Were the people who lived tens of thousands of years ago different from people today? Biologically, members of Homo sapiens sapiens seem not to have become more diverse 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 imaginations wonder at the meaning of the world and the celestial bodies above them?
Very little evidence exists to answer these important questions except in one form: cave paintings. First discovered in France in the late nineteenth century, such art immediately suggested that those who drew it were sophisticated modern people like ourselves. Just as the skeletal remains of Homo sapiens of a hundred thousand years ago show they
The Lion Panel in Chauvet Cave, France (Courtesy, Jean Clottes)
Removed due to copyright permissions restrictions.
Food Gathering and Stone Toots
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.
Although it is true that some animals also learn new ways, their activities are determined primarily by inherited instincts. Among humans the proportions are reversed: instincts are less important than the cultural traditions that each generation learns from its elders. All living creatures are part of natural history, which traces biological development, but only human communities display profound cultural developments over time. The development, transmission, and transformation of cultural practices and events are the subject of history.
When archaeologists examine the remains of ancient human sites, the first thing that jumps out at them is the abundant Had modern bodies, the art they made suggests they had modern minds.
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. Even as the temporal distance from us increases, the evidence supports the conclusion that these early people had minds and imaginations no different from those of people today.
We may sense these cave artists' common humanity with ourselves, but it is not easy to understand the 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, based on his own examination of cave paintings.
His first suggestion is that the context in which the art was made tells us a great deal. Throughout the world, early artists drew, carved, and painted on many surfaces, many fairly inaccessible. The decision to work inside dark caves that the artists could illuminate only with crude torches was not an accident. The fact that the hidden caves protected and preserved their art for tens of thousands of years could not have been part of their plan. Rather, Fagan suggests, the artists went 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 the sense of nature's mystery and power with which they informed their paintings. It is thus likely that the artists were already the spiritual guides of their communities.
As for the art itself, one should begin with the cautionary remark that even today's art conveys many messages. Still, Fagan believes, 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, he suggests that other cave art concerned the mystical relationship of humans with the animals they hunted. The form of the paintings and the ingredients that went into them meant that 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 the variety of art in the 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?
Evidence of human toolmaking—the first recognizable cultural activity. 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 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. In the first place, not all tools were made of stone. Early humans would also have made useful objects and tools out of bone, skin, wood, and other natural materials less likely than stone to survive the ravages of time. In the second place, this period of nearly 2 million years contains many distinct periods and cultures. Early students recognized two distinct periods in the Stone Age: the Paleolithic° (Old Stone Age) down to 10,000 years ago and the Neolithic° (New Stone Age) associated with agriculture. Modern scientists have found evidence for many more subdivisions.
Paleolithic (pay-lee-oh-LITH-ik) Neolithic (nee-oh-LITH-ik)
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 allpurpose hand axes, but the small blades also required fewer rock cores—an important consideration in areas 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.)
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 one of the changes evident in the Ice Age is the growing consumption of highly nutritious animal flesh. Moreover, unlike australopithecines, humans regularly made tools. These two changes—increased meat eating and toolmaking—appear to be closely linked.
The first crude tools made their appearance with Homo habilis. Most stone tools made by Homo habilis have been found in the Great Rift Valley of eastern Africa, whose sides expose sediments laid down over millions of years. One branch of this valley, the Olduvai Gorge in
Tanzania, explored by Louis and Mary Leakey, has yielded evidence that Homo habilis made tools by chipping flakes off the edges of volcanic stones. Modern experiments show that the razor-sharp edges of such flakes are highly effective for skinning and butchering wild animals. Later human species made much more sophisticated tools.
Lacking the skill to hunt and kill large animals, smallbrained Homo habilis probably obtained animal protein by scavenging meat from kills made by animal predators or resulting from accidents. There is evidence that this species used large stone “choppers” for cracking open bones to get at the nutritious marrow. The fact that many such tools are found together far from the outcrops of volcanic rock 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 would have made them cleverer at it— capable, for example, of finding and stealing the kills that leopards and other large predators dragged up into trees. They also made more effective tools for butchering large animals, although the stone flakes and choppers of earlier eras continued to be made. The stone tool most associated with Homo erectus was a hand ax formed by removing chips from both sides of a stone to produce a sharp outer edge.
Modern experiments show the hand ax to be an efficient multipurpose tool, suitable for skinning and butchering animals, for scraping skins 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. From sites in Spain there is evidence that Homo erectus even butchered elephants, which then ranged across southern Europe, by driving them into swamps, where they became trapped and died.
Members of Homo sapiens were far more skillful hunters. They tracked and killed large animals (such as mastodons, mammoths, and bison) throughout the world. Their success reflected their superior intelligence and their use of an array of finely made tools. Sharp stone flakes chipped from carefully prepared rock cores were often 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 skillful and successful as hunters that they may have caused or contributed to a series of ecological crises. Between 40,000 and 13,000 years ago the giant mastodons and mammoths gradually disappeared, first from Africa and Southeast Asia and then from northern Europe. In North America the sudden disappearance around 11,000 years
Gender Roles and Social Life
Ago of highly successful large-animal hunters known as the Clovis people was almost simultaneous with the extinction of three-fourths of the large mammals in the Americas, including giant bison, camels, ground sloths, stag-moose, giant cats, mastodons, and mammoths. In Australia there was a similar event. Since these extinctions occurred during the last series of severe cold spells at the end of the Ice Age, it is difficult to measure which effects were the work of global and regional climate changes and which resulted from the excesses of human predators.
Finds of fossilized animal bones bearing the marks of butchering tools clearly attest to the scavenging and hunting activities of Stone Age peoples, but anthropologists do not believe that early humans depended primarily on meat for their food. Modern foragers (hunting and food-gathering peoples) in the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa and the Ituri Forest of central Africa derive the bulk of their day-to-day nourishment from wild vegetable foods; meat is the food of feasts. It is likely that the same was true for Stone Age peoples, even though the tools and equipment for gathering and processing vegetable foods have left few traces because they were made of materials unable to survive for thousands of years.
Like modern foragers, 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. Archaeologists believe that donut-shaped stones often found at Stone Age sites may have been weights placed on wooden digging sticks to increase their effectiveness.
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, but there is new evidence from East and South Africa that humans may have been setting fires deliberately between 1 million and 1.5 million years ago. The wooden spits and hot rocks that they would have used for roasting, frying, or baking are not distinctive enough to stand out in an archaeological site. Only with the appearance of clay cooking pots some 12,500 years ago in East Asia is there hard evidence of cooking.
Some 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 by the time of modern Homo sapiens the two-parent family would have been characteristic. How this change from a mother-centered family to a two-parent family developed over the intervening millennia can only be guessed at, but it is likely that physical and social evolution were linked. Larger brain size was a contributing factor. Big-headed humans have to be born in a less mature state than other mammals so 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 at some point. 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 (estrus) 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 ensured offspring a high rate of survival and would have enabled humans to multiply more rapidly than other large mammals.
Other researchers have studied the few surviving present-day foragers for models of what such early societies could have been like. They 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 and shoulders, would have been more suited than women to hunting, particularly
Hearths and
Cultural
Expressions
For large animals. Some early cave art shows males in hunting activities.
Other aspects of social life in the Ice Age are suggested by studies of modern peoples. All recent hunter-gatherers have lived in small groups or bands. The community has to have enough members to defend itself from predators and to divide responsibility for the collection and preparation of animal and vegetable foods. However, if it has too many members, it risks exhausting the food available in its immediate vicinity. Even a band of optimal size has to move at regular intervals to follow migrating animals and to 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.
Because frequent moves were necessary to keep close to migrating herds and ripening plants, early hunting and gathering peoples usually did not lavish much time on housing. Natural shelters under overhanging rocks or in caves in southern Africa and southern France are known to have been 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 as seasonal camps. More elaborate dwellings were common in areas where protection against harsh weather was necessary.
An interesting camp dating to 15,000 years ago has been excavated in the Ukraine southeast of Kiev. Its communal dwellings were framed with the bones of elephant-like mammoths and then covered with hides. Each oblong structure, measuring 15 to 20 feet (4.5 to 6 meters) by 40 to 50 feet (12 to 15 meters), was capable of holding fifty people and would have taken several days to construct. The camp had five such dwellings, making it a large settlement for a foraging community. 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.
Making clothing was another necessary technology in the Stone Age. Animal skins were an early form of clothing, and the oldest evidence of fibers woven into cloth dates from about 26,000 years ago. An “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
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. (Ronald Sheridan/Ancient Art & Architecture Collection)
World History
