The classic practitioner of prepared-core technology was undoubtedly H. neanderthalensis, the best-known member of an endemic European and western Asian hominid radiation that traces its roots back to at least 500 kyr ago. One reason the Neanderthals are so well known as fossils is that they practiced burial of the dead, though whether this exercise had the same connotations to them as it does to us is not clear. H. neanderthalensis possessed a brain the size of our own, although it was enclosed in a skull of very different appearance, with a long, low profile and large double-arched brow ridges over a protruding face with swept-back cheekbones. Its body proportions were also different from ours, especially in the funnel-shaped rib cage that tapered outward to match a widely flaring pelvis. Neanderthals made stone tools beautifully but rather monotonously, their Mousterian utensils varying little over time or space. They rarely took advantage of other materials such as bone and antler. The Neanderthals were resident in Europe when the first H. sapiens arrived from the south and east some 40 kyr ago. With their ultimate origins in Africa, these immigrant ‘Cro-Magnons’ had at their disposal the entire cognitive apparatus that distinguishes modern humans today. This is borne out by the abundant evidence they left behind of symbolic consciousness: phenomenal art on cave walls; delicate animal carvings and engravings; notations on bone plaques; flutes made from vulture bones; and so on. These people were fully equivalent in anatomy and sensibility to us, and it was the Cro-Magnons who presumably outcompeted the long-established Neanderthals into extinction within a dozen millennia.
Yet the first anatomically modern H. sapiens, who evolved in Africa between about 200 and 150 kyr ago, appear to have had none of these complex behaviors. The earliest African H. sapiens are associated with very crude stone tools, and the earliest anatomically modern humans we know of who lived outside Africa - in Israel, between about 90 and 100 kyr ago - had an identical technology to that of the Neanderthals. Moreover, there was no displacement of the Neanderthals in this region until Cro-Magnon-equivalent stoneworking techniques appeared less than 50 kyr ago. What was going on? To understand this, we have to return to the disconnect between new hominids and new ways of behaving. What most plausibly happened is that the potential for the symbolic behaviors that are the most fundamental hallmark of living humans was born with the biological reorganization that produced the distinctive modern human anatomy; but that this potential lay unused until it was ‘released’ by a cultural innovation. To many it seems most likely that this innovation was the invention of language, which is the ultimate symbolic activity and facilitator of symbolic thought. This places the origin of our unprecedented human consciousness squarely in the realm of emergence - the phenomenon whereby a chance combination of factors produces an entirely unanticipated result.
World History
