Monday, January 7, 2019

Cavemen Rock, Part VIII: Excalibur, or Homo heidelbergensis




Hi everybody, welcome back to Office Hours with the Brofessor: The Show that’s Proudly Irrelevant.  Today we have Cavemen Rock, Part VIII: The Quest for Excalibur!

Well, you’re probably thinking, I wasn’t expecting Bro to make that connection!  What does Arthurian Legend have to do with cavemen?  Well, if you’re a paleoanthropology nut like I am, then you already know!  If you don’t know what I’m referencing, don’t google it yet—that would ruin the surprise.

H. heidelbergensis

To start with, let’s ask RZA for the keys to the Time Traveling Elevator again, and go back this time to between 600 and 300 KYA.  Homo antecessor, whose, shall we say, atavistic behavior we discussed last time, has developed into—or been replaced by—the larger-brained Homo heidelbergensis, named of course for the German city of Heidelberg, where its fossils were first found.  Of course, as I like to pretend, the reality is that Heidelberg was named after him! 

Now, the line of succession here with H. antecessor is a little fuzzy.  Was H. antecessor ancestral to H. heidelbergensis, or was H. heidelbergensis a separate line that arose from ergectus and replaced H. antecessor?  This is a matter of heated debate among the approximately seven people who care.

At any rate, by 600 KYA or so, we see H. antecessor replaced generally throughout Europe by H. heidelbergensis.  Due to the amount of material of this period that we have from Europe, we’re focusing on this part of the world right now.  That doesn’t mean interesting things weren’t happening elsewhere.  In Africa and Asia all sorts of crazy stuff was going on, much of which has just been discovered.  As we do more work in these parts of the world, surely more cool stuff will show itself!  And as for what we have seen from Africa and Asia during this period, we’ll cover that in future episodes.  For the moment, however, we’re focusing on Europe.

One thing that I really like about these heidelbergensis guys is that they were some of the first archaic hominins to look reasonably like us up close.  Remember, if you saw an ergectus from a distance, you’d recognize it as vaguely humanlike, but up close you would change your mind.  On the other hand, with H. heidelbergensis, you’d have to look much closer to see differences.  For one thing, H. heidelbergensis was the first human ancestor to be as tall as us.  On average, they stood at five feet seven, which is comparable to modern humans. For another, they, along with later H. antecessor, had reached the end of the process of body hair loss, which means that they might have been hairy, but no more so than my uncle Jim.  Everyone has an uncle Jim.  He’s the guy who has his wife shave his back every week.

So let’s see what these guys looked like.  We have a wonderful variety of individuals from H. heidelbergensis remains, as I’ll discuss shortly, so we get to see a good variety of variation.  In fact, we have enough data to put together whole family portraits:


By Kennis and Kennis


By Mauricio Anton

            These are two of my favorite pictures ever.  They’re so wonderful.  Of course the individuals these reconstructions are based on probably didn’t all live at the same time, but that’s not the point, doofus.  How wonderful it is to see them together in a community, and look at them as they looked at each other!  There is something almost mystical here.  These are the first human ancestors where I feel as though I could look into their eyes and see my fellow man, my brother or sister in the Romance of the Ages.  When I look at these pictures, even more than other reconstructions, I feel like I’m looking through a window in time.  I would love to hang out with these guys and be friends with them.  And I say “friends” deliberately—I can be friends with my cat or dog, but it’s not the same thing as being friends with another human.  But when I look at these pictures I have to imagine that if these guys and I got to know each other, we could actually forge something approximating a human friendship.

How did they behave?

            Could we be bros with H. heidelbergensis?  You might roll your eyes at the absurdity of this question, but it is an important one.  No matter how much we love our pets, our bonds with them are intrinsically different from our bonds with other people.  Could we have made a genuine human connection with these creatures? 

            First of all, H. heidelbergensis was not behaviorally modern.  There is no evidence for art, symbolism, religion or any of the marks of a behaviorally modern society.  They probably could not speak to the extent that we can.  Still, they were certainly no dummies.  They stood on the shoulders of their H. erectus and H. antecessor forebears, who passed onto them the persistence hunting strategy, the Acheulean hand-axe, and the control—but not necessarily manufacture—of fire(2):


If they practiced persistence hunting, it follows that they knew how animal footprints worked.  That’s huge, because to understand how footprints work necessitates an implicit understanding of cause and effect.  That’s an incredibly complex mental process, and just like the pre-planned nature of Acheulean hand-axes, it would’ve taken thousands upon agonizing thousands of generations for everyone to get on board with it.  But by the time of heidelbergensis, they had been axe-planning and persistence hunting for a good million years.  Furthermore, the advantages of hand axes, persistence hunting, and their requisite cognitive abilities suggest that once developed, they would present an evolutionary advantage and spread quickly.

            Following the premise that, having had a million years’ trial run in fire, knapping, hunting, and fire, it is safe to assume that H. heidelbergensis would have had the cognitive ability to reliably and consistently:

·         plan outcomes (make hand axes);

·         anticipate cause and effect (follow tracks), and;

·         follow step-by-step processes (control fire).

Each of these abilities represents “a giant leap for mankind”: a successful jump over the yawning chasm between man and beast.  If H. heidelbergensis was able to perform these functions, he would finally, definitively, be more mentally like us than like a chimpanzee.  So I think it is safe to say that yes, you could forge a genuine human-to-human friendship with these creatures.  That is not, again, to say they are “behaviorally modern”.  H. heidelbergensis probably couldn’t speak like we do, or learn to read, or write a symphony.  But the groundwork was there, so I think that even if they couldn’t understand human friendship, they did feel it.

            Now, why am I waxing poetic about these guys?  After all, at a date of 400-ish KYA, these guys are still halfway between us and those wacky cannibals that we met last time.  Fair enough, but we do have evidence of something very deep down in H. heidelbergensis that resonates with us today.  It is possible—don’t get your briefs in a knot, I said possible, not certain—that somewhere around this time, H. heidelbergensis caught a glimpse, faint though it may have been, of the spiritual.

Atapuerca Findings

So let’s head back to Atapuerca, the mountain that isn’t really a mountain.  It is here that we find the MOST METAL PALEOANTHROPOLOGICAL SITE IN THE WORLD: La Sima de los Huesos, which is Spanish for…


THE PIT…OF BONES!!!!

Isn’t that name badass?  Earlier on I talked about how it’s a shame that there are lots of good Viking metal bands, but no caveman metal bands, at least as far as I know.  Well, if you’re starting that band, I’ve got your name right here.  Take it, it’s yours, just give me a shout-out at the Grammys.

Anyway, the Pit of Bones gives us a wonderful glimpse of this H. heidelbergensis population.  There’s a wide range of individuals that we can study, of both sexes, and of a variety of ages.  We can also find clues about their lives, just like with our H. ergectus finds.  One poor schlub sustained an injury on his face that healed oddly, rendering him goofy-looking for the rest of his life (1):


Fortunately, he was a good listener and had a really sweet personality, so he could still get dates.

But even more interesting, to me anyway, than the physical remains are the implications of their placement here.  If we find a pit full of H. heidelbergensis, it raises the possibility of these remains having been put there on purpose.  Could we be looking at an early form of deliberate burial?  If so, what are the implications for their behavior?  Could we even infer the presence of primitive religious beliefs and rituals?  If not, what are some other possible explanations?

For modern humans, the way we dispose of our dead is a practice that varies by religious or cultural tradition.  Whatever the method, however, every culture has some way of doing this.  Evolutionarily, this must have emerged because dead bodies bring disease and dangerous scavengers.  For modern humans, however, treatment of the dead has become infused with ritual, taboo, and beliefs about the afterlife.  It is therefore natural to jump to the conclusion of “this must be evidence of a funeral”.  We must, however, detach ourselves from our modern cognitive abilities and look at the Pit of Bones from the point of view of H. heidelbergensis.  There is no clear evidence of religious belief—or, indeed, abstract thought of any kind—at this time depth.  Even if the bodies were left there deliberately, he conclusion is unavoidable that H. heidelbergensis was not depositing of his dead here for ritual reasons, but rather simply because a giant hole in the ground is a convenient place to dispose of dead bodies.  Doing something with dead bodies does not necessarily imply the existence of religion, despite modern sensibilities.

And that would probably be agreed upon, if it were not for one important find.  As archaeologists dug through the pit, they made an amazing discovery:


HOLY MOLEY JUST LOOK AT THAT HAND AXE.  THAT IS A NICE HAND AXE.

            Not only is it well-crafted, but it’s aesthetically beautiful too.  It’s made of red quartzite, which would produce a beautiful sparkling effect in the sun.  What’s more, the material appears not to have been sourced locally, which means that it was brought from some distance away (I remember reading that somewhere, but can’t find the source.  Sorry).  These items took a lot of effort to make, and were the difference between life and death for their users.  Scientists, as a nod to its beautiful workmanship, have given it the name of Excalibur.

            Looking at this frankly amazing piece, one has to wonder what it was doing at the bottom of…


THE PIT…OF BONES!!!!

            You almost don’t want to say this, because it would be such an incredible development, but…could it have been left there on purpose?  Are we seeing in Excalibur the first rumblings of humanity’s belief in the afterlife?

            I know, I know, it sounds crazy.  Besides, it could’ve just been that some guy was exploring the cave, and he fell down the pit along with his trusty hand axe.  I acknowledge that this is possible, and perhaps even probable.

            Still, looking at the exceptional quality of this hand axe brings to mind the haunting possibility that we could be looking at some kind of funeral offering.  What could this have looked like?  Let’s get in the Wu-Tang time-traveling elevator and find out:

The Emergence of “Shouldness”

             It was 400KYA.  A tribe of H. heidelbergensis lived in the forests and plains of what is now northern Spain.  They hunted animals like elk and wooly rhinoceros by following their tracks, running them down, and killing them with spears:

This spear, for example, was found in Germany and dated to 400,000 years ago.

These spears were mostly sharpened sticks but they may have worked out the idea of sticking a hand-axe on the end.  Hand-axes were extremely important items, and to be good at making hand-axes was to be evolutionarily successful.  They had no language, and communicated perhaps through onomatopoeic vocal calls, or occasional utterances of isolated proto-words.  They had no music or art, but they could recognize, and liked producing, audible rhythms and visual patterns without understanding why.  They felt, but had no concept of, love.  They valued courage, intelligence, and altruism, again without having any comprehension of these abstract ideas.  Behaviors like hugging, waving, and hand-clapping probably existed among them and were done in specific times and places.  They had also realized that dead bodies attract scavengers, so they had a habit of disposing of their dead:


Art: Mauricio Anton

The most convenient place was a big pit, which was found at the back of a cave where nobody lived.  It was here that they habitually deposited bodies, thereby avoiding scavengers and pestilence:


A scale model of the Pit of Bones…in Lego!

            After a few generations, this habit became so ingrained that even if it would’ve been convenient to do so elsewhere, they were still disposing of the dead in this place.  It had become a tradition in the community.  It was the place of death, where children placed their fathers, and were eventually placed themselves.  They may have had some vague idea of their own mortality, and an idea that they too would someday drop into that great darkness.  That they mourned their dead is virtually certain, since mourning behavior is present in both humans and chimpanzees(4).  Could it be that certain specific actions were performed, in the course of mourning, in association with the disposal of the body?  Perhaps certain vocal calls were made that were exclusive to disposal of the dead.  Perhaps bodies were always disposed of by the same member of the community.  Perhaps even a primitive taboo had developed wherein this place, the place of death, was avoided by the living. 

Finally, one day, somebody was disposing a body, and it just seemed right to toss his friend’s hand-axe down with him:


Whoever did this wasn’t sure why, but he had the feeling that he needed to do it, the feeling of shouldness.  He felt that he should dispose of the dead in this place.  He should make the designated ululations at the time of death and when carrying the body, ululations that he should not make at other times.  And he had a deep, gut feeling that he should leave the hand-axe with its owner.  Perhaps—just perhaps—this feeling was developed enough that he could conceptualize some idea that his friend’s death was not really the end, and left him his favorite tool in that hope.

But given the isolation of this occurrence, it does not seem that the community was consistently depositing grave goods with the dead, and thus it seems that they did not consistently have the cognitive ability to sense the need for them.  But one day, somebody was getting rid of his loved one, and he thought something like, “Wherever he’s going, I should leave him this.”

There’s that should again.  The shouldness that this individual felt was the first stirring of the human conscience, of morality, and of religion.  That individual stood, though he did not know it, at the precipice of perhaps the most important development in humanity’s behavioral evolution thus far observed.  If you are a theologian looking for a date to the Fall of Man, I would put it around here someplace.  Shouldness is not mustness, and necessarily gives us free will, the option always being there not to do as you should.  A sense of shouldness, therefore, is a prerequisite for the ability to sin.  It is in this sense, demonstrated by a primitive funeral offering, that we are seeing the first stirring of the conscience, that noblest of Man’s faculties.

Now before you neckbearded basement trolls rev up your keyboards, I’m not saying that this is definitely evidence of funeral practices, or even of deliberate burial.  I’m just saying that it could be, and wouldn’t it be cool if it was.  I don’t know.

So this, I think, is the verdict: we still could not interact with H. heidelbergensis the same way we interact with each other.  But we almost could.  While they could not speak, perhaps their nonverbal communication was humanlike.  Important physical actions at the core of our being, like hand-clapping, pointing, or whistling, would have had some meaning to them.  They probably laughed and cried like we do, for the same reasons.  And I believe there was that shouldness which we call a conscience.  So on the big stuff, we connect with these creatures.  We have crossed the behavioral Rubicon, and have by this time almost certainly had embarked on the path to behavioral modernity.  By this time if not earlier, our ancestors were behaving more like us than like our primate cousins.

Before I go, there’s one thing I want to leave you guys with: under the direction of the man, the myth, the legend, the towering badass Svante Paabo and his team of science nerds, we can now study scraps of H. heidelbergensis DNA, potentially giving us more clues about their story.  I would be interested to see whether this genetic data could give us any clues to their behavior.

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