When Darwin wrote that he believed that humans were descended from primates, no significant fossils of early hominids were known. The Neanderthal was the first of many subsequent discoveries which have since made it much easier to map our place in nature. But although there is now no shortage of evidence, that place is still incompletely understood. The Darwinist tradition has always tended to underestimate the unique attributes of our own species. More recent discoveries have provided plenty of grounds to correct this tendency, but their implications have not been widely understood.
It is clear that bipedal prehistory divides into two periods: the first period very long, the second comparatively brief. The first period is the period of the bipedal apes and early hominids. The first bipedal apes - now called australopithecines - appeared at least 3-4 million years ago and quite possibly much earlier; they were followed or replaced about 2 million years ago by the first animals generally now classified as members of the genus Homo. Various Homo variants appeared, whether new species or not, over the following 1-2 million years. As time went on, brain sizes became typically bigger and the genus expanded its geographical range, from tropical Africa into Asia and Europe.
The second period is that of Homo sapiens. It began at the most 100,000 years ago - only about 4000 generations or 1500 modern lifetimes. Commencing even later - only around 50,000 years ago, or less than a thousand modern lifetimes - the species which we call Homo sapiens very quickly replaced all earlier hominids, expanded to the habitable limits of Africa and Eurasia, colonised Australia (and probably many other islands) by boat and finally (only about 10-15 thousand years ago) colonised North and South America - rapidly to their habitable limits.
There is an extreme contrast between the behaviour of the Homo sapiens people and the behaviour of all the earlier bipeds. Over millions of years, our bipedal predecessors gradually acquired bigger brains and became better able to cope with colder environments; but (as far as we can judge) their technology progressed extremely slowly and quite probably their lifestyles hardly changed in hundreds of thousands of years. In cultural terms, all the pre-sapiens bipeds - up to and including the Neanderthals, who were the only bipeds in Europe until about 50,000 years ago - may perhaps have belonged as much with the great apes as with the people of our own species who followed them.
By contrast Homo sapiens appears quite suddenly as an animal in a hurry. Over a period of less than a thousand modern lifetimes, he has developed technology at a progressively more rapid rate, so that people now dominate all other forms of life. Dangerous and competitive animals have been progressively eliminated; useful animals and plants and the forces of nature have been enlisted in the service of humanity. We have emerged into the world which we now know.
In what follows, the animals of the very long first period are referred to as "australopithecines" and "hominids"; taken together, they are referred to simply as "bipeds". The terms "human" and "people" are reserved for Homo sapiens during the much shorter second period. Despite the domain name of this site, I have tried to avoid the term "man", which I now think causes confusion. It is confusing to refer to the Neanderthals and their predecessors as "man". Despite close skeletal resemblances, they must have been in some way fundamentally different from us.
The Bipeds
I
It was once thought that "man is the only toolmaker". This was believed partly because only members of the genus Homo are known to have made artifacts from stone - and stone artifacts are the only artifacts which usually remain to tell the story. It is now known that some animals do make tools; and chimpanzees - our nearest living relatives - make quite a lot of simple tools out of perishable natural materials.
Bipedality obviously made toolmaking and tool use easier, because it set the forelimbs free from other duties, so that (among other things) bipedal primates could develop new powers of manipulation and learn to process difficult but useful materials like stone. But the first bipedal apes, now called australopithecines, lived and flourished for several million years and yet (it seems) never learned to make anything out of stone at all. Then why did they adopt the upright posture?
It may be significant that there was a change in their canine teeth. Other primates (including chimpanzees) have long and dangerous canines. In some of the earliest australopithecine fossils, the canines are still bigger than the other teeth, though smaller and less impressive than those of a chimpanzee. In the later fossils, the canines take their place, as ours do, as food-processing tools rather than weapons. The picture below, taken from Glenn Conroy's Reconstructing Human Origins, shows (left) the teeth of Proconsul, an earlier fossil ape, (centre) the teeth of Australopithecus afarensis (about 3.3 million years ago) and (right) Australopithecus africanus (about 2.6 mya):
Canine teeth are an essential piece of equipment to an ape. Apes have no horns, claws or hooves: the canines are their principal weapons. Canines are used to fight against, and to deter, predators and rival members of their own species. Occasionally they are used to kill animal prey. If bipedality enabled the australopithecines to manage without these essential weapons, it must have provided them with an alternative weapons system, or they would not have survived.
Chimpanzees do not rely entirely upon their teeth when fighting. Michael Leach, an acute and experienced observer in the wild, tells us that when two rival groups meet..
..bloody warfare can break out. When one group greatly outnumbers another, chimps will fight in small cooperative packs; two or three animals will hold down an enemy while the others bite and hit him...Armed with piercingly long canine teeth and flesh-crunching molars, a chimpanzee bite can inflict terrible damage on an opponent. On top of this, they are fast, strong and extremely aggressive. They will attack enemies, of any species, with long branches wielded as clubs, together with missiles carefully selected for their weight. Experienced males go out of their way to collect large stones in preference to pebbles...The same firepower is turned on any carnivore that comes too close.
(Michael Leach The Great Apes)
Other sources confirm that chimpanzees often throw sticks and stones, but tend to suggest that they are not very good at it. The forelimbs of a chimpanzee are general purpose organs, adapted for locomotion - and needed for locomotion whenever the animal wants to move quickly and nimbly. A habitual quadruped is likely to be slow and liable to lose its balance when fighting on the back legs alone.
But the australopithecines, although related to chimpanzees, were fully adapted bipeds, probably as quick on their two feet as an active modern man. They had hands and arms which (not being required for locomotion) could afford to specialise in manipulation - throwing and handling weapons and natural tools. They must have become much better at throwing stones; they would have been better able to carry a supply of stones around with them, and they would have been better at fighting at close quarters with natural clubs. As bipeds, able to keep predators at a safe distance much of the time with missiles and clubs, they had less and less need to bite or threaten their enemies with their teeth. It was more useful for the canines to be adapted for eating.
The natural connection between bipedality and the loss of canine weapons was suggested long before the first australopithecine remains were discovered, by no less than Darwin:
The free use of the arms and hands, partly the cause and partly the result of man's erect position, appears to have led in an indirect manner to other modifications of structure. The early male forefathers of man were, as previously stated, probably furnished with great canine teeth; but as they gradually acquired the habit of using stones, clubs, or other weapons, for fighting with their enemies or rivals, they would use their jaws less and less.
(Darwin: The Descent of Man)
Nevertheless the importance of throwing and the use of other natural weapons has not always been registered. In the words of a brilliant paper by Barbara Isaac (see link):
Ability to throw was probably achieved at an early stage of human evolution but has received little scholarly attention. Although this ability is poorly developed in apes, anatomical studies suggest that the hand of Australopithecus afarensis was adapted to throw with precision and force.
Mrs Isaac's paper pointed out nearly twenty years ago that
A cornered band of protohominids armed with rocks weighing 200g would be formidable opponents. All carnivores avoid disablement which can lead to starvation....the use of stones would usually be defensive, occasionally aggressive, and subsequently predatory.
There is no evidence that australopithecines made artificial stone weapons - though (like chimpanzees) they must surely have made some simple tools (see link) out of perishable materials. The appearance of Homo - the next stage in bipedal development - coincides with the first stone artifacts. But the ability to throw stones (and to carry around with them a stock of suitable natural ammunition) must have given all these bipeds something which no other animal had - the ability to defend themselves and their young by inflicting injury at a distance whilst remaining out of range of their enemies' teeth and claws.
The throwing action in a human is a complex one, in which great power and accuracy are achieved by the coordination of all the muscles of the arm, wrist, fingers and back - even of the legs. If, as it seems, the ability to throw missiles effectively was a fundamental factor in bipedal survival, then the evolution of those muscles (and of the brain which controlled them) must have been influenced by the need to develop that ability. Bipeds are perhaps (among many other things) animals evolutionarily designed to survive by throwing missiles.
The evidence suggests that the long struggle for bipedal survival and ultimately human dominance over other species began when the australopithecines differentiated themselves as animals which walked, ran and fought on their back legs only, and could use their forelimbs to wield weapons and to throw missiles, thus uniquely becoming able to drive away predators and competitors whilst avoiding combat at close quarters. That may be how they survived. For we have to remember that until quite recently, the environment in which bipeds have lived was always a very dangerous one; and the first question we have to answer is how they survived in it at all.
II
The relationship of the australopithecines and early hominids to their living environment is hard for us to imagine. Nowadays few wild animals are dangerous to us in practice because almost all of them avoid us at all costs. We are so accustomed to their respect for us that we have forgotten that at some time in the distant past, the big cats, hyenas and jackals must surely have regarded bipedal primates - particularly, of course, their defenceless young - as a natural prey. Lions and leopards, cheetahs, sabretooths, jackals and hyenas - and eagles, well able to carry off a hominid infant - was there any reason why they should have not have preyed upon australopithecines and pre-sapiens hominids?
We live in a world where even the great predators fear people more than we fear them. We take our dominance over other animals for granted. But the australopithecines could not take it for granted. As time went on, they and their successors must somehow have earned the dominance and respect that to us appears normal. Almost all animals - even the the great cats - now fear us; and their fear is partly or perhaps wholly at the level of instinct. These powerful animals must have acquired that instinctive fear because they increasingly needed to acquire it - because it became impossible to survive without it.
We ourselves have come to take their fear for granted and to rely upon it for our own safety. Even in Britain now, where the most dangerous wild animals are the fox and the badger, the safety of our small children depends to some degree upon the fear of man that all wild animals feel. A hungry fox is not frightened to go into the hen coop. Yet he would not go into a house and take a baby from its cot. Why not? We assume without thinking about it that no fox would dare to enter a house or (unless cornered) attack a human being, however small and defenceless. We take the respect we inspire in all other species for granted. But what is it that they so respect in us?
The answer is probably our long-range weaponry. From the time of the australopithecines, we bipeds have developed long-range weapons which have given us an increasing advantage over animals who could only fight at close quarters. Animals in the wild have learned from hundreds of thousands of years of experience of us and of our bipedal predecessors that our missiles - first stones, later spears, arrows and bullets - can kill or maim quite unexpectedly from a distance without harm to ourselves. They have learned that even to be seen, at a distance, by a biped, can be dangerous or even fatal. It is best to keep out of our way, at least during daylight. Animals who failed to learn that lesson and to pass it on genetically or by example to their offspring have left no descendants.
From the beginning, bipeds probably became expert at throwing stones. A shower of stones can kill any animal which cannot run away (people have been executed by stoning) and well-aimed sharp stones might well drive away a leopard or a lion. Against an animal which can run away, the value of stoning is primarily defensive; but in conflict with a predator, defensive action is all that is required. Predators are careful to avoid injuries because even a minor injury can diminish their chances of killing prey and can rapidly lead to starvation.
To shape stones to make more effective projectiles was the logical next step. It may well be that the so-called handaxe was a specially made "throwing stone" just as the boomerang was a specially made "throwing stick". Over the immensely long period during which handaxes were produced - a period of more than a million years, during which the hominid brain almost doubled in size - the art of making and throwing missiles is likely to have been gradually perfected. If a hominid (with the benefit of training or example based on hundreds of thousands of years of practice) could throw a sharpened stone missile reliably to hit a distant target point first - and he probably could - it would have been a very dangerous weapon.
But effective though it would have been as a defensive weapon, even a well-thrown handaxe would have lacked the penetrative power necessary to kill or disable a large animal. The weapons of Homo sapiens were later to make him by far the most successful of hunters. But this came later - in the earlier period, hunting large animals would have been difficult. Before about 50,000 years ago, archaeology has uncovered nothing that would be regarded as an effective weapon by modern or even by medieval standards. To kill a large animal, a stone point needs to gain momentum and penetration by being hafted on to a wooden shaft. No such hafted spear points or arrow heads appear until the days of Homo sapiens. What other weapons were available? Wooden clubs and sharpened wooden spears are useful defensive weapons but of limited use for hunting.
Animal food appears to have been part of the hominid diet, but this does not necessarily provide evidence of hunting large animals. If a shower of stones could drive a leopard away from an infant, it could also drive it away from an animal which it had just killed. It may have been possible to obtain big game by waiting at a water hole until a heavy animal was killed by a predator and then driving the predator off the carcase with missiles. Perhaps the hominids were prey-stealers rather than predators.
Over the million years of handaxe development, the hominids undoubtedly made themselves increasingly formidable opponents whom it had become dangerous for most other animals to approach too closely. But this did not mean that they were masters of their environment. They never developed any weapons which could enable them to challenge the dominant animals of their time: the elephants.
Elephants are highly intelligent animals and until the appearance of the bipeds, the only mammals which could manipulate objects without needing to to use limbs intended mainly for walking, running or climbing. The elephant trunk is immensely strong yet able to pick individual blades of grass. Elephants appear to have sophisticated means of communication over distances (using low-frequency notes which we cannot hear). Until the appearance of Homo sapiens, the elephant was undoubtedly nature's masterpiece.
Throughout the whole world (with the exception of Australia and the oceanic islands, where in any case there were no hominids either) the members of the elephant family - mammoths, mastodonts and and mastodons - once lived in huge numbers. They feared few predators and had adapted to almost every kind of climate. It is not likely to have been the hominids who determined the shape of the landscape in which they lived. More probably it was the large mammals - particularly members of the elephant family:
The elephant has shaped much of the natural African landscape, rendering it more fit for habitation by human beings. ..As they forage, elephants create and maintain broad paths through impenetrable bamboo and elephant grass belts, and in forested areas, they keep extensive glades in permanent state of early succession, not only breaking down trees but also tearing up acres of saplings for their roots. They excavate and weed out water holes, and “garden” interconnected glades and clearings into tangled vegetation.
Elephants make tracks through forest which man and other animals subsequently use; many of our present-day roads may well have originated in this way. They dig wells which are subsequently used by other animals:
The wells that they dig can reach nearly 2m in depth. Most well-digging is initiated by adult males, which locate the best places to dig by finding damp places on the ground surface. ..Wells dug by elephants collapse after the rains begin, yet they are invariably redug within a few feet of where they had been located before..
(Gary Haynes (1991) Mammoths, Mastodonts & Elephants)
Mammoths were closely related to modern elephants and are likely to have behaved very similarly:
Great differences in the social behaviours of the extinct species seem unlikely; the two surviving taxa (African and Indian elephants) diverged from a common ancestry millions of years ago and yet today they display behaviors that are strikingly similar. Their behaviors might therefore be similar to to those of directly ancestral or closely related extinct forms.
(Haynes)
It is easy and probably correct to imagine woolly mammoths providing drinking water for themselves and others by breaking holes in the ice on frozen Siberian rivers and lakes.
How effective would handaxes, clubs and wooden spears have been against a herd of mammoths? Before the coming of Homo sapiens (only at most 5000 generations ago) and the development of more sophisticated weapons (and probably more complex social organization) hominids probably always lived in fear of elephants and had little control over the environment in which they lived. Agriculture was inconceivable because crops would have been trampled and eaten. Permanent dwellings (unless in inaccessible locations) would always have been liable to be overrun.
Language and Social Organization
What kind of creatures were our bipedal predecessors? Our starting point for attempting to conceptualise them must probably be that if we met one, we would probably not react to it/him/her as a member of our own species. Any strangeness of language, culture and appearance which we may sense in relating to unfamiliar Homo sapiens peoples is as nothing when compared with our likely sensations on meeting a pre-sapiens hominid. From our own viewpoint, we would probably perceive them as non-human animals. Despite their skeletal resemblance to ourselves, despite their undoubted intelligence and skills, they were not people (See link).
So we must avoid anthropomorphism: skeletal resemblance is not enough. In particular, we should not assume necessarily that they had our typically human powers of speech. There are some good reasons for suggesting that they had not.
In contrast with these earlier bipeds, Homo sapiens possessed some new and unique qualities which enabled people to make very rapid progress and finally to dominate their environment in an entirely new way. These new and unique qualities are likely to have been the possession of language and large-scale social organization. The two advantages go together.
Animals communicate with one another in surprisingly complex ways. In the words of Dmitri Bayanov, "By the communication means at their disposal, animals can greet, warn, threaten, frighten, order, tease, invite, entice, deceive, ask for, beg, give consent and show indifference, surprise, bewilderment, respect, contempt, contentment. A bee through her dances can indicate to her sisters the direction and distance to nectar-laden flowers, which the instructed bees don't fail to find." (see link). Nevertheless all known forms of animal communication are of very limited scope compared with human speech.
But apart from that, there is one important difference between their "languages" and ours. Human languages (unlike any animal communication, as far as we know) rely on arbitrarily chosen vocal symbols. These symbols differ from one human language to another. There is no special reason why "child" should be conveyed by "child" in English, but by "rebyonok" in Russian; but so it is. The concept is much the same but the word is different.
A human language is a kind of code. It functions on the basis of a vocabulary - a unique set of verbal symbols which correspond to all the objects or ideas which the speakers of that language need to communicate to one another. It also has rules, followed habitually by its speakers, for linking the words of the language together.
Languages in the sense in which we understand them have developed as the common means of communication of large groups of people who habitually communicate with one another and communicate less often with outsiders. A language draws those who speak it together, and excludes others. The rules for using a language are followed by all members of the linguistic community, for all wish to be understood. Those rules are typically paralleled by other rules - or laws, conventions, customs - which all have to follow if they wish to be socially accepted in that particular social and political community.
Communities speaking a single language are typically endogamous breeding populations. Matings outside the language group do happen, but they are occasional exceptions, rather than the general rule. Thus an individual typically grows up speaking a particular language and all his life is spent amongst others who also speak that language. Those who speak other languages may be regarded as outsiders, even enemies. The basically endogamous continuity of each group is maintained by difficulties of communication and differences of social custom (and often overt hostility) between one group and another, so that "peoples" become partially separated gene pools and start to seem different from one another even in their appearance.
Animal social groups (among animals which are social at all) are typically quite different. They may be temporary accumulations, like flocks of birds. If they are more permanent, they are often simply large families, male-centred (deer, walruses) or female-centred (bees, elephants). Larger groups are typically bands, seldom containing more than a hundred individuals, all of whom know one another (chimpanzees). These bands re-form over time as individuals leave them to form relationships with individuals outside the group or as quarrels or limited territorial resources cause groups to split up. They are not big enough to be long-term breeding populations; to avoid in-breeding, either males or females (it varies from species to species) typically leave the band after puberty and find mates in other groups; so that neighbouring groups are constantly exchanging members.
During the pre-sapiens period, we probably have to imagine a widespread bipedal species - or perhaps sometimes a number of different bipedal species - divided into a very large number of families or small groups but with groups and families constantly dissolving and new ones being formed. A hominid species probably consisted of a single very large gene pool; as with other animals, there were no sharp genetic or cultural barriers at any point between neighbours.
It is hard to imagine small exogamous groups of bipeds could have lived together for long enough to develop a common language, nor would it have made sense for members of any one band to have been unable to communicate freely with members of other neighbouring bands, with whom despite inter-band hostility they would have regularly exchanged members.
Animal "languages" differ only from species to species. Within any one species and within the limits of the "language", all members of the species understand one another. When a dog raises, lowers or wags its tail, all other dogs understand what is meant and react accordingly. Before the development of what we now call languages, hominids almost certainly developed a system of communication which was able to exchange much more complex ideas than that of any other species. But although "dialects" no doubt existed in different parts of the world, the bipeds(like other animals) are likely to have communicated in much the same way everywhere. Just as members of the species Homo were making and using very similar hand axes in both Africa and Eurasia, they were probably also making more or less the same sounds and gestures.
There is a complete contrast between this probable earlier uniformity within the species and the incredible diversity which we find in the languages and customs of those hunter-gatherer peoples who survived long enough to be described by recent explorers and anthropologists. The people of Australia, numbering perhaps a million, spoke at least 300 different languages (see link) . Each language group had its own customs and endogamous life; each was a partially separated gene pool.
How did significant endogamous communities each having a common and exclusive language come into existence? The development of a community containing thousands of individuals is hard to imagine without the possession of a common language. Equally the possession of a common language implies the existence of a community large enough, and cohering for a long enough period of time, to build up an agreed vocabulary and agreed grammatical rules - a community containing thousands of individuals.
In the first place, languages and political communities seem likely to have helped one another to become established. Populations who probably lacked the one probably also lacked the other. But languages would have enabled men to live in larger social units practising cooperation and division of labour and able to mobilise large-scale resources under central leadership; and this may have been the secret of their success.
Language networks minds together. The brains of the most developed hominid animals, the Neanderthals, were (on average) not smaller but a little bigger than those of the species we call Homo sapiens (wise man), yet Homo sapiens became much more successful and developed much more complex patterns of culture. We have to accept the fact that Neanderthals may have been in some ways cleverer than we are. But perhaps our smaller brain has been more than compensated for by our possession of language. The existence of a common spoken language (and even more, the later possession of a common written language) networks many minds together. Each member benefits from the communicated experience of others, so that the mental capacity of each separate individual becomes less important.
Language not only enables fellow-members of contemporaneous groups to share information and experience; it also facilitates transmission of information and experience over the generations. All advanced animals learn skills from their parents which they pass on their young; the young instinctively copy their elders. But in the course of an adult life, an animal gains much experience which is of personal use to him or her but cannot be easily passed on, simply because the situation in which the learning experience occurred does not repeat itself in the presence of the learner. The burned cat fears the fire: but she cannot explain the danger of fire except by example; a kitten brought up in the absence of fire will never be taught this lesson and will have to learn all over again. For human children, this painful learning experience, repeated in each generation, is less necessary. Language enables us to relate our experiences to our children in order that effectively, our experience becomes theirs.
Given written language, we can even pass on the benefit of our experience to others whom we have never met, living perhaps in the distant future. But even before the invention of writing, people developed techniques for passing on common human experience from generation to generation; this is the origin of poetry, because patterns of rhyme or metre make words easier to remember. Simple easily memorised word patterns like "Red sky at night - shepherd's delight" - which some people still use in attempting to predict tomorrow's weather - were memorised and passed on long before they were written down. So, originally, were the great epic poems, which instilled moral values and patriotism and set examples of behaviour. Each people speaking a common language developed a collective memory - a common store of cultural experience on which all could draw. Language enabled a community to build up long-term traditions, beliefs and values which differentiated it from other communities.
So the development of language - whenever it occured - may well have led to, or been concurrent with, the emergence of larger political and economic communities. The larger economic communities meant greater division of labour, more specialised skills and the emergence of many new techniques and weapons. These techniques and weapons and the larger political communities enabled mankind to conquer the world.
The Human Revolution
I
Richard Klein summarises some of the archaeological evidence of change when Homo sapiens displaced the earlier bipeds:
Table 8.1 Some Attributes of Fully Modern Human Behaviour Detectable in the Archaeological Record Beginning 50-40 kya ago
Substantial growth in the diversity and standardisation of artifact types
Rapid increase in the rate of artifactual change through time and in the degree of artifact diversity through space
First shaping of bone, ivory, shell and related materials into formal artifacts ("points", "awls", "needles", "pins" etc.)
Earliest appearance of incontrovertible art.
Oldest undeniable evidence for spatial organization of camp floors, including elaborate hearths and the oldest indisputable structural "ruins".
Oldest evidence for the transport of large quantities of highly desirable stone raw material over scores or even hundreds of kilometres.
Earliest secure evidence for ceremony and ritual, expressed both in art and in relatively elaborate graves.
First evidence for human ability to live in the coldest, most continental parts of Eurasia (northeastern Europe and northern Asia).
First evidence for human population densities approaching those of historic hunter-gatherers in similar environments.
First evidence for fishing and other significant advances in human ability to acquire energy.
(R G Klein, The Human Career)
More may be added to this. Not only could people fish. They had boats - and quite soon they had crossed the sea between Asia and Australia, where there was never a land bridge. And now at last they were extremely proficient hunters. For the first time, they could haft stone points on to wooden shafts, and soon they developed the spear-thrower - a device which gave greater leverage, effectively lengthening the thrower's arm. It would not be long before they invented the bow.
Klein's book is essential background for understanding these changes. He focuses very interestingly on cultural variability:
Previous chapters have emphasised that before 40 kya ago - that is, before the Upper Palaeolothic and comparable cultural manifestations had completely supplanted earlier ones - vast areas were characterised by remarkably uniform artifact assemblages that differed from one another mainly in the relative abundance of the same artifact types. In addition, artifactual change through time was painfully slow: basic assemblage types lasted tens or even hundreds of thousands of years. After 40 kya, however, the general pattern changed radically. Like-aged artifact assemblages from neighbouring regions often differed qualitatively and within single regions the pace of artifactual change accelerated dramatically.
(Klein)
What had happened? Some of the elaborate graves which Klein mentions are worth examining more closely:
The Sungir grave was dug into permanently frozen subsoil (permafrost) more than 22 thousand years ago and contained the extended skeletons of two children, one arguably male and the other female, placed head-to-head. The putative male was covered with 4903 beads whose arrangement suggests they were fitted to closely fitting clothing. In addition, there were 250 perforated fox canines placed as if they had been attached to a belt at the waist....The putative female was covered and surrounded by 5374 beads or bead fragments that were also probably attached to clothing.....Experimentation suggests that the beads alone required thousands of hours to manufacture.(Klein)
The beads were of ivory: this was the age of the mammoth-hunters. The children must have had a special social status or role. Either they belonged to something very like a royal family or (more likely) they must have been sacrificed as part of an important communal rite - nothing else could justify the labour entailed in the grave clothes. Either way, we are now looking at a human society much more like those of historical time - a community including many individuals (perhaps thousands) who were not all closely related to one another, yet felt they belonged to a common social unit with common customs and rituals.
The larger social unit must have made possible a much greater division of labour than had previously existed. It also made possible the rapid development of technology within individual endogamous tribal groups; technology which would not necessarily spread to other tribes immediately, because of cultural and language barriers and inter-group hostility. This is enough to explain the cultural diversity which Klein describes; and the absence of this cultural diversity before 40 thousand years ago suggests that in the earlier period, no such barriers existed.
Among earlier hominids, we have no reason to think that social organization was any more complex than among chimpanzees. Among chimpanzees, social groups are much smaller and the role and status of an individual is determined basically by his or her sex and age, relationships with other group members and relative dominance at the time. Roles (except gender) change as the individual's life progresses. Early hominid groups may have been different from this, but they were probably not much more complex. But in the Sungir period, there may have been kings and royal families and perhaps also, at the other extreme, slaves; certainly specialised craftsmen, including artists and holy men. The wider communities - or tribes - in which people now lived must each have been bound together by a common language.
II
About a thousand generations ago was perhaps the period which subsequently remained in many folk memories as the Golden Age. In this period, our mastery of the other animals had reached a its highest point; yet we were still in some ways part of the animal world. Life was more secure than ever before and there must often have been a surplus of food. Hunting and other forms of self-expression and self-indulgence now reached a climax: this was the age of the mammoth-hunters, the cave painters and the first colonisation of America.
15,000 years ago, the American continents were uncolonised and unhunted. They were inhabited by an immense range of animals, including many members of the elephant family, camels, wild horses, giant beavers and ground sloths. These animals were preyed upon by predators including sabertooths, scimitartooths and cheetahs. Human predation was unknown to them.
Glaciation reduced sea levels and for a time, a land bridge existed between Siberia and Alaska. Animals came across from Siberia and colonised first the bridge and then America. People came over at about the same time: perhaps following the game, perhaps fishing further and further along the coast in their boats. Perhaps they even crossed the Pacific - or the Atlantic - a little earlier. The sea was less and less a barrier to human colonisation. Australia had been reached (undoubtedly by sea) some 30,000 years earlier, and the first inhabitants of America may even, like the later Russian Cossacks, have reached America in boats designed for the great Siberian rivers.
These people are likely to have been highly skilled and sophisticated hunters, probably at least as sophisticated and socially organised as the inhabitants of Sungir in Russia, who had lived some 10,000 years earlier. Like their descendants, the peoples living in America at the time of European colonisation, they were probably organized in large tribal units, equipped with relatively sophisticated weapons. They had hafted spears, perhaps spear-throwers, perhaps even bows. They were well able to kill animals of any size, especially those unaccustomed to human attack.
These were the people some of whose descendants, not so long afterwards, set up the empires of the Incas, the Mayas and the Aztecs. They were "prehistoric" only in the sense that they did not initially live in settled communities and they had not yet invented writing - hence we do not know the details of their history. They had much more in common with the Mongols of Genghis Khan than with the Neanderthals and they were much nearer to the Mongols in time.
Within a few thousand years, two things had happened. The human population of America had expanded to fill both continents, down to the tip of South America. And all the big animals listed above - and many more, together with the predators which preyed upon them - had become extinct.
America must have seemed to its first human colonisers a hunter's paradise. Its animals, in huge numbers, had not adapted to human attack and initially must have had little or no fear of man. Just how animals can behave when they have no previous experience of man is vividly suggested by Darwin's experience in the Galapagos:
The animals and birds were not used to human intruders and were very trusting in their behaviour. For the Beagle men it was almost like entering a Garden of Eden. Darwin rode a tortoise, caught an iguana by its tail and came so close to a hawk that he could push it off a bough with his gun..
Janet Browne: The Origin of Species: a Biography
Darwin himself summarises his thoughts on the "tameness" of the Galapagos birds, compared with elsewhere:
In regard to the wildness of birds towards man, there is no way of accounting for it, except as an inherited habit: comparatively few young birds, in any one year, have been injured by man in England, yet almost all, even young nestlings, are afraid of him; many individuals, on the other hand, both at the Galapagos and at the Falklands, have been pursued and injured by man, yet have not yet learned a salutary dread of him. We may infer from these facts, what havoc the introduction of any new beast of prey must cause in a country, before the instincts of the indigenous inhabitants have become adapted to the stranger's craft or power.
Darwin: Journal of Researches during the Voyage of HMS Beagle
In the Americas, man was that new beast of prey.
With little danger of predation (American predators would have been no match for human weapons and defensive tactics) and unlimited easy food available, human populations must have increased dramatically. But hunting has always been, for man, a sport as well as (sometimes) a source of food. We do not know how the early colonisers of America reacted to this situation. Did they conserve the game, once they had all the food they needed? Or like a British landowner shooting his pheasants - or like a fox in the henhouse - did they slaughter far more than they needed, for the sheer joy of it?
Hunting societies which survived into the twentieth century usually conserved game and were often careful not to kill more than they could easily consume. Often they had rituals in which they apologised to the souls of the animals they had killed. But the most parsimonious person can lose his head when confronted with sudden untold wealth. The new situation was unprecedented and it could well be that their previous traditions could not be adapted to it. In the case of the elephants, there was another reason why slaughter may have exceeded what was needed for food. Ivory had already become a useful and valued material.
Much the same had occurred earlier in Australia. The earliest humans reached that continent in boats at a time when western Indonesia was joined to Asia and New Guinea was joined to Australia. There was still a significant sea crossing, including one island-hop of over 50 miles, but they survived it, and colonised a previously isolated world occupied by a wide variety of giant marsupials. All these giants disappeared not long after the appearance of man.
Since man now had boats, many other extinctions must also have taken place on large and small islands during the same period. In the Old World, animal populations had had millions of years to adapt to the increasing dangers posed by bipeds and changes were less dramatic. But organised Homo sapiens, now equipped with hafted spears and increasingly with new weapons like the spear-thrower and the bow, still caused widespread extinctions within a relatively short period. Elephants and mammoths, rhinos and woolly rhinos, wild horses, giant deer, hippos, musk oxes and the sabretooths which had preyed on them suddenly (in a few thousand years) disappear from the European fossil record.
But prey animals, once extinct, were no longer available for food. The Golden Age of hunting could not last. Everywhere, human populations must have grown rapidly until the game became harder and harder to find. Everywhere there must have been a sudden collision between expanding populations and declining resources of food. As hunters followed the diminishing supplies of game, tribal armies probably fought one another for territory and hunting rights. Accustomed to a meat diet which was increasingly unobtainable, spending more and more of their energy in fighting other human competition rather than hunting game, people may sometimes have taken to cannibalism (see link).
In the period which followed, all kinds of new food resources were explored. People living by rivers and on the coast devised new means of catching fish in quantity. In north-west Europe, excavation has suggested that communities existed for whom the hazelnut harvest was a major food. But hazelnuts never became a long-term solution to the imbalance between population and food supply. No satisfactory solution emerged until cereal cultivation became the norm. And with elephants and other large animals less of a problem, large-scale cultivation was now possible.
III
Nevertheless the transition to agriculture has always been hard to explain. Why should people have given up a an enjoyable lifestyle and a varied diet and adopted lifestyles and diets which were often very tedious and limited? In the words of Mark Nathan Cohen "the adoption of agriculture probably resulted in an increased per-capita work load and a decline in the quality of the diet".
Pre-agricultural peoples have a varied diet and their food-gathering activities are often satisfying for their own sake. The "hunter-gatherers" are using their mental and physical resources for the purposes for which they were intended by nature. By contrast agriculture, particularly before the employment of draft animals, involved a great deal of mechanical back-breaking toil. Food preparation was hard work also, given that cereals had to be ground by hand. And the final result, for most people, was a monotonous staple diet and not much else. Why did people adopt agriculture?
The answer seems to be very simple: expanding human populations meant that they had no choice.
Cohen's book explains the only possible reason why humanity embarked on the agricultural revolution: agriculture yields more calories per hectare; it was the only way that the available land could be made to yield sufficient food to feed its human population:
By approximately 11,000 or 12,000 years ago, hunters and gatherers, living on a limited range of preferred foods, had by natural population increase and concomitant territorial expansion fully occupied those portions of the globe which would support their lifestyle with reasonable ease. By that time, in fact, they had already found it necessary in many areas to broaden the range of wild resources used for food in order to feed growing populations. I suggest that after that time, with territorial expansion becoming increasingly difficult and unattractive as a means of adjusting to growing population, they were forced to become even more eclectic in their food-gathering, to eat more and more unpalatable foods, and in particular to concentrate on foods of low trophic level and high density. In the period between 9000 and 2000 B.P. populations throughout the world, already using nearly the full range of available palatable foods., were forced to adjust to further increases in population by artificially increasing, not those resources which they preferred to eat, but those which responded well to human attention and could be made to produce the greatest number of edible calories per unit of land.
(Cohen, Mark Nathan: The Food Crisis in Prehistory)
Ways were to be found to make unpalatable foods more acceptable. But dense agricultural populations living on limited diets became more liable to disease. Repetitive strain injuries must have become the normal lot of people engaged in constant mechanical work. And not everybody adjusted equally well to the work ethic. History shows that those who adjusted less well sometimes adopted what seemed to them like a more attractive alternative - to live on the toil of others.
Wherever a peaceful people under enlightened leadership had settled down to the routine of agriculture, they would have been a continual temptation to their less settled neighbours. Denied the pleasure of hunting animals for a living, many men and many tribes of men preferred to turn their weapons against other men and to attempt, with varying success, to obtain by robbery, conquest and enslavement what they they were unwilling to work for.
Often the restless outsiders, sweeping down from the steppe or the desert (or like the Vikings, from the Northern seas) conquered the agriculturists, reduced them to subjection, took over their land and became a ruling aristocracy. Often (like the Normans in England) they set aside some of their conquered land as a game reserve, where they could escape from the disagreeable realities of agriculture and recreate the golden age of hunting.
Making use of their pooled resources of intelligence and experience, people had expanded to the limits of the world. They now totally dominated their environment. But by their thoughtless abuse of that environment, they had destroyed the quality of their own lives. Most people now lived a life of monotonous toil, often made worse by tyrannical oppression and punctuated by destructive wars.
But life could still be good. And agriculture was the way forward: it meant a much more assured food surplus and permanent human settlements; it led everywhere, quite rapidly, to cities, literacy and civilization.