B. Fagan & N. Durrani, World Prehistory: The Basics
Enter Homo sapiens (c. 300,000 years ago and later) [21 mins.]
Michael curates today’s Social Science Files selection:
In their book World Prehistory: The Basics, published in 2022, Brian M. Fagan and Nadia Durrani wrote:
CHAPTER 3
Enter Homo sapiens (c. 300,000 years ago and later)
… …
HOMO SAPIENS (MODERN HUMANS, C. 300,000 YEARS AGO—PRESENT)
We call ourselves Homo sapiens, “wise person”. We are clever people, capable of subtlety, of manipulation, and of self-understanding. We modern humans are very adaptable, successful primates, found on every continent and the only surviving hominin of the past 6 million-plus years. While we emerged before 300,000 years ago, at first, our skulls show a mix of archaic and modern traits. We only became fully skeletally modern by perhaps 120,000 years ago. Such Homo sapiens would have been physically (and presumably cerebrally) identical to any modern human, and are known in the literature as AMH which stands for “anatomically modern humans” (while the precise scientifc label, not used in this book, is Homo sapiens sapiens—double the wise).
What separates us from earlier humans? The answers are complicated and not always obvious, particularly since various other hominins have possessed similar traits to our own—from upright stances to big brains, to the FOXP2 gene associated with speech and language. Rather than comparing, perhaps the answer is to consider what many believe to be our greatest asset: articulate, fluent speech. We communicate, we tell stories, we pass on knowledge and ideas, all through the medium of language. Consciousness, cognition, self-awareness, foresight, and the ability to express oneself and one’s emotions are direct consequences of fluent speech. They are also linked to our capacity for symbolic and spiritual thought. We’re concerned not just with subsistence and technology, but also with the boundaries of existence, and the relations between the individual, the group, and the universe.
With these abilities and the full fowering of human creativity expressed in art and religion, Homo sapiens eventually colonized not just temperate and tropical environments, but the entire globe.
OUR ORIGINS (C. 300,000 YEARS AGO)
For generations, two opposing theories sought to explain the origins of modern humans.
REGIONAL CONTINUITY MODEL
This scenario argued that Homo erectus evolved independently in diferent regions of the Old World, first into intermediary forms of humans and then into fully modern people. In other words, there were multiple, ancient, origins for different regional groups of humans. Meanwhile, highly adaptive, novel anatomical features spread rapidly. These kept human populations on the same fundamental evolutionary path toward modern people.
OUT OF AFRICA MODEL
This approach argues that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa and then spread elsewhere from what was a single place of origin. It argues that today’s geographic populations have shallow roots derived from a single source in relatively recent times.
After years of research into genetics and archaeology, consensus holds that the Out of Africa theory is correct, but with some modifications. All Homo sapiens are indeed of recent African origin, but that they engaged with some minor interbreeding with now-extinct human species: both within Africa, and—for those who left Africa—with the Neanderthals and Denisovans (if not others, too).
Molecular biology has played a major role in unraveling modern human origins. Researchers initially zeroed in on mtDNA (mito-chondrial DNA), which mutates much faster than nuclear DNA. This mtDNA is inherited only through the maternal line and does not mix with paternal DNA, which means it provides a potentially reliable link with ancestral populations. The latest research tells us that the mtDNA lineage evolved for some time in Africa, followed by an out-migration by a small number of people. All later Asian and European Homo sapiens lineages originated in this small African population.
When did the most common recent ancestor live? Molecular biology dated the split to about 200,000 years ago. This date is a statistical approximation. The fossil evidence comprises a scatter of Homo sapiens finds in sub-Saharan Africa, specifcally from Omo Kibish and Herto in Ethiopia from a time bracket between 195,000 and 150,000 years ago. Specialists have also found skull fragments from the Apidima Cave in Greece, which have been controversially dated to at least 210,000 years ago. Finally, there are some even earlier Homo sapiens individuals from Jebel Irhoud cave in Morocco in northwestern Africa dating to about 315,000 years ago.
A mere scatter of human fossils, but there are other interesting clues. Between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago, the age-old handaxe technology of earlier times gave way to lighter toolkits in eastern and southern Africa that combined sharp stone flakes with wooden spear shafts and more specialized tools for wood-working and butchery. Perhaps these lighter, but simple, tools were the remote prototypes of more efficient ones that developed after 75,000 years ago.
All the available information points to an African homeland for our species, Homo sapiens. But tens of thousands of years passed before AMHs explored new continents.
MOVING OUT OF AFRICA (C. 120,000 YEARS AGO AND LATER)
There was no one moment when a band of anatomically modern humans (AMH) woke up one day in Africa and decided to travel far from home. We will never decipher the details of what must have been irregular and sporadic population movements, most of them dictated by the realities of life as a hunter and forager. Putting the contested early Greek evidence to one side for now, the oldest AMH remains found outside Africa have come from two caves in Israel dating to about 120,000 to 90,000 years ago. These individuals were thin on the ground and living in the same landscapes as Neanderthals, with whom they occasionally interbred. They left few traces of their presence there, which is hardly surprising, given their small numbers. We only have widespread indications of AMH settlement around 50,000 years ago.
There may have been few of them, but the newcomers were accustomed to maintaining connections with fellow kin and neighbors over long distances. Their weaponry was light and efficient for tackling animals large and small, while they also relied on a wide range of plant foods. These were people adapted to semi-arid and arid landscapes where survival depended on information exchanged with others.
The Nile Valley was a natural route to the north, with the Sahara Desert a seemingly major barrier to movement toward the Mediterranean. But bitterly cold conditions during the last glaciation in the north brought a cooler and wetter climate to the Sahara from before 100,000 until about 40,000 years ago. For long periods, what is now one of the driest places on earth supported semi-arid grassland and herds of game. These were millennia when people could hunt and forage their way across the Sahara. They may have moved northward along now-dried-up watercourses leading from the heart of the desert. Others still are thought to have crossed over the narrow straits of the Red Sea, from Ethiopia (a heartland of our species) to the Arabian Peninsula, and thence onwards to the east. We know from stone tools found on the Red Sea plain of Arabia that archaic human species had been making this passage deep into the Ice Age.
AFRICA: THOSE WHO STAYED AT HOME (C. 65,000 YEARS AGO TO MODERN TIMES)
CONTINUITY
The genetic ancestry of indigenous sub-Saharan Africans goes back to the very beginnings of modern humanity. Some of the oldest genealogical lineages on earth lie among the Hazda of modern-day Tanzania, the Pygmies of the Congo, and the San of southern Africa. All of them were hunter-gatherers with deep roots in the remote past.
The frst archaeological signs of modern cognition among Homo sapiens groups includes material found in the Blombos Cave in Southern Africa. Dated to before 70,000 years ago, it comprises shell beads and abstract, ocher-painted art. Other signs of modern human behavior appeared in southern Africa by at least 65,000 years ago. Tools and weapons became gradually smaller and more efcient and may even have included a simple bow-and-arrow. From the beginning, AMHs visited southern African caves like Klasies River and Sibudu as they gradually developed more efcient ways of hunting and foraging. Rainfall improved after 50,000 years ago; Africa’s population grew rapidly. By then, AMHs fourished throughout sub-Saharan Africa.
At that time, our species lived of a wide range of game and plant foods, and, near coasts, of mollusks, fish, penguins, and seals. Hunters pursued more docile antelope like the eland. They exploited more formidable animals like buffalo and elephant, whose flesh may have been scavenged from predator kills, especially those of older or young beasts. By 13,000 years ago, just after the end of the last glaciation, hunting became more specialized, perhaps as more easily hunted animals became rarer owing to overhunting.
Even further south, close to modern-day Cape Town, the people visiting Elands Bay Cave took large and medium-sized antelope in 11,000 BCE. Two thousand years later, they turned their attention to smaller browsing animals and relied heavily on mollusks and marine animals. At first, hunting bands merely visited the cave, then lived there for long periods of time. Then, around 6000 BCE, they abandoned the cave as rising sea levels fooded the nearby coastal plain when the climate became warmer.
As temperatures warmed after the last glaciation, so the African interior became drier. Hunting and foraging became ever more specialized as people moved close to reliable water supplies and to coastal areas where herds of smaller animals might be found. Many groups, such as the rainforest peoples of the Congo Basin, were unable to hunt as many animals as those dwelling in woodland and savanna landscapes so they relied heavily on rabbits, tortoises, and also on plant foods.
Unfortunately, preservation conditions are such that most sites once occupied by these groups yield only stone tools and the occasional bone spear point. There are exceptions, like the Gwisho hot springs in Central Zambia, which lie on the edge of the seasonally fooded foodplain of the Kafue River. Several hunting camps nestled among the bubbling hot springs, which were occupied repeatedly for over 3000 years. The waterlogged levels of the camps contain not only the bones of animals of all sizes, but also plant remains, mostly from eight species, notably the edible seeds of the Bauhinia shrub. So little have foraging practices changed over the past 3000 years that a San from the Kalahari was able to identify seeds from the excavations and tell the archaeologists what they were used for.
There were traces of a grass-and-stick shelter, of hearths, and layers of grass that may have served as bedding. Thirty-fve people were buried in the camps. Hundreds of stone arrow barbs and small scraping tools lay alongside pestles and grindstones used to process the plant foods that were central to the Gwisho diet. The people uprooted roots with wooden digging sticks found in the site. There were even the remains of plants used to poison arrow heads.
We cannot, of course, assume that the 3000 year-old Gwisho site was a prototype for modern lifeways, but the general similarities are striking. For example, the average present-day San camp in the Kalahari Desert holds between 10 and 30 people, just as the Gwisho camp probably did. If ancient San communities were anything like modern ones, a camp would have been in a continual state of social flux. Kinship systems among hunter-gathers tend to be highly fexible. Every member of a band has not only close family connections, but also kin ties with a much larger number of people living over a wide area. Such arrangements mean that individuals are able to move to a new camp and readily find a family with kin ties to accept them. Quite apart from preventing social chaos, such easy movement functions as a network for mutual assistance in times of food scarcity.
Ancient San paintings and engravings amplify what we know from archaeology and ethnographic studies of 19th-century and modern-day San groups. San artists depicted the game they hunted, the chase, and life in camp. They drew running hunters, people fishing from canoes, and scenes of gathering honey and plant foods. The hunters can be seen stalking game in disguise. In one example, a hunter wearing an ostrich skin stands in the midst of a fock of his prey.
One can justly admire San rock art as an artistic tradition in its own right, and with good reason. The artists were highly talented. But much San art has deeper symbolic meanings, some of which have come down to us from 19th-century research by German-born linguist Wilhelm Bleek. South African archaeologist David Lewis- Williams has studied these ethnographic records of San art. He points out that each superimposition of paintings, and each relationship between human fgures and animals, had profound meaning to the artists and the people.
Many of the paintings depict eland antelope with dancers cavorting around them. Lewis-Williams believes that the dancers were acquiring the potency released by the death of their prey. Perhaps, he argues, they went into trances so powerful that they became eland themselves while in an altered state of consciousness. Lewis-Williams and others argue that shamanistic behavior with its trances and hallucinogenic drugs was involved, to the accompaniment of much scholarly controversy. This debate, like so many others, is unresolved.
By the end of the 19th century, there was no San painting in South Africa. The art of stone toolmaking had all but died out. The last stoneworkers used industrial glass bottle fragments instead of their usual quartz pebbles. In the face of African farming people, who spread into southern Africa after 1 CE, and then European settlement, they retreated from the savanna woodlands into remoter, and often drier, landscapes, where their descendants survive in ever smaller numbers to this day.
SPREADING TO THE EAST (C. 120,000 YEARS AGO AND LATER)
There is one certainty about AMH groups of 120,000 years ago and later. They moved irregularly and constantly. A territory could become too crowded; a band would split, its members heading in opposite directions; a young man and his family would move to a neighboring valley in search of game or plant foods. Distance was unimportant, but human connections provided information, as well as wives. The dynamics behind these seemingly irregular movements propelled AMHs to every corner of the world, and from Africa into Asia and beyond. For instance, as conditions in the Middle East grew progressively drier after 50,000 years ago while the last glaciation intensified in the north, the AMH newcomers responded to population pressure and food shortages by moving northward and northwestward in Europe and Eurasia, also westward along Mediterranean coasts.
The movement out of tropical Africa followed routes used down the ages, and saw people moving eastward, into and across the Nile Valley and the Red Sea, also across the narrow southern end of the Red Sea, over to the lower reaches of Arabia. Ultimately, they wound their ways into the subtropical and tropical reaches of South and Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, the details remain hazy, clues virtually non-existent. Forty-seven AMH teeth from Fuyan Cave in southern China date to between 120,000 and 80,000 years ago. Some stone tools dating to around 70,000 years ago come from the Malay peninsula. Most likely, some AMH bands had crossed India by that time, but this is little more than a guess. Whether there was but one permanent dispersal from Africa, or many of them, is unknown.
But the Homo sapiens were not alone at this early stage. There still existed other hominin species, including the mysterious diminutive humans from Flores island’s Liang Bua cave, which date to between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago. They were only about a meter tall, with prominent brow ridges and a low brain case. The teeth are modern, the face delicate, but the limbs are slight. Named Homo foresiensis, they may be the descendants of a remnant Homo erectus population, who occupied the region very much earlier. As to their small stature, it was likely the result of dwarfsm by isolation.
Although their disappearance roughly coincides with our appearance in the region, there is no evidence that we were the necessary cause of their demise. Instead, perhaps challenging climatic conditions were involved in their extinction. Around 70,000 years ago, Mount Toba, a major active volcano on Sumatra in Southeast Asia exploded in one of the greatest eruptions of the past 23 million years. Dense clouds of volcanic ash fell over a wide area from the northeastern Arabian Sea and much of the Indian Ocean, on northern India and Bangladesh, also the South China Sea. The eruption must have decimated animal and plant communities over a huge area of the tropics. As large eruptions always do, several years of colder weather and intense drought afected a wide area.
The Mount Toba cataclysm must have affected sparse human populations over thousands of square kilometers. Competing theories are emerging. At one extreme, some experts argue that the falling ash devastated human populations, many of them far from the volcano. A severe genetic bottleneck caused by the mass casualties took hold, impeding cultural development. But climatic data from cores bored into Lake Malawi in Central Africa indicate that the eruption did not impact East Africa significantly, and that the eruption did not cause a genetic bottleneck. Africa was a long way from Southeast Asia, so the effects of the disaster must have been muted.
Another plausible scenario talks not of genetic bottlenecks, but of a series of innovative “sparks” of rapid change in some areas, but not in others. One such spark was the development of blade technology in the Middle East by 50,000 years ago. The appearance of art in Europe and Southeast Asia between 40,000 and 50,000 years before present, perhaps also Africa, may have been another spark. It was only after about 30,000 years ago that rapid culture change took place in all parts of the humanly colonized world.
Full modern human behavior seems to have developed over a long period, perhaps in fits and starts, with fully articulate human speech as a major contributor. By 50,000 years, AMHs were firmly established, albeit in small numbers, in eastern and southwestern Asia. Thereafter, a complex process of colonization and dispersal carried their descendants into every kind of natural environment imaginable—to East and mainland Southeast Asia, to New Guinea, Australia, and the frontiers of the Pacifc, also to Europe, Eurasia, and the Americas.
The geneticists are certain that modern humans settled Southeast Asia in multiple waves. They speculate that there may have been two movements. One involved some Denisovan DNA, contributing the ancestors of New Guineans and Australians among others. The second brought present-day East Asians and Indonesians.
GOING OFFSHORE: SUNDA AND SAHUL (AFTER 60,000 YEARS AGO)
This is all very tentative, whereas the geological evidence is not. At the height of the last glaciation about 18,000 years ago, global sea levels were over 90 meters below modern levels. Southeast Asia’s geography was radically diferent. Dry land linked Sumatra to Borneo. Rolling plains connected to the Asian mainland linked many of the offshore islands. Great rivers crossed the now-submerged plains, forming a long-vanished land known to geologists as Sunda. Further offshore, another vast landmass called Sahul linked Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea. The lower sea levels meant that open water passages were much shorter, but people still needed watercraft to colonize New Guinea and Australia.
Watercraft were essential to cross deep water, with most human settlement along coasts and close to reliable water supplies. Here the inhabitants could catch fish and mollusks, especially giant clams, in shallow water, as well as hunt game and harvest plant foods. Simple rafts of mangrove poles and bamboo lashed together with forest vines would have sufficed for fishing in shallow water and for reaching offshore shell beds. Such rafts may have been the way that people first crossed from the mainland to Sunda and Sahul, perhaps blown offshore by strong winds. For instance, computer simulations suggest that a raft could have drifted from the island of Timor to what is now Australia in a mere seven days.
This colonization took place remarkably quickly, between about 40,000 and 45,000 years ago. We know, for example, that tuna fishers visited Jerimalai Cave on East Timor at least 42,000 years ago. People had settled along some 3000 kilometers of the Sahul coastline soon afterward.
Much of Sahul was rolling, semi-arid lowlands (what is now Australia) with a quite different landscape of rugged mountains and highland valleys in the north. Genetic data hints that Australia and New Guinea were occupied about 55,000 years ago, with the earliest archaeological evidence for human settlement in New Guinea coming from the highlands about 45,000 years before present.
THE ARTISTS
For a century, archaeologists have been convinced that the world’s earliest figurative (as opposed to abstract) art comes from European caves. But they may be wrong. The Leang Tedongnge cave on the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia, lies in a remote valley hemmed in by limestone clifs; periodic fooding means that it is only accessible during the dry season. An unknown artist painted a dark red warty pig on the wall of the cave with red ocher pigment (Figure 3.4). The painting shows a short crest of upright hair, and a pair of hornlike facial warts that are characteristic of adult males. There are two handprints above the pig’s hindquarters. It appears to be facing two other (only partially preserved) pigs, as if observing a fight or social interaction between them. Using uranium-series isotope dating, expert Maxime Aubert dated the calcite layer over-lying the painting to 45,500 years ago. This is a minimum date for the painting, which underlies the calcite, apparently the oldest cave painting in the world.
Dozens of caves on Sulawesi have yielded hands stencils, cave paintings, also pigment crayons, and carved figurines. One scene in red pigment in a small ceiling space depicting a hunting scene where eight hunters, armed with spears or ropes, pursue a Sulawesi warty hog and a small-horned dwarf bufalo, both of which still live on the island. They have elongated snouts, as if they were wearing masks. More likely the figures are mythical animal–human figures participating in a ritual hunt. A calcite layer overlying the paintings gives a minimum age of 44,000 years ago.
If the dates stand up to further scrutiny, this vibrant artistic tradition is at least 4000 years older than the dates given to any other fgurative rock art in the world. It developed on the island soon after the first modern human settlement of about 50,000 years ago.
INTO THE PACIFIC
To the east of New Guinea lies open ocean, with islands close offshore. The island of New Britain is only 50 kilometers further, with New Ireland a short voyage further on. Deep water separates the two islands, which may be seen from one another. Some form of seaworthy watercraft came into use for paddling from New Guinea. Voyages must have been commonplace by 35,000 years ago, by which time people were catching shark and tuna. By 20,000 years ago, their successors were trading fine-grained obsidian, a volcanic glass for toolmaking, across open water from nearby New Britain.
Some voyagers were even more ambitious. By 30,000 years ago, communities of islanders were catching tuna, mackerel and other open water fish while visiting Kilu rock shelter on Buka Island in the northern Solomon Islands. Fishing there would have required open water voyages of at least 130 to 180 kilometers. These would have involved not only seaworthy canoes, but also reliable water containers and enough food for several days at sea.
Generally good weather, also predictable seasonal winds and currents carried Ice Age voyagers this far offshore. This was the limit of their pioneer journeys, for distances to islands further out in the southwestern Pacifc were much longer. Such passages required larger canoes, much more sophisticated navigational skills, and easily storable food crops. The closer islands were a superb “nursery” for seafaring techniques without elaborate technology.
AUSTRALIA
The first settlement of Australia is surrounded by controversy, just as is that over the first Americans. Human settlement is well documented after 36,000 to 38,000 years ago, but traces of earlier settlement are very thin. Once again, it’s a matter of finding traces of very sparse, mobile hunter-gatherer groups.
A few traces of human settlement survive. Madjedbebe rock shelter lies in the Kakadu National Park in northern Australia. This site has yielded numerous well-dated stone tools, which are said to be at least 65,000 years old. The Warratyi rock shelter in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia has dates as early as 49,000 years ago. Lake Mungo in western New South Wales, again in the south, is said to date to about 40,000. The isolated finds from Madjedbebe and elsewhere hint at a virtually invisible occupation for many thousands of years.
Whatever the date of initial colonization, we know that people could have walked all the way from New Guinea to Tasmania far to the south throughout the late Ice Age. Some scholars believe that initial colonization was a slow, gradual process that unfolded along the coasts, then into the interior. Others argue for rapid colonization in small groups, who expanded rapidly over the continent as a result of their highly mobile lifeways.
In the far south, climatic conditions in Tasmania were quite severe, with ice sheets on higher ground. Low sea levels connected the island to the mainland for at least 55,000 years, so the first settlers simply walked there. There is well documented settlement as early as 35,000 years ago at the Parmerpar Meethaner Cave, which was occupied until about 780 years ago. People dwelt in the rugged landscape of Central Tasmania throughout the coldest millennia of the last glaciation around 18,000 years ago. Their main prey was red wallabies in a diet combined with plant foods. These were the southernmost people living on earth during the last glaciation.
Between 25,000 and 10,000 years ago, Australia’s human population may have numbered as many as a million people. The Australian Aborigines maintained their traditional lifeway with minimal technology and only the simplest of tools. Cultural change was gradual, taking place over thousands of years. The great elaboration of Australian and Tasmanian culture was in ritual and social life, also its ancient artistic traditions, which helped maintain the balance between the Aborigines and available food resources in an arid environment. Aboriginal technology developed within Australia over a long period in response to local needs and without the benefit of cultural innovation from outside. …
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The Source has been:
Brian M. Fagan and Nadia Durrani, World Prehistory: The Basics, Routledge 2022
Brian M. Fagan has been a loyal subscriber and regular reader of Social Science Files since March 2022.
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