get caught in the pocket of the southwest corner of Europe at the onset
of the last great glaciation became the classic Neanderthalers. Out in
the Near East, Howell thinks, it is possible to see traces of people
evolving from the pre-neanderthaloid type toward that of fully modern
man. Certainly, we don’t see such extreme cases of “neanderthaloidism”
outside of western Europe.
There are at least a dozen good examples in the main or classic
Neanderthal group in Europe. They date to just before and in the
earlier part of the last great glaciation (85,000 to 40,000 years ago).
Many of the finds have been made in caves. The “cave men” the movies
and the cartoonists show you are probably meant to be Neanderthalers.
I’m not at all sure they dragged their women by the hair; the women
were probably pretty tough, too!
Neanderthal men had large bony heads, but plenty of room for brains.
Some had brain cases even larger than the average for modern man. Their
faces were heavy, and they had eyebrow ridges of bone, but the ridges
were not as big as those of Java man. Their foreheads were very low,
and they didn’t have much chin. They were about five feet three inches
tall, but were heavy and barrel-chested. But the Neanderthalers didn’t
slouch as much as they’ve been blamed for, either.
One important thing about the Neanderthal group is that there is a fair
number of them to study. Just as important is the fact that we know
something about how they lived, and about some of the tools they made.
OTHER MEN CONTEMPORARY WITH THE NEANDERTHALOIDS
We have seen that the neanderthaloids seem to be a specialization
in a corner of Europe. What was going on elsewhere? We think that
the pre-neanderthaloid type was a generally widespread form of men.
From this type evolved other more or less extreme although generally
related men. The Solo finds in Java form one such case. Another was the
Rhodesian man of Africa, and the more recent Hopefield finds show more
of the general Rhodesian type. It is more confusing than it needs to be
if these cases outside western Europe are called neanderthaloids. They
lived during the same approximate time range but they were all somewhat
different-looking people.
EARLY MODERN MEN
How early is modern man (_Homo sapiens_), the “wise man”? Some people
have thought that he was very early, a few still think so. Piltdown
and Galley Hill, which were quite modern in anatomical appearance and
_supposedly_ very early in date, were the best “evidence” for very
early modern men. Now that Piltdown has been liquidated and Galley Hill
is known to be very late, what is left of the idea?
The backs of the skulls of the Swanscombe and Steinheim finds look
rather modern. Unless you pay attention to the face and forehead of the
Steinheim find--which not many people have--and perhaps also consider
the Ternafine jaws, you might come to the conclusion that the crown of
the Swanscombe head was that of a modern-like man.
Two more skulls, again without faces, are available from a French
cave site, Fontéchevade. They come from the time of the last great
interglacial, as did the pre-neanderthaloids. The crowns of the
Fontéchevade skulls also look quite modern. There is a bit of the
forehead preserved on one of these skulls and the brow-ridge is not
heavy. Nevertheless, there is a suggestion that the bones belonged to
an immature individual. In this case, his (or even more so, if _her_)
brow-ridges would have been weak anyway. The case for the Fontéchevade
fossils, as modern type men, is little stronger than that for
Swanscombe, although Professor Vallois believes it a good case.
It seems to add up to the fact that there were people living in
Europe--before the classic neanderthaloids--who looked more modern,
in some features, than the classic western neanderthaloids did. Our
best suggestion of what men looked like--just before they became fully
modern--comes from a cave on Mount Carmel in Palestine.
THE FIRST MODERNS
Professor T. D. McCown and the late Sir Arthur Keith, who studied the
Mount Carmel bones, figured out that one of the two groups involved
was as much as 70 per cent modern. There were, in fact, two groups or
varieties of men in the Mount Carmel caves and in at least two other
Palestinian caves of about the same time. The time would be about that
of the onset of colder weather, when the last glaciation was beginning
in the north--say 75,000 years ago.
The 70 per cent modern group came from only one cave, Mugharet es-Skhul
(“cave of the kids”). The other group, from several caves, had bones of
men of the type we’ve been calling pre-neanderthaloid which we noted
were widespread in Europe and beyond. The tools which came with each
of these finds were generally similar, and McCown and Keith, and other
scholars since their study, have tended to assume that both the Skhul
group and the pre-neanderthaloid group came from exactly the same time.
The conclusion was quite natural: here was a population of men in the
act of evolving in two different directions. But the time may not be
exactly the same. It is very difficult to be precise, within say 10,000
years, for a time some 75,000 years ago. If the Skhul men are in fact
later than the pre-neanderthaloid group of Palestine, as some of us
think, then they show how relatively modern some men were--men who
lived at the same time as the classic Neanderthalers of the European
pocket.
Soon after the first extremely cold phase of the last glaciation, we
begin to get a number of bones of completely modern men in Europe.
We also get great numbers of the tools they made, and their living
places in caves. Completely modern skeletons begin turning up in caves
dating back to toward 40,000 years ago. The time is about that of the
beginning of the second phase of the last glaciation. These skeletons
belonged to people no different from many people we see today. Like
people today, not everybody looked alike. (The positions of the more
important fossil men of later Europe are shown in the chart on page
72.)
DIFFERENCES IN THE EARLY MODERNS
The main early European moderns have been divided into two groups, the
Cro-Magnon group and the Combe Capelle-Brünn group. Cro-Magnon people
were tall and big-boned, with large, long, and rugged heads. They
must have been built like many present-day Scandinavians. The Combe
Capelle-Brünn people were shorter; they had narrow heads and faces, and
big eyebrow-ridges. Of course we don’t find the skin or hair of these
people. But there is little doubt they were Caucasoids (“Whites”).
Another important find came in the Italian Riviera, near Monte Carlo.
Here, in a cave near Grimaldi, there was a grave containing a woman
and a young boy, buried together. The two skeletons were first called
“Negroid” because some features of their bones were thought to resemble
certain features of modern African Negro bones. But more recently,
Professor E. A. Hooton and other experts questioned the use of the word
“Negroid” in describing the Grimaldi skeletons. It is true that nothing
is known of the skin color, hair form, or any other fleshy feature of
the Grimaldi people, so that the word “Negroid” in its usual meaning is
not proper here. It is also not clear whether the features of the bones
claimed to be “Negroid” are really so at all.
From a place called Wadjak, in Java, we have “proto-Australoid” skulls
which closely resemble those of modern Australian natives. Some of
the skulls found in South Africa, especially the Boskop skull, look
like those of modern Bushmen, but are much bigger. The ancestors of
the Bushmen seem to have once been very widespread south of the Sahara
Desert. True African Negroes were forest people who apparently expanded
out of the west central African area only in the last several thousand
years. Although dark in skin color, neither the Australians nor the
Bushmen are Negroes; neither the Wadjak nor the Boskop skulls are
“Negroid.”
As we’ve already mentioned, Professor Weidenreich believed that Peking
man was already on the way to becoming a Mongoloid. Anyway, the
Mongoloids would seem to have been present by the time of the “Upper
Cave” at Choukoutien, the _Sinanthropus_ find-spot.
WHAT THE DIFFERENCES MEAN
What does all this difference mean? It means that, at one moment in
time, within each different area, men tended to look somewhat alike.
From area to area, men tended to look somewhat different, just as
they do today. This is all quite natural. People _tended_ to mate
near home; in the anthropological jargon, they made up geographically
localized breeding populations. The simple continental division of
“stocks”--black = Africa, yellow = Asia, white = Europe--is too simple
a picture to fit the facts. People became accustomed to life in some
particular area within a continent (we might call it a “natural area”).
As they went on living there, they evolved towards some particular
physical variety. It would, of course, have been difficult to draw
a clear boundary between two adjacent areas. There must always have
been some mating across the boundaries in every case. One thing human
beings don’t do, and never have done, is to mate for “purity.” It is
self-righteous nonsense when we try to kid ourselves into thinking that
they do.
I am not going to struggle with the whole business of modern stocks and
races. This is a book about prehistoric men, not recent historic or
modern men. My physical anthropologist friends have been very patient
in helping me to write and rewrite this chapter--I am not going to
break their patience completely. Races are their business, not mine,
and they must do the writing about races. I shall, however, give two
modern definitions of race, and then make one comment.
Dr. William G. Boyd, professor of Immunochemistry, School of
Medicine, Boston University: “We may define a human race as a
population which differs significantly from other human populations
in regard to the frequency of one or more of the genes it
possesses.”
Professor Sherwood L. Washburn, professor of Physical Anthropology,
Department of Anthropology, the University of California: “A ‘race’
is a group of genetically similar populations, and races intergrade
because there are always intermediate populations.”
My comment is that the ideas involved here are all biological: they
concern groups, _not_ individuals. Boyd and Washburn may differ a bit
on what they want to consider a “population,” but a population is a
group nevertheless, and genetics is biology to the hilt. Now a lot of
people still think of race in terms of how people dress or fix their
food or of other habits or customs they have. The next step is to talk
about racial “purity.” None of this has anything whatever to do with
race proper, which is a matter of the biology of groups.
Incidentally, I’m told that if man very carefully _controls_
the breeding of certain animals over generations--dogs, cattle,
chickens--he might achieve a “pure” race of animals. But he doesn’t do
it. Some unfortunate genetic trait soon turns up, so this has just as
carefully to be bred out again, and so on.
SUMMARY OF PRESENT KNOWLEDGE OF FOSSIL MEN
The earliest bones of men we now have--upon which all the experts
would probably agree--are those of _Meganthropus_, from Java, of about
450,000 years ago. The earlier australopithecines of Africa were
possibly not tool-users and may not have been ancestral to men at all.
But there is an alternate and evidently increasingly stronger chance
that some of them may have been. The Kanam jaw from Kenya, another
early possibility, is not only very incomplete but its find-spot is
very questionable.
Java man proper, _Pithecanthropus_, comes next, at about 400,000 years
ago, and the big Heidelberg jaw in Germany must be of about the same
date. Next comes Swanscombe in England, Steinheim in Germany, the
Ternafine jaws in Algeria, and Peking man, _Sinanthropus_. They all
date to the second great interglacial period, about 350,000 years ago.
Piltdown and Galley Hill are out, and with them, much of the starch
in the old idea that there were two distinct lines of development
in human evolution: (1) a line of “paleoanthropic” development from
Heidelberg to the Neanderthalers where it became extinct, and (2) a
very early “modern” line, through Piltdown, Galley Hill, Swanscombe, to
us. Swanscombe, Steinheim, and Ternafine are just as easily cases of
very early pre-neanderthaloids.
The pre-neanderthaloids were very widespread during the third
interglacial: Ehringsdorf, Saccopastore, some of the Mount Carmel
people, and probably Fontéchevade are cases in point. A variety of
their descendants can be seen, from Java (Solo), Africa (Rhodesian
man), and about the Mediterranean and in western Europe. As the acute
cold of the last glaciation set in, the western Europeans found
themselves surrounded by water, ice, or bitter cold tundra. To vastly
over-simplify it, they “bred in” and became classic neanderthaloids.
But on Mount Carmel, the Skhul cave-find with its 70 per cent modern
features shows what could happen elsewhere at the same time.
Lastly, from about 40,000 or 35,000 years ago--the time of the onset
of the second phase of the last glaciation--we begin to find the fully
modern skeletons of men. The modern skeletons differ from place to
place, just as different groups of men living in different places still
look different.
What became of the Neanderthalers? Nobody can tell me for sure. I’ve a
hunch they were simply “bred out” again when the cold weather was over.
Many Americans, as the years go by, are no longer ashamed to claim they
have “Indian blood in their veins.” Give us a few more generations
and there will not be very many other Americans left to whom we can
brag about it. It certainly isn’t inconceivable to me to imagine a
little Cro-Magnon boy bragging to his friends about his tough, strong,
Neanderthaler great-great-great-great-grandfather!
Cultural BEGINNINGS
[Illustration]
Men, unlike the lower animals, are made up of much more than flesh and
blood and bones; for men have “culture.”
WHAT IS CULTURE?
“Culture” is a word with many meanings. The doctors speak of making a
“culture” of a certain kind of bacteria, and ants are said to have a
“culture.” Then there is the Emily Post kind of “culture”--you say a
person is “cultured,” or that he isn’t, depending on such things as
whether or not he eats peas with his knife.
The anthropologists use the word too, and argue heatedly over its finer
meanings; but they all agree that every human being is part of or has
some kind of culture. Each particular human group has a particular
culture; that is one of the ways in which we can tell one group of
men from another. In this sense, a CULTURE means the way the members
of a group of people think and believe and live, the tools they make,
and the way they do things. Professor Robert Redfield says a culture
is an organized or formalized body of conventional understandings.
“Conventional understandings” means the whole set of rules, beliefs,
and standards which a group of people lives by. These understandings
show themselves in art, and in the other things a people may make and
do. The understandings continue to last, through tradition, from one
generation to another. They are what really characterize different
human groups.
SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF CULTURE
A culture lasts, although individual men in the group die off. On
the other hand, a culture changes as the different conventions and
understandings change. You could almost say that a culture lives in the
minds of the men who have it. But people are not born with it; they
get it as they grow up. Suppose a day-old Hungarian baby is adopted by
a family in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and the child is not told that he is
Hungarian. He will grow up with no more idea of Hungarian culture than
anyone else in Oshkosh.
So when I speak of ancient Egyptian culture, I mean the whole body
of understandings and beliefs and knowledge possessed by the ancient
Egyptians. I mean their beliefs as to why grain grew, as well as their
ability to make tools with which to reap the grain. I mean their
beliefs about life after death. What I am thinking about as culture is
a thing which lasted in time. If any one Egyptian, even the Pharaoh,
died, it didn’t affect the Egyptian culture of that particular moment.
PREHISTORIC CULTURES
For that long period of man’s history that is all prehistory, we have
no written descriptions of cultures. We find only the tools men made,
the places where they lived, the graves in which they buried their
dead. Fortunately for us, these tools and living places and graves all
tell us something about the ways these men lived and the things they
believed. But the story we learn of the very early cultures must be
only a very small part of the whole, for we find so few things. The
rest of the story is gone forever. We have to do what we can with what
we find.
For all of the time up to about 75,000 years ago, which was the time
of the classic European Neanderthal group of men, we have found few
cave-dwelling places of very early prehistoric men. First, there is the
fallen-in cave where Peking man was found, near Peking. Then there are
two or three other _early_, but not _very early_, possibilities. The
finds at the base of the French cave of Fontéchevade, those in one of
the Makapan caves in South Africa, and several open sites such as Dr.
L. S. B. Leakey’s Olorgesailie in Kenya doubtless all lie earlier than
the time of the main European Neanderthal group, but none are so early
as the Peking finds.
You can see that we know very little about the home life of earlier
prehistoric men. We find different kinds of early stone tools, but we
can’t even be really sure which tools may have been used together.
WHY LITTLE HAS LASTED FROM EARLY TIMES
Except for the rare find-spots mentioned above, all our very early
finds come from geological deposits, or from the wind-blown surfaces
of deserts. Here is what the business of geological deposits really
means. Let us say that a group of people was living in England about
300,000 years ago. They made the tools they needed, lived in some sort
of camp, almost certainly built fires, and perhaps buried their dead.
While the climate was still warm, many generations may have lived in
the same place, hunting, and gathering nuts and berries; but after some
few thousand years, the weather began very gradually to grow colder.
These early Englishmen would not have known that a glacier was forming
over northern Europe. They would only have noticed that the animals
they hunted seemed to be moving south, and that the berries grew larger
toward the south. So they would have moved south, too.
The camp site they left is the place we archeologists would really have
liked to find. All of the different tools the people used would have
been there together--many broken, some whole. The graves, and traces
of fire, and the tools would have been there. But the glacier got
there first! The front of this enormous sheet of ice moved down over
the country, crushing and breaking and plowing up everything, like a
gigantic bulldozer. You can see what happened to our camp site.
Everything the glacier couldn’t break, it pushed along in front of it
or plowed beneath it. Rocks were ground to gravel, and soil was caught
into the ice, which afterwards melted and ran off as muddy water. Hard
tools of flint sometimes remained whole. Human bones weren’t so hard;
it’s a wonder _any_ of them lasted. Gushing streams of melt water
flushed out the debris from underneath the glacier, and water flowed
off the surface and through great crevasses. The hard materials these
waters carried were even more rolled and ground up. Finally, such
materials were dropped by the rushing waters as gravels, miles from
the front of the glacier. At last the glacier reached its greatest
extent; then it melted backward toward the north. Debris held in the
ice was dropped where the ice melted, or was flushed off by more melt
water. When the glacier, leaving the land, had withdrawn to the sea,
great hunks of ice were broken off as icebergs. These icebergs probably
dropped the materials held in their ice wherever they floated and
melted. There must be many tools and fragmentary bones of prehistoric
men on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea.
Remember, too, that these glaciers came and went at least three or four
times during the Ice Age. Then you will realize why the earlier things
we find are all mixed up. Stone tools from one camp site got mixed up
with stone tools from many other camp sites--tools which may have been
made tens of thousands or more years apart. The glaciers mixed them
all up, and so we cannot say which particular sets of tools belonged
together in the first place.
“EOLITHS”
But what sort of tools do we find earliest? For almost a century,
people have been picking up odd bits of flint and other stone in the
oldest Ice Age gravels in England and France. It is now thought these
odd bits of stone weren’t actually worked by prehistoric men. The
stones were given a name, _eoliths_, or “dawn stones.” You can see them
in many museums; but you can be pretty sure that very few of them were
actually fashioned by men.
It is impossible to pick out “eoliths” that seem to be made in any
one _tradition_. By “tradition” I mean a set of habits for making one
kind of tool for some particular job. No two “eoliths” look very much
alike: tools made as part of some one tradition all look much alike.
Now it’s easy to suppose that the very earliest prehistoric men picked
up and used almost any sort of stone. This wouldn’t be surprising; you
and I do it when we go camping. In other words, some of these “eoliths”
may actually have been used by prehistoric men. They must have used
anything that might be handy when they needed it. We could have figured
that out without the “eoliths.”
THE ROAD TO STANDARDIZATION
Reasoning from what we know or can easily imagine, there should have
been three major steps in the prehistory of tool-making. The first step
would have been simple _utilization_ of what was at hand. This is the
step into which the “eoliths” would fall. The second step would have
been _fashioning_--the haphazard preparation of a tool when there was a
need for it. Probably many of the earlier pebble tools, which I shall
describe next, fall into this group. The third step would have been
_standardization_. Here, men began to make tools according to certain
set traditions. Counting the better-made pebble tools, there are four
such traditions or sets of habits for the production of stone tools in
earliest prehistoric times. Toward the end of the Pleistocene, a fifth
tradition appears.
PEBBLE TOOLS
At the beginning of the last chapter, you’ll remember that I said there
were tools from very early geological beds. The earliest bones of men
have not yet been found in such early beds although the Sterkfontein
australopithecine cave approaches this early date. The earliest tools
come from Africa. They date back to the time of the first great
alpine glaciation and are at least 500,000 years old. The earliest
ones are made of split pebbles, about the size of your fist or a bit
bigger. They go under the name of pebble tools. There are many natural
exposures of early Pleistocene geological beds in Africa, and the
prehistoric archeologists of south and central Africa have concentrated
on searching for early tools. Other finds of early pebble tools have
recently been made in Algeria and Morocco.
[Illustration: SOUTH AFRICAN PEBBLE TOOL]
There are probably early pebble tools to be found in areas of the
Old World besides Africa; in fact, some prehistorians already claim
to have identified a few. Since the forms and the distinct ways of
making the earlier pebble tools had not yet sufficiently jelled into
a set tradition, they are difficult for us to recognize. It is not
so difficult, however, if there are great numbers of “possibles”
available. A little later in time the tradition becomes more clearly
set, and pebble tools are easier to recognize. So far, really large
collections of pebble tools have only been found and examined in Africa.
CORE-BIFACE TOOLS