Evidence of early humans' splendid creative abilities came to light in 1940 near Lascaux in southern France. Youths who stumbled onto the entrance to a vast underground cavern found its walls covered with paintings of animals, including many that had been extinct for thousands of years. Other ancient cave paintings have been found in Spain, Africa, Australia, and elsewhere. The artistic quality of ancient cave art is vivid evidence that the biologically modern people who made such art were intellectually modern as well (see Diversity and Dominance: Cave Art).
Culture Socially transmitted patterns of action and expression.
Stone Ages
Stone Age The historical period characterized by the production of tools from stone and other nonmetallic substances.
Paleolithic The period of the Stone Age associated with the evolution of humans.
Neolithic The period of the Stone Age associated with the ancient Agricultural Revolution(s).
Early Toolmaking and Food-Gathering Techniques
The production of similar art and specialized tools over wide areas and long periods of time demonstrates that skills and ideas were deliberately passed along within societies. These learned patterns of action and expression constitute culture. Culture includes both material objects, such as dwellings, clothing, tools, and crafts, and nonmaterial values, beliefs, and languages. While some animals also learn new ways, their activities are determined primarily by inherited instincts. Among humans, instincts are less important than the cultural traditions that each generation learns from its elders.
Food Gathering and Stone Tools
When archaeologists examine the remains of ancient human sites, the first thing that jumps out at them is the abundant evidence of human toolmaking. Because the tools that survive are made of stone, the extensive period of history from the appearance of the first fabricated stone tools around 2.6 million years ago until the appearance of metal tools around four thousand years ago has been called the Stone Age.
The name can be misleading because not all tools were made of stone. Early humans also made useful objects out of bone, skin, wood, and other materials less likely than stone to survive the ravages of time. Early scholars recognized two phases of the Stone Age: the Paleolithic (pay-lee-oh-LITH-ik) (Old Stone Age), down to 8000 b. c.e., and the Neolithic (NEE-OH-LITH-IK) (New Stone Age), which is associated with the rise of agriculture. Modern scientists have found evidence for many more subdivisions.
Most early human activity centered on gathering food. Like the australopithecines, early humans depended heavily on vegetable foods such as leaves, seeds, and grasses, but during the Ice Age the consumption of highly nutritious animal flesh increased. Moreover, unlike australopithecines, humans regularly made tools. These two changes—increased meat eating and toolmaking—appear to be closely linked.
Specimens of crude early tools found in the Great Rift Valley of eastern Africa reveal that Homo habilis made tools by chipping flakes off the edges of volcanic stones. The razor-sharp edges of such flakes are highly effective for skinning and butchering wild animals.
Lacking the skill to hunt and kill large animals, small-brained Homo habilis probably obtained animal protein by scavenging meat from kills made by animal predators or resulting from accidents. This species probably used large stone “choppers” for cracking open bones to get at the nutritious marrow. The fact that such tools are found far from the volcanic outcrops where they were quarried suggests that people carried them long distances for use at kill sites and camps.
Members of Homo erectus were also scavengers, but their larger brains made them more clever. They made more effective tools for butchering large animals, including a hand ax formed by removing chips from both sides of a stone to produce a sharp outer edge. The hand ax was an efficient multipurpose tool, suitable for skinning and butchering animals, for scraping skins
Cave Art
Were the people who lived tens of thousands of years ago different from people today? Biologically, members of Homo sapiens have not changed much over time. But what were our ancestors like inside—in their thoughts, imaginations, and emotions? Did their eyes see beauty, their ears hear music, and their minds wonder at the meaning of the world around them and the celestial bodies above them?
Very little evidence exists to answer these questions except in one form: cave paintings. First discovered in Spain and France in the late nineteenth century, such art immediately suggested that those who made it were sophisticated people like ourselves. Just as the skeletal remains of Homo sapiens of a hundred thousand years ago show they had modern bodies, the art they made suggests they had modern minds.
The Lion Panel in Chauvet Cave, France
Clean for use as clothing and mats, for sharpening wooden tools, and for digging up edible roots. Since a hand ax can also be hurled accurately for nearly 100 feet (30 meters), it might also have been used as a projectile to fell animals. Homo erectus even hunted elephants by driving them into swamps, where they became trapped and died.
Humans as Hunters
Foragers People who support themselves by hunting wild animals and gathering wild edible plants and insects.
Members of Homo sapiens were far more skillful hunters. Using their superior intelligence and an array of finely made tools, they tracked and killed large animals. Sharp stone flakes chipped from carefully prepared rock cores were used in combination with other materials. Attaching a stone point to a wooden shaft made a spear. Embedding several sharp stone flakes in a bone handle produced a sawing tool.
Indeed, members of Homo sapiens were so successful as hunters that they may have caused a series of ecological crises. Between 40,000 and 13,000 years ago the giant mastodons and mammoths gradually disappeared from Africa, Southeast Asia, and northern Europe. In North America around 11,000 years ago, three-fourths of the large mammals became extinct, including giant bison, camels, ground sloths, stag-moose, giant cats, mastodons, and mammoths. In Australia there was a similar event. However, since these extinctions occurred during severe cold spells at the end of the Ice Age, it is difficult to distinguish the effects of climate change and human predation.
Despite the evidence for hunting, anthropologists do not believe that early humans depended primarily on meat for their food. The few surviving present-day foragers (hunting and food-gathering peoples) in Africa derive the bulk of their day-to-day nourishment from wild vegetable foods, with meat reserved for feasts. The same was probably true for Stone Age peoples,
Hunter-Gatherer Diets
Two-Parent Families
The oldest cave paintings discovered in southeastern France date from 32,000 years ago—a very long time measured in human lifetimes, but a small part of human existence. The oldest recognizable human art, a carefully crosshatched bone from Blombos Cave east of Cape Town, South Africa, dates from over 70,000 years ago.
We may sense these cave artists' common humanity with ourselves, but it is not easy to understand the meaning and cultural context of their work. Why did they draw what they did? And why in caves? In his book From Black Land to Fifth Sun (1998), archaeologist Brian Fagan suggests three approaches to bridging the gap.
He first suggests that the context in which the art was made tells us a great deal. Throughout the world, early artists drew, carved, and painted on various surfaces, many of them fairly inaccessible. The decision to work inside dark caves that could be illuminated only with crude torches was not an accident. The fact that hidden caves protected and preserved their art for tens of thousands of years was probably not their aim. Rather, the artists may have gone deep underground “to feel the power of the earth." Unlike contemporary urban people, who have lost a sense of nature's spiritual power, the cave painters would have believed that the wild animals and the earth itself were full of spiritual energy. The dark and enclosed caves would have heightened that sense of nature's mystery and power, which they infused into their paintings. It is thus likely that the artists were the spiritual guides of their communities.
As for the meanings of the art itself, Fagan believes that, since the artists and original viewers were part of a community, it is likely that the common culture they shared enabled them to understand art in the same ways. Citing the example of the rock art traditions of the San artists of southern Africa that continued into the twentieth century c. E., he suggests that ancient cave art also may have concerned the mystical rela
Tionship of humans with the animals they hunted. Humans could absorb something of the power of the bears, antelope, bison, or other animals depicted in the caves by viewing or touching them.
Finally, Fagan says, we need to consider what these caves were used for and why cave artists returned over many generations, filling the walls and ceilings with their works. In some places later artists even painted over earlier works. Fagan compares the decorated caverns of remote antiquity with the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, beautifully decorated by the artist Michelangelo, where many religious ceremonies are staged, including the election of the pope. The decorated caverns were not galleries where people went to view art, but holy places where religious ceremonies were performed and where those present would have had powerful religious experiences.
The scenes reproduced here from the large tableau of animal drawings known as the “Lion Panel" show the skill, techniques, and variety of art in the oldest known painted cavern, Chauvet Cave. From the right come a band of female lions on the hunt, approaching a herd of bison, who turn to regard them. Across a cleft in the rock the panel resumes with a herd of rhinoceroses and another group of lions at the far left of the panel.
QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS
1. Is there anything in the depiction of the animals that suggests whether the artists were in awe of them, felt superior to them, or felt at one with them?
2. Are all the animals ones that people hunted to eat? How persuasive are Fagan’s explanations?
3. What comparisons can you make between this cave painting and the rock engraving of cattle that opens this chapter?
Even though tools for gathering and processing vegetable foods have left few traces because they were made of perishable materials. Ancient humans would have used skins and mats woven from leaves for collecting fruits, berries, and wild seeds. They would have dug edible roots out of the ground with wooden sticks.
Both meat and vegetables become tastier and easier to digest when they are cooked. The first cooked foods were probably found by accident after wildfires. Humans may have been setting fires deliberately as early as 1.4 million years ago, and maintaining hearths around 500,000 years ago. However, only with the appearance of clay cooking pots some 18,000 years ago in East Asia is there hard evidence of cooking.
Gender Roles and Social Life
Researchers have studied the organization of nonhuman primates for clues about very early human society. Gorillas and chimpanzees live in groups consisting of several adult males and females and their offspring. Status varies with age and sex, and a dominant male usually heads the group. Sexual unions between males and females generally do not result in long-term pairing. Instead, the strongest ties are those between a female and her children and among siblings. Adult males are often recruited from neighboring bands.
Very early human groups likely shared some of these primate traits, but long before the advent of modern Homo sapiens the two-parent family would have been common. We can only guess how this change developed, but it is likely that physical and social evolution were
Making Stone Tools About 35,000 years ago the manufacture of stone tools became highly specialized. Small blades chipped from a rock core were mounted in a bone or wooden handle. Not only were such composite tools more varied than earlier all-purpose hand axes, but the small blades also required fewer rock cores—an important consideration where suitable rocks were scarce. (From Jacques Bordaz,
Tools of the Old and New Stone Age. Copyright 1970 by Jacques Bordaz. Redrawn by the permission of Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers, Inc.)
Foraging Bands
Linked. Big-headed humans with large brains have to be born in a less mature state than other mammals so that they can pass through the narrow birth canal. Other large mammals are mature at two or three years of age; humans are not able to care for themselves until the age of twelve to fifteen. The need of human infants and children for much longer nurturing makes care by mothers, fathers, and other family members a biological imperative.
The human reproductive cycle also became unique. In other species sexual contact is biologically restricted to a special mating season of the year or to the fertile part of the female's menstrual cycle. Moreover, among other primates the choice of mate is usually not a matter for long deliberation. To a female baboon in heat any male will do, and to a male baboon any receptive female is a suitable sexual partner. In contrast, adult humans can mate at any time and are much choosier about their partners. Once they mate, frequent sexual contact promotes deep emotional ties and longterm bonding.
An enduring bond between human parents made it much easier for vulnerable offspring to receive the care they needed during the long period of their childhood. Working together, mothers and fathers could nurture dependent children of different ages at the same time, unlike other large mammals, whose females must raise their offspring nearly to maturity before beginning another reproductive cycle. Spacing births close together also would have enabled humans to multiply more rapidly than other large mammals.
Researchers studying present-day foragers infer that Ice Age women would have done most of the gathering and cooking (which they could do while caring for small children). Older women past childbearing age would have been the most knowledgeable and productive food gatherers. Men, with stronger arms, would have been more suited than women to hunting, particularly for large animals.
All recent foragers have lived in small bands. The community has to have enough members to defend itself from predators and divide responsibility for collection and preparation of foods. However, too many members would exhaust the food available in its immediate vicinity. The band has to move at regular intervals to follow migrating animals and take advantage of seasonally ripening plants in different places. Archaeological evidence from Ice Age campsites suggests that early humans, too, lived in highly mobile bands.
Hearths and Cultural Expressions
Shelter and Clothing
Because frequent moves were necessary, early hunter-gatherers did not lavish much time on housing. Natural shelters under overhanging rocks or in caves were favorite camping places to which bands returned at regular intervals. Where the climate was severe or where natural shelters did not exist, people erected huts of branches, stones, bones, skins, and leaves. Large, solid structures were common in fishing villages that grew up along riverbanks and lakeshores, where the abundance of fish permitted people to occupy the same site year-round.
Animal skin cloaks were probably an early form of clothing. Although the oldest evidence of fibers woven into cloth dates from about 26,000 years ago, the appearance of the body louse around 70,000 years ago has been linked to people beginning to wear close-fitting garments. An
The Iceman
The discovery of the well-preserved remains of a man at the edge of a melting glacier in the European Alps in 1991 provided detailed information about everyday technologies of the fourth millennium B. c.E. Not just the body of this “Iceman" was well preserved. His clothing, his tools, and even the food in his stomach survived in remarkably good condition.
Dressed from head to toe for the cold weather of the mountains, the fifty-year-old man was wearing a fur hat fastened under the chin with a strap, a vest of different colored deerskins, leather leggings and loincloth, and a padded cloak made of grasses. His calfskin shoes also were padded with grass for warmth and comfort. The articles of clothing had been sewn together with fiber and leather cords. He carried a birch-bark drinking cup.
In a leather fanny pack he carried small flint tools for cutting, scraping, and punching holes, as well as some tinder for making a fire. He also carried a leather quiver with flint-tipped arrows, but his 6-foot (1.8-meter) bow was unfinished, lacking a bowstring. In addition, he had a flint knife and a tool for sharpening flints. His most sophisticated tool, indicating the dawning of the age of metals, was a copper-bladed ax with a wooden handle.
A small arrowhead lodged in his shoulder caused the Iceman's death. In his stomach, researchers found the remains of the meat-rich meal he had eaten not long before he died.
The Iceman This is an artist’s rendition of what the Iceman might have looked like. Notice his tools, remarkable evidence of the technology of his day.
“Iceman” from 5,300 years ago, whose frozen remains were found in the European Alps in 1991, was wearing many different garments made of animal skins sewn together with cord fashioned from vegetable fibers and rawhide (see Environment and Technology: The Iceman).
Although accidents, erratic weather, and disease might take a heavy toll on a foraging band, day-to-day existence was probably not particularly hard or unpleasant. Studies suggest that, in game-rich areas, obtaining necessary food, clothing, and shelter would have occupied only from three to five hours a day. This would have left a great deal of time for artistic endeavors, toolmaking, and social life.
Science, Art, and Religion
The foundations of science, art, and religion were built during the Stone Age. Basic to human survival was extensive knowledge about the natural environment. Gatherers learned which local plants were best for food and when they were available. Successful hunting required intimate knowledge of the habits of game animals. People learned how to use plant and animal
Interior of a Neolithic House This stone structure from the Orkney Islands off Scotland shows a double hearth for cooking and a small window in the center, along with stone partitions. Elsewhere, few Neolithic houses were made of stone, but wood was scarce in the Orkneys.
Parts for clothing, twine, building materials, and dyes; minerals for paints and stones for tools; as well as natural substances effective for medicine and consciousness altering. It is very likely that the transmission of such knowledge involved verbal communication, even though direct evidence for language appears only in later periods.
Early music and dance have left no traces, but there is abundant evidence of painting and drawing (see Diversity and Dominance: Cave Art). Because many cave paintings feature wild animals that were hunted for food, some believe they were meant to record hunting scenes or formed part of magical and religious rites to ensure successful hunting. However, a newly discovered cave in southern France features rhinoceroses, panthers, bears, and other animals that probably were not hunted. Other drawings include people dressed in animal skins and smeared with paint. In many caves there are stencils of human hands. Are these the signatures of the artists or the world's oldest graffiti? Some scholars suspect that other marks in cave paintings and
SECTION REVIEW
Unlike other animals, humans have used the learned patterns of culture to adapt to and occupy very diverse environments.
Early humans made tools, foraged for food, and hunted. They found natural shelters or built temporary shelters, and they provided themselves with clothing.
In early hunter-gatherer societies, women gathered the plant foods that provided most of the band's diet, while men did the hunting. The two-parent family offered children protection and a long period to mature.
This lifestyle left them leisure to develop art and religion. Although the remains of their art and religion are difficult to interpret, it is clear that early modern humans had the mental capabilities that we have.
On bones from this period may represent efforts at counting or writing. Other theories suggest that cave and rock art represent concerns with fertility, efforts to educate the young, or elaborate mechanisms for time reckoning.
Without written texts it is difficult to know about the religious beliefs of early humans. Sites of deliberate human burials from about 100,000 years ago give some hints. The fact that an adult was often buried with stone implements, food, clothing, and red-ochre powder suggests that early people revered their leaders enough to honor them after death and may imply a belief in an afterlife.
Today we recognize that the Stone Age, whose existence was scarcely dreamed of two centuries ago, was a formative period. Important in its own right, it also laid the foundation for major changes ahead as human communities passed from being food gatherers to food producers.
World History
