First Complex Social Cognition, dates & indicators
Care systems, symbolisms, means-to-ends tool conceptualizations
[Writings of William GOLDING, David REICH, and Tom HIGHAM]
WILLIAM GOLDING, a novelist, wrote about Neanderthals [1955]:
At last Mal finished his cough. He began to straighten himself by bearing down on the thorn bush and by making his hands walk over each other up the stick. He looked at the water then at each of the people in turn, and they waited … Lok patted the dead tree affectionately and Mal led them upward. Now in their joy they also began to pay attention to his weakness, though they were not yet aware how deep it was. Mal lifted his legs like a man pulling them out of mud and his feet were no longer clever. They chose places of their own unskilfully, but as though something were pulling them sideways so that he reeled on his stick. The people behind him followed each of his actions easily out of the fullness of their health. Focused on his struggle they became an affectionate and unconscious parody. As he leaned and reached for his breath they gaped too, they reeled, their feet were deliberately unclever. They wound up through a litter of grey boulders and knees of stone until the trees fell away and they were out in the open. Here Mal stopped and coughed and they understood that now they must wait for him …
… Lok stretched out his hand and touched Mal. But Mal did not feel the touch in his pain and under the woman's sheltering hair … She bent and whispered in Mal's ear: “To-morrow there will be food. Now sleep” … Then they began to yawn widely. They arranged themselves round Mal, huddling in, holding him in a cradle of warm flesh with the fire in front of him. They shuffled and muttered. Mal coughed a little, then he too was asleep …
… Ha squatted against the rock and shuffled his back till it fitted. His right hand found a stone and picked it up. He showed it to the people. “I have a picture of this stone. Mal used it to cut a branch. See! Here is the part that cuts.” Mal took the stone from Ha, felt the weight, frowned a moment, then smiled at them. “This is the stone I used," he said. "See! Here I put my thumb and here my hand fits round the thickness." He held up the stone, miming Mal cutting a branch. “The stone is a good stone," said Lok. "It has not gone away. It has stayed by the fire until Mal came back to it” …
… [Lok] shouted as loudly as he could. “New people! New people!” Suddenly he froze in the swaying branches. The new people had heard him …
… “The new people [humans] have many pictures. And I have many pictures too." Lok laughed, uncertainly …
… The indefinable attraction of the new people pushed the flock out of Lok's head. He forgot to blink … [He] sought to comprehend the new people from whom all changes came. Lok discovered "Like". He had used likeness all his life without being aware of it. Fungi on a tree were there, the word was the same but acquired a distinction by circumstances that could never apply to the sensitive things on the side of his head.
Now, in a convulsion of the understanding Lok found himself using likeness as a tool as surely as ever he had used a stone to hack at sticks or meat …
DAVID REICH, a geneticist, wrote about Neanderthals [2018]:
The earliest human skeletons with “anatomically modern” features — defined as falling within the range of variation of all humans today with regard to having a globular brain case and other traits — date up to two hundred to three hundred thousand years ago and are all from Africa. Outside of Africa and the Near East, though, there is no convincing evidence of anatomically modern humans older than a hundred thousand years and very limited evidence older than around fifty thousand years.
Archaeological evidence of stone tool types also points to a great change after around fifty thousand years ago, a period known to archaeologists of West Eurasia as the Upper Paleolithic, and to archaeologists of Africa as the Later Stone Age. After this time, the technology for manufacturing stone tools became very different, and there were changes in style every few thousand years, compared to the glacial earlier pace of change. Humans in this period also began to leave behind far more artifacts that revealed their aesthetic and spiritual lives: beads made of ostrich eggshells, polished stone bracelets, body paint made from red iron oxide, and the world’s first representational art …
… The anthropologist best known for embracing the idea that a genetic change might explain how we came to be behaviorally distinct from our predecessors was Richard Klein. He put forward the idea that the Later Stone Age revolution of Africa and the Upper Paleolithic revolution of western Eurasia, when recognizably modern human behavior burst into full flower after about fifty thousand years ago, were driven by the rise in frequency of a single mutation of a gene affecting the biology of the brain, which permitted the manufacture of innovative tools and the development of complex behavior.
According to Klein’s theory, the rise in frequency of this mutation primed humans for some enabling trait, such as the ability to use conceptual language. Klein thought that prior to the occurrence of this mutation, humans were incapable of modern behaviors …
… Klein’s hypothesis came under intense criticism almost as soon as he suggested it, most notably from the archaeologists Sally McBrearty and Alison Brooks, who showed that almost every trait that Klein considered to be a hallmark of distinctly modern human behavior was evident in the African and Near Eastern archaeological records tens of thousands of years before the Upper Paleolithic and Later Stone Age transitions.
But even if no single behavior was new, Klein had put his finger on something important. The intensification of evidence for modern human behavior after fifty thousand years ago is undeniable, and raises the question of whether biological change contributed to it …
… [It] will take an evolutionary Manhattan Project to understand the function of each mutation that we have and that Neanderthals do not. This Manhattan Project of human evolutionary biology is one to which we as a species should commit ourselves. But even when it is carried out, I expect that the findings will be so complicated — with so many individual genetic changes contributing to what makes humans distinctive — that few people will find the answer comprehensible. While the scientific question is profoundly important, I expect that no intellectually elegant and emotionally satisfying molecular explanation for behavioral modernity will ever be found …
… Today, our closest living relatives are the African apes: the chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas, all incapable of making sophisticated tools or using conceptual language. But until around forty thousand years ago, the world was inhabited by multiple groups of archaic humans who differed from us physically but walked upright and shared many of our capabilities. The question that the archaeological record cannot answer — but the DNA record can — is how those archaic people were related to us.
For no archaic group has the answer to this question seemed more urgent than for the Neanderthals. In Europe after four hundred thousand years ago, the landscape was dominated by these large-bodied people with brains slightly bigger on average than those of modern humans …
… Although Darwin didn’t himself appreciate their significance, Neanderthals were eventually acknowledged to be from a population more closely related to modern humans than to living apes, providing evidence for Darwin’s theory that such populations must have existed in the past.
… [F]rom all the evidence we have, before about one hundred thousand years ago, Neanderthals were behaviorally just as sophisticated as our own ancestors — anatomically modern humans.
Both Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans made stone tools using a technique that has become known as Levallois, which requires as much cognitive skill and dexterity as the Upper Paleolithic and Later Stone Age toolmaking techniques that emerged among modern humans after around fifty thousand years ago. In this technique, flakes are struck off carefully prepared rock cores that have little resemblance to the resulting tools, so that craftspeople must hold in their minds an image of what the finished tool will look like and execute the complex steps by which the stone must be worked to achieve that goal.
Other signs of the cognitive sophistication of Neanderthals include the evidence that they cared for their sick and elderly. An excavation at Shanidar Cave in Iraq has revealed nine skeletons, all apparently deliberately buried, one of which was a half-blind elderly man with a withered arm, suggesting that the only way he could have survived is if friends and family had lovingly cared for him. The Neanderthals also had an appreciation of symbolism, as revealed by jewelry made of eagle talons found at Krapina Cave in Croatia and dating to about 130,000 years ago,3 and stone circles built deep inside Bruniquel Cave in France and dating to around 180,000 years ago.
TOM HIGHAM, an archeologist, wrote about Neanderthals [2021]:
Looking closely as I held it in my hands, I could see what others had noted before: that virtually all of his teeth were missing, lost before, rather than after, death. He must have had great difficulty gathering and processing food and surely would have needed the help of a community or wider group. He could not have survived alone …
… It turns out, however, that Neanderthals were much more innovative than thought, and did use other, more complex forms of technology to make tools. Some 72,000 years ago, at the site of Umm-el-Tlel in Syria, Neanderthals transported small balls of bitumen to heat for hafting their Levallois weapons, probably to wooden spears.
Evidence from a range of other sites shows that Neanderthals used tar from birch bark to provide handles or for hafting tools. We know that Neanderthals also made lissoirs, or bone smoothers, that may have been the key tool for softening leather and working hides. Previously these were considered the sole preserve of Homo sapiens. They are not, and in fact it is possible that moderns learnt to work hides like this from the Neanderthals.
Other types of material that could have been used to make tools, particularly wood, do not survive nearly as well in the archaeological record but in some lucky cases we have evidence for these more perishable items. In the 1990s at the German site of Schöningen, for example, the potential importance of wood was brought into sharp focus with the discovery of nine beautifully made spears, a lance, a burnt stick and a double pointed implement, found amongst the remains of butchered horses dating to about 300,000 years ago … they suggest to me that such technology was almost certainly used from this date by our human family …
… Food and tool choices, however, are not necessarily indicative of complex cognitive behaviours. Were Neanderthals able to express themselves in abstract and symbolic ways? Could they make art, recall their dreams or joke? And, if there was a difference between us and them, could this be the reason for our ultimate success in survival and their demise?
Archaeologists have to infer behaviour from the record of materials and artefacts, which is tricky. At the dawn of the Early Upper Palaeolithic in Europe, around 45,000 years ago, we see a proliferation of objects in the archaeological record such as perforated teeth and shell pendants, the use of pigments and colourants, decorated and incised bones, carved figurative art and cave painting. This occurs at about the time Homo sapiens first arrived.
Objects and ornaments such as these are important because they give us an insight into the human mind, and particularly what we call behavioural or cognitive complexity. Complex symbolic objects allow information to be transmitted to others, sometimes over great distances.
Symbols are powerful; they can be used to bind people together, to confer a degree of membership, to reflect rank or seniority or bring people from afar into a joint network or alliance. The benefits of this type of system are far-reaching. In times of economic or subsistence stress, for example, they may confer an advantage to some groups and not others. A shared identity and group alliance make it more likely that help will be given in times of need and that others can and that others can be relied upon to provide assistance. Networks and links between groups can also reduce dangerous inbreeding in small hunter-gatherer groups and ensure that genetic diversity is maintained …
… Homo sapiens were not the only ones capable of such advanced behaviour. At a Neanderthal site in the south of Spain, for example, archaeologists found shells with perforations that enabled them to be worn or displayed. In addition, the remains of pigments were found on and near the shells. These included ochre (red), pyrite (black) and natrojarosite (yellow) minerals. A small bone with pigment present at its tip implies its use in preparing these pigments and mixing them to make different colours, mixed in a larger Spondylus shell container. The remains date to around 115–120,000 years ago, well before Upper Palaeolithic modern humans are present in Europe. In ancient Egypt natrojarosite was used as a cosmetic. Could Neanderthals have been using these various pigments to the same effect or for self-decoration? I think the answer must be yes.
In South Africa, at the site of Blombos Cave, similar but better-preserved evidence for pigments and colourant preparation is taken to reflect behavioural complexity amongst modern humans. Surely, the same must apply to the Neanderthals of Spain.
In addition to shells, Neanderthals seem to have had a genuine interest in the feathers of big birds of prey. They may have used them in a decorative and therefore symbolic manner. This evidence is based on the presence in archaeological sites of certain birds’ wing bones that have been clearly cut and sawn by stone tools. The argument is that, since these bones derive from the wing regions and are not nutritionally valuable, there must have been another reason to focus on them. It might be that they were targeting the wings for feathers, and perhaps these were being used for decorative purposes. There is now a total of sixteen Neanderthal sites that have furnished examples of bird bones linked with this behaviour. There is also increasing evidence that Neanderthals used eagle talons as well. Talons which have been deliberately cut with flint tools have been identified at sites in France and Croatia …
… Further inside [a deep cave in Bruniquel, France], 336m from the entrance [teenage cavers] found something that could only have been made by humans. Broken stalagmites, some burnt, were laid deliberately into shapes. Two large circles had been formed, one about 7m across and a smaller one 2m in diameter. In some areas the stalagmites were stacked one on top of the other. There were traces of fire all around. Who had made the strange features, and when? Dates later obtained indicated they were more than 170,000 years old. They were almost certainly, therefore, made by Neanderthals … [with] evidence for the building of structures, the use of fire and the possible gathering of people more than 170,000 years ago, long before we find compelling evidence for the presence of Homo sapiens on the continent. Neanderthals did not just enter these deep caves; recent work suggests that they may have also made abstract art and rock paintings while there …
… Increasingly, then, the weight of evidence is swinging towards Neanderthals not as ignorant cave-dwelling brutes, but as much more similar to us than we previously suspected. This shift is recent. It also raises the distinct possibility that the first Homo sapiens in Europe learnt new things from Neanderthals …
… The Châtelperronian [France, Spain] has been associated with Neanderthals based on evidence obtained principally at one key site: the Grotte du Renne at Arcy-sur-Cure, south-east of Paris. In the 1950s and 60s, Mousterian archaeological levels were excavated there, above which were three layers that have become known as Châtelperronian. This industry is characterized by a desire on the part of its makers to produce blades, with one of the tools, the eponymous knife, being the characteristic type. Twenty-nine Neanderthal teeth and a tiny ear bone were found within the Châtelperronian levels of Arcy. Archaeologists also found pierced teeth of animals such as fox, deer, hyena, bear and horse and curious decorated ivories in the form of rings in the same levels – a range of artefacts similar to those we usually see in the Aurignacian, made by Homo sapiens. Then, in 1979, at the French site of Saint-Césaire, a Neanderthal skeleton was excavated, and the archaeologists there associated it with the Châtelperronian level.
Since Neanderthal remains are found together with symbolically laden ornaments and objects, this must mean that Neanderthals made them, implying once more that Neanderthals too had symbolic or complex behaviour …
… I think the evidence increasingly shows that Neanderthals were more capable than previously thought … The weight of evidence now suggests that if there was cultural transmission it probably occurred in both directions, and that the earliest evidence for the beginnings of complex behaviour in Europe was prior to the widespread arrival of Homo sapiens. Dating is clearly crucial …
… The bitter debate about whether Neanderthals and modern humans met and interacted archaeologically has abated to a large degree principally because of the discovery of interbreeding. If our groups were interbreeding, then cultural transfer – the exchange of ideas, thoughts and language – may well also have been happening.
… Our understanding of the crucial period of late human evolution, from around 200,000 to 50,000 years ago has transformed fundamentally in little more than a decade. Fresh excavations and the application of new and improved scientific methods, particularly ancient genomics, has shown us that the world before us is far more complex than we could have ever thought possible. In 2010 the Neanderthal Genome Project revealed for the first time that we had interbred with Neanderthals … Imagine the opportunities inherent in meeting a completely new group of people who were doing things a little bit differently, more creatively, perhaps better than your own group.
We have also seen that the idea of a single group of successful modern humans sweeping out of Africa and rapidly replacing all other groups is unlikely. Ultimately it did happen – we are the only remaining humans on the planet, after all – but the entire process seems to have been much more subtle and drawn out than we previously thought … [The] DNA evidence [indicates] to me that the most parsimonious reading of the accumulated evidence thus far is for a mosaic of human groups, geographically separated but meeting and interbreeding occasionally …
The Sources:
William Golding, The Inheritors, Faber and Faber, 1955
David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past, Oxford 2018
Tom Higham, The World Before Us: How Science is Revealing a New Story of Our Human Origins, Penguin Random House 2021
Further Reading:
Readers of Social Science Files will recall that Immanuel Kant recommended reading novels to form mental ‘pictures’ — like Golding’s ‘Lok’ — of inaccessible lives one is endeavoring to study ‘scientifically’. I recommend the three novels in a series called A Time Odyssey [Time’s Eye 2003, Sunstorm 2005, and Firstborn 2007] written by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter which maintains a Neanderthal dimension alongside all human imperial, industrial, and AI history into a distant future across earth’s continents and cosmological planetary systems. A ripping yarn of so-called ‘hard’ science fiction in which the sciences are to the forefront. The audio editions are read by John Lee who also performs Bolaño’ 2666, Conrad’s Nostromo, and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, all of which, arguably, are important for a social science perspective.
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