Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World (15 page)

For a short while that narrow green corridor opened (
Figure 1.8
), allowing migration from the Arabian Gulf to Syria, and the great-granddaughters of Asian Eve went north-west up the Fertile Crescent to the Levant (see
Chapter 3
). The original South Asian source for these European migrants is revealed by the genetic trail: as can be seen from the genetic tree (see
Figure 1.4
), for each Nasreen branch that went north-west to Europe, another Nasreen branch went east to India.

Figure 1.8
   The Fertile Crescent corridor to Europe. Around 50,000 years ago, weather warmed and moistened sufficiently to open a green corridor (dotted lines) across the desert between South Asia and Turkey. For the first time since the interglacial 75,000 years before, modern humans were able to move into the Levant and then to Europe.

Such a picture of Europeans’ genetic roots in South Asia overturns the northern out-of-Africa theory. It also fundamentally changes the Eurocentric view of Europeans as the first fully modern human culture outside Africa. So, to be safe, we must ask whether there is any archaeological evidence to contradict the idea of the first Europeans coming from South Asia. There does not appear to be any – rather, it seems to be the other way round.

The earliest archaeological evidence in West Eurasia for technology of the Upper Palaeolithic is no more than 47,000 years old. The Belgian archaeologist Marcel Otte challenges the conventional view of Europeans’ ancestors having come out of North Africa, developing their Upper Palaeolithic technology en route, and points instead to the Zagros Mountain range in the present-day ethnic region of Kurdistan, just north of the Gulf, which he argues was the core region for Upper Palaeolithic technology.
⁴⁸

Sri Lanka, then a peninsula to the south of India, is extraordinary in that it turns the east–west cultural tables. Reliable evidence gives a date of 28,000 years ago for manufacture of microliths on Sri Lanka. These tiny, specialist stone blades did not appear in Europe and the Levant until 10,000 years ago. Indeed, in a tantalizing find, one level below those microliths, another more basic microlith layer has been dated to between 64,000 and 74,000 years ago. If the date of this find is confirmed, then it could be the smoking gun of the trail out of Africa around 70,000 years ago.
⁴⁹

Summary

Archaeological and anthropological controversies over our ultimate origins as the latest human species could be resolved by the
unbroken genetic trail of our Eve line back to the first modern Africans. The genetic evidence has allowed us to focus this perspective down to the precise movements of our immediate ancestors. As a result, we can see only one group of people coming out of Africa over 70,000 years ago. This fundamental departure from the conventional view of multiple movements out of Africa fixes all subsequent migration routes for the rest of human history, starting from that single southern trail. The first out-of-Africa pioneers moved along the Arabian coast to the Arabian Gulf, where they founded the first colony of Westerners, who would colonize Europe much later. The journey from India onwards to the East has another history.

W
HEN DID WE BECOME MODERN
?

T
HE PAROCHIAL OBSESSION OF
E
UROPEANS
with their past and with their apparent supremacy in Palaeolithic material culture led, in the last century, to a number of presumptions. Roughly speaking, these were that we (for I am European) were the first to think symbolically and in the abstract, and the first to speak, paint, carve, dress, weave, and exchange goods.

In
Chapter 1
, I suggested that the false assumption that these skills were unavailable to our African forebears paralleled the conviction that Levantines and Europeans arose from a northern move out of Africa separate from those that gave rise to Australians and Asians. This view is undermined if we accept the evidence that European and other Western genetic lines arose as early offshoots of a single South Asian family group that spawned the whole non-African world. In this chapter I argue that the desire to make a centrepiece of the ‘coming of age’ of modern humans in Europe and the Levant obscured other, valid views of the prehistory of both the East and the West.

The genetic evidence that modern humans emerged from Africa, leaving behind them ‘homeland’ representatives whose descendants still live in Africa and are self-evidently ‘fully modern’ in every way,
has disturbing implications for continuing Western perceptions of modern Africans. Although the danger of these views is obvious, the mindset of some European archaeologists has remained unchanged.

Out-of-Africa versus the multiregionalists

Archaeologists have continued to argue that a number of innate and fundamental human behaviours sharply distinguished the first modern Europeans from their close European cousins, the Neanderthals, and also, following a similar line of argument, from their immediate ancestors in Africa. One reason for emphasizing this contrast may have been to counter the multiregional hypothesis of human origins and prove that we were not descended from Neanderthals. Implicit in these arguments, however, is the assumption not only that early modern Europeans (the Cro-Magnons) were the first to develop and transmit these new skills to succeeding generations, but that the Neanderthals were somehow biologically not up to it. Extending that type of argument would suggest that the Cro-Magnons’ anatomically modern ancestors in Africa were not sharp enough to create Upper Palaeolithic technology either. In other words, the Europeans were the first to speak, paint, and carve, and then, we have to assume, they somehow later taught the Africans and Australian aboriginals (not to mention Asians) how to do it. Now, I may have misunderstood what I have read, but this is the message I get even from some recent publications. Before examining the external evidence against this Eurocentric view, I will look at what could have given rise to such a distorted picture.

The problem began in 1856 with the first discovery of a Neanderthal skull. Right from the start, Neanderthals were given a bad press, being ridiculed as beetle-browed idiots. This image was defined in 1921 in a short story, ‘The Grisly Folk’, offered by popular science writer H.G. Wells, who presented them, in contrast to the modern and articulate Cro-Magnons, as grunting, hunched monsters. Attempts to rehabilitate Neanderthals as our potential
equals and cousins never quite succeeded, because even their apologists consistently damned them with faint praise, and film documentaries continued to stress their physical appearance and overlook their large brains.

The truth is that we still all regard the Neanderthals as lesser folk, and experts continue to emphasize perceived cultural differences. When we place their material culture alongside that of their contemporaries, the first modern Europeans, our prejudice seems to be confirmed. The moderns painted cave walls, and even themselves – no indication that Neanderthals did that. The moderns worked non-stone objects such as bone, shell, and antler, and carved figurines – something it was previously thought no Neanderthal could be caught doing. Such artefacts moved hundreds of kilometres across Europe, indicating some kind of trade or exchange – initially, no evidence for that among Neanderthals. How could there be? Neanderthals were not even using these materials. Such long-distance cooperation appeared to complement other evidence which has been used to argue that moderns had larger and more complex social networks than Neanderthals. They, in contrast, have been portrayed as living inflexibly in small groups, lacking the intellectual wherewithal to adapt to changing circumstances – although Clive Gamble points out that exotic high-grade raw stone for knapping had, in fact, been moved up to 300 km (200 miles) around Europe before the Upper Palaeolithic.
¹
The moderns made hearths and buried their dead – not a typical feature of Neanderthal culture. Finally, when we look at that most abundant and durable message from the past, stone tools, we find a clear and convenient difference between Neanderthals and moderns. The latter were making
blades
– slivers struck from a stone core that were more than twice as long as they were broad.

Cro-Magnons, the first European moderns, appeared on all these counts to be the ‘all-singing, all-dancing’ people when compared with the dull, brutish, inflexible Neanderthals – so why? The
standard answer has always been that we must have been biologically superior, at least as far as our brains were concerned. The Neanderthals’ acknowledged superiority in physical strength, and their thick bones, contrasting with our own thin skeletons, completed the picture of brawn versus brain. The degree of contrast in these cultural differences between the two groups of humans has been used to further enhance the case for a biological coming of age of modern Europeans as sentient beings, but there is little logic in this argument.

What else about our cousins could we speculate on? Among the perceived differences that elevated man from beast are abstract and symbolic thought – and yes, speech. Could we establish that Neanderthals were ‘without speech’ – in other words, ‘dumb’? The fact that they had a very similar ‘bone of speech’ (the hyoid) in their voice box which is very similar to the hyoid in moderns has not stopped such speculation. There is even a common opinion that all the new skills demonstrated by modern Europeans, including the development of speech, resulted from a special gene or genes that kicked in 40,000–50,000 years ago (see the Prologue).

The first and indeed
most
of the spectacular discoveries of early modern human creativity (Upper Palaeolithic art and technology from roughly 18,000–35,000 years ago) were made in Europe. That is, after all, where archaeology started and where, for the past 150 years, most archaeologists have come from. We are all familiar with the extraordinary grace, realism, and perception revealed in the cave paintings of Lascaux and Chauvet in southern France (see
Plate 9
). It seems an almost unconscious extension of wondering about the artistic explosion of the European later stone age (also known as the European Upper Palaeolithic) to see this as marking modern humans’ coming of age. Some put this thought into plain words and argue that, before this time, ‘Anatomically Modern Humans’, whose remains date back in Africa to at least
160,000 years ago, may have looked modern but had not quite ‘got there’ yet.
²

If modern Europeans were emerging from the chrysalis with such a spectacular unfolding of genius, the extreme argument continues, then surely there must have been some biological (i.e. genetically determined) element which before then had been wanting in our make-up. However, this line of argument seems, dangerously, to conclude that the ancestors of modern Africans and modern Australians would have been biologically less advanced than those of Europeans.

But stop! What are we saying? Isn’t this a bit like a city slicker going to a small country village and announcing, ‘You country bumpkins are out-of-date biological primitives’, or a historian claiming that the invention of writing, the industrial and agricultural revolutions, and musical notation were each the result of new genes? Future historians comparing the sophistication of life and dominance of developed Western countries with that of stone-age cultures in Papua New Guinea would be unwise to attribute the contrast to anything biological.

Many of us, perhaps most, nurture unspoken feelings that other groups are self-evidently inferior to ours. So much so that the American biologist Jared Diamond felt compelled to set the record straight. He wrote his best-selling
Guns, Germs, and Steel
³
to explain that inequalities of development and global power are more likely to be the result of historical accidents of opportunity rather than of any innate intellectual differences between different populations. He wanted to explain how it was, for instance, that small bands of conquistadors could destroy the populous pre-Columbian civilizations of the Americas.

Yali’s question

At the beginning of his book, Diamond poses his main question as it was put to him by a remarkable man and popular local leader, Yali,
from one of the world’s last surviving Neolithic cultures, on the north coast of New Guinea (see
Plate 10
). Yali asked, ‘Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?’ (‘cargo’, in the context Yali used the word, literally means ‘imported goods’ such as sacks of Australian rice, and refrigerators and other luxury goods). Yali was no average villager. He was no average human, having spent much of his life actively grappling with the implications of this question from the magico-religious perspective of his own culture. Diamond came under his spell and clearly regarded him as an unusually perceptive, enquiring, and intelligent person.