Masters of the Planet (31 page)

What is more, just what form any possible acculturation represented by the Châtelperronian may have taken is largely conjectural: suggestions as to how the odd combination of cultural features came about include trading, imitation, and theft. Still, some recent developments may have made all this moot, for the tide appears to be turning against the idea that the Châtelperronian bone and ivory items were the handiwork of Neanderthals—although the blade artifacts were clearly developed within an older Neanderthal tradition. Unquestionably the most famous potentially symbolic Châtelperronian pieces were found in a cave called
the
Grotte du Renne, at Arcy-sur-Cure, in France. They include a rather splendid polished ivory pendant that most people would have little difficulty in identifying as a symbolic object, and until recently they were believed to have been associated with some rather fragmentary Neanderthal fossils from the same site. But several independent studies have recently concluded that they were most likely introduced from above into the earlier Neanderthal layers, through the sort of natural mixing up of strata that can frequently occur in caves. Similarly, the association with the Châtelperronian of the clearly Neanderthal skeleton from St.Césaire has been called into question by recent studies. The bottom line here is that, although it seems improbable that the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons did not encounter each other once in a while, we still have no good record of any interaction between them, let alone of what form it might have taken.

Thus the obvious question—whether the large-brained Neanderthals
could
have acquired symbolic ways of dealing with information from the incoming Cro-Magnons—remains unanswerable on the basis of the material record we have to hand. But when we take all the indirect lines of evidence into account, it seems a bit unlikely. When Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons met on the landscape it seems probable that, for all their similarities, they would have perceived each other as alien beings, each with its own way of viewing and dealing with the world. Language would have been a major issue, among many others. Whereas the Cro-Magnons almost certainly possessed language as we know it today—however different their specific language might have been from any spoken now, or even within recorded history—it seems likely that the Neanderthals did not. Language is an intensely symbolic activity that, as we'll see in detail later, probably played a unique and pivotal role in the acquisition of modern symbolic consciousness; and even in the unlikely event that an occasional gifted Neanderthal managed to acquire its rudiments, there is no firm indication that any potential interchange had a material effect on the cultural or biological trajectory of either group.

When we ponder the differences between the Cro-Magnons—whose lives, like ours, were doubtless riddled with myth and superstition—and the Neanderthals, perhaps the closest thing we can obtain to a glimpse of the divergence in psyche comes from the grisly yet matter-of-fact fate of
the
hapless denizens of El Sidrón, and from the casual way in which that piece of skull bone from La Quina was used as the most inconsequential type of tool. I cannot help but read an intense form of focused practicality—and a related lack of symbolic imagination—into these and all the other material leavings of the Neanderthals. These large-brained relatives certainly were smart; but their particular kind of smartness was not ours. This difference is hard for us to comprehend fully. As I've already stressed, it is just not possible for a symbolically thinking modern human to project him- or herself into the mind of any creature that did not think that way—no matter how large-brained or closely related to us it might have been. The cognitive gulf is just too great. At our current stage of understanding we simply cannot know how Neanderthals subjectively experienced the world and communicated that experience to each other. All we can be certain of is that we do the Neanderthals a grave injustice by looking upon them as an unsuccessful version of ourselves.

TWELVE

ENIGMATIC ARRIVAL

About the same time that
Homo neanderthalensis
first appeared in Europe, our own species
Homo sapiens
was emerging in Africa. But while the Sima de los Huesos fossils give us a pretty good idea of Neanderthal ancestry in Europe, we have no African equivalent in our own case. A number of hominid crania are known from sites in eastern and southern Africa in the 400- to 200-thousand-year range, but none of them looks like a close antecedent of the anatomically distinctive
Homo sapiens.
Yet we can be confident that Africa was the continent of our birth, not only because the very earliest plausibly
Homo sapiens
fossils are found there, but because numerous DNA comparisons of modern human populations have made it clear that they all converge back to an African ancestry. The lack of anticipatory fossils might simply be due to the fact that Africa is a very large place that has not been explored in great detail; but it may also suggest that our unusual species originated in the kind of systemwide genetic regulatory event I have already mentioned in the case of the also radically new
Homo ergaster.
For
Homo sapiens
departs in numerous features from the much more ancestral body form exemplified both by the Neanderthals and those other extinct members of the genus
Homo
represented by relevant fossils. Still, this is not the whole story, for as far as
Homo sapiens
is concerned it appears that body form was one thing, while the symbolic cognitive system that distinguishes us so greatly from all other creatures was entirely another.
The
two were not acquired at the same time, and the earliest anatomical
Homo sapiens
appear right now to have been cognitively indistinguishable from the Neanderthals and other contemporaries.

ANATOMICALLY MODERN
Homo sapiens

The first traces we have of people who looked in their bony structure exactly—or almost exactly—the way we do today, come from two sites in northeastern Africa. In the late 1960s, rocks in southern Ethiopia's Omo Basin that are now reckoned to be about 195 thousand years old yielded the fragmentary remains of a skull that, reconstructed, looks plausibly to be a
Homo sapiens,
even if not exactly like a member of any human population living today. And much more recently, deposits at Herto in northern Ethiopia produced a trio of crania, including a fairly complete child and adult, that are also best considered
Homo sapiens,
if once more differing from today's people in a few details. Certainly the adult shows the characteristic high, voluminous cranial vault, with a small face retracted beneath its front, which is so conspicuously unique to our species. The Herto fossils can be firmly dated to between 155 and 160 thousand years ago; so, between them, the Omo and Herto hominids demonstrate pretty clearly that the distinctive basic
Homo sapiens
cranial anatomy was established by about 200 to 160 thousand years ago. Importantly, this date range coincides with the dates for the origin of
Homo sapiens
proposed by molecular anthropologists, based on the time-to-coalescence calculated for a large number of different modern human populations from around the world.

Still, in cultural terms it seems that the reign on Earth of
Homo sapiens
started with more of a whimper than a bang. Stone tools found at both of the Ethiopian sites are unimpressive. At Omo the few artifacts found have been characterized as “nondescript,” while at Herto handaxes are present, as well as prepared-core flakes. This is the latest recorded presence of handaxes in Africa, and it places the Herto stone tool assemblage right at the end of what was evidently a complex and prolonged transition from the Acheulean to the “Middle Stone Age” (MSA) technology associated with later humans. The MSA has regularly—if, as it turns out, a bit inappropriately—been regarded as the African equivalent of the Neanderthals'
Mousterian in Europe, largely because both traditions relied upon prepared-core techniques. But, as we will shortly see, there seems to have been a lot more going on in the MSA than there ever was in the Mousterian—although as far as we know at present, these stirrings were not expressed until after Omo/Herto times.

Because of the persistence of the old alongside the new that has typified all of human technological history—and continues unabated today—it's hard to say exactly when the MSA began. But a general reckoning would place its origin in the period between about 300 and 200 thousand years ago, most likely before recognizable
Homo sapiens
had come into existence—and if so, comfortably in line with the disconnect we've already seen between biological and cultural innovation in human evolution.

The matter of
Homo sapiens
origins has been muddied by a long-running tendency among paleoanthropologists to identify reasonably large-brained non-Neanderthal hominids who didn't look like us as “archaic
Homo sapiens.
” This appellation has been applied to specimens found in almost all regions of Africa, as well as elsewhere. But it really doesn't help much to include in our species creatures who didn't share at least the most basic aspects of our distinctive anatomy (most especially that reduced and retracted face). Among the most puzzling of such fossils are certain crania from North Africa, some of which are associated with a stoneworking industry known as the Aterian, after the site of Bir el Ater, in Algeria. The Aterian toolkit is fairly characterized as a variant of the MSA, but it includes some unique tool types, such as the defining “tanged points” that may have been hafted as spear tips or even conceivably, in very late phases, as arrowheads.

Long considered to be quite recent in date, the Aterian is now known to occur at some quite ancient sites, and this has excited speculation that the earliest producers of this industry may have played a role in the initial exodus of
Homo sapiens
out of Africa. Geographically this makes sense, for the Sahara desert has not always been the barrier to human movement that it is today, and areas that are now sandy wastelands have produced ample evidence of earlier occupation, notably by Aterians. As fossil drainage systems now covered by blowing sands testify, the Sahara has periodically “greened” as rainfall increased and lakes and vegetation
sprouted
everywhere. One of the wettest such periods occurred between about 130 and 120 thousand years ago (the time of the last interglacial in Europe). And at that point the Sahara could certainly have acted as a conduit for modern human populations expanding northward, although there are reasons for thinking that the Aterians themselves may have remained effectively in Africa, at least in the longer term.

One reason for uncertainty is the Aterian peoples' identity. Although it is generally unwise to associate any particular kind of hominid exclusively with a specific toolkit, it may be relevant that the North African hominid remains so far associated with early Aterian societies belong in that very dubious “archaic
Homo sapiens
” category. Best known among these fossils is a partial cranium, plus more fragmentary materials, from Dar-es-Soltan II, a site in Morocco that may be as much as 110 thousand years old or more. One that has received a lot of publicity lately is a crushed and fragmented but relatively complete child's cranium from Contrebandiers Cave, also in Morocco, which has been dated to about the same time and which, in its reconstructed form, is clearly not a standard-issue modern human despite a reasonably capacious braincase. Even more unlike modern humans are a couple of crania from another Moroccan site, Jebel Irhoud, which may be over 160 thousand
years
old. These earlier specimens are associated with a toolkit that is said to closely resemble the Mousterian of the Neanderthals—though the hominids themselves don't look Neanderthal at all. None of these North African specimens presents itself as an obvious variety of
Homo sapiens,
despite brain volumes for the Jebel Irhoud individuals of 1,305 cc and 1,400 cc. The more complete Jebel Irhoud 1 cranium has a rather small lower face; but the whole facial skeleton is forwardly positioned, and it also boasts prominent brows behind which the forehead retreats in a manner unlike anything we see in modern
Homo sapiens.

Front and side views of a cranium from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, that is thought to be some 160 thousand years old. Often considered close to
Homo sapiens,
it actually has a very distinctive facial structure. The associated industry is very much like that of the Neanderthals in Europe. Drawing by Don McGranaghan.

Recognizing species from their bones is often a tough proposition among close relatives: in some cases, much physical diversity may accumulate within a population without speciation occurring, while in others, the bones of members of two species descended from the same ancestor may be virtually indistinguishable. In the absence of a good morphological yardstick we thus can't be absolutely sure that Aterians or the Jebel Irhoud people would not have been able to exchange genes with anatomically mainstream
Homo sapiens.
Indeed, they may conceivably have done so, as we'll see in a moment. Still, as we will also see, although Aterians could have ventured a bit beyond Africa at a very early stage, they certainly did not play a role in the definitive
Homo sapiens
exodus that later populated the world.