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.