Excavations at Happisburgh, Suffolk, England, just up the coast from Pakefield. This site, which has yielded around eighty stone tools, has been dated to at least 780,000 years ago.
Compared with Homo erectus, the first Europeans were more modern in a number of ways. Their brains were slightly larger, they were less robust and their teeth were smaller. These traits tend to link the first Europeans more closely to the Africans who were on the evolutionary path to modern humans, rather than to the Asian Homo erectus family. To confuse matters, the fossils from Atapuerca, especially from Sima del Elefante, share some of their distinguishing features and bone structure with Chinese fossils from around the same period.
Of the various European fossils from this period, the most surprising is that of a child from Gran Dolina. Its brain is larger than that of an adult Homo erectus and its cheekbones are prominent, unlike the flat faces of Homo erectus. The excavators said that this child looks very modern and argued that the first Europeans are in the ancestral line of Homo sapiens. Given the ancient date of the fossils, the excavators concluded that the people from Gran Dolina were the last common ancestor between Neanderthals and modern humans.
It is always difficult, however, to compare juveniles in one human species to adults of another. Just as domesticated dogs retain the playful traits of wolf pups in adulthood, one argument goes, modern humans are in a sense domesticated versions of our fiercer ancestors. Could it be that we modern adult humans resemble the pre-adolescent versions of our ancestors? The population of cannibalized humans at Gran Dolina seems to indicate this.
So who were these European pioneers? From the time after Homo erectus and possibly also Homo habilis left Africa, there are at least a dozen named species whose interrelationships are far from clear. Outside the world of Tolkeinesque fantasy literature, we tend to think that it is normal for there to be just one human species on Earth at a time. The past twenty or thirty millennia, however, have been the exception, in that we have mostly been the only large-brained primate. Before then, the human world was much more diverse.
Many of the early human species are known from just one individual or from one site, and it is not clear how many true species there were – whether a dozen is an overestimate or an underestimate. It is a classic debate between ‘lumpers’, who tend to see a lot of variation taking place within interbreeding populations, or who see this variation as reflecting normal differences caused by age, sex and disease within a species, and ‘splitters’, who are more willing to accept that human diversity involved divisions into several different species.
Given these uncertainties, the excavators of Atapuerca followed the only path left to them, which is to name a new species: Homo antecessor. Coined in 1997, this translates as ‘ancestor’ or ‘pioneer’ from the Spanish. To confuse matters, there is another possibility, which is that the first Europeans may have been the same species as one identified in Algeria from the same period, known from three jaws and some teeth and assigned to Homo mauritanicus in 1954. But the evidence for Homo mauritanicus is too fragmentary to make a firm connection with the European material.
On the question of the origins of Homo antecessor, the modern features of the child from Gran Dolina are evidence that antecessor inherited traits that evolved in Africa after the first human expansion into Asia. But others do see parallels with Asian populations, so this issue seems far from settled.
Equally contentious is the excavators’ original idea that Homo antecessor is a common ancestor of both Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis. Arguments against this notion include antecessor’s relative ‘modernity’ in comparison to the Neanderthals and genetic evidence that the split came later. To judge from the small number of sites from this period, antecessor seems not to have been very successful and probably did not survive Europe’s first major glaciation.
In short, the first Europeans seem to represent an isolated migration from Africa, or possibly Asia, that either reached a dead end or retreated back out of Europe when the climate deteriorated. From this evidence, they were probably not ancestral to the Neanderthals. In the next chapter, we will find out who was.
CHAPTER three
Defeating the Cold:
600,000 to 250,000 years ago
Starting just over 650,000 years ago, Europe underwent almost 40,000 years of icy conditions in the coldest and most sustained glacial period since humans first arrived. For a genus that was adapted to the tropics, this probably marked the end of what was never more than a low-level colonization of the continent.
After the melt, a new kind of human, bearing such tools as handaxes and wooden spears, arrived in Europe. These humans fended off other large carnivores to obtain primary access to large game, such as the rhinos and horses that they were probably hunting, and seem to have shown respect for the dead. Their occupation was much more extensive than that of Homo antecessor before them. The next time the climate deteriorated, they were able to maintain a presence in Europe, living through increasingly long and hostile glaciations. This second wave of Europeans evolved into a new form of humanity which, by 250,000 years ago, had become recognizably Neanderthal.
Who were these more successful European colonists who gave rise to the Neanderthals? Three skulls from Ethiopia, Zambia and South Africa provide a clue. Dating to the period covered in this chapter, these skulls match the species that made its first appearance in Europe just over half a million years ago. Some classify this species in Africa as Homo rhodesiensis or ‘archaic’ Homo sapiens. But if they are indeed the same species as their European counterparts, as they seem to be, then priority goes to the first named fossil of its kind, and so we call it Homo heidelbergensis.
With two prominent human species named after places in Germany, it is easy to forget that Africa was the primary engine of human evolution. Neanderthals, as we saw in Chapter One, are named after the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf. Down a road called the E31, less than 300 kilometres (185 miles) away, is Heidelberg, an ancient seat of European learning and, more recently, home to American and NATO military headquarters in Europe. Heidelberg received the honour of having a human species named after it when a jaw bone turned up in a quarry in the area of nearby Mauer in 1907.
Map showing the major sites discussed in this chapter and generally attributed to Homo heidelbergensis.
Making a handaxe with a bone or antler tool.
A pointed handaxe from Swanscombe and an ovate handaxe from Boxgrove, both sites in England (lengths approx. 140 mm and 160 mm).
Few people have heard of Homo heidelbergensis, despite the fact that it is probably our own immediate ancestor. If the Neanderthals are our closest human cousins, then Homo heidelbergensis is our shared grandparent. Fossil evidence suggests that this species extended across Africa and Europe about 600,000 years ago. Some researchers believe it reached into Asia, citing fossils from China and India.
In addition, DNA evidence that measures the ‘clock’ of genetic changes between the Neanderthals and ourselves indicates that this is the moment when we last shared a common ancestor. Looked at globally, it is possible that Homo heidelbergensis represents a second major wave of migration out of Africa, following the initial Homo erectus exodus. By the time of the final wave – of our own Homo sapiens ancestors – the European heidelbergensis population had evolved into Neanderthals. In this scenario, the initial Homo antecessor colonization of Europe probably represents a minor, less successful migration from Africa in the time between the Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis expansions. Small groups were probably going in and out of Africa throughout much of the last two million years, and it was only a few times that these events coincided with evolutionary changes and left evidence that we can read in the fossil record.
The Homo heidelbergensis occupation of Europe is framed by two major changes in stone tool technology. The first arrivals used handaxes, in contrast to the simple pebble-and-flake tools of Homo antecessor. By about 250,000 years ago, which most researchers a
gree marks the appearance of Neanderthals, there is another change, as cutting tools became smaller and more sophisticated. As we will see in the next chapter, this later technological shift seemed to occur simultaneously in Europe, western Asia and South Africa.
In contrast to the earlier Homo antecessor occupation of Europe, the evidence of Homo heidelbergensis is widespread, and we know a great deal more about heidelbergensis’s evolution, anatomy and behaviour. As with our understanding of Homo antecessor, our knowledge of Homo heidelbergensis is exploding thanks to a wealth of new discoveries. The last few decades have seen the excavation of the richest hominin site in the world at Atapuerca, the discovery of the world’s oldest wooden artifacts in the form of spears from Schöningen, Germany, and the excavation of the best-preserved butchery site from this period at Boxgrove, England.
As we gain a fuller understanding of the Neanderthals’ immediate ancestor, it is remarkable how familiar it is in behaviour and appearance. In Europe, half a million years ago, there was an intelligent, capable and even sentimental form of humanity. Homo heidelbergensis – which, remember, some refer to as ‘archaic’ Homo sapiens – is our most recent ancestor too, and its essential modernity should not surprise us. The more interesting question is how Neanderthals evolved from Homo heidelbergensis, to what extent they followed a parallel course to our own direct line and in what ways they differed. In this chapter we examine our shared starting point, remembering that the evidence of Homo heidelbergensis is far richer in Europe than in Africa, and so it is here that we find the clearest understanding of our own ancestry as well.
A Palaeolithic Pompeii
In a quarry at Boxgrove in southern England, archaeologists excavated a 500,000-year-old ground surface that was so well preserved that they could make out the exact spot where an ancient human sat to knap a handaxe. Starting in 1985, a decade of excavations produced no fewer than 300 handaxes, along with butchered remains of large animals such as elephants, rhinoceroses, horses, bison and red deer.
How did the remains of butchery and flint-knapping come to be so well preserved at the site? Boxgrove is located beneath a cliff that once marked Britain’s southern shore. Today, it is quite a way inland. When the sea level began to fall as a result of growing ice sheets, the area became a salt-water lagoon and the emerging coastal plain proved attractive to animal herds. Meanwhile, the cliff itself was a good source of flint to make handaxes. With large game and raw material to make tools in a confined area, Boxgrove seemed custom-made for human exploitation.
The lagoon was the key to the site’s preservation. In a similar, albeit much less dramatic, way to how life in Pompeii was frozen in time by the ash of a volcanic eruption in AD 79, there are a number of flint-knapping and butchery episodes at Boxgrove around 500,000 years ago that were preserved by the accumulating silts of the lagoon. Thanks to these shallow waters, we are able to see the results of activities that were probably as brief as fifteen minutes and no longer than an hour or so. To be able to see such a snapshot of ancient life is incredibly rare, but at Boxgrove it is also unfathomably distant in the past.
The great excitement from Boxgrove, however, was not just the preservation but the fact that the site has overturned some long-held ideas about the capabilities of our recent ancestors. It is clear from the animal bones that humans were the first predators to reach them. By the time scavengers such as hyenas and wolves fed on the bones and left their teeth marks, there were handaxe cut marks on them already. And these bones formed complete animals, meaning that the carcasses were still intact when humans started defleshing them.
In other words, whether or not humans hunted and killed such enormous game, they were at least able to drive away rival predators and have their choice of meat and fat. They may well have directed the animals into the lagoon to trap and kill them. Until recently, some researchers thought that the Neanderthals were merely marginal scavengers, making do with the scraps of other animals’ kills, so it has come as a surprise that even the Neanderthals’ predecessors were probably hunting large animals such as elephants and rhinos and were able to drive away lions and wolves, whose bones have also been found at the site.
To put an end to the question of human scavenging versus hunting at this early date, researchers found a ‘smoking gun’ in the form of a horse shoulder blade that showed signs of being pierced by a spear. In 1997 startling confirmation came when actual examples of such spears, some still embedded in horses, were uncovered from the site of Schöningen in Germany and dated to 340,000 years ago. There is little doubt that Homo heidelbergensis was a formidable hunter. At the end of this chapter, we discuss the European heidelbergensis’s practice of short-range ambush hunting, and consider whether this may have been a pivotal factor in the evolutionary split between the Neanderthals and modern humans.
Towards the end of the Boxgrove project, a new discovery rattled the archaeological world once again. In May 1994 Nature published news that a shin bone found at Boxgrove was the same age as the jaw bone from the heidelbergensis ‘type-site’ of Mauer, making it one of the oldest fossils then known in Europe. This claim to fame was not long-lived, because bones almost twice as old were discovered that very summer at Gran Dolina (which we discussed in Chapter Two). Known as Roger after discoverer Roger Pedersen, the original owner of this shin bone is still on record as the most ancient Briton. Two teeth turned up at Boxgrove a year later, confirming that the Boxgrove people were Homo heidelbergensis.
From these few fossil remains we can get a different kind of snapshot of life at Boxgrove. We knew from the preservation what the humans were doing at the site. Now we know much about who some of them were. The owner of the shin bone was built like an athlete. The individual was probably a male and lived to the ripe age of forty. Estimates of his height and weight (180 cm and 90 kg, or 5 ft 11 in. and 200 lb) are eerily close to those of the heavyweight champion boxer Mike Tyson. As for the teeth, the cut marks indicate that they belonged to a right-handed person who used his jaw as a vice for cutting.
Reconstruction of a male, nicknamed Roger, from the site of Boxgrove, based on the robust shin bone excavated at the site as well as other fossils of Homo heidelbergensis. He is equipped with a wooden spear similar to an actual one discovered at Schöningen in Germany.
The animal species at Boxgrove place the site in the warm period just before a cold spell called the Anglian glaciation, when most of northern Europe was covered by ice sheets or was a polar desert. Humans did not survive in Britain in these conditions, but they did survive on the continent.
The world’s first mass grave?
Within a dark and forbidding cave at Atapuerca, there is a seemingly bottomless hole. Some 14 metres (46 ft) down a narrow shaft lies a small chamber. First explored by palaeontologists in the 1970s, the chamber started to produce the world’s greatest collection of ancient human fossils – both in terms of quantity and preservation – in the 1990s. Appropriately called Sima de los Huesos (‘Pit of the Bones’), this site represents a dual mystery: who are the unfortunate souls that came to rest in the Sima, and how did they get there?
At first this site was dated to 250,000 years ago, but this has been slowly pushed back through successive advances in dating technology. More recently, the excavators put it at 430,000 years ago. The bodies in the Sima already show incipient Neanderthal features, making them among the earliest that we can attribute with any confidence to the ancestral line of the Neanderthals. Some researchers, such as Chris Stringer, go so far as to say that they are early Neanderthals, and in fact he believes that the correct date for the site is closer to 350,000 years ago. Others, such as Juan Luis Arsuaga, the Spanish excavator, regard them as late Homo heidelbergensis. Because proponents of both viewpoints agree that heidelbergensis evolved into neanderthalensis, this can be seen as something of a semantic point.
Excavation at the bottom of the cramped pit has been painstaking but rewarding. The site has produced over 6,500 hominin fossil bones and teeth, r
epresenting around thirty individuals, plus fossil animal bones of hundreds of cave bears and other predators such as lions, wolves and foxes. How did so many humans end up in such a small place? In contrast to nearby Gran Dolina, there are no remains of animals that might represent food debris. This was not a simple dumping ground.
There is a clue to this mystery in the only artifact found among the bones. It is a beautiful handaxe, knapped from reddish quartz, a rare material among the river pebbles used for making stone tools in the Atapuerca area (see p. 68). The excavators have named this handaxe Excalibur, in order to drive home their interpretation that this was an artifact loaded with symbolic meaning and that what took place at Sima de los Huesos was some sort of funerary rite. These are extraordinary claims for such ancient hominins, who until recently were thought not to have had the capacity for symbolic thought or to have attached any special meaning to death. But Sima de los Huesos is an extraordinary site, and it may just warrant an extraordinary interpretation.
Another clue is the age profile of the dead. Thanks mainly to the amazing preservation of the teeth, we know that most of the individuals died in their prime. If the Sima were something like a community grave site, then we would expect the bones to be mainly of children and the elderly, who typically die in greater numbers. But of the thirty or so individuals buried there, we have only one pre-pubescent child and just three adults over thirty years old.
The excavators believe that a catastrophic event, such as a drought, drove these hominins to the refuge of the Atapuerca Hills. In this scenario, only the fittest members of the group made it as far as the cave. Then, when their luck ran out, the last survivors dragged their deceased friends and family deep into the cave and dropped them in the pit, along with a symbolic red handaxe.
The Neanderthals Rediscovered: How Modern Science is Rewriting Their Story Page 5