McGranaghan.

  We see this not only in their material productions, but in less direct indicators such as the higher population densities that are reflected in the number and size of Cro-Magnon sites. Indeed, it is most probably the Cro-Magnons’ abilities to exploit the environment much more intensively than the Neanderthals could, as well as their evident advantages in planning if it ever came to direct conflict, that led to the total disappearance of the latter within ten millennia of the new hominids’ arrival. It has been argued that, in the run-up to the last peak of cold that occurred some 20 thousand years ago, Neanderthals were already in terminal decline; and this may well have been the case regionally, as in the southern tip of Iberia, which late Neanderthals seem to have abandoned before the Cro-Magnons arrived. But it is unlikely that no contact was made between the two kinds of hominid anywhere within the huge territory that the Neanderthals had inhabited, and there are some rather speculative indirect indications—in addition to the DNA—that the two species did encounter each other.

  Cave entrances and rock overhangs are common features in limestone areas of Europe, and were preferred living places for early humans because of the natural shelter they provided. Still, the epithet “cave men” is certainly not justified. Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons alike roamed and camped widely over the landscape, and we associate them with caves simply because such places are relatively protected from erosion, and thus preferentially preserve the traces of ancient occupation. Many caves and rock shelters preserve multiple layers of debris left behind by successive generations of both Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons (usually as indicated by the artifacts they left behind—their bones are much more rarely found). Where a single site has evidence of both hominids, the Upper Paleolithic levels almost invariably overlie the latest Mousterian strata, the two most often distinctly separated by sterile sediments signifying that the site was abandoned for a period of time. Only two localities show possible evidence of Mousterian overlying Upper Paleolithic before finally being definitively replaced.

  But at a few very late sites there is evidence of yet another cultural tradition—known as the “Châtelperronian” and found at a scattering of sites in western France and northern Spain—that incorporates features of both the Mousterian and the Aurignacian (the first cultural phase of the Upper Paleolithic). The Châtelperronian industry exhibits not only the “flake” tools of the Mousterians, but also “blade” tools like those that were a major feature of the Aurignacian tool kit, in addition to bone and ivory objects. As you’ll recall, blades are those slender flakes, more than twice as long as wide, that occasionally also turn up in Africa in much earlier contexts; and in Europe they are a Cro-Magnon hallmark. In recent years, the Châtelperronian has generally been viewed as the handiwork of Neanderthals, possibly as a result of acculturation due to contact with modern humans, who were well established in Europe by Châtelperronian times. Sites attributed to the Châtelperronian all fall in the very brief 36-thousand- to 29-thousand-year range, whereas radiocarbon dates indicate that Cro-Magnons were already in Spain by 40 thousand years ago, having likely arrived from the east. It is worth noting, though, that radiocarbon dating in this remote time period is rather tricky, due partly to the minuscule amounts of radiocarbon that remain in samples of that age. Recent work indicates that dates obtained using older methods tend to be a bit young, and recent high-precision dates have suggested to some researchers that the period of overlap between the two hominid species was both earlier and briefer than traditionally believed—another reason for concluding that abrupt replacement was involved.

  What is more, just what form any possible acculturation represented by the Châtelperronian may have taken is largely conjectural: suggestions as to how the odd combination of cultural features came about include trading, imitation, and theft. Still, some recent developments may have made all this moot, for the tide appears to be turning against the idea that the Châtelperronian bone and ivory items were the handiwork of Neanderthals—although the blade artifacts were clearly developed within an older Neanderthal tradition. Unquestionably the most famous potentially symbolic Châtelperronian pieces were found in a cave called the Grotte du Renne, at Arcy-sur-Cure, in France. They include a rather splendid polished ivory pendant that most people would have little difficulty in identifying as a symbolic object, and until recently they were believed to have been associated with some rather fragmentary Neanderthal fossils from the same site. But several independent studies have recently concluded that they were most likely introduced from above into the earlier Neanderthal layers, through the sort of natural mixing up of strata that can frequently occur in caves. Similarly, the association with the Châtelperronian of the clearly Neanderthal skeleton from St.Césaire has been called into question by recent studies. The bottom line here is that, although it seems improbable that the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons did not encounter each other once in a while, we still have no good record of any interaction between them, let alone of what form it might have taken.

  Thus the obvious question—whether the large-brained Neanderthals could have acquired symbolic ways of dealing with information from the incoming Cro-Magnons—remains unanswerable on the basis of the material record we have to hand. But when we take all the indirect lines of evidence into account, it seems a bit unlikely. When Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons met on the landscape it seems probable that, for all their similarities, they would have perceived each other as alien beings, each with its own way of viewing and dealing with the world. Language would have been a major issue, among many others. Whereas the Cro-Magnons almost certainly possessed language as we know it today—however different their specific language might have been from any spoken now, or even within recorded history—it seems likely that the Neanderthals did not. Language is an intensely symbolic activity that, as we’ll see in detail later, probably played a unique and pivotal role in the acquisition of modern symbolic consciousness; and even in the unlikely event that an occasional gifted Neanderthal managed to acquire its rudiments, there is no firm indication that any potential interchange had a material effect on the cultural or biological trajectory of either group.

  When we ponder the differences between the Cro-Magnons—whose lives, like ours, were doubtless riddled with myth and superstition—and the Neanderthals, perhaps the closest thing we can obtain to a glimpse of the divergence in psyche comes from the grisly yet matter-of-fact fate of the hapless denizens of El Sidrón, and from the casual way in which that piece of skull bone from La Quina was used as the most inconsequential type of tool. I cannot help but read an intense form of focused practicality—and a related lack of symbolic imagination—into these and al
l the other material leavings of the Neanderthals. These large-brained relatives certainly were smart; but their particular kind of smartness was not ours. This difference is hard for us to comprehend fully. As I’ve already stressed, it is just not possible for a symbolically thinking modern human to project him- or herself into the mind of any creature that did not think that way—no matter how large-brained or closely related to us it might have been. The cognitive gulf is just too great. At our current stage of understanding we simply cannot know how Neanderthals subjectively experienced the world and communicated that experience to each other. All we can be certain of is that we do the Neanderthals a grave injustice by looking upon them as an unsuccessful version of ourselves.

  TWELVE

  ENIGMATIC ARRIVAL

  About the same time that Homo neanderthalensis first appeared in Europe, our own species Homo sapiens was emerging in Africa. But while the Sima de los Huesos fossils give us a pretty good idea of Neanderthal ancestry in Europe, we have no African equivalent in our own case. A number of hominid crania are known from sites in eastern and southern Africa in the 400- to 200-thousand-year range, but none of them looks like a close antecedent of the anatomically distinctive Homo sapiens. Yet we can be confident that Africa was the continent of our birth, not only because the very earliest plausibly Homo sapiens fossils are found there, but because numerous DNA comparisons of modern human populations have made it clear that they all converge back to an African ancestry. The lack of anticipatory fossils might simply be due to the fact that Africa is a very large place that has not been explored in great detail; but it may also suggest that our unusual species originated in the kind of systemwide genetic regulatory event I have already mentioned in the case of the also radically new Homo ergaster. For Homo sapiens departs in numerous features from the much more ancestral body form exemplified both by the Neanderthals and those other extinct members of the genus Homo represented by relevant fossils. Still, this is not the whole story, for as far as Homo sapiens is concerned it appears that body form was one thing, while the symbolic cognitive system that distinguishes us so greatly from all other creatures was entirely another. The two were not acquired at the same time, and the earliest anatomical Homo sapiens appear right now to have been cognitively indistinguishable from the Neanderthals and other contemporaries.

  ANATOMICALLY MODERN Homo sapiens

  The first traces we have of people who looked in their bony structure exactly—or almost exactly—the way we do today, come from two sites in northeastern Africa. In the late 1960s, rocks in southern Ethiopia’s Omo Basin that are now reckoned to be about 195 thousand years old yielded the fragmentary remains of a skull that, reconstructed, looks plausibly to be a Homo sapiens, even if not exactly like a member of any human population living today. And much more recently, deposits at Herto in northern Ethiopia produced a trio of crania, including a fairly complete child and adult, that are also best considered Homo sapiens, if once more differing from today’s people in a few details. Certainly the adult shows the characteristic high, voluminous cranial vault, with a small face retracted beneath its front, which is so conspicuously unique to our species. The Herto fossils can be firmly dated to between 155 and 160 thousand years ago; so, between them, the Omo and Herto hominids demonstrate pretty clearly that the distinctive basic Homo sapiens cranial anatomy was established by about 200 to 160 thousand years ago. Importantly, this date range coincides with the dates for the origin of Homo sapiens proposed by molecular anthropologists, based on the time-to-coalescence calculated for a large number of different modern human populations from around the world.

  Still, in cultural terms it seems that the reign on Earth of Homo sapiens started with more of a whimper than a bang. Stone tools found at both of the Ethiopian sites are unimpressive. At Omo the few artifacts found have been characterized as “nondescript,” while at Herto handaxes are present, as well as prepared-core flakes. This is the latest recorded presence of handaxes in Africa, and it places the Herto stone tool assemblage right at the end of what was evidently a complex and prolonged transition from the Acheulean to the “Middle Stone Age” (MSA) technology associated with later humans. The MSA has regularly—if, as it turns out, a bit inappropriately—been regarded as the African equivalent of the Neanderthals’ Mousterian in Europe, largely because both traditions relied upon prepared-core techniques. But, as we will shortly see, there seems to have been a lot more going on in the MSA than there ever was in the Mousterian—although as far as we know at present, these stirrings were not expressed until after Omo/Herto times.

  Because of the persistence of the old alongside the new that has typified all of human technological history—and continues unabated today—it’s hard to say exactly when the MSA began. But a general reckoning would place its origin in the period between about 300 and 200 thousand years ago, most likely before recognizable Homo sapiens had come into existence—and if so, comfortably in line with the disconnect we’ve already seen between biological and cultural innovation in human evolution.

  The matter of Homo sapiens origins has been muddied by a long-running tendency among paleoanthropologists to identify reasonably large-brained non-Neanderthal hominids who didn’t look like us as “archaic Homo sapiens.” This appellation has been applied to specimens found in almost all regions of Africa, as well as elsewhere. But it really doesn’t help much to include in our species creatures who didn’t share at least the most basic aspects of our distinctive anatomy (most especially that reduced and retracted face). Among the most puzzling of such fossils are certain crania from North Africa, some of which are associated with a stoneworking industry known as the Aterian, after the site of Bir el Ater, in Algeria. The Aterian toolkit is fairly characterized as a variant of the MSA, but it includes some unique tool types, such as the defining “tanged points” that may have been hafted as spear tips or even conceivably, in very late phases, as arrowheads.

  Long considered to be quite recent in date, the Aterian is now known to occur at some quite ancient sites, and this has excited speculation that the earliest producers of this industry may have played a role in the initial exodus of Homo sapiens out of Africa. Geographically this makes sense, for the Sahara desert has not always been the barrier to human movement that it is today, and areas that are now sandy wastelands have produced ample evidence of earlier occupation, notably by Aterians. As fossil drainage systems now covered by blowing sands testify, the Sahara has periodically “greened” as rainfall increased and lakes and vegetation sprouted everywhere. One of the wettest such periods occurred between about 130 and 120 thousand years ago (the time of the last interglacial in Europe). And at that point the Sahara could certainly have acted as a conduit for modern human populations expanding northward, although there are reasons for thinking that the Aterians themselves may have remained effectively in Africa, at least in the longer term.

  One reason for uncertainty is the Aterian peoples’ identity. Although it is generally unwise to associate any particular kind of hominid exclusively with a specific toolkit, it may be relevant that the North African hominid remains so far associated with early Aterian societies belong in that very dubious “archaic Homo sapiens” category. Best known among these fossils is a partial cranium, plus more fragmentary materials, from Dar-es-Soltan II, a site in Morocco that may be as much as 110 thousand years old or more. One that has received a lot of publicity lately is a crushed and fragmented but relatively complete child’s cranium from Contrebandiers Cave, also in Morocco, which has been dated to about the same time and which, in its reconstructed form, is clearly not a standard-issue modern human despite a reasonably capacious braincase. Even more unlike modern humans are a couple of crania from another Moroccan site, Jebel Irhoud, which may be over 160 thousand years old. These earlier specimens are associated with a toolkit that is said to closely resemble the Mousterian of the Neanderthals—though the hominids themselves don’t look Neanderthal at all. None of these North African specimens presents
itself as an obvious variety of Homo sapiens, despite brain volumes for the Jebel Irhoud individuals of 1,305 cc and 1,400 cc. The more complete Jebel Irhoud 1 cranium has a rather small lower face; but the whole facial skeleton is forwardly positioned, and it also boasts prominent brows behind which the forehead retreats in a manner unlike anything we see in modern Homo sapiens.

  Front and side views of a cranium from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, that is thought to be some 160 thousand years old. Often considered close to Homo sapiens, it actually has a very distinctive facial structure. The associated industry is very much like that of the Neanderthals in Europe. Drawing by Don McGranaghan.

  Recognizing species from their bones is often a tough proposition among close relatives: in some cases, much physical diversity may accumulate within a population without speciation occurring, while in others, the bones of members of two species descended from the same ancestor may be virtually indistinguishable. In the absence of a good morphological yardstick we thus can’t be absolutely sure that Aterians or the Jebel Irhoud people would not have been able to exchange genes with anatomically mainstream Homo sapiens. Indeed, they may conceivably have done so, as we’ll see in a moment. Still, as we will also see, although Aterians could have ventured a bit beyond Africa at a very early stage, they certainly did not play a role in the definitive Homo sapiens exodus that later populated the world.

  Now let’s shift the scene to the nearby Levant, the area along the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea that would have been the first stop along the route followed by hominids leaving Africa and spreading north and west. Because the Levant has typically shared elements of its fauna with Africa rather than with regions to its north, biogeographers have actually often considered this area an extension of the great African landmass. Following Omo/Herto times we have a growing inventory of African fossil hominid crania that unequivocally show the distinctive modern Homo sapiens morphology; but none of them is indisputably as early as a more or less complete skeleton that was buried, by the latest reckoning 100 thousand years ago or more, at the Israeli cave site of Jebel Qafzeh. This specimen clearly represents a member of our own species, as do the remains of an adolescent found nearby. Yet at the same site we also find—in larger numbers—the remains of big-brained hominids who are not your standard-issue Homo sapiens, although they are certainly not Neanderthals. To deepen the mystery, all of these hominids were found in association with Mousterian stone tool kits. These tools were more or less identical to those produced by the Neanderthals whose presence is well documented in Israel at around the same time. Indeed, Neanderthal sites in the region date from at least 160 thousand years ago to about 45 thousand years ago.