There is a kind of consciousness that is uniquely human. Known as reflexive consciousness, it refers to our ability to think about ourselves, ponder our existence, and wonder about our destiny. Most of what we do – getting dressed, preparing breakfast, driving to work, and so on throughout the day – does not require reflective thought. We do these things automatically. But there are also times when we reflect on our lives and make choices based on such reflection. This kind of consciousness seems linked to our equally unique ability to express ourselves in syntaxed language, tensed verbs, and creative art – all of which were in full play from at least 35,000 years ago when the Cro-Magnon people were busy inventing more sophisticated technologies and painting the walls of their caves with representational art. It also seems linked to a heightened awareness of our mortality, a consciously embraced worldview, and the emergence of religious practice at about this same time in our collective history.
Many of these features of reflexive consciousness make their appearance in our individual development during that stage (age 4-7) that I have called The Curious Explorer. It is also the stage during which, according to developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, the young child attributes conscious intention to objects and events in the natural world – or what is known as animism.
According to the animistic worldview that developed during humanity’s migratory era and that still prevails today in many indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures, the entire universe is alive and interconnected. Everything is animated by spirits. They exist in humans, animals, plants, rocks, natural phenomena such as thunder, and geographic features such as mountains and rivers – and everything that happens is under their control. They can be influenced, however, by rituals, often with sacrificial aspects, designed to win their favour or to keep malevolent spirits at bay.
The spirit that indwells all animals and humans survives physical death. In the case of humans, it may pass on to an easier world of abundant game, or it may remain on earth as a malignant ghost. Those who die a violent death may become malignant spirits that, intent on avenging their death, endanger those who come near the haunted spot. Many traditional Native American religions are fundamentally animistic. In some, such as the Navajo, the departed soul embarks on a journey to the spirit world that requires certain rituals to be performed by the survivors if it is not to become lost and wander forever as a ghost. Only in later cultures did the simple practice of offering food or lighting fires at the grave become elaborated to include the sacrifice of wives, slaves, and animals to provide the departed with such necessities in the future life.
In the animistic worldview, humans are very much a part of nature rather than separate from or superior to it. And because they are on a roughly equal footing with other animals, it is imperative to treat them with respect – especially since an animal may be the spiritual abode of one of your dead ancestors. Animal worship was sometimes intertwined with hunting rites. Archaeological evidence from both cave paintings and animal remains suggests that the bear cult involved a sacrificial ritual in which a bear was shot with arrows and then ritualistically buried near a clay bear statue covered by a bear fur with the skull and the body of the bear buried separately. Other rituals and taboos were designed to please the souls of slain animals so that they would tell other still-living animals that they need not resist being caught and killed.
The practice of shamanism is closely linked to the animistic worldview. A shaman is an intermediary between the human and spirit worlds, capable of leaving his or her body to travel throughout a layered cosmos - flying above the earth to the spirit world or descending into the underworld – to negotiate with good and evil spirits on behalf of the tribe. By entering a trance, the soul of the shaman ventures into other worlds to seek out the underlying causes of mundane earthly events – and then fights, begs, or cajoles the spirits to offer guidance, ameliorate illness, or otherwise intervene in human affairs down here on the ground. It’s a risky business. The spirits themselves may be less than happy with the shaman’s interference; the plant materials used to induce the trance can be toxic or fatal if misused; and failure to return from an out-of-body journey can lead to death. To assist in the work, therefore, the shaman may have “spirit helpers” (usually the spirits of powerful or agile animals) who enable him or her to fly high like a hawk or dive deep like a fish into the spirit world.
Shamans perform a variety of functions – healing the sick, delivering solutions to community problems, predicting the future, leading sacrifices, and guiding the souls of the dead to their proper abode. Healing is accomplished by retrieving lost parts of the person’s soul or by cleansing the soul of the negative energies polluting it. The shaman’s spirit may enter the body of the patient to confront the spiritual infirmity and banish the infectious spirit. Sometimes medicinal herbs may be prescribed. And in the case of an infertile woman, the problem can be cured by contacting the soul of the wished-for child.
Given the value of these functions and the risks involved in performing them, the shaman usually enjoyed great power and prestige in his or her community – as evidenced by a 12,000 year old shaman burial site in a cave in Galilee. The elderly woman’s body had been arranged with ten large stones placed on her head, pelvis and arms. Among her unusual grave goods were 50 complete tortoise shells, a human foot, and body parts of assorted animals with whose spirits the woman had been in close relationship.
It seems clear that shamanism was practiced as early as 30,000 years ago – the date assigned to the earliest known undisputed shaman burial site in what is now the Czech Republic. Many of the cave paintings from this time – such as the half-human half-animal images, and images of humans wearing animal masks – are suggestive of shamanic practices. And the discovery of bone flutes and drums made of animal skins found in the graves of shamans from this time are in keeping with the use of music to induce shamanic trances.
To this day, shamanism is strongest in societies that still rely on hunting and gathering. It is only when agricultural societies became established that shamanism evolved into a priestly class and animism gave way to more institutionalised forms of religion.
One final feature of the worldview prevalent at this time is the emergence of the first goddesses. Along with the cave paintings of the Cro-Magnon people, we find an abundance of female figurines, naked and unadorned, carved of stone or of mammoth bone or ivory. She was far and away the chief object of sculpture for these cave dwellers. Although some anthropologists have suggested that they may depict actual women, or represent a kind of stone-age pornography, the wider consensus is that they point towards the mythic role of woman as a mother-goddess, experienced as the source and giver of life. Many of these figurines have been found pressed into the earth in sacred settings in household shrines. One, known as the Venus of Hohle Fels, was found in Germany and dated to 35,000 BCE. Made of mammoth tusk, it so emphasizes the vulva and breasts as to make it clear that this was a fertility amulet, almost certainly used in rituals of sympathetic magic to ensure the fertility of women and the land.
To the people of this time, nature was not only animated by spirits but clearly female – a fruitful mother-goddess who gave them life and all that was needed to sustain them, She would more and more come to be symbolised as the Great Goddess of whom these early Venus figurines were the forerunner – the Magna Mater who would become central in the worldviews still to emerge in the civilizations of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Crete.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Friday, September 24, 2010
The World of the Great Migrations
Here’s a quick recap of what in the previous post we called “The African Exodus”.
Because they survived by hunting large animals, their lifestyle was chiefly nomadic. Those living near the ice in northern Europe followed the herds of reindeer and caribou. Those living in warmer climes hunted mammoths. It was dangerous work, but they were sufficiently skilled to hunt many large animal species to extinction. The Cro-Magnon people in Europe invented a lunar calendar with which to predict the migration of their prey animals. And as early as 30,000 years ago, both in Europe and Asia, our forbears entered a partnership with dogs. Still evolving from wolves, these animals helped in herding and bringing down game, and were rewarded by scavenging what their human partners left behind. Evidence of humans and dogs being buried together at a site in Israel 14,000 years ago is testimony to the deepening bond that subsequently developed and has continued between man and his best friend to this day.
Like their African ancestors, the migrants lived and moved about in small groups, finding shelter in caves and sometimes in purpose-built huts or pits dug into the earth. Rarely would one group encounter another. Mostly they had to deal only with other animals – many of them extremely dangerous. In coastal areas where they could rely on fishing, their lifestyle would have been somewhat more settled.
These nomadic or semi-nomadic groups were neither large nor complex. Kinship and proximity were the binding elements. There was no significant inequality or distinction of rank. Possessions were simple, with no real difference in wealth. War as we know it didn’t exist. While some division of labour by gender may have existed for the sake of efficiency in acquiring food, this was probably the most gender-equal time in all of history. Some women were very highly regarded, as indicated by the burial, 30,000 years ago in what is now the Czech Republic, of one who was a shaman. And it seems likely that family groups at this time followed a pattern of matrilineal descent.
A diet of meat, roots and fruit became supplemented with wild cereal grains as early as 23,000 years ago. Bananas and tubers may have been cultivated in a rudimentary form of horticulture even earlier. Nor were they slow to learn the secrets of getting high. Wine making and the consumption of hallucinogenic plants seems to have originated during this same period. The widespread use of cooking and other food-processing is reflected in a trend towards smaller teeth in humans over the last 100,000 years. Our face, jaw, and teeth today are about 10% less robust than was the case 10,000 years ago, and 25% less robust than 30,000 years ago.
The Cro-Magnon people brought with them to Europe an inventive genius previously unknown. Fishing nets, harpoons, the bow and arrow, spears that could be thrown, skilfully crafted stone blades, lamps fuelled with animal fat, tailored garments decorated with beads, sewing needles, fireplace cooking utensils, and a variety of containers, some made with wood – all these were in use 30,000 years ago.
Most impressive, however, is the art that decorated the walls of caves such as Chauvet Cave in France. Dated to 30,000 years ago, it is a veritable gallery of prehistoric art, depicting animals and humans, risky hunting scenes, creatures that are half-human and half-animal, as well as assorted symbolic shapes and patterns. There are also engravings, jewellery, animal carvings, sculptures made of bone and ivory, Venus figurines, and the oldest example of ceramic art – the Venus of Dolni Vestonice, dated to about 27,000 years ago. Artistic creations such as these reflect a new capacity for abstract thought, conceptual understanding, and spoken language. While these had been evolving gradually over time, the pace quickened during this Upper Paleolithic period. And with them would have come as well greater emotional capacities for intimacy and sympathetic response to the needs of others.
These cognitive and emotional developments, together with an awakening curiosity about the larger world and a willingness to venture into it at greater risk, correspond with what is typical of early school-age children (aged 4 – 6) – the stage of development that I call “The Curious Explorer”. It is what Jean Piaget described as the “conceptual pre-operations” stage (4-7 years), and the stage in which the key developmental task described by Erik Erikson is “Initiative versus Guilt” (3-6 years). During this stage, initiative adds the element of planning to the tasks we undertake. In learning new skills, the child is also learning to master the world around him. He learns to take initiative for the sake of achieving goals. And his growing courage and independence leads to more risky behaviour. Whether such behaviour is the child’s crossing a street on his or her own, or the early migrants venturing across the Coral Sea to Australia, it is classic exploratory behaviour that characterises this stage.
At the heart of these developments is an emerging sense of self. While still centered primarily on the body rather than being a mental-ego, the self is nonetheless now very much separate from the world and seems central to it. And with that sense of separateness comes a heightened awareness of our mortality and of the threats against which the self must now be defended. Sometime around age four in our individual development, and during this migratory era in our collective development, we awaken to the finiteness and vulnerability of our separate existence. No longer protected from the vision of our mortality, we start defending our now-separate self against death and do what we can to make it seem enduring and immortal. In short, we begin to devise the innumerable strategies of death-denial that distinguish our species, that shape our worldviews, and that lie near the heart of our religious beliefs and rituals.
Just how that was expressed for our ancestors during this particular period of our history I will put on hold until my next Post.
- 60,000 years ago, a first wave of migrants journeyed from Africa to Australia, leaving pockets of population scattered en route along the coasts of Pakistan, India, and the islands of Southeast Asia.
- 50,000 years ago, as this coastal clan reached China, a second wave left Africa, settled in the Levant, and followed the steppe highway eastward.
- 35,000 years ago, these steppe migrants reached southern Siberia and entered China from the north.
- At the same time, a separate group of the steppe clan (the Cro-Magnon people) travelled west from central Asia into Europe.
- 20,000 years ago, the steppe clan that was still travelling northeast crossed the land bridge from Siberia to Alaska and then, 15,000 years ago, expanded south into North, Central, and South America.
- Only 4000 years ago did descendants of the coastal clan who had settled in Southeast Asia venture across vast expanses of the Pacific to colonise Polynesia.
Because they survived by hunting large animals, their lifestyle was chiefly nomadic. Those living near the ice in northern Europe followed the herds of reindeer and caribou. Those living in warmer climes hunted mammoths. It was dangerous work, but they were sufficiently skilled to hunt many large animal species to extinction. The Cro-Magnon people in Europe invented a lunar calendar with which to predict the migration of their prey animals. And as early as 30,000 years ago, both in Europe and Asia, our forbears entered a partnership with dogs. Still evolving from wolves, these animals helped in herding and bringing down game, and were rewarded by scavenging what their human partners left behind. Evidence of humans and dogs being buried together at a site in Israel 14,000 years ago is testimony to the deepening bond that subsequently developed and has continued between man and his best friend to this day.
Like their African ancestors, the migrants lived and moved about in small groups, finding shelter in caves and sometimes in purpose-built huts or pits dug into the earth. Rarely would one group encounter another. Mostly they had to deal only with other animals – many of them extremely dangerous. In coastal areas where they could rely on fishing, their lifestyle would have been somewhat more settled.
These nomadic or semi-nomadic groups were neither large nor complex. Kinship and proximity were the binding elements. There was no significant inequality or distinction of rank. Possessions were simple, with no real difference in wealth. War as we know it didn’t exist. While some division of labour by gender may have existed for the sake of efficiency in acquiring food, this was probably the most gender-equal time in all of history. Some women were very highly regarded, as indicated by the burial, 30,000 years ago in what is now the Czech Republic, of one who was a shaman. And it seems likely that family groups at this time followed a pattern of matrilineal descent.
A diet of meat, roots and fruit became supplemented with wild cereal grains as early as 23,000 years ago. Bananas and tubers may have been cultivated in a rudimentary form of horticulture even earlier. Nor were they slow to learn the secrets of getting high. Wine making and the consumption of hallucinogenic plants seems to have originated during this same period. The widespread use of cooking and other food-processing is reflected in a trend towards smaller teeth in humans over the last 100,000 years. Our face, jaw, and teeth today are about 10% less robust than was the case 10,000 years ago, and 25% less robust than 30,000 years ago.
The Cro-Magnon people brought with them to Europe an inventive genius previously unknown. Fishing nets, harpoons, the bow and arrow, spears that could be thrown, skilfully crafted stone blades, lamps fuelled with animal fat, tailored garments decorated with beads, sewing needles, fireplace cooking utensils, and a variety of containers, some made with wood – all these were in use 30,000 years ago.
Most impressive, however, is the art that decorated the walls of caves such as Chauvet Cave in France. Dated to 30,000 years ago, it is a veritable gallery of prehistoric art, depicting animals and humans, risky hunting scenes, creatures that are half-human and half-animal, as well as assorted symbolic shapes and patterns. There are also engravings, jewellery, animal carvings, sculptures made of bone and ivory, Venus figurines, and the oldest example of ceramic art – the Venus of Dolni Vestonice, dated to about 27,000 years ago. Artistic creations such as these reflect a new capacity for abstract thought, conceptual understanding, and spoken language. While these had been evolving gradually over time, the pace quickened during this Upper Paleolithic period. And with them would have come as well greater emotional capacities for intimacy and sympathetic response to the needs of others.
These cognitive and emotional developments, together with an awakening curiosity about the larger world and a willingness to venture into it at greater risk, correspond with what is typical of early school-age children (aged 4 – 6) – the stage of development that I call “The Curious Explorer”. It is what Jean Piaget described as the “conceptual pre-operations” stage (4-7 years), and the stage in which the key developmental task described by Erik Erikson is “Initiative versus Guilt” (3-6 years). During this stage, initiative adds the element of planning to the tasks we undertake. In learning new skills, the child is also learning to master the world around him. He learns to take initiative for the sake of achieving goals. And his growing courage and independence leads to more risky behaviour. Whether such behaviour is the child’s crossing a street on his or her own, or the early migrants venturing across the Coral Sea to Australia, it is classic exploratory behaviour that characterises this stage.
At the heart of these developments is an emerging sense of self. While still centered primarily on the body rather than being a mental-ego, the self is nonetheless now very much separate from the world and seems central to it. And with that sense of separateness comes a heightened awareness of our mortality and of the threats against which the self must now be defended. Sometime around age four in our individual development, and during this migratory era in our collective development, we awaken to the finiteness and vulnerability of our separate existence. No longer protected from the vision of our mortality, we start defending our now-separate self against death and do what we can to make it seem enduring and immortal. In short, we begin to devise the innumerable strategies of death-denial that distinguish our species, that shape our worldviews, and that lie near the heart of our religious beliefs and rituals.
Just how that was expressed for our ancestors during this particular period of our history I will put on hold until my next Post.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
The African Exodus
Sixty thousand years ago, somewhere on the African coast of the Red Sea, a tribal band of probably not more than 150 people left Africa and headed east. Following the coasts of Arabia and India, they quickly reached southeast Asia, crossed 60 miles of open sea to Australia without any way of knowing that a hospitable landfall awaited them, and then proceeded to colonise central and east Asia. Considering that Homo sapiens, not long before, had been reduced almost to the point of extinction, it was a remarkable accomplishment to say the least.
What drove them to leave Africa after staying close to home for more than a millennium? We can only speculate. The developments in language and symbolic thought that had marked “the great leap forward” and were accelerating at the time of the African exodus would have contributed to their ability to navigate such a journey – as would their developing skill in producing more refined stone and bone tools. The last Ice Age was also accelerating, driving early humans out of Africa’s drought-stricken interior to the coastal areas where they had learned to gather food from the sea. Tools from this period found at coastal sites indicate that they could migrate over long distances along the coast of eastern Africa. There was no reason why they couldn’t do the same between continents. All they had to do was cross the narrow strait between present-day Djibouti and Yemen and they had relatively easy access to the endless beaches of southeast Asia.
Were they, like early school-age children, prompted by a growing confidence and curiosity to explore the world beyond what had become familiar? Or was the exodus just a gradual and unwitting expansion of range driven by local conditions? Certainly the speed with which they completed their migration to Australia suggests that they were driven by more than a careless meandering.
Human artefacts from the Northern Territory of Australia (where they landed after crossing from New Guinea) as well as at Lake Mungo (1000 kilometres west of Sydney) are clear evidence that humans were there 60,000 years ago. They would have arrived in sufficient numbers to start a breeding population and then found their way 2000 miles inland from Australia’s north coast to a lush oasis known as the Willandra Lakes. These presumably were descendants of the same people who left Africa, on the other side of the planet, at more or less the same time – 60,000 years ago. Whatever their route from Africa, it allowed for very rapid movement. Exactly how they got there, why they came, and what was driving them are questions we may never be able to answer. We do know, however, that Australia had to be colonised from elsewhere. It had been disconnected from the continents of Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas for 100 million years. So it missed out on all the mammalian, primate, and hominid species that evolution had delivered elsewhere – pursuing instead its own path of placental species like kangaroos. And since humans most assuredly did not evolve from kangaroos, they must have come from somewhere beyond Australia.
Then 10,000 years later, according to the genetic and archaeological evidence, a second wave of migrants followed their curiosity and probably herds of grazing antelope out of Africa – this time to the Middle East. We know the Sahara as the largest desert in the world and a distinctly inhospitable place. But during certain periods of early human history it was a relatively moist region that allowed for human habitation. This had been true from 100,000 to 80,000 years ago – and again for a few thousand years some 50,000 years ago. This would have opened a route along the Red Sea, down the Nile to the Mediterranean, and then eastward across the Sinai to the Levant. Or perhaps this second wave of migrants made their exit, as the first wave probably had, across the 20-kilometre-wide strait of Bab al Mandab into southern Arabia.
However they got there, this was the last substantial exchange between Africa and Eurasia for tens of thousands of years. Another period of glaciations, the Wisconsin Ice Epoch, between 40,000 and 15,000 years ago, turned the Sahara into desert again, effectively closing the door between the two continents and dividing the human world into its African and Eurasian constituents.
The path was now open, however, to the rest of the Eurasian continent and beyond. While the first wave of migrants had taken the southern coastal route of Pakistan and India, this second wave could travel a virtual highway of steppe from the Gulf of Aqaba to northern Iran and on into central Asia and Mongolia. So East Asia was settled by modern humans from both the south and north. Those who took the southern coastal route arrived as early as 50,000 years ago, while those who took the northern route probably entered about 15,000 years later from the steppes of southern Siberia.
About the same time that those on the northern route reached East Asia (i.e. 35,000 years ago), another group from that same route took advantage of a climatic window of opportunity to head west from the central Asian steppes into Europe – into the territory that, until then, had been the preserve of the Neanderthals. Just 5000 years later, they had so dominated the region that their Neanderthal cousins were all but extinct. Known as the Cro-Magnon people (named after the cave in southwest France where some of their bones were first unearthed), they mostly inhabited southern Europe and the Balkans during the depths of the Wisconsin Ice Epoch, and expanded northward during the post-glacial period. They were notable for their advanced culture – called the Aurignacian culture – characterised by a new artistic and inventive genius that found expression in skilfully crafted stone and bone tools, antler-tipped spears, bows and arrows, woven clothing, cooking utensils, musical instruments, and above all in spectacular cave paintings and ivory sculptures.
Meanwhile, those who were following the northern steppe highway eastward had already reached southern Siberia by 40,000 years ago. Their journey seems to have stalled there for the next 20,000 years as they adapted to the frighteningly harsh conditions of the Asian Arctic during the Wisconsin glaciation. So the earliest sites in northeast Siberia date from 20,000 years ago. Considering that they had only relatively recently come from their tropical homeland, one can only imagine the hardships they would have endured in this frozen wilderness. Having honed their hunting skills on the central Asian steppes, they survived mainly on large mammals such as musk ox, reindeer, and mammoths, and eventually followed these herds eastward across the land bridge that had been exposed between Siberia and Alaska. Sea levels had dropped so dramatically during the ice age that the Bering Strait had dried up, allowing these northern pioneers to live a dual Asian-American existence.
At first, it would have been impossible for them to expand southward. A continuous sheet of ice covered most of northern Canada and eastern Alaska, keeping them locked in their northern home. Only when the ice began to retreat some 15,000 years ago were they able to enter the North American plains. Initially it may only have been a few dozen, or a few hundred at most, who made the journey into what must have been happy hunting grounds beyond their wildest dreams – a vast grassland teeming with large grazing animals. Almost immediately their population exploded, and within a thousand years they had journeyed all the way to the tip of South America and driven 75% of all the large mammals in the Americas to extinction. So much for any romantic notion that our indigenous forbears were naturally eco-friendly!
The last chapter in our populating this planet was not written until much later – some 4000 years ago. It was then that those who had long since peopled the islands of southeast Asia, and over thousands of years become both agriculturalists and consummate seafarers, pursued their island-hopping curiosity far out into the Pacific into what would become Polynesia. Despite Thor Heyerdahl’s contention that the Polynesians originated in South America, the linguistic evidence seems clear: Hawaii was settled from southeast Asia. But for all that this last chapter was written relatively recently, it is no less heroic than the exploits of those who first undertook this exodus from Africa 60,000 years ago. Even the most direct route to Hawaii by island-hopping would have required at least two enormous sea passages of a few thousand miles – a voyage on which they would have had to take their own crops, confident in their ability to survive wherever they might find land again. What greater testimony could there be to the irrepressible curiosity of this relatively hairless hominid who left his African homeland so long ago!
What drove them to leave Africa after staying close to home for more than a millennium? We can only speculate. The developments in language and symbolic thought that had marked “the great leap forward” and were accelerating at the time of the African exodus would have contributed to their ability to navigate such a journey – as would their developing skill in producing more refined stone and bone tools. The last Ice Age was also accelerating, driving early humans out of Africa’s drought-stricken interior to the coastal areas where they had learned to gather food from the sea. Tools from this period found at coastal sites indicate that they could migrate over long distances along the coast of eastern Africa. There was no reason why they couldn’t do the same between continents. All they had to do was cross the narrow strait between present-day Djibouti and Yemen and they had relatively easy access to the endless beaches of southeast Asia.
Were they, like early school-age children, prompted by a growing confidence and curiosity to explore the world beyond what had become familiar? Or was the exodus just a gradual and unwitting expansion of range driven by local conditions? Certainly the speed with which they completed their migration to Australia suggests that they were driven by more than a careless meandering.
Human artefacts from the Northern Territory of Australia (where they landed after crossing from New Guinea) as well as at Lake Mungo (1000 kilometres west of Sydney) are clear evidence that humans were there 60,000 years ago. They would have arrived in sufficient numbers to start a breeding population and then found their way 2000 miles inland from Australia’s north coast to a lush oasis known as the Willandra Lakes. These presumably were descendants of the same people who left Africa, on the other side of the planet, at more or less the same time – 60,000 years ago. Whatever their route from Africa, it allowed for very rapid movement. Exactly how they got there, why they came, and what was driving them are questions we may never be able to answer. We do know, however, that Australia had to be colonised from elsewhere. It had been disconnected from the continents of Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas for 100 million years. So it missed out on all the mammalian, primate, and hominid species that evolution had delivered elsewhere – pursuing instead its own path of placental species like kangaroos. And since humans most assuredly did not evolve from kangaroos, they must have come from somewhere beyond Australia.
Then 10,000 years later, according to the genetic and archaeological evidence, a second wave of migrants followed their curiosity and probably herds of grazing antelope out of Africa – this time to the Middle East. We know the Sahara as the largest desert in the world and a distinctly inhospitable place. But during certain periods of early human history it was a relatively moist region that allowed for human habitation. This had been true from 100,000 to 80,000 years ago – and again for a few thousand years some 50,000 years ago. This would have opened a route along the Red Sea, down the Nile to the Mediterranean, and then eastward across the Sinai to the Levant. Or perhaps this second wave of migrants made their exit, as the first wave probably had, across the 20-kilometre-wide strait of Bab al Mandab into southern Arabia.
However they got there, this was the last substantial exchange between Africa and Eurasia for tens of thousands of years. Another period of glaciations, the Wisconsin Ice Epoch, between 40,000 and 15,000 years ago, turned the Sahara into desert again, effectively closing the door between the two continents and dividing the human world into its African and Eurasian constituents.
The path was now open, however, to the rest of the Eurasian continent and beyond. While the first wave of migrants had taken the southern coastal route of Pakistan and India, this second wave could travel a virtual highway of steppe from the Gulf of Aqaba to northern Iran and on into central Asia and Mongolia. So East Asia was settled by modern humans from both the south and north. Those who took the southern coastal route arrived as early as 50,000 years ago, while those who took the northern route probably entered about 15,000 years later from the steppes of southern Siberia.
About the same time that those on the northern route reached East Asia (i.e. 35,000 years ago), another group from that same route took advantage of a climatic window of opportunity to head west from the central Asian steppes into Europe – into the territory that, until then, had been the preserve of the Neanderthals. Just 5000 years later, they had so dominated the region that their Neanderthal cousins were all but extinct. Known as the Cro-Magnon people (named after the cave in southwest France where some of their bones were first unearthed), they mostly inhabited southern Europe and the Balkans during the depths of the Wisconsin Ice Epoch, and expanded northward during the post-glacial period. They were notable for their advanced culture – called the Aurignacian culture – characterised by a new artistic and inventive genius that found expression in skilfully crafted stone and bone tools, antler-tipped spears, bows and arrows, woven clothing, cooking utensils, musical instruments, and above all in spectacular cave paintings and ivory sculptures.
Meanwhile, those who were following the northern steppe highway eastward had already reached southern Siberia by 40,000 years ago. Their journey seems to have stalled there for the next 20,000 years as they adapted to the frighteningly harsh conditions of the Asian Arctic during the Wisconsin glaciation. So the earliest sites in northeast Siberia date from 20,000 years ago. Considering that they had only relatively recently come from their tropical homeland, one can only imagine the hardships they would have endured in this frozen wilderness. Having honed their hunting skills on the central Asian steppes, they survived mainly on large mammals such as musk ox, reindeer, and mammoths, and eventually followed these herds eastward across the land bridge that had been exposed between Siberia and Alaska. Sea levels had dropped so dramatically during the ice age that the Bering Strait had dried up, allowing these northern pioneers to live a dual Asian-American existence.
At first, it would have been impossible for them to expand southward. A continuous sheet of ice covered most of northern Canada and eastern Alaska, keeping them locked in their northern home. Only when the ice began to retreat some 15,000 years ago were they able to enter the North American plains. Initially it may only have been a few dozen, or a few hundred at most, who made the journey into what must have been happy hunting grounds beyond their wildest dreams – a vast grassland teeming with large grazing animals. Almost immediately their population exploded, and within a thousand years they had journeyed all the way to the tip of South America and driven 75% of all the large mammals in the Americas to extinction. So much for any romantic notion that our indigenous forbears were naturally eco-friendly!
The last chapter in our populating this planet was not written until much later – some 4000 years ago. It was then that those who had long since peopled the islands of southeast Asia, and over thousands of years become both agriculturalists and consummate seafarers, pursued their island-hopping curiosity far out into the Pacific into what would become Polynesia. Despite Thor Heyerdahl’s contention that the Polynesians originated in South America, the linguistic evidence seems clear: Hawaii was settled from southeast Asia. But for all that this last chapter was written relatively recently, it is no less heroic than the exploits of those who first undertook this exodus from Africa 60,000 years ago. Even the most direct route to Hawaii by island-hopping would have required at least two enormous sea passages of a few thousand miles – a voyage on which they would have had to take their own crops, confident in their ability to survive wherever they might find land again. What greater testimony could there be to the irrepressible curiosity of this relatively hairless hominid who left his African homeland so long ago!
Sunday, September 19, 2010
The Great Leap Forward
We seem to like very much the idea of making a “great leap forward.” In 1958 Chairman Mao used the phrase to describe his plan to modernise China’s economy. And “New Age” enthusiasts like to think that humanity is now making a “quantum leap” in consciousness. But the original “great leap forward”, according to many anthropologists, occurred sometime between 75,000 and 50,000 years ago when Homo sapiens became a species driven by language and culture. An explosion in our capacity for symbolic thought and self-awareness, accompanied by breakthrough developments in spoken language, brought with it an accompanying explosion in cultural creativity.
Over what period of time these advancements took place remains a matter of debate among anthropologists. One theory holds that a leap into “behavioural modernity,” or what is sometimes called the Upper Paleolithic Revolution, occurred almost suddenly some 50,000 years ago – perhaps as a result of a genetic mutation or a reorganization of the brain that led to a major advance in language. Proponents of this theory, known as the “big bang” theory of human mental evolution, base their evidence on the abundance of artefacts, such as artwork and bone tools, that appear in the fossil record after 50,000 years ago – indicating, they suggest, that prior to this date Homo sapiens lacked the cognitive skills required to produce such artefacts. Jared Diamond, an evolutionary scientist at UCLA, contends that, prior to this time, there is little evidence of cultural change. But then, coinciding more or less with our exodus from Africa to colonise the world, there is a sudden flowering of tool-making, sophisticated weaponry, sculpture, cave painting, body ornaments, and long-distance trade
An alternative theory known as the Continuity Theory holds that “behavioural modernity” has resulted from a gradual accumulation of knowledge, skills, and culture occurring over hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution. Advocates of this view, such as geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer, contend that evidence of modern behaviour can be found at a number of sites in Africa and the Levant from a much earlier time. A ritual burial with grave goods, for example, has been uncovered at Qafzeh in Israel and dated to 90,000 years ago. Continuity theorists believe that what appears to be a later technological revolution is probably the result of increased cultural exchange within a growing human population.
The truth may lie somewhere between the extremes of these two theories. From about 75,000 years ago there appears to have been a marked acceleration in the development of human language, cognition, and culture. The evidence for this consists primarily of artefacts found at Blombos Cave, 30 meters above the sea on the southern tip of South Africa. Here we find the earliest undisputed evidence of art in the form of bracelets, beads, rock art, and ochre used as body paint.
Beads made from the shells of tiny molluscs, dating from 76,000 years ago, were found in clusters. Pierced holes in the shells, together with smooth worn patches, suggest that the beads were strung together into necklaces or bracelets which may have rubbed against clothing. Blombos cave is also famous for its abstract engravings on red ochre from the same time. Together with the beadwork, it suggests that inhabitants of the cave had a complex sense of symbolism and a sufficiently developed language to describe the symbolic meaning that the beads and engravings represent. Here was the first tangible evidence of advanced, abstract thought.
Why should our ancestors have gone out of their way to collect high-quality red iron oxides? The red ochre has got to be culturally significant. At first it looks like any lump of pinkish rock. But look more closely and you see a cross-hatched pattern carefully etched onto its surface. It is regarded as the first evidence of Stone Age lipstick – as if, almost suddenly, people wanted to paint their bodies. Coincident with this is evidence that clothing also originated in Africa 75,000 years ago. It would of course have been useful when Homo sapiens left Africa and ventured into colder climes – but that migration did not take place until some 15,000 years later. It would seem that our taste for jewellery, fashion, art and cosmetics all emerged at about the same time. But why? Was it all about sexual attraction and signaling one’s genetic fitness with rare adornments? Or was it evidence of prestige and status? Even in this egalitarian society, some people would be more successful than others, and they may have wanted to signal their success with prized material items. This could, in other words, be the first evidence of social ranking marked by material possessions.
There were also significant advances in tool-making at this time. The harpoon had been invented 90,000 years ago. But now, just 70,000 – 65,000 years ago, using the earlier technology of heating silcrete to temperatures of 450-degrees Fahrenheit, small stone tools and points were invented, making possible the manufacture of lightweight bows and arrows and projectile spears.
Considering all these developments, along with the evidence of more permanent dwellings, hearths, and group living, and we begin to see the first signs of an organised society, communicating through language, symbolism, and rituals. Whether such developments occurred abruptly or more gradually, it seems clear that there was a significant advance in human cognition and culture from 75,000 years ago, leading to the African exodus of 60,000 years ago. The question is “Why?”
Climate was almost certainly a factor. With the onset of a new Ice Age some 80,000 years ago, our relatively settled life on the African savannah was forced to change. By 70,000 years ago it was getting downright nippy in the northern hemisphere. Great sheets of ice were bearing down on what would later be Seattle and New York. In Africa a 10-degree Celsius drop in the average world temperature, as well as the fallout from the eruption of a super-volcano in Sumatra, brought extensive drought to the interior, forcing early humans to coastal regions where they could survive on seafood. Genetic evidence, however, suggests that they nonetheless suffered a massive decline in population at this time – dwindling to as few as 2000 individuals. Homo sapiens was literally on the brink of extinction. The upside was that, in adapting to these new and difficult conditions, our species also became a whole lot smarter. The deep-freeze and drought may have been the catalyst for the Great Leap Forward, favouring intelligence and more complex social structures as life became more difficult.
It may also be that just a few small genetic mutations at this time gave us these amazing minds and the power of abstract conceptual thought. Whatever the trigger, none of these changes could have occurred without the development of language and the social networks that language makes possible. More specifically, the Great Leap Forward depended on our mastery of syntax – the ability to create multi-word sentences that are structured with a subject, verb, and object. How those parts of speech are arranged varies from one language to another. English and most other languages are characterised by a subject-verb-object (SVO) syntax. An SOV structure is used by a few languages; VSO and VOS are used by about 15% of languages; and OSV is the rarest of all. But whatever the structure, our ability to communicate complex meaning depends on our understanding and use of syntax. It’s what distinguishes human from ape communication.
Just why we should have crossed the syntax barrier at this point in our history remains unclear. It parallels the development of language in children and seems to require the maturation of certain brain structures. Children begin to speak by babbling. At about 12 months, they begin to use actual words. Over the next year there is a massive expansion of single-word vocabulary and the emergence of two-word sentences. Between two and three years of age, children begin to put together three-word sentences with syntax. This is the stage in individual development that corresponds with the Great Leap Forward in humanity’s development.
It was all necessary in order to make possible the next stage in our development when, some 60,000 years ago, we began to leave our African homeland and spread into Europe and Asia. During the next couple of thousand years we had walked around the coast of South Asia and reached Australia. A later wave of expansion took us into the Middle East and then on into Europe, Asia, and the Americas. A species that had almost been made extinct rallied to populate the entire world. And what set it all in motion happened first in Africa – this Great Leap Forward that marked our initiation as modern humans
Over what period of time these advancements took place remains a matter of debate among anthropologists. One theory holds that a leap into “behavioural modernity,” or what is sometimes called the Upper Paleolithic Revolution, occurred almost suddenly some 50,000 years ago – perhaps as a result of a genetic mutation or a reorganization of the brain that led to a major advance in language. Proponents of this theory, known as the “big bang” theory of human mental evolution, base their evidence on the abundance of artefacts, such as artwork and bone tools, that appear in the fossil record after 50,000 years ago – indicating, they suggest, that prior to this date Homo sapiens lacked the cognitive skills required to produce such artefacts. Jared Diamond, an evolutionary scientist at UCLA, contends that, prior to this time, there is little evidence of cultural change. But then, coinciding more or less with our exodus from Africa to colonise the world, there is a sudden flowering of tool-making, sophisticated weaponry, sculpture, cave painting, body ornaments, and long-distance trade
An alternative theory known as the Continuity Theory holds that “behavioural modernity” has resulted from a gradual accumulation of knowledge, skills, and culture occurring over hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution. Advocates of this view, such as geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer, contend that evidence of modern behaviour can be found at a number of sites in Africa and the Levant from a much earlier time. A ritual burial with grave goods, for example, has been uncovered at Qafzeh in Israel and dated to 90,000 years ago. Continuity theorists believe that what appears to be a later technological revolution is probably the result of increased cultural exchange within a growing human population.
The truth may lie somewhere between the extremes of these two theories. From about 75,000 years ago there appears to have been a marked acceleration in the development of human language, cognition, and culture. The evidence for this consists primarily of artefacts found at Blombos Cave, 30 meters above the sea on the southern tip of South Africa. Here we find the earliest undisputed evidence of art in the form of bracelets, beads, rock art, and ochre used as body paint.
Beads made from the shells of tiny molluscs, dating from 76,000 years ago, were found in clusters. Pierced holes in the shells, together with smooth worn patches, suggest that the beads were strung together into necklaces or bracelets which may have rubbed against clothing. Blombos cave is also famous for its abstract engravings on red ochre from the same time. Together with the beadwork, it suggests that inhabitants of the cave had a complex sense of symbolism and a sufficiently developed language to describe the symbolic meaning that the beads and engravings represent. Here was the first tangible evidence of advanced, abstract thought.
Why should our ancestors have gone out of their way to collect high-quality red iron oxides? The red ochre has got to be culturally significant. At first it looks like any lump of pinkish rock. But look more closely and you see a cross-hatched pattern carefully etched onto its surface. It is regarded as the first evidence of Stone Age lipstick – as if, almost suddenly, people wanted to paint their bodies. Coincident with this is evidence that clothing also originated in Africa 75,000 years ago. It would of course have been useful when Homo sapiens left Africa and ventured into colder climes – but that migration did not take place until some 15,000 years later. It would seem that our taste for jewellery, fashion, art and cosmetics all emerged at about the same time. But why? Was it all about sexual attraction and signaling one’s genetic fitness with rare adornments? Or was it evidence of prestige and status? Even in this egalitarian society, some people would be more successful than others, and they may have wanted to signal their success with prized material items. This could, in other words, be the first evidence of social ranking marked by material possessions.
There were also significant advances in tool-making at this time. The harpoon had been invented 90,000 years ago. But now, just 70,000 – 65,000 years ago, using the earlier technology of heating silcrete to temperatures of 450-degrees Fahrenheit, small stone tools and points were invented, making possible the manufacture of lightweight bows and arrows and projectile spears.
Considering all these developments, along with the evidence of more permanent dwellings, hearths, and group living, and we begin to see the first signs of an organised society, communicating through language, symbolism, and rituals. Whether such developments occurred abruptly or more gradually, it seems clear that there was a significant advance in human cognition and culture from 75,000 years ago, leading to the African exodus of 60,000 years ago. The question is “Why?”
Climate was almost certainly a factor. With the onset of a new Ice Age some 80,000 years ago, our relatively settled life on the African savannah was forced to change. By 70,000 years ago it was getting downright nippy in the northern hemisphere. Great sheets of ice were bearing down on what would later be Seattle and New York. In Africa a 10-degree Celsius drop in the average world temperature, as well as the fallout from the eruption of a super-volcano in Sumatra, brought extensive drought to the interior, forcing early humans to coastal regions where they could survive on seafood. Genetic evidence, however, suggests that they nonetheless suffered a massive decline in population at this time – dwindling to as few as 2000 individuals. Homo sapiens was literally on the brink of extinction. The upside was that, in adapting to these new and difficult conditions, our species also became a whole lot smarter. The deep-freeze and drought may have been the catalyst for the Great Leap Forward, favouring intelligence and more complex social structures as life became more difficult.
It may also be that just a few small genetic mutations at this time gave us these amazing minds and the power of abstract conceptual thought. Whatever the trigger, none of these changes could have occurred without the development of language and the social networks that language makes possible. More specifically, the Great Leap Forward depended on our mastery of syntax – the ability to create multi-word sentences that are structured with a subject, verb, and object. How those parts of speech are arranged varies from one language to another. English and most other languages are characterised by a subject-verb-object (SVO) syntax. An SOV structure is used by a few languages; VSO and VOS are used by about 15% of languages; and OSV is the rarest of all. But whatever the structure, our ability to communicate complex meaning depends on our understanding and use of syntax. It’s what distinguishes human from ape communication.
Just why we should have crossed the syntax barrier at this point in our history remains unclear. It parallels the development of language in children and seems to require the maturation of certain brain structures. Children begin to speak by babbling. At about 12 months, they begin to use actual words. Over the next year there is a massive expansion of single-word vocabulary and the emergence of two-word sentences. Between two and three years of age, children begin to put together three-word sentences with syntax. This is the stage in individual development that corresponds with the Great Leap Forward in humanity’s development.
It was all necessary in order to make possible the next stage in our development when, some 60,000 years ago, we began to leave our African homeland and spread into Europe and Asia. During the next couple of thousand years we had walked around the coast of South Asia and reached Australia. A later wave of expansion took us into the Middle East and then on into Europe, Asia, and the Americas. A species that had almost been made extinct rallied to populate the entire world. And what set it all in motion happened first in Africa – this Great Leap Forward that marked our initiation as modern humans
Thursday, September 16, 2010
The World of Early Homo Sapiens
By “early homo sapiens” I mean the first modern humans who emerged in the African Rift Valley about 200,000 years ago. They maintained a relatively stable existence on the grasslands and in coastal regions of Africa until about 75,000 years ago when a rapidly accelerating Ice Age forced them to adapt in ways that anthropologists call the Great Leap Forward. Then, some 60,000 years ago, in the Great Migration, they left Africa to colonise the world.
Given the sparseness of the archaeological record, little can be said about their worldview. Indeed, given their still primitive level of cognitive development, they would have had no conceptual worldview as we think of it today. The best we can do, based on what evidence we have, is guess at what their experience of the world might have been.
Although his direct ancestry remains unclear, it seems likely that Homo sapiens, like his Neanderthal cousins in Europe, evolved from Homo heidelbergensis. Three fossil skulls found in Ethiopia and dated to 160,000 years ago are the oldest human remains yet discovered. His average brain size of 1485 cc is almost 50% larger than that of Homo erectus and slightly smaller than that of the Neanderthals. His appearance is distinguished from other Homo species by his nearly vertical forehead, very much smaller or non-existent eyebrow ridges, smaller teeth, a prominent chin, and a more gracile skeleton.
There are indications that, sometime after 160,000 years ago, four separate groups travelled south to the Cape of Good Hope, southwest to the Congo Basin, west to the Ivory Coast, and northeast to the coast of the Red Sea. Then, about 125,000 years ago, a group travelled across the Sahara and up the Nile to the Levant. Human remains found at sites in present-day Israel indicate that we were there from at least 110,000 years ago. From the end of the Illinoian Ice Age 130,000 years ago until the onset of the Intermediate Ice Age 80,000 years ago, the Levant was effectively an extension of northern Africa, with similar climatic conditions and animals. It would have been natural and relatively easy to follow the animals out of Africa. But then, soon after 80,000 years ago, modern humans abruptly disappeared from these sites. The encroaching Ice Age turned the Levant and North Africa into extreme desert and killed off the animals on which humans had relied for thousands of years. Those who had left Africa during warmer and wetter times either died off themselves or migrated back to Africa.
They were hunter-gatherers who lived in small bands – necessarily small since the game present in any region was limited – comprised of a few family groups based on long-term monogamous relationships, with both parents caring for their children. Survival was less an individual thing than a group achievement. And because survival depended on cooperation and the equal distribution of food to everyone, the bands were egalitarian. There were no elite, no social stratification, and no formal leadership. Decision-making would have been consensual. Nor was there any formal division of labour. While women probably took greater responsibility for gathering and men for hunting, each member of the group would have been skilled at all tasks essential for survival. And for those too old or infirm to carry their weight, there is evidence that they were cared for by the group.
Surviving in the open grasslands would not have been easy. Maintaining a fire throughout the night helped keep the big cats at bay, but it required intelligence and cooperation for humans to hunt game that was much faster and stronger than they. As early as 165,000 years ago they had discovered a new way of fashioning tools by heating silcrete to a high temperature in a fire’s embers to create more consistent and sharper stone flakes. These in turn made possible the invention of stone-tipped spears and harpoons. But still the hunting of big game presented a challenge. It seems to have been accomplished by running the prey to exhaustion and then closing in for the kill at close quarters. Homo sapiens had emerged as a relatively hairless creature who perspired, so they could run for extended periods of time and still maintain their internal body temperature. Their large prey, while swifter over short distances, could not maintain that pace. Panting rather than perspiring, they needed to stop periodically to avoid overheating. Eventually the pursuing humans would run them to the ground.
Although primarily nomadic as they followed game from one region to another, they maintained central campsites (hearths and shelters) as home bases. Because their population was sparse – estimated at only one person per square mile – a given band would have hunted an area of perhaps 60 square miles from a single home base before moving on. Organised violence between bands was rare. The low population density, the abundance of food resources, the lack of any reason to hoard food beyond the group’s immediate needs, the survival value of cooperation, and the advantages of collaboration on hunting expeditions probably all contributed to the relative peacefulness of this period in our otherwise war-ravaged history.
Their diet consisted primarily of meat, fish, shellfish, leafy vegetables, fruit, nuts and insects. With a gradual drying up of the African interior that began 120,000 years ago, humans were attracted more and more to coastal environments where they could migrate easily along the coast and make their living from the sea. The cooking of shellfish is evident as early as 164,000 years ago at a site called Pinnacle Point in South Africa; large dumps of clam and oyster shells, dating from 125,000 years ago, have been found in Eritrea on the eastern Horn of Africa; and large 6-foot-long catfish were being caught with barbed fishing points 90,000 years ago in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Our now extinct ancestors began cooking their food at least 250,000 years ago and perhaps much earlier. Because cooked food, and especially cooked meat, delivers significantly more energy for less effort, it would have contributed to the growth and maintenance of our larger brains. It probably also contributed to our becoming more sociable as we brought food back to the central cooking area. We can imagine the band gathering at the end of the day, kindling a fire in the hearth both to cook their food and ward off animals, and then settling in around the fire to eat, laugh, sing, and enjoy their emerging ability to converse in spoken language, in a scene not unlike that which has been repeated countless times to the present day.
Archaeological evidence tells us more about the cosmology and religious practices of European Neanderthals than it does about that of contemporaneous Homo sapiens in Africa – but we may reasonably assume that they were similar. For both, it would be the animals – their nearest neighbours – that played a central role. Neanderthals’ veneration of the bear in mountainous sanctuaries is matched by evidence of animal worship in the Tsodilo Hills in the Kalahari desert. A giant rock resembling a python, and a secret chamber inside a cave there, is accompanied by broken spear points (dated to 70,000 BCE) that had been offered as a sacrifice. The python is still worshipped by present-day !Kung San hunter-gatherers who are descendants of the early humans who first devised the practice. Similarly, the discovery of “butchered” human bones at both European and African sites may point to a ritual post-mortem bone cleaning for presumably religious reasons. And one of the skulls found in Ethiopia has grooves cut into it in a manner suggesting that it was carried around after death – possibly as part of an ancestor worshipping ritual and indicating a belief in some kind of afterlife.
It is unlikely that they were concerned about their own death. While memory would have delivered some notion of the past, their orientation in time would have been predominantly the simple present. With little sense of time or causality, they would not easily have imagined their own death. Nor would they have been able to plan far ahead. They would have responded to their environment either immediately or after only a short delay.
Their language skills and cognitive development in general were probably like that of a 2 – 4-year-old child – what I call “the Innocent Nestling.” It corresponds to what Jean Piaget described as the “pre-conceptual pre-operations” stage, during which the child begins to use mental symbols to understand his world. By the end of this stage, vocabulary consists of about 200 words which the child can put together in 2 – 3-word phrases. He is beginning to understand the relationship between things, and has some notion of cause and effect. A gradually emerging sense of self finds expression in words such as “me” and “mine”. By the age of 4 the child has a clear sense of “I”, though it is still much more a body-ego than a mental-ego. All of this was probably true as well of early Homo sapiens.
The worldview at this stage, both for early humans and for the Innocent Nestling, can be described as animistic and magical. Animism is the belief that, like oneself, everything is conscious and animated by some life force. It makes for a dramatic universe filled with spirit-powers. Magical thinking arises from the tendency at this stage to confuse psychic and external reality – an inability to fully differentiate the mental image of an object from the object itself. In the world of magic one manipulates an external object by manipulating an image or symbol of that object – as in sticking pins into a Voodoo doll. So in primitive hunting rites, a man draws the animal in the sand before dawn, and when the first sun-ray touches the drawing, he drives a spear into the drawing. Later he slays the animal and performs a ritual dance at evening. But in his magical world, the symbolic act and the actual killing of the animal are so connected as to be inseparable. One cannot happen without the other.
Even today we have not totally outgrown such magical thinking. Many people continue to engage in symbolic acts either to bring good luck or to ward off misfortune. And when the right words are intoned by the right person in a properly celebrated ritual, the symbols of bread and wine are still believed by millions to become the actual body and blood of Christ.
Given the sparseness of the archaeological record, little can be said about their worldview. Indeed, given their still primitive level of cognitive development, they would have had no conceptual worldview as we think of it today. The best we can do, based on what evidence we have, is guess at what their experience of the world might have been.
Although his direct ancestry remains unclear, it seems likely that Homo sapiens, like his Neanderthal cousins in Europe, evolved from Homo heidelbergensis. Three fossil skulls found in Ethiopia and dated to 160,000 years ago are the oldest human remains yet discovered. His average brain size of 1485 cc is almost 50% larger than that of Homo erectus and slightly smaller than that of the Neanderthals. His appearance is distinguished from other Homo species by his nearly vertical forehead, very much smaller or non-existent eyebrow ridges, smaller teeth, a prominent chin, and a more gracile skeleton.
There are indications that, sometime after 160,000 years ago, four separate groups travelled south to the Cape of Good Hope, southwest to the Congo Basin, west to the Ivory Coast, and northeast to the coast of the Red Sea. Then, about 125,000 years ago, a group travelled across the Sahara and up the Nile to the Levant. Human remains found at sites in present-day Israel indicate that we were there from at least 110,000 years ago. From the end of the Illinoian Ice Age 130,000 years ago until the onset of the Intermediate Ice Age 80,000 years ago, the Levant was effectively an extension of northern Africa, with similar climatic conditions and animals. It would have been natural and relatively easy to follow the animals out of Africa. But then, soon after 80,000 years ago, modern humans abruptly disappeared from these sites. The encroaching Ice Age turned the Levant and North Africa into extreme desert and killed off the animals on which humans had relied for thousands of years. Those who had left Africa during warmer and wetter times either died off themselves or migrated back to Africa.
They were hunter-gatherers who lived in small bands – necessarily small since the game present in any region was limited – comprised of a few family groups based on long-term monogamous relationships, with both parents caring for their children. Survival was less an individual thing than a group achievement. And because survival depended on cooperation and the equal distribution of food to everyone, the bands were egalitarian. There were no elite, no social stratification, and no formal leadership. Decision-making would have been consensual. Nor was there any formal division of labour. While women probably took greater responsibility for gathering and men for hunting, each member of the group would have been skilled at all tasks essential for survival. And for those too old or infirm to carry their weight, there is evidence that they were cared for by the group.
Surviving in the open grasslands would not have been easy. Maintaining a fire throughout the night helped keep the big cats at bay, but it required intelligence and cooperation for humans to hunt game that was much faster and stronger than they. As early as 165,000 years ago they had discovered a new way of fashioning tools by heating silcrete to a high temperature in a fire’s embers to create more consistent and sharper stone flakes. These in turn made possible the invention of stone-tipped spears and harpoons. But still the hunting of big game presented a challenge. It seems to have been accomplished by running the prey to exhaustion and then closing in for the kill at close quarters. Homo sapiens had emerged as a relatively hairless creature who perspired, so they could run for extended periods of time and still maintain their internal body temperature. Their large prey, while swifter over short distances, could not maintain that pace. Panting rather than perspiring, they needed to stop periodically to avoid overheating. Eventually the pursuing humans would run them to the ground.
Although primarily nomadic as they followed game from one region to another, they maintained central campsites (hearths and shelters) as home bases. Because their population was sparse – estimated at only one person per square mile – a given band would have hunted an area of perhaps 60 square miles from a single home base before moving on. Organised violence between bands was rare. The low population density, the abundance of food resources, the lack of any reason to hoard food beyond the group’s immediate needs, the survival value of cooperation, and the advantages of collaboration on hunting expeditions probably all contributed to the relative peacefulness of this period in our otherwise war-ravaged history.
Their diet consisted primarily of meat, fish, shellfish, leafy vegetables, fruit, nuts and insects. With a gradual drying up of the African interior that began 120,000 years ago, humans were attracted more and more to coastal environments where they could migrate easily along the coast and make their living from the sea. The cooking of shellfish is evident as early as 164,000 years ago at a site called Pinnacle Point in South Africa; large dumps of clam and oyster shells, dating from 125,000 years ago, have been found in Eritrea on the eastern Horn of Africa; and large 6-foot-long catfish were being caught with barbed fishing points 90,000 years ago in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Our now extinct ancestors began cooking their food at least 250,000 years ago and perhaps much earlier. Because cooked food, and especially cooked meat, delivers significantly more energy for less effort, it would have contributed to the growth and maintenance of our larger brains. It probably also contributed to our becoming more sociable as we brought food back to the central cooking area. We can imagine the band gathering at the end of the day, kindling a fire in the hearth both to cook their food and ward off animals, and then settling in around the fire to eat, laugh, sing, and enjoy their emerging ability to converse in spoken language, in a scene not unlike that which has been repeated countless times to the present day.
Archaeological evidence tells us more about the cosmology and religious practices of European Neanderthals than it does about that of contemporaneous Homo sapiens in Africa – but we may reasonably assume that they were similar. For both, it would be the animals – their nearest neighbours – that played a central role. Neanderthals’ veneration of the bear in mountainous sanctuaries is matched by evidence of animal worship in the Tsodilo Hills in the Kalahari desert. A giant rock resembling a python, and a secret chamber inside a cave there, is accompanied by broken spear points (dated to 70,000 BCE) that had been offered as a sacrifice. The python is still worshipped by present-day !Kung San hunter-gatherers who are descendants of the early humans who first devised the practice. Similarly, the discovery of “butchered” human bones at both European and African sites may point to a ritual post-mortem bone cleaning for presumably religious reasons. And one of the skulls found in Ethiopia has grooves cut into it in a manner suggesting that it was carried around after death – possibly as part of an ancestor worshipping ritual and indicating a belief in some kind of afterlife.
It is unlikely that they were concerned about their own death. While memory would have delivered some notion of the past, their orientation in time would have been predominantly the simple present. With little sense of time or causality, they would not easily have imagined their own death. Nor would they have been able to plan far ahead. They would have responded to their environment either immediately or after only a short delay.
Their language skills and cognitive development in general were probably like that of a 2 – 4-year-old child – what I call “the Innocent Nestling.” It corresponds to what Jean Piaget described as the “pre-conceptual pre-operations” stage, during which the child begins to use mental symbols to understand his world. By the end of this stage, vocabulary consists of about 200 words which the child can put together in 2 – 3-word phrases. He is beginning to understand the relationship between things, and has some notion of cause and effect. A gradually emerging sense of self finds expression in words such as “me” and “mine”. By the age of 4 the child has a clear sense of “I”, though it is still much more a body-ego than a mental-ego. All of this was probably true as well of early Homo sapiens.
The worldview at this stage, both for early humans and for the Innocent Nestling, can be described as animistic and magical. Animism is the belief that, like oneself, everything is conscious and animated by some life force. It makes for a dramatic universe filled with spirit-powers. Magical thinking arises from the tendency at this stage to confuse psychic and external reality – an inability to fully differentiate the mental image of an object from the object itself. In the world of magic one manipulates an external object by manipulating an image or symbol of that object – as in sticking pins into a Voodoo doll. So in primitive hunting rites, a man draws the animal in the sand before dawn, and when the first sun-ray touches the drawing, he drives a spear into the drawing. Later he slays the animal and performs a ritual dance at evening. But in his magical world, the symbolic act and the actual killing of the animal are so connected as to be inseparable. One cannot happen without the other.
Even today we have not totally outgrown such magical thinking. Many people continue to engage in symbolic acts either to bring good luck or to ward off misfortune. And when the right words are intoned by the right person in a properly celebrated ritual, the symbols of bread and wine are still believed by millions to become the actual body and blood of Christ.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Was there a Garden of Eden?
The first chapters of the Bible describe our human origins as deriving from a single set of parents in a place called the Garden of Eden. That mythical account is not far removed from what anthropologists and geneticists are now telling us – though we are still far from consensus on the matter.
The name Homo sapiens (Latin for “wise man”) was coined in the early 18th century by a Swedish botanist, Linnaeus, who recognised that all humans were part of one species. What does that mean? Since the mid-20th century a species has been defined as an interbreeding (or potentially interbreeding) group of organisms. If it’s possible to produce offspring together, you must be of the same species.
But Linnaeus also believed that our Homo sapiens species was divided into distinct sub-species or races. And when evolutionary theory became popular in the 19th century, it was widely believed that these races – identified as African, Native American, East Asian, and European – had evolved at different times and in different places. The theory sat comfortably with Europeans. It meant that they were the most recent and therefore the most advanced race to evolve, while the others, especially the dark-skinned Africans and Native Americans, were downright primitive by comparison. It found further support when the philosopher Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” – (a phrase that was never used by Darwin) – and used it to justify the social divisions inherent in late-19th century Britain. So now there was scientific justification for believing not only that the Aryan race was superior to all others, but that people who occupied the top strata of society deserved to be there since they must be more “fit” than the mere peasants.
By the end of the 19th century this widespread belief had given rise to the eugenics movement – (“eugenics” means “good birth”) – which in 1907 gave birth in Britain to the Eugenics Education Society, the stated objective of which was to improve the gene pool of humanity through the selective breeding of “fit” individuals. Supported by the best scientific evidence of the time, the elite loved it. By the 1910s and 1920s it was being used in the U.S. as justification for the forced sterilization of people believed to be mentally subnormal. And from there it was only a short step to the Nazi death camps and the systematic extermination of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and other supposedly inferior groups.
In the 1960s, we were still finding scientific justification for such thinking. The American anthropologist Carleton Coon advanced the idea, very like that of Linnaeus 250 years earlier but now known as the “multi-regionalism hypothesis”, that there are five distinct human subspecies that evolved at different times into their present form from ancestral hominids. The basic idea is that ancient hominid species migrated out of Africa over the past two millions years, established themselves in East Asia very early on, and then evolved in situ into modern-day humans – creating the different races in the process. Again, it was the African “Congoids” that appeared first and have remained trapped ever since in an evolutionary dead-end. And of course the dominance of the more recently evolved Europeans is a natural consequence of their genetic superiority.
Since then the debate has continued to rage. In 1987, an analysis of mitochondrial DNA declared that all modern humans descended from one African population within the last 140,000 years. It was a serious blow to multi-regionalism. But by 1992, that study had been largely discredited. Then, in late 2000, a Swedish study of mitochondrial DNA again seemed to demonstrate that all modern humans emerged from Africa within the past 100,000 years and came from a breeding stock of no more than 10,000 individuals.
It began to look like the multi-regionalism hypothesis was dead. Indeed, most scientists who have studied the matter now agree that all modern humans evolved in Africa within the past 200,000 years. Their direct ancestor was probably the species Homo heidelbergensis that appeared on the scene in Africa some 500,000 years ago and then migrated into Europe. Those that went to Europe later evolved into Neanderthal Man, while those that remained in Africa evolved into modern Homo sapiens. Geneticist Spencer Wells claims to have identified our ancestry even more specifically as Mitochondrial Eve – the African great-great- .... grandmother of us all who lived about 150,000 years ago.
Where did Mitochondrial Eve live? Where, in other words, was the Garden of Eden where our first parents originated? We don’t know specifically, but it was almost certainly somewhere in the Great Rift Valley. A recent genetic survey suggests that a region on the coast of southwest Africa near the Kalahari Desert, at the southern terminus of the Rift Valley, may be our place of origin. It is now homeland to the Bushmen or San people who represent a direct link back to our earliest ancestors. But at that time, the San occupied a much larger area that stretched from southern Africa up the east coast as far as present-day Ethiopia – so the Garden of Eden could have been anywhere within that Valley.
How did this one family of humanity develop distinctive physical traits among different geographic groups – the traits that we used to think represented separate “races”? Some 60,000 years ago, Homo sapiens began to leave Africa and spread across the globe to colonise the entire planet. The physical traits that distinguish modern geographic groups subsequently developed as an adaptation to local environmental conditions. So skin colour varies with the intensity of sunlight in a given region to ensure the necessary absorption of Vitamin D. It has nothing to do with racial identity. We really are one family.
Or are we? In actual fact, the multi-regionalism hypothesis is far from dead. Where, for instance, did the aboriginal people of Australia come from? Spencer Wells and others argue that they migrated there from Africa. But there’s a problem. Although modern humans are thought not to have left Africa before 60,000 years ago, human remains dating to 62,000 years ago have been found at what was once Lake Mungo in the interior of Australia. Even if our dating is off by a bit, migrants from Africa would certainly have had to hustle in order to arrive first in Indonesia, then build ships and navigate a few hundred kilometres of open sea, and finally move more than 2000 kilometres inland from the northern Australian coast to Lake Mungo.
More than this, as recently as 2001, Alan Thorne and his colleagues at the Australian National University reported that mitochondrial DNA from the oldest of the Mungo residents was genetically distinct. It is no longer found in living humans, as it should be if he was descended from the people who left Africa. And then Rosalind Harding, a population geneticist at Oxford, found two genetic variants that are common among Asians and the indigenous people of Australia, but hardly exist in Africa. These variant genes, she is certain, arose more than 200,000 years ago, not in Africa but in East Asia – long before Homo sapiens reached the region. Where then did the aboriginal people of Australia come from? Could it be, as Alan Thorne proposes, that human evolution has been continuous and that different strains of Homo sapiens evolved from Homo erectus – who was already in Indonesia, and only a sea voyage away from Australia, long before the Africans even began their migration eastward?
I, for one, would still like to believe that we are all one family that originated in an updated version of the Garden of Eden somewhere in Africa. But the supporting evidence is not nearly as clear as we might like to think. With any kind of luck, a revival of the multi-regionalism hypothesis will not also revive the racism that we are having such difficulty leaving behind. The moral of the story seems to be this: Be careful lest you too quickly embrace supposedly “hard evidence” to support your own personal prejudices and predilections.
The name Homo sapiens (Latin for “wise man”) was coined in the early 18th century by a Swedish botanist, Linnaeus, who recognised that all humans were part of one species. What does that mean? Since the mid-20th century a species has been defined as an interbreeding (or potentially interbreeding) group of organisms. If it’s possible to produce offspring together, you must be of the same species.
But Linnaeus also believed that our Homo sapiens species was divided into distinct sub-species or races. And when evolutionary theory became popular in the 19th century, it was widely believed that these races – identified as African, Native American, East Asian, and European – had evolved at different times and in different places. The theory sat comfortably with Europeans. It meant that they were the most recent and therefore the most advanced race to evolve, while the others, especially the dark-skinned Africans and Native Americans, were downright primitive by comparison. It found further support when the philosopher Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” – (a phrase that was never used by Darwin) – and used it to justify the social divisions inherent in late-19th century Britain. So now there was scientific justification for believing not only that the Aryan race was superior to all others, but that people who occupied the top strata of society deserved to be there since they must be more “fit” than the mere peasants.
By the end of the 19th century this widespread belief had given rise to the eugenics movement – (“eugenics” means “good birth”) – which in 1907 gave birth in Britain to the Eugenics Education Society, the stated objective of which was to improve the gene pool of humanity through the selective breeding of “fit” individuals. Supported by the best scientific evidence of the time, the elite loved it. By the 1910s and 1920s it was being used in the U.S. as justification for the forced sterilization of people believed to be mentally subnormal. And from there it was only a short step to the Nazi death camps and the systematic extermination of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and other supposedly inferior groups.
In the 1960s, we were still finding scientific justification for such thinking. The American anthropologist Carleton Coon advanced the idea, very like that of Linnaeus 250 years earlier but now known as the “multi-regionalism hypothesis”, that there are five distinct human subspecies that evolved at different times into their present form from ancestral hominids. The basic idea is that ancient hominid species migrated out of Africa over the past two millions years, established themselves in East Asia very early on, and then evolved in situ into modern-day humans – creating the different races in the process. Again, it was the African “Congoids” that appeared first and have remained trapped ever since in an evolutionary dead-end. And of course the dominance of the more recently evolved Europeans is a natural consequence of their genetic superiority.
Since then the debate has continued to rage. In 1987, an analysis of mitochondrial DNA declared that all modern humans descended from one African population within the last 140,000 years. It was a serious blow to multi-regionalism. But by 1992, that study had been largely discredited. Then, in late 2000, a Swedish study of mitochondrial DNA again seemed to demonstrate that all modern humans emerged from Africa within the past 100,000 years and came from a breeding stock of no more than 10,000 individuals.
It began to look like the multi-regionalism hypothesis was dead. Indeed, most scientists who have studied the matter now agree that all modern humans evolved in Africa within the past 200,000 years. Their direct ancestor was probably the species Homo heidelbergensis that appeared on the scene in Africa some 500,000 years ago and then migrated into Europe. Those that went to Europe later evolved into Neanderthal Man, while those that remained in Africa evolved into modern Homo sapiens. Geneticist Spencer Wells claims to have identified our ancestry even more specifically as Mitochondrial Eve – the African great-great- .... grandmother of us all who lived about 150,000 years ago.
Where did Mitochondrial Eve live? Where, in other words, was the Garden of Eden where our first parents originated? We don’t know specifically, but it was almost certainly somewhere in the Great Rift Valley. A recent genetic survey suggests that a region on the coast of southwest Africa near the Kalahari Desert, at the southern terminus of the Rift Valley, may be our place of origin. It is now homeland to the Bushmen or San people who represent a direct link back to our earliest ancestors. But at that time, the San occupied a much larger area that stretched from southern Africa up the east coast as far as present-day Ethiopia – so the Garden of Eden could have been anywhere within that Valley.
How did this one family of humanity develop distinctive physical traits among different geographic groups – the traits that we used to think represented separate “races”? Some 60,000 years ago, Homo sapiens began to leave Africa and spread across the globe to colonise the entire planet. The physical traits that distinguish modern geographic groups subsequently developed as an adaptation to local environmental conditions. So skin colour varies with the intensity of sunlight in a given region to ensure the necessary absorption of Vitamin D. It has nothing to do with racial identity. We really are one family.
Or are we? In actual fact, the multi-regionalism hypothesis is far from dead. Where, for instance, did the aboriginal people of Australia come from? Spencer Wells and others argue that they migrated there from Africa. But there’s a problem. Although modern humans are thought not to have left Africa before 60,000 years ago, human remains dating to 62,000 years ago have been found at what was once Lake Mungo in the interior of Australia. Even if our dating is off by a bit, migrants from Africa would certainly have had to hustle in order to arrive first in Indonesia, then build ships and navigate a few hundred kilometres of open sea, and finally move more than 2000 kilometres inland from the northern Australian coast to Lake Mungo.
More than this, as recently as 2001, Alan Thorne and his colleagues at the Australian National University reported that mitochondrial DNA from the oldest of the Mungo residents was genetically distinct. It is no longer found in living humans, as it should be if he was descended from the people who left Africa. And then Rosalind Harding, a population geneticist at Oxford, found two genetic variants that are common among Asians and the indigenous people of Australia, but hardly exist in Africa. These variant genes, she is certain, arose more than 200,000 years ago, not in Africa but in East Asia – long before Homo sapiens reached the region. Where then did the aboriginal people of Australia come from? Could it be, as Alan Thorne proposes, that human evolution has been continuous and that different strains of Homo sapiens evolved from Homo erectus – who was already in Indonesia, and only a sea voyage away from Australia, long before the Africans even began their migration eastward?
I, for one, would still like to believe that we are all one family that originated in an updated version of the Garden of Eden somewhere in Africa. But the supporting evidence is not nearly as clear as we might like to think. With any kind of luck, a revival of the multi-regionalism hypothesis will not also revive the racism that we are having such difficulty leaving behind. The moral of the story seems to be this: Be careful lest you too quickly embrace supposedly “hard evidence” to support your own personal prejudices and predilections.
Monday, September 6, 2010
Our Extinct Predecessors
Homo sapiens is not this planet’s first experiment in big brains. Prior to our arrival on the scene 200,000 years ago, a number of other Homo species preceded us and, for the most part, survived many times longer than we have before becoming extinct. It remains to be seen how long we will survive. Although there is still considerable lack of consensus regarding their lines of ancestry and progeny, they have been identified from their fossil remains as:
Homo habilis (2.6 – 1.4 million years ago)
Homo ergaster (2.5 – 1.7 million years ago)
Homo erectus (1.9 million – 100,000 years ago)
Homo antecessor (1.2 million – 800,000 years ago)
Homo heidelbergensis (600,000 – 230,000 years ago)
Homo neanderthalensis (230,000 – 24,000 years ago)
In this post I want to look briefly at three of them.
Homo habilis (2.6 – 1.4 million years ago)
About 2.6 million years ago, at Turkana in northwest Kenya, a species of Australopithecus (probably A. africanus) evolved into the first species of the Homo genus. A hunter and meat-eater, Homo habilis or “handy man” is so named because of his use of flaked stone tools for killing and dissecting other animals. It was the beginning of the Stone Age. The remnants of tools found at a mass production site at Lokalalei, west of Lake Turkana, and dated to 2.35 million years ago, suggest that the tool makers there had enough smarts to plan their raw material procurement and manage the production process.
The male of the species stood about 5’0” tall and weighed about 100 pounds. His face was still primitive, but his brain size (660-700 cc) was 50% larger than his australopithecine forbears. His brain shape is also more humanlike, suggesting that he may have been capable of rudimentary speech. Despite the many theories that have been proposed, we still have no idea why hominid brains suddenly began to grow. Anthropologist Ian Tattersall says: “There is simply no compelling reason we know of to explain why human brains got large.”
Their life would have centred on survival, with energy devoted primarily to meeting their physical needs. They never learned to harness fire. Their sense of time probably did not extend much beyond tomorrow. Nor is there any hint of the death denial that later emerged in Neanderthals in association with burial rituals. For habilis, no food is death, and a full stomach is as much immortality as they hoped for.
Homo erectus (1.9 million – 100,000 years ago)
Homo erectus and Homo habilis probably shared a common ancestor and co-existed in Africa for about 500,000 years. But unlike habilis, erectus quickly migrated out of Africa. His fossilized remains, dated to 1.8 million years ago, have been found from the Atlantic coast of Europe to the Pacific coast of China.
The nearly complete skeleton of a 9 – 12 year old boy (“Turkana boy”), who died 1.54 million years ago, gives us the best picture of H erectus. Though still sporting protruding jaws and thick brow ridges, he looks more human than his predecessors – long-limbed and lean, very strong, and intelligent enough to spread successfully over a vast area. Brain size averaged 1000 cc – 50% larger again than that of habilis – and may have included a Broca’s area in the frontal lobe associated with speech.
Almost wherever erectus went, he left behind his signature tool – a teardrop-shaped, flint hand-axe. A recent excavation at Olorgesailie in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley has revealed a 10-acre site where these so-called Acheulean tools were mass produced in incalculable numbers from 1.2 million to 200,000 years ago. For a million years it operated as a well organised “factory” for fashioning new axes and re-sharpening blunt ones. Strangely, no human bones have ever been found there. It seems that H erectus went somewhere else to die.
They lived in small self-sustaining bands of 15-30 people in semi-permanent cave shelters, began using animal skins for clothing, and were the first to harness fire – perhaps as early as 1.6 million years ago and certainly since 800,000 years ago. Since there is no evidence that they cooked food, a fire in the hearth may have contributed both to physical warmth and to a sense of unity and intimacy within the group. The bones of a 1.7 million year old woman reveal that she had lived for months with an agonizing condition before dying, indicating that someone had looked after her – perhaps the first evidence of tenderness in human evolution. And the oldest known remains of a purpose-built hut, found north of Tokyo and dated to 500,000 years ago, testifies to their evolving technology and cognitive ability.
When Homo sapiens emerged in Africa 200,000 years ago, with a brain yet another 50% larger than that of erectus, they simply out-competed their smaller-brained predecessors. And by the time sapiens arrived in China c. 50,000 years ago, there was no longer any evidence there of H erectus. In fact, there are no erectus remains in China after 100,000 years ago. It seems likely that a deep freeze either drove them away or killed them off before sapiens arrived. Whatever happened, this now-extinct predecessor deserves our respect, for they walked the Earth for close to two million years.
Homo neanderthalensis (230,000 – 24,000 years ago)
In 1856, three years before Darwin published On the Origin of Species, a skull was discovered in the Neander Valley of western Germany. It belonged to the first hominid ancestor to be discovered – Neanderthal Man. Recent evidence indicates that they shared a common ancestor with modern humans – probably Homo erectus. They dominated Europe, the Middle East, and parts of western and central Asia for some 200,000 years until H sapiens arrived and displaced them. Indeed, current genetic evidence suggests that interbreeding took place with H sapiens 80,000 – 50,000 years ago, resulting in 1 – 4% of the genome of Eurasian people having been contributed by Neanderthals.
Males stood about 5’6” in height; females were about 6” shorter. Like erectus, they had a protruding jaw and receding forehead. Their brain size of 1450 cc was equivalent to that of modern humans. What distinguished them anatomically were their heavy bones and powerful muscles. They would have been extraordinarily strong by modern standards. Almost exclusively carnivores, they hunted large animals such as mammoths and endured brutally hard lives. As a species they were magnificently resilient and practically indestructible.
Neanderthal culture is identified with its cave dwellings, extensive use of fire, personal ornaments, well-wrought stone implements, and skin-covered huts more advanced than those of any preceding peoples. Painted scallops and cockleshells found recently in Spain suggest that they had a capacity for symbolism, imagination, and creativity similar to H sapiens.
The Neanderthals lived in a dramatic universe filled with spirit powers that required symbolic rituals and sacrifice – the earliest signs of a religious mode of consciousness. Almost inaccessible sanctuaries in high mountain caves show cave-bear skulls ceremonially disposed in symbolic settings. The bear is a venerated beast whose powers survive death and are effective in the preserved skull. The burial of their own dead also suggests a life to come. A 10-month-old Neanderthal baby, whose remains were discovered in a cave in northern Israel, was deliberately laid to rest in a small niche in the cave. The jawbone of a red deer that had been offered as a sacrifice was lying on the infant’s pelvis – clearly an attempt to cope with the imprint of death on the Neanderthal psyche.
Neanderthals were competitively replaced by Homo sapiens within the past 50,000 years. They disappeared from Asia 50,000 years ago, from Europe 30,000 years ago, and finally from Gibraltar 24,000 years ago. It was probably natural selection that did them in. Modern humans were much more efficient hunters and would have gradually excluded them from their food resources. What Neanderthals could only do with brute force, modern humans accomplished with tools and brains.
Homo habilis (2.6 – 1.4 million years ago)
Homo ergaster (2.5 – 1.7 million years ago)
Homo erectus (1.9 million – 100,000 years ago)
Homo antecessor (1.2 million – 800,000 years ago)
Homo heidelbergensis (600,000 – 230,000 years ago)
Homo neanderthalensis (230,000 – 24,000 years ago)
In this post I want to look briefly at three of them.
Homo habilis (2.6 – 1.4 million years ago)
About 2.6 million years ago, at Turkana in northwest Kenya, a species of Australopithecus (probably A. africanus) evolved into the first species of the Homo genus. A hunter and meat-eater, Homo habilis or “handy man” is so named because of his use of flaked stone tools for killing and dissecting other animals. It was the beginning of the Stone Age. The remnants of tools found at a mass production site at Lokalalei, west of Lake Turkana, and dated to 2.35 million years ago, suggest that the tool makers there had enough smarts to plan their raw material procurement and manage the production process.
The male of the species stood about 5’0” tall and weighed about 100 pounds. His face was still primitive, but his brain size (660-700 cc) was 50% larger than his australopithecine forbears. His brain shape is also more humanlike, suggesting that he may have been capable of rudimentary speech. Despite the many theories that have been proposed, we still have no idea why hominid brains suddenly began to grow. Anthropologist Ian Tattersall says: “There is simply no compelling reason we know of to explain why human brains got large.”
Their life would have centred on survival, with energy devoted primarily to meeting their physical needs. They never learned to harness fire. Their sense of time probably did not extend much beyond tomorrow. Nor is there any hint of the death denial that later emerged in Neanderthals in association with burial rituals. For habilis, no food is death, and a full stomach is as much immortality as they hoped for.
Homo erectus (1.9 million – 100,000 years ago)
Homo erectus and Homo habilis probably shared a common ancestor and co-existed in Africa for about 500,000 years. But unlike habilis, erectus quickly migrated out of Africa. His fossilized remains, dated to 1.8 million years ago, have been found from the Atlantic coast of Europe to the Pacific coast of China.
The nearly complete skeleton of a 9 – 12 year old boy (“Turkana boy”), who died 1.54 million years ago, gives us the best picture of H erectus. Though still sporting protruding jaws and thick brow ridges, he looks more human than his predecessors – long-limbed and lean, very strong, and intelligent enough to spread successfully over a vast area. Brain size averaged 1000 cc – 50% larger again than that of habilis – and may have included a Broca’s area in the frontal lobe associated with speech.
Almost wherever erectus went, he left behind his signature tool – a teardrop-shaped, flint hand-axe. A recent excavation at Olorgesailie in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley has revealed a 10-acre site where these so-called Acheulean tools were mass produced in incalculable numbers from 1.2 million to 200,000 years ago. For a million years it operated as a well organised “factory” for fashioning new axes and re-sharpening blunt ones. Strangely, no human bones have ever been found there. It seems that H erectus went somewhere else to die.
They lived in small self-sustaining bands of 15-30 people in semi-permanent cave shelters, began using animal skins for clothing, and were the first to harness fire – perhaps as early as 1.6 million years ago and certainly since 800,000 years ago. Since there is no evidence that they cooked food, a fire in the hearth may have contributed both to physical warmth and to a sense of unity and intimacy within the group. The bones of a 1.7 million year old woman reveal that she had lived for months with an agonizing condition before dying, indicating that someone had looked after her – perhaps the first evidence of tenderness in human evolution. And the oldest known remains of a purpose-built hut, found north of Tokyo and dated to 500,000 years ago, testifies to their evolving technology and cognitive ability.
When Homo sapiens emerged in Africa 200,000 years ago, with a brain yet another 50% larger than that of erectus, they simply out-competed their smaller-brained predecessors. And by the time sapiens arrived in China c. 50,000 years ago, there was no longer any evidence there of H erectus. In fact, there are no erectus remains in China after 100,000 years ago. It seems likely that a deep freeze either drove them away or killed them off before sapiens arrived. Whatever happened, this now-extinct predecessor deserves our respect, for they walked the Earth for close to two million years.
Homo neanderthalensis (230,000 – 24,000 years ago)
In 1856, three years before Darwin published On the Origin of Species, a skull was discovered in the Neander Valley of western Germany. It belonged to the first hominid ancestor to be discovered – Neanderthal Man. Recent evidence indicates that they shared a common ancestor with modern humans – probably Homo erectus. They dominated Europe, the Middle East, and parts of western and central Asia for some 200,000 years until H sapiens arrived and displaced them. Indeed, current genetic evidence suggests that interbreeding took place with H sapiens 80,000 – 50,000 years ago, resulting in 1 – 4% of the genome of Eurasian people having been contributed by Neanderthals.
Males stood about 5’6” in height; females were about 6” shorter. Like erectus, they had a protruding jaw and receding forehead. Their brain size of 1450 cc was equivalent to that of modern humans. What distinguished them anatomically were their heavy bones and powerful muscles. They would have been extraordinarily strong by modern standards. Almost exclusively carnivores, they hunted large animals such as mammoths and endured brutally hard lives. As a species they were magnificently resilient and practically indestructible.
Neanderthal culture is identified with its cave dwellings, extensive use of fire, personal ornaments, well-wrought stone implements, and skin-covered huts more advanced than those of any preceding peoples. Painted scallops and cockleshells found recently in Spain suggest that they had a capacity for symbolism, imagination, and creativity similar to H sapiens.
The Neanderthals lived in a dramatic universe filled with spirit powers that required symbolic rituals and sacrifice – the earliest signs of a religious mode of consciousness. Almost inaccessible sanctuaries in high mountain caves show cave-bear skulls ceremonially disposed in symbolic settings. The bear is a venerated beast whose powers survive death and are effective in the preserved skull. The burial of their own dead also suggests a life to come. A 10-month-old Neanderthal baby, whose remains were discovered in a cave in northern Israel, was deliberately laid to rest in a small niche in the cave. The jawbone of a red deer that had been offered as a sacrifice was lying on the infant’s pelvis – clearly an attempt to cope with the imprint of death on the Neanderthal psyche.
Neanderthals were competitively replaced by Homo sapiens within the past 50,000 years. They disappeared from Asia 50,000 years ago, from Europe 30,000 years ago, and finally from Gibraltar 24,000 years ago. It was probably natural selection that did them in. Modern humans were much more efficient hunters and would have gradually excluded them from their food resources. What Neanderthals could only do with brute force, modern humans accomplished with tools and brains.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Our Primate Ancestors
Before commencing an account of how our worldviews evolved over the course of human history, I want to orient us in terms of an evolutionary timeline and summarise what we know of our ancestral forbears.
We are members of the species homo sapiens,
of the genus homo,
in the family of hominids (or hominidae)
in the order of primates,
in the class of mammals.
67 million years ago, the first family of primates emerged from mammals and, over millions of years, evolved into many different species throughout the Eurasian continent. Distinguished by their opposing thumbs and big toes, they were forest dwellers who lived extensively in trees. One of these was Ida – about the size of a cat and looking somewhat like a modern lemur – who lived c. 47 million years ago and whose fossilized remains were discovered in 1983 in Germany
43 million years ago, these early primates diversified into anthropoids (leading eventually to monkeys, apes, and humans) and prosimians (leading to lemurs, lorises, and tarsiers).
37 million years ago, the anthropoids diversified into New World and Old World monkeys, with the latter marking the first arrival of primates in Africa. One of these, known as “the Dawn Ape”, who lived in Egypt 35-33 million years ago, was a fox-sized anthropoid with an anatomy and teeth that would later characterise fully developed apes.
25 million years ago, apes diversified from Old World monkeys. One of the earliest of these, named Proconsul, appeared in the fossil record in Kenya. With no tail, a weight of 84 lbs, and a brain capacity of 150 cc, he was the predecessor of all the later great apes.
20 million years ago, the great apes began to disperse around the world. Those that went east into Asia evolved into the gibbon and later the orang-utan. Those that stayed in Africa evolved still later (9 million years ago) into gorillas, and then (5-6 million years ago) into hominids, chimpanzees and bonobos. Given our relatively recent common ancestry, it is not surprising that humans are 98.4% genetically the same as chimps. In fact, there is more difference between a zebra and a horse, or between a dolphin and a porpoise, than there is between you and a modern chimpanzee.
A particularly dry spell in Africa at that time appears to have driven some tree-dwelling apes out of the forest and into the grasslands, to which they adapted by standing upright on two legs, learning to hunt other mammals, and gradually developing bigger brains. These were the hominids, among whom the dominant species (from 4.1 to 1.9 million years ago) were the australopithecines. They consisted of half a dozen species that lived in Kenya, Tanzania, and Ethiopia, with enough brainpower to live in groups of up to 70.
One of these was the now-famous Lucy – a 3.18 million year old australopithecine whose remains were found in Ethiopia in 1974. A three-year-old girl, 3 ½ feet tall, she was bipedal and a good climber, but her brain size was only slightly larger than that of a chimpanzee. Her shoulder blades resembled a young gorilla’s, as did the hyoid bone in the throat, suggesting that speech had not yet begun to evolve. Two years later, in Tanzania, Mary Leakey found footprints from two individuals from the same family of hominids, dated to 3.6 million years ago
The African Rift Valley stretches for 2000 miles from Ethiopia in the north to Malawi in the south. It was here that the first species of the homo genus – homo habilis – made its appearance some 2.5 million years ago, probably evolving from a smaller-brained australopithecine. The still larger-brained homo erectus emerged some 500,000 years later, and our own species, homo sapiens, with a brain 50% larger again, emerged 200,000 years ago.
We do well, I think, to remember our origins – and, with an appropriate measure of humility, recognise that this big-brain experiment in self-awareness has been in operation for not much more than the twinkling of an eye. If we shrink the evolution of life on this planet to a time-span of just one year, homo sapiens has been here since only 26 minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve. Even our australopithecine forbears survived 10 times longer than that before they became extinct, and our chimpanzee cousins have been around for 30 times as long. We should only be so lucky!
We are members of the species homo sapiens,
of the genus homo,
in the family of hominids (or hominidae)
in the order of primates,
in the class of mammals.
67 million years ago, the first family of primates emerged from mammals and, over millions of years, evolved into many different species throughout the Eurasian continent. Distinguished by their opposing thumbs and big toes, they were forest dwellers who lived extensively in trees. One of these was Ida – about the size of a cat and looking somewhat like a modern lemur – who lived c. 47 million years ago and whose fossilized remains were discovered in 1983 in Germany
43 million years ago, these early primates diversified into anthropoids (leading eventually to monkeys, apes, and humans) and prosimians (leading to lemurs, lorises, and tarsiers).
37 million years ago, the anthropoids diversified into New World and Old World monkeys, with the latter marking the first arrival of primates in Africa. One of these, known as “the Dawn Ape”, who lived in Egypt 35-33 million years ago, was a fox-sized anthropoid with an anatomy and teeth that would later characterise fully developed apes.
25 million years ago, apes diversified from Old World monkeys. One of the earliest of these, named Proconsul, appeared in the fossil record in Kenya. With no tail, a weight of 84 lbs, and a brain capacity of 150 cc, he was the predecessor of all the later great apes.
20 million years ago, the great apes began to disperse around the world. Those that went east into Asia evolved into the gibbon and later the orang-utan. Those that stayed in Africa evolved still later (9 million years ago) into gorillas, and then (5-6 million years ago) into hominids, chimpanzees and bonobos. Given our relatively recent common ancestry, it is not surprising that humans are 98.4% genetically the same as chimps. In fact, there is more difference between a zebra and a horse, or between a dolphin and a porpoise, than there is between you and a modern chimpanzee.
A particularly dry spell in Africa at that time appears to have driven some tree-dwelling apes out of the forest and into the grasslands, to which they adapted by standing upright on two legs, learning to hunt other mammals, and gradually developing bigger brains. These were the hominids, among whom the dominant species (from 4.1 to 1.9 million years ago) were the australopithecines. They consisted of half a dozen species that lived in Kenya, Tanzania, and Ethiopia, with enough brainpower to live in groups of up to 70.
One of these was the now-famous Lucy – a 3.18 million year old australopithecine whose remains were found in Ethiopia in 1974. A three-year-old girl, 3 ½ feet tall, she was bipedal and a good climber, but her brain size was only slightly larger than that of a chimpanzee. Her shoulder blades resembled a young gorilla’s, as did the hyoid bone in the throat, suggesting that speech had not yet begun to evolve. Two years later, in Tanzania, Mary Leakey found footprints from two individuals from the same family of hominids, dated to 3.6 million years ago
The African Rift Valley stretches for 2000 miles from Ethiopia in the north to Malawi in the south. It was here that the first species of the homo genus – homo habilis – made its appearance some 2.5 million years ago, probably evolving from a smaller-brained australopithecine. The still larger-brained homo erectus emerged some 500,000 years later, and our own species, homo sapiens, with a brain 50% larger again, emerged 200,000 years ago.
We do well, I think, to remember our origins – and, with an appropriate measure of humility, recognise that this big-brain experiment in self-awareness has been in operation for not much more than the twinkling of an eye. If we shrink the evolution of life on this planet to a time-span of just one year, homo sapiens has been here since only 26 minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve. Even our australopithecine forbears survived 10 times longer than that before they became extinct, and our chimpanzee cousins have been around for 30 times as long. We should only be so lucky!
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Eras, Worldviews, and Stages of Development
Our changing worldviews reflect the changing circumstances and conditions of life during Homo sapiens' 200,000 year history. Tracking our development through identifiable eras, we can see how the worldviews that prevailed in any particular era were shaped by the interplay of certain key factors:
(1) our knowledge of the world – especially our cosmology;
(2) our population density and social structure;
(3) our stage of technological and economic development;
(4) the level of our cognitive and emotional development; and
(5) our sense of time and awareness of death
In subsequent posts I want to focus on each historical era and how these factors shaped the worldviews that were dominant at that time. In particular I want to highlight how these eras and their worldviews parallel the stages in our individual development as described by developmental psychologists.
The following is an overview of these eras, the stages of individual cognitive and emotional development that each era reflects, and the worldviews that prevailed in each. The names that describe the developmental stages are chosen to make evident the link between each stage and its corresponding historical era.
Historical Eras Individual Developmental Stages
1. Hunter-Gatherer Bands (200,000 – 60,000 BCE) The Innocent Nestling (2-3 years)
2. The Migratory Era (60,000 – 10,000 BCE) The Curious Explorer (4-6 years)
Worldview: Nature Spirits and Goddesses
3. The Neolithic Village (10,000 – 3,000 BCE) The Responsible Participant (7-12 years)
Worldview: The Mother Goddess
4. Civilizations and Empires (3000 BCE to the present) The Conquering Hero (13-17 years)
Worldviews: Cosmic Order, Kingship, and Polytheism
The Emergence of Monotheism
The Axial Age
The Materialist and Idealist Worldviews of Greek Philosophy
The Christian Worldview
5. The Age of Reason (1500 CE to the present) The Rational-Reflective Seeker (18-20 years)
Worldviews: The Clockwork Universe
The Accidental Universe
The Technological Wonderland
6. The Age of Globalization (1950 CE to the present) The Soul-Centered Co-Creator (21 years +)
Worldview: The Emerging Worldview
(1) our knowledge of the world – especially our cosmology;
(2) our population density and social structure;
(3) our stage of technological and economic development;
(4) the level of our cognitive and emotional development; and
(5) our sense of time and awareness of death
In subsequent posts I want to focus on each historical era and how these factors shaped the worldviews that were dominant at that time. In particular I want to highlight how these eras and their worldviews parallel the stages in our individual development as described by developmental psychologists.
The following is an overview of these eras, the stages of individual cognitive and emotional development that each era reflects, and the worldviews that prevailed in each. The names that describe the developmental stages are chosen to make evident the link between each stage and its corresponding historical era.
Historical Eras Individual Developmental Stages
1. Hunter-Gatherer Bands (200,000 – 60,000 BCE) The Innocent Nestling (2-3 years)
2. The Migratory Era (60,000 – 10,000 BCE) The Curious Explorer (4-6 years)
Worldview: Nature Spirits and Goddesses
3. The Neolithic Village (10,000 – 3,000 BCE) The Responsible Participant (7-12 years)
Worldview: The Mother Goddess
4. Civilizations and Empires (3000 BCE to the present) The Conquering Hero (13-17 years)
Worldviews: Cosmic Order, Kingship, and Polytheism
The Emergence of Monotheism
The Axial Age
The Materialist and Idealist Worldviews of Greek Philosophy
The Christian Worldview
5. The Age of Reason (1500 CE to the present) The Rational-Reflective Seeker (18-20 years)
Worldviews: The Clockwork Universe
The Accidental Universe
The Technological Wonderland
6. The Age of Globalization (1950 CE to the present) The Soul-Centered Co-Creator (21 years +)
Worldview: The Emerging Worldview
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