Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World (17 page)

I then asked Professor Roe which, in his view, was the greater conceptual leap: in the Middle Palaeolithic, the further development and use of prepared cores from which to strike tools; or in the Upper Palaeolithic, the invention of the struck blade. He thought for a moment. His considered answer was the earlier Middle Palaeolithic achievement, because the use of prepared cores was a multistage process that required the final product to be fixed in the maker’s mind throughout. Any mistake in preparation, and the artisan would have to start again. Striking a blade rather than a flake off the core, although opening tremendous opportunities, was still a single knack at the end point of an existing sequence. In other words, older humans making prepared cores by the time of the Middle Palaeolithic was a more significant conceptual advance than modern humans developing blades in the Upper Palaeolithic, several hundred thousand years later.
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Figure 2.1
   Prepared cores, flakes and blades. Simplified view of classification of stone tool-making advances (Modes 1–5 from top down), shown in relative, not absolute, chronological order. An advance does not necessarily imply that older modes are discarded – rather, the progress was cumulative.

Robert Foley takes this ‘hallmark’ view further, arguing that the prepared core technologies of the Middle Palaeolithic mark the appearance of
Homo helmei
and are also better general markers for the worldwide spread of modern humans than the blades of the Upper Palaeolithic.
¹⁰

To explain the ‘conceptual’ paradox of the blade revolution to myself, I tried to think of an everyday example of a rather simple technical insight that resulted in an explosion of diverse useful results, and eventually I thought of Velcro patches. With all due respect to the insight (or foresight) of the inventor, the invention had already been made by plants, in the burr seed that hitches a ride on sheep’s wool. While the inventive originality of the Velcro patch was humdrum, the diverse applications have been revolutionary in many aspects of everyday life.

Neanderthals were behind the times, but could they catch up?

So, before 50,000 years ago modern humans were at the same stage as Neanderthals in their use of stone tools – that’s one side of the argument. What about the period from 28,000 to 40,000 years ago, when Neanderthals came into contact with moderns? We might be able to test the opposing hypotheses of better brains versus same brains by looking at what happened when the two groups interacted. If the Neanderthals, with their large brain volume and close evolutionary relationship to the moderns, had simply missed out on a good idea, then they should easily have picked up the new skills of the invaders. If, on the other hand, they really were dumb and these techniques were beyond them, they should have learnt nothing. In the event they did adapt, and in some places they even developed
their own versions of some of the new Upper Palaeolithic technologies. But this adaptation was clearly not fast enough.

The first thing to note, when thinking of possibilities for technology exchange, was that although Neanderthals and moderns coexisted in Europe for between 5,000 and 12,000 years (at some time between 28,000 and 40,000 years ago), all the evidence shows that for most of that time their territories hardly overlapped at all. As the moderns expanded rapidly from Eastern Europe, the Neanderthals, who were concentrated in the west, gradually retreated to their last strongholds – in Italy, then southern France, and finally Spain and Portugal. Careful computer analysis of sites and dates has recently shown that the areas of coexistence were limited to after 35,000 years ago, and to just the two last strongholds, in southern France and in the south-west tip of Spain (
Figure 2.2
). By that time it was perhaps too little, too late. The reasons for the Neanderthals’ retreat can still only be guessed at. Was it because of violent conflict, for instance, or more peaceful competition? The lack of territorial overlap for 10,000 years suggests a prolonged and probably unfriendly stalemate. However, more overlap might not have helped Neanderthals to change their tool-making methods. The new advances in technology were, after all, something that had taken moderns tens of thousands of years to develop. In the same way that Yali’s people could never get at the secrets of the Europeans’ luxury goods, the Neanderthals could never fully realize the potential of the newcomers’ revolutionary culture if they were not socially close to them. Maybe Neanderthals rarely got the opportunity to pick up the new technology. In spite of these problems, they actually picked up quite a few ‘modern’ habits, mainly during the periods and in the regions of overlap.
¹¹

Hearths and burials

Built hearths are claimed to be hallmarks of fully modern Upper Palaeolithic behaviour, but hearths as old as 50,000 years have been
identified in Russia and Portugal, associated with Mousterian tools, suggesting that the practice was already present in the Middle Palaeolithic and was therefore being used even by Neanderthals. Perhaps one of the most controversial vindications of Neanderthal cultural potential concerns formal burials. Deliberate burial, especially with goods and tools which had been used during life, evocatively suggests at least a concern with what happens after death and perhaps a belief in an afterlife. Such a belief could even be regarded as the first evidence for a particular aspect of religious thought. This kind of philosophical speculation makes it important to identify whether a particular set of bones was deliberately buried and whether or not grave goods are really present.
¹²

Figure 2.2
   Space-time estimates of Neanderthal–modern coexistence. The Neanderthals’ last refuges were in south-west France and Portugal.
¹¹

Complete skeletons can indicate formal burial, but not always. The presence of complete human skeletons dating to times after 100,000 years ago, and particularly for Neanderthals between 40,000 and 60,000 years ago, could alternatively be the result of change in occupation of caves by hyenas and other carnivores. The degree to which grave goods such as flowers, stone circles, goats’ horns, and artefacts were ritually or religiously placed has also been disputed.
¹³
Perhaps the most important evidence that this was just a locally shared cultural innovation is that early burials happened only among humans in West Eurasia, including the early moderns at Qafzeh in Israel (see
Chapter 1
). There is no evidence for the practice of burial among their contemporaries in Africa. In other words, burial, like many other aspects of Upper Palaeolithic technology, was a local invention in West Eurasia which spread to Neanderthals, who in turn preceded Modern Africans in burying their dead. This sequence undermines the biological determinism that ascribes particular cultural practices exclusively and progressively to particular human species.

Why talk up Neanderthals at all?

My reason for taking this apologist stance, fair-brokering the skills of Neanderthals with those of early humans, is not to try to prove they had exactly the same ‘genetically determined’ intellectual potential. There is no way one can claim this on current evidence. Neanderthals, as well as being large-brained, were anatomically different from moderns in other ways, so it would not be a surprise if there were some slight mental differences. No, my purpose is to suggest that the arguments that Neanderthals were culturally backward because they were duller, dumber, or more stupid than the invading moderns are based on a false belief that biological and cultural traits go very closely together. At the very least, as far as
Europe is concerned this argument may have been overstated and may have gone further than is justified by the evidence.

The European Upper Palaeolithic has been glorified as the ‘human revolution’, with dramatic cognitive advances such as abstract thought and speech. Often explicit in this scenario is the concept of a biological advance: the idea that a genetically determined change – a thought or speech gene – somehow brought about the Upper Palaeolithic revolution in Europe. Many of the most dramatic innovations of the modern newcomers were, however, just that: new inventions that had a clear regional and chronological beginning long after our species’ emergence. These late inventions gave the moderns a special local advantage. Neanderthals were outgunned and wrong-footed by the complex culture the newcomers had quite recently developed. By analogy, no anthropologist would dare say that Yali’s Neolithic people in New Guinea had less biological potential than Jared Diamond’s own metal-age people, but it is clear that, as a result of cultural isolation, they had not benefited from certain Western technical innovations of the past 2,000 years, such as guns and steel.

Why do I defend Neanderthals? The answer is that bad-mouthing Neanderthals, regarding them as people who were like but unlike us, is symptomatic of a deep need among all human societies to exclude and even demonize other groups (see also
Chapter 5
). I suggest that the unproven dumbing of the Neanderthals is an example of the same cultural preconception that has, by a mistaken geographical logic, cast our own Anatomically Modern African ancestors in the same role, as ‘moderns manqués’. The very real problem for this Eurocentric standpoint is that today’s modern Africans are the direct descendants of those pre-Upper Palaeolithic peoples, and share with them more of their original genes than do any other people in the world. By denigrating their ancestors, by implication we denigrate them.

The European Upper Palaeolithic: cultural or biological revolution?
Clive Gamble is a world expert on the reconstruction of Palaeolithic human behaviour. In a very readable book,
Timewalkers
, he summarized conventional views and identified the period from 40,000 to 60,000 years ago as the crucial behavioural threshold between ancients and moderns. He describes the end of this timespan, 40,000 years ago, as the time after which the great acceleration took place, with the advent in Europe of art, bone tools, body ornament, open-site burials, storage pits, quarries, exchange of goods, and long-term occupation of harsh environments. He takes the threshold argument further, saying, ‘There is no doubt that after 35,000 BP [before the present] Upper Palaeolithic industries sweep the board, not only in Europe but across much of the Old World, with Australia forming a notable exception . . .’
¹⁴
This Australian ‘exception’ clearly does not apply to rock art, since six pages later he mentions ‘the rock engravings from Karolta in South Australia, now directly dated to as much as 32,000 BP’. Such a date makes them almost as old as the Chauvet Cave art, and in fact does seem to extend his earlier point, at least partially, to include Australia.

Others, such as Chicago palaeoanthropologist Richard Klein, take this cultural explosion a stage further and interpret it as a human biological epiphany. In a standard text,
The Human Career
, written in 1989, he states:

it can be argued that the Upper Paleolithic signals the most fundamental change in human behavior that the archeological record may ever reveal . . . The strong correlation between Upper Paleolithic artifacts and modern human remains further suggests that it was the modern human physical type that made the Upper Paleolithic (and all subsequent cultural developments) possible. The question then arises whether there is a detectable link between the evolution of modern people and the development of those behavioral traits that mark the Upper Paleolithic.