Lives in Ruins (7 page)

To start, he chose a dozen or so archaeological sites out of the thousands or even tens of thousands that date back to about 6,000–8,000 years ago, then ranged through the Middle East, Europe, China, Indonesia, and North and South Africa, before ending up at the few available ancient sites in East Africa where apes and apelike humans lived. (The Americas are of less interest to paleoanthropologists; they're too young—there's little verified evidence of humans on these continents until about 13,000 or 14,000 years ago,
^*
and as Shea said, “I don't even start paying attention until twelve thousand years ago.”) Before we went on our imaginary journey, though, we had to absorb several scientific principles, especially one that archaeologists borrowed from geology,
uniformitarianism
: In explaining the past, we use only those processes we can observe in the present. “This takes fairly pernicious ideas off the table, like ancient alien stuff,” Shea explained. “Has anyone noticed aliens coming down today and giving us advice on buildings? ‘O space lords! Thank you'? No!”

Shea also wanted us to separate our observations from our interpretation, as good scientists do. He set a water glass on the desk and asked us to describe it. Half full? Half empty? Either involved a judgment and colored our description. A good scientist would describe it simply as a half glass of water. Alert for inadvertent bias in
description, we also had to remember that some artifacts of culture simply don't show up in the archaeological record. “If an ancient hominin [human] butchers a goat, and makes several canoes, and a guitar, ultimately there will be no remains of the wooden efforts. After a few ice ages, it's a goat butchery site.” Why are paleoarchaeologists obsessed with flint? Because that is what survives.

Another important lesson: Shea wanted to disabuse us of the notion that everything in the world could be divided in two. The convention that there were two sides to every story eliminated the third and fourth and fifth sides. Even dividing the past two and a half million years into the “Neolithic” (the new stone age) and the “Paleolithic” (the old stone age) was reductionist. “Write this down,” he said. “Dichotomies are for idiots.” Throughout the winter and spring, he threw it out there at odd moments, “Who are dichotomies for?” and back come their young, strong voices, like Neandertals preparing to ambush a mammoth: “IDIOTS!”

WE STARTED THE
class in the Middle East, in the dense Neolithic village of Jericho, also known as Tell es-Sultan. (A
tell
is a mound that grows gradually as successive generations live and build on it.) After many centuries, the people of Jericho found themselves living atop a mound seventy feet high. I am not exactly sure why someone would want to knock down an old mud-brick house and build on top of the debris instead of moving down the road, but the result is a boon for scientists who come along centuries later. Archaeologists love
tells
because they're like layer cakes, with the trash of the pre-pottery people at the base, and deposits from more recent people, including their pottery and gnawed animal bones, near the top.

As I sat in an uncomfortable molded seat, watching the professor draw little figures and diagrams with chalk, I meditated on how much of archaeology involved graves and garbage. Even from the distance of eighty centuries, I could smell the rot. Archaeologists opening the jaws of those early, hardworking farmers found “lots
of periodontal diseases,” Shea told us. “These guys were shorter, squatter, and sicklier than us. They probably have only half their teeth, if that.” Teeth are gold mines for archaeologists, “like fossils in your mouth,” one archaeologist told me; and burials—well, we would be crawling into a few on this journey. The people of Jericho kept their dead close, under their living areas, and buried their children as well. Hunter-gatherers of even a few thousand years ago threw the bodies of their dead infants in the trash.

Painted, decorated human skulls were found at Jericho, along with stone bowls, obsidian, and cowrie shells originating from distant places; and there really was a wall around it, and a tower, too. But Shea, naturally, bored in on the
lithics
, the stone weapons. A few different kinds of points were found in Jericho: tiny stone arrowheads, long ones with many notches that did terrible damage to their prey, but also “ginormous arrowheads, super-sized, and almost guaranteed to break when they slam into something,” Shea said. “Maybe these were designed to cripple the target—but you don't want to wound an animal that then runs away. When would crippling be preferable to killing?” I looked around at the blank faces on my classmates. We were people who bought our hamburger already ground, if not cooked, and were clearly at a disadvantage in this game. “Any military veterans here?” he asked. “How about shooting to wound or maim, as in combat? Shoot to kill, you take out one person. Shoot to wound, you take three people out of the fight. These weren't weapons for hunting, they were weapons for war.”

Shea dialed back the time machine 25,000 years to the Upper Paleolithic, when people started spending huge amounts of time crafting tools and making art, and told us about the exotic site of Dolní Věstonice in what is now the Czech Republic. Mammoth bones littered the site and framed the round dwellings built on stone foundations. The people of Dolní Věstonice loved their mammoth bones, which they burned for fuel (imagine the stink!).
They also carved stout little figures out of ivory and other materials, giving them small heads, big breasts and hips, a slit for the vulva, and stylized feet. This was not unusual; such “Venus figures” have been found from one end of Europe to the other. What was unusual about Dolní Věstonice was its pottery, which was made, not into vessels for food or drink, but into statues of animals. These earliest potters also made round balls of clay spiked with copper oxides and salts. Heating the animal figures made them durable; heating the balls made them explode in colored flames, like ancient firecrackers.

The burials were the oddest part of this odd site. Most striking was what Shea told us about three young bodies, arranged so deliberately that I couldn't help but think that those who buried them were trying to tell us a story. Shea described the scene: on the left, a male skeleton in his early twenties, his skull covered in powdered red ochre, rests one of his hands on the pelvis of the middle figure, apparently female. The figure in the center has a crippled back and is slightly curved toward another male on the right; their arms are interlocked, and both of their heads, too, are covered in red ochre. A soap opera, a love triangle, an ancient version of Romeo and Juliet? Mostly, it was a mystery, in meaning and in the details. Take the ochre. We can guess why ochre made great chalk for pictures or body paint, but why would people be buried with it? Yet both
Homo sapiens
humans and Neandertals buried their dead with such mineral pigments. Who knows why? Who knows why Venus figures appear across Europe? Who knows why big piles of hand-axes are found littered throughout Africa, Europe, and Asia? That's a phrase that should crop up in every archaeological paper:
Who knows why?

Archaeologists live with mystery. Teasing open a site and studying it from all angles not only doesn't answer all our questions, it mainly leads to more questions. So we study archaeology to gather authentic fragments of our human past, but the further back we go, the more we see what an incomplete picture we have of human history.

There was another odd burial at Dolní Věstonice, this one of an older woman. She was found in a fetal position under the shoulder blades of a mammoth, near a fox skeleton, and scientists said her facial bones indicated paralysis on the left side of her face. Also found nearby at Dolní Věstonice: a carved ivory head and an ivory plaque with an incised face, and get this—both had faces that droop on the left. The carved head was the size of a thumb, and “that ivory would have taken dozens of hours to carve,” Shea said with respect. That woman was somebody.

The people of Dolní Věstonice might seem cryptic and strange, but reaching back twice as far, to the Middle Paleolithic's Neandertals and then even further by hundreds of thousands of years, first to
Homo heidelbergensis
and then to
Homo erectus
, was like watching a badly damaged, flickering black-and-white time travelogue. Neandertals ranged across Europe and the eastern Mediterranean (the Levant) into Russia, and lived in caves. Did they live in other dwellings, too? We know only about the ones preserved in caves. For a time,
Homo neanderthalensis
and
Homo sapiens
both inhabited the Levant; then, for a significant period between 80,000 and 50,000 years ago,
Homo sapiens
disappeared from the archaeological record in this area. Again, who knows why?

Did Neandertals and
Homo sapiens
reproduce with each other? This is the hot question ever since a laboratory sequenced the Neandertal genome in 2010 and scientists announced that a small percentage of Eurasian DNA could be traced to Neandertals. The results percolated down to the popular press—“It's Fred, Wilma—And You!” and “Who're You Calling a Neanderthal?” As with most paleoanthropological news, though, the conclusion was soon challenged. Do humans carry traces of Neandertal genes because they interbred or because they shared a common ancestor? Evolutionary genetics “is a young science,” Shea noted. “They only got Neandertal DNA in 1996. The jury's still out.” To an archaeologist, that's like yesterday. The laboratory at the Max Planck Institute
for Evolutionary Anthropology, which sequenced the genome,
^*
has a stellar reputation, Shea acknowledged, but his experience with laboratories overall is not reassuring: “All you have to do is look sideways at a sample to contaminate it.” From an archaeological perspective, “There is no clear and convincing proof that either hominin set eyes on the other.” You never find these people's tools or bones in the same place at the same time. He refers to Neandertals as “our cousins” and conceded, “At most, the Neandertals are ancestral only to some of us.” He attributed part of the fascination with the species to the fact that their remains are easy to find and there are lots of specimens, and also to European scientists' traditional preference for excavating in their own backyard, within easy reach of wine, cheese, and pâté.

WHAT REALLY INTERESTED
Shea were the tools, and there were places, like the caves he helped excavate in Israel, where there was evidence that
Homo sapiens
had used the same kinds of knives and tools as Neandertals. “The complex projectile weapons seem to be uniquely
Homo sapiens
, though,” he said. “Neandertals don't seem to have used them.”

Through Shea's vivid descriptions, I finally learned to distinguish a few of the tangled branches of the human tree.
Homo sapiens
who lived in caves put trash in front and slept in the back; not so in the caves occupied by
Homo heidelbergensis
. Those humans, probably the last common ancestor of
Homo sapiens
and
neanderthalensis
, lived like frat boys 700,000 to 300,000 years ago, “flinging shit everywhere”—and the idea of slovenly boy and girl ancestors fascinated me. “Big heavy stone tools . . . probably solved things with brute force. Commandos without too much thought,” Shea riffed. “If you were going to cast
Jersey Shore
, you'd go with
heidelbergensis
.”

The even more ancient
Homo erectus
, the tall thin guys who ran down their prey like wolves, began in Africa between a million and two million years ago. Most
Homo erectus
fossils, creepily, are missing part of the skull. Were they eaten? I think of the comic Louis C.K., another guy with a somewhat Neandertal build, who reminds us that we don't have to worry about being hunted and eaten on our way to work every day. “We got out of the food chain!” he crows. “That is a massive upgrade.”

And then there was
Homo floresiensis
. The three-foot-tall hobbits are a twenty-first-century discovery from Indonesia and lived on the island of Flores, apparently until about 18,000 years ago. “You want to make a name for yourself? Learn the language of Indonesia, get a permit, and start digging holes there,” Shea advised.

As for variations of our even-more-ancient ancestors, the proto-humans
Paranthropus
and
Australopithecus
, genera that appeared two to four million years ago in Africa, they had outsized teeth, the better to eat masses of vegetation. “The first thing you'd hear as you approached them is farting,” Shea said. There, now—we won't ever confuse them with
Homo erectus
, let alone
Homo sapiens
.

It was Shea's idea that I should sit and take the exam for the Archaeology of Human Origins with the undergraduates. In spite of my crush on
Homo heidelbergensis
and newfound comfort with various extinct species of humans, I was horrified. I thought that was half the point,
the
point, of auditing—that I wouldn't have to write a paper or take a test. “No, it'll be good for you, it will focus your mind,” Shea said. “Just see how you do.” It must have occurred to him as I eased out of the classroom that my pallor and anxiety might have something to do with my age. “How long has it been since you took a science test?” he asked. Let's see, tenth-grade biology—forty-two years? He was impressed.

All the students who signed up for the class but didn't bother to attend the lectures showed up for the exam. The teaching assistant had to go hunt for extra desks. Shea prefaced the test with a short
lecture that distracted me briefly. He talked about Shanidar Cave in Iraq, excavated in the fifties and sixties by the married archaeologists Ralph and Rose Solecki, who found Neandertals buried there with evidence of flowers. The startling find, which has never been replicated, quickly worked its way into the popular culture and became the primary inspiration for Jean Auel's fur-bodice-ripping bestsellers that began with
The Clan of the Cave Bear
. But Shea wondered, had those Neandertals been deliberately buried with flowers, or had the flowers been introduced by a native burrowing rodent? I am a skeptic; I voted for the rodent.