The Incredible Human Journey (42 page)

Moving beyond the Aurignacian, improved hunting tools appear, like spear-throwers in the Gravettian, and, eventually, bows
and arrows and boomerangs.
⁹
Wulf had brought some of these along with him. The atlatl – or spear-thrower – was a very simple tool, essentially a stick,
about half a metre in length, with a hooked end that fitted into a recess in the end of the spear.

‘This spear-thrower has a beautiful carved antler end. We don’t know what the original shaft looked like, but this is a reconstruction.
It’s interpretation, but it works.’

‘I’d like to see how far you can throw these slender spears, with and without a spear-thrower,’ I challenged him.

‘OK, and you will be astonished.’ Wulf took up the gauntlet.

He threw a spear without the spear-thrower first. ‘That was 220 grams thrown by hand,’ he said. Then he got ready to throw
another spear, fitting it into the hook and laying it above the spear-thrower, gripping them both with one hand. ‘And this
is 220 grams thrown with a spear-thrower – with the same power.’

He threw it – rotating the spear-thrower so that it became like an extension of his arm – and the spear flew off …

It was
extraordinary: it had double the range. I had a go as well and amazed myself by how much further I could throw the spear with
the atlatl. It was such a simple but impressive piece of kit.

‘If you’re trained you can get it even further. The record is 180 metres,’ said Wulf.

Wulf had more examples of Stone Age projectile weaponry with him.

‘At the end of the line stands the bow and arrow,’ said Wulf. He had a beautiful replica of a Mesolithic bow with him. It
was found in Denmark, preserved in a bog called Holmegaard, near Copenhagen. ‘The original is about 8,600 years old. It’s
the oldest bow we’ve ever found.’

Even earlier arrows have been found, dating to more than 11,000 years ago, and some archaeologists argue that there is evidence,
albeit fragmentary, going even further back, into the Upper Palaeolithic. It seems that the development of bows and arrows
was related to ecological changes: they appear as the world was warming up after the Ice Age, and Europe was becoming wooded.
‘If you’re hunting in the woods, a bow and arrow is much more effective than a spear-thrower. And it’s easier to aim,’ said
Wulf.

I enjoyed playing with Wulf’s ‘Mesolithic’ bow and flint-tipped arrows, and I am very sorry to say that two were left behind
– somewhere in the long grass by the stream in that field; after so much time had been spent looking for them, we had to accept
that the arrows were gone. Perhaps they will be found by archaeologists one day.

Neanderthals, as far as we know, never made spear-throwers or bows and arrows, although they did progress from using thrusting
spears to throwing spears. But does that really indicate an innate technological superiority of modern humans? Stone Age weapons
expert John Shea has argued that the development of true projectile technology was key to our species’ ecological success,
giving our ancestors an advantage in hunting and even providing them with long-range weapons that could be used to eliminate
rivals, of our own species and perhaps others as well.
¹⁰
But there’s no direct evidence to suggest that spear-throwers were ever used against Neanderthals. And the first sign of
the bow and arrow is well after the LGM, when Europe was warming up and woodland was returning – long after Neanderthals had
disappeared from the landscape.

But I’m getting diverted here by later developments of the Upper Palaeolithic. Sticking with the Aurignacian, which was contemporary
with the Mousterian, there is still a distinct difference between Middle and Upper Palaeolithic. Bar-Yosef
⁹
argued that the characteristic elements of the Upper Palaeolithic are ‘evidence for rapid technological changes, emergence
of self-awareness and group identity, increased social diversification, formation of long distance alliances, [and] the
ability to symbolically record information’.

Across Europe, then, the change from Middle to Upper Palaeolithic cultures, between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago, is taken
to represent the replacement of Neanderthals – bearing Middle Palaeolithic technology – with modern humans, carrying with
them Upper Palaeolithic tools and artefacts. It has been called the ‘Upper Palaeolithic Revolution’, but this is a problematic
label as it suggests that the late Pleistocene, in Europe, is the time and place of some kind of emergence of ‘fully modern’
behaviour. This is difficult to argue, as this pits modern humans in Europe not only against the Neanderthals but also against
modern humans elsewhere. Were the people in Africa and Asia, still making Middle Palaeolithic stone tools, cognitively inferior
to the Europeans? This is obviously a very divisive and Eurocentric viewpoint, and recalls that comment by Movius about Eastern Asia being an
area of ‘cultural retardation’. It seems much more likely that modern behaviour was essentially born at the same time as our
species, and that modern humans came out of Africa, as Oppenheimer puts it ‘painting, talking, singing, and dancing’.
¹¹
And, as we have seen, the African evidence supports this idea.

But there is no doubt that the Aurignacian represents a new sort of culture. So how can we explain it? Well, culture is something
that represents human interaction with the environment, and with other humans, so changes in culture can be seen as being
driven by changes in climate and environment, as well as changes in society – and rather than a biological change. The Aurignacian
didn’t require a new brain, or a few new genes. It was a new product of a brain that was already well equipped to develop
behavioural solutions to environmental challenges. We have seen that the hallmark of modern humans elsewhere was ingenuity,
adaptability and inventiveness. So it seems utterly reasonable to suggest that, in Europe, the new, modern human culture of
the Aurignacian represented adaptations to a new environment – perhaps including the existence of a competitor in the landscape.

The Aurignacian objects that have been passed down to us from our earliest ancestors in Europe show us that much more was
going on on top of the change to a new method of tool manufacture. They show us that those people were flexible and adaptable,
and forming complex social networks. They seem to indicate that these people felt
part of
something which extended far beyond their immediate families and familiar landscapes. Archaeologists argue endlessly about
classification and naming of toolkits. The arguments can seem – especially to someone more schooled in bones than stones
– incredibly complicated and esoteric. But the arguing itself means that this was an interesting time: several things are happening all at once: new stone tools
are appearing in Europe, and at the same time there are new social structures emerging.
⁹
Maybe the new styles of stone tools are part of a badge of identity, a fashion, for those early modern humans in Europe.
⁸

The Aurignacians spread inexorably across Europe. Perhaps at times the Neanderthals regained territory, but, ultimately, they
were to disappear from the landscape. Their traces gradually contract and disappear, and the last Neanderthals seem to have
occupied a lonely outpost in the very south-west corner of Europe: Gibraltar.

Tracking Down the Last Neanderthals: Gibraltar

The first Neanderthal fossil to be found was in Gibraltar – a skull blasted out of Forbes Quarry, in 1848
¹
– but no one recognised
it at the time, so the German find, six years later, had the honour of giving the species its name.

The Gibraltar skull, probably that of a female, remains one of the best-preserved Neanderthal fossils. In 1926, another Neanderthal
fossil – parts of the skull of a four-year-old child
¹
– was excavated from the Devil’s Tower site on Gibraltar. So Neanderthals
certainly lived on the Rock – and more recent excavations have revealed quite challenging details about their way of life,
and even why they might have died out.

As I flew into Gibraltar, it was much smaller than I expected it to be: a 6km-long rocky headland sticking off the south-west
corner of Spain into the Mediterranean. The runway of the airport was crossed by the main road into Gibraltar. From the plane
window I could see the white cliffs of the limestone outcrop, dotted with square caves. The Rock is riddled with caves and
tunnels, some natural, but many man-made. A great deal of them date from the Second World War, when civilians were evacuated
and Gibraltar became a military fortress. The military presence on Gibraltar is still very evident today, but the Rock is
also home to nearly 30,000 people. Sheer cliffs, more than 400m tall, rise out of the sea on its east side, but on the west
the houses and hotels of the town cluster at the foot of a more gentle slope.

I had travelled to Gibraltar to see Clive and Gerry Finlayson, and we met up on the terrace of the Rock Hotel, looking out
over the harbour. They had studied the Gibraltar Neanderthals for years, and were keen to set the record straight when it
came to perceptions of these ancient people as brutish, cold-adapted savages. In fact, the evidence emerging from Gibraltar
seemed to indicate people much more like ourselves.

Clive’s background as a zoologist and ecologist informed his approach to Palaeolithic archaeology. He wasn’t into constructing
theories based on stone tool typologies, but favoured a landscape-first view where humans (modern and Neanderthals) were firmly
placed in their environmental context. He saw differences in technology as very much driven by ecological and social changes
– not the other way around. From this perspective, technological and cultural differences represented quantitative rather
than qualitative differences between the people making them. He was clearly not a supporter of the Upper Palaeolithic revolution,
and argued that there was no sudden appearance of ‘modern behaviour’. He wasn’t suggesting that there were no differences
between modern humans and Neanderthals, but rather that those differences were shaped by the environments in which cultures
emerged, and by the social structures adopted by each population.
²
The Finlaysons’ research in Gibraltar had provided evidence not only for late survival of the ancients in this corner of
Europe, but for something which I had, perhaps naively, previously thought of as being exclusively ‘modern’ behaviour: the
Neanderthals had beachcombed.

Early the following morning, I met up with Clive down at the marina, and we took a boat out, heading around the point to the
cliffs on the east. As we set out, the sea was as smooth as glass, and we seemed to glide along, the Rock bathed in golden
sunlight and looking magnificent. There were natural caves, half in, half out of the water, all along the east side of the Rock.

‘There are over a hundred and forty caves in the whole of the Rock, and there’s probably twenty or thirty just along this
cliff,’ Clive told me. ‘We get the feeling this was almost like a “Neanderthal city”. On Gibraltar, we’ve got ten sites, two
with fossils and the other eight with tools: occupation sites. That’s probably the highest density that’s been recorded anywhere.
And bear in mind, that’s just the sites where the archaeology has been preserved to today. It’s difficult to say how many
people were living here, but I imagine the Rock would have had maybe a hundred Neanderthals living on it.’

Clive wanted to show me one site in particular where he had been excavating in search of Neanderthals for several years –
with very successful results: Gorham’s Cave.

‘Most of the evidence is submerged or has been lost. So we’re lucky to have Gorham’s Cave: the sea hasn’t washed the sediments
away there. And we’ve found a lot of evidence of Neanderthal occupation: stone tools, animals that they’ve butchered, hearths – Neanderthal
barbecues, if you like.’

The site had first been excavated in the 1950s, then had lain forgotten for decades. Clive had started excavations again in
1991.

‘We come every year and excavate the site. It’s huge. There’s eighteen metres’ depth of archaeology in there, and there are
new results coming out every year.’

The results of radiocarbon dating on charcoal from the cave showed that it was occupied until 28,000, and perhaps even as
late as 24,000 years ago. It made this cave the last known Neanderthal outpost.
³

Some archaeologists have argued that these late dates for the uppermost Mousterian level in Gorham’s Cave are due to contamination
with charcoal from even higher, Upper Palaeolithic layers. But Clive has argued that the stratigraphy inside the cave is reliable,
and that indeed, after the last Middle Palaeolithic occupation, the cave seemed to have lain abandoned for 5000 years. After
19,000 years ago, the cave was reoccupied, by modern humans bearing a later Upper Palaeolithic toolkit called the Solutrean.
³