But finally, between fifty and a hundred
thousand years ago, people who thought, spoke, and acted exactly like us were
spreading across the world. This brings us to a period called the Upper
Paleolithic, in which modern human behavior can be inferred from archaeological
remains. During the Upper Paleolithic, people spread out around the world,
either displacing or assimilating all other Homo species in their wake. These
ancient species, known as archaic hominins, include not only Neanderthals, Homo
heidelbergensis, and other species already discussed, but some surprising new
species that have only recently been unearthed and studied; we know,
furthermore, that at least some of these stragglers managed to hold on until a
startlingly recent date, suggesting that perhaps even more surprising
discoveries await science.
Behaviorally modern humans, henceforth “we” or “us”, seemed to have arisen in Africa, and by 50,000 years ago had spread to Asia, Europe, and Australia. Throughout this series, we have been doing an interesting exercise: imagining our interactions, as people, with the creatures we encounter. Thus far, every species we have encountered has come up wanting, despite increasingly frequent flashes of pseudo-modern behavior. But finally, we can say definitively that, by fifty thousand years ago, there were people living who we could interact with as other people—we would be able to talk to them, befriend them, go to war with them, and marry them. There was no apparent cognitive or behavioral disparity between us today and us fifty thousand years ago. How do we know this? The intricacy of tools suggests critical thinking, innovation, and the ability to teach skills using language. Meanwhile, the Upper Paleolithic sees an explosion of creative expression; art becomes not only ubiquitous but beautifully made. Here are a few of my favorite pieces from the period:
I don’t know about you guys, but the cheekbones remind me of Darth Vader’s
helmet.
Conclusion
Species 1: Behaviorally Modern Humans
Behaviorally modern humans, henceforth “we” or “us”, seemed to have arisen in Africa, and by 50,000 years ago had spread to Asia, Europe, and Australia. Throughout this series, we have been doing an interesting exercise: imagining our interactions, as people, with the creatures we encounter. Thus far, every species we have encountered has come up wanting, despite increasingly frequent flashes of pseudo-modern behavior. But finally, we can say definitively that, by fifty thousand years ago, there were people living who we could interact with as other people—we would be able to talk to them, befriend them, go to war with them, and marry them. There was no apparent cognitive or behavioral disparity between us today and us fifty thousand years ago. How do we know this? The intricacy of tools suggests critical thinking, innovation, and the ability to teach skills using language. Meanwhile, the Upper Paleolithic sees an explosion of creative expression; art becomes not only ubiquitous but beautifully made. Here are a few of my favorite pieces from the period:
Engraved ostrich shells from Diepkloof,
South Africa (60 KYA):
(1)
The Oldest Extant Naturalistic Art (from Sulawesi, 44 KYA)
(2)
Lowenmensch “Lion Man” (Germany, 35-40 KYA)
(3)
Animal + Genitals Painting, Chauvet Cave, France (30-35 KYA)
(4)
THE FRENCH: BIZARRE, PRETENTIOUS ABSTRACT ART SINCE 30,000 BC
At the same
time, this is only what has survived over tens of thousands of years. During
this time people had other aesthetic experiences, such as music, storytelling,
and ceremony that have not survived to the present. How I would love to meet the
people who made these works, and be able to hear their stories and listen to
their music! Their lives, now long gone beneath the surging tide of ages, were
just as rich and dramatic as our own.
Species 2: Post-Contact Neanderthals
“OAAAAAAAAA!”
That’s a quote from one of my
favorite movies, “Ao: The Last Hunter”. Good movie. It’s a slightly cheesy look
at what interactions between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens might have been like
during this period. Check it out! Be warned, there is a pretty gross caveman sex
scene. Neanderthals thought we were pretty cool. Or at least, they thought our
whole “culture” thing was pretty cool. As soon as they made contact with us, we
start finding more and more tantalizing hints that they borrowed elements of
true culture from Homo sapiens, such as scratching geometric patterns into cave
floors (5) and decorating themselves with feathers—black was their favorite
color (6). Furthermore, the oldest known cave paintings, dating from over 60
KYA, were Neanderthal in origin (7):
We also have neanderthal paintings of seals, apparently the local food source,
that are roughly concurrent with the buffalo painting above (43kya):
It seems, therefore, that interaction with behaviorally modern people brought
Neanderthals into something approximating behavioral modernity. Could we, and
did we, really interact with them the same way we interact with one another?
Sadly, we will never know. BUT. Another thing that Neanderthals did when they
met us is make babies. Yes, with us. Which meant, if you’re at all familiar with
the process of baby manufacture, that at least some humans and Neanderthals
actually found one another attractive. That’s right: humans and Neanderthals
could fall in love:
Amazing artwork from Tom Bjorklund (8).
Tell me Neanderthal girls aren’t cute!
That’s right, you can’t!
We know we had children together because, having
sequenced the Neanderthal genome, geneticists have located Neanderthal DNA in
the genetic makeup of many modern people—myself included!
Species 3: Relict H.
erectus on Java
Before we get into the recently-discovered species, let’s
mention someone else we’re already familiar with. On the island of Java in
modern Indonesia, long outlasting the other members of their species, a relict
population of Homo erectus survived until as late as 108,000 years ago (9), at
the same time behavioral modernity was emerging among H. sapiens. Once spanning
all across Afro-Eurasia, Erectus had now been relegated to a tiny toehold in the
rainforests of Java. This makes H. erectus by far the most successful Homo
species, with a tenure of 1.8 million years stretching back beyond the old days
of Grandpa George (Homo georgicus). That’s almost seven times the age of our
species, and seventeen times the age of behavioral modernity.
It’s entirely possible that behaviorally modern humans may have even run into
these guys as they migrated along the Indian Ocean coast, which would be a very
interesting interaction to see. How much of our culture could Erectus have
picked up? Could we have communicated with them at all? If there’s one thing
Erectus loved, it’s symmetrical hand-axes, and we know that even these had some
degree of aesthetics to them, not least in their striking symmetry. In some
admittedly non-Indonesian cases we see the incorporation of naturally occurring
fossils, or hand-axes too large to be practically useful. When I was at the Met
in New York, I had the opportunity to get a load of this absolute unit:
Let’s also not forget, these are the guys who made the Trinil shell doodles.
Would that potential for aesthetics have been enough for them to learn language,
or develop a truly human culture, once they came into contact with us? Finally,
what was their ultimate fate? Could they have assimilated into our communities,
or had children with us? Did they die of our diseases, get outcompeted for
resources, or were they so different from us that we simply killed them on
sight?
Species 4: Denisovans
Now we’re getting into archaic species that have
just been discovered. Denisovans, named for Denisova cave in Siberia, were
cousins of the Neanderthals that lived in northern and eastern Asia—so far their
presence has also been confirmed in Tibet. Touchingly, the latter find is
accompanied by the hand-and footprints of Denisovan children (10), like you
might see a child’s handprint in concrete today.
The Siberian finds, which yielded some bone fragments, have given us enough DNA
to know that these creatures were a separate species from both us and
Neanderthals, but also that they contributed to the genes of some people living
today. Amazingly, the people who carry their genes are not from Siberia, as you
might expect, but are instead the Indigenous people of Australia, New Guinea,
and parts of the South Pacific (11). This, I think, goes to show how much we
still have to learn about these fascinating prehistoric migrations. Also germane
to the discussion is that they were apparently making abstract art, as these
100,000 year-old etchings from Northern China show (12):
Here is an artist’s interpretation of a teenage Denisovan girl whose remains
were found in Siberia, from the PBS series “Eons”. Also worthy of note is that
she’s also Neanderthal; her DNA tells us that her Dad was a Neanderthal, and her
mom was a Denisovan.
(13)
And now, a shout out to some cool modern kids who may have Denisovans among
their ancestors:
Species 5: Homo floresiensis
Speaking of the South Seas, this
is a relatively new species found in Indonesia that turned the
paleoanthropological community upside-down. You might have read about these guys
before—they’re the “hobbits” of the prehistoric world, who due to isolation on a
remote island stood only three feet tall.
(14) Here’s another image that I wish I had the source for, but don’t. Sorry. I
think it’s from National Geographic.
They also hunted Komodo Dragons, which is awfully badass in my book, especially
if you're three feet tall:
Now how does this happen? If you’re stuck on an island for hundreds of thousands
of years, you gradually get smaller, since there are fewer resources. Compare,
for instance, Shetland ponies. Now here’s where things get interesting: on the
Indonesian island of Flores, where these guys were discovered, there have been
stories told of weird little caveman dudes living in the jungle and stealing
farmers’ crops…and sure enough, here are skeletons of weird little caveman
dudes. Could these stories have been grounded in reality? Could a relict
population of H. floresiensis have survived long enough for the modern
population to remember them? Now, if you’re a real scientist, you’re probably
rolling your eyes at my pseudoscientific speculation…but you have to wonder!
Species 6: Homo luzonensis
Not much to say about these guys yet, except that
they lived in the Philippines, and probably used boats to get there (15).
Species 7: Homo naledi
Yet another species just discovered in the last few
years, this time in South Africa. These guys are interesting because of how
ancient-looking they are. There’s a great Nova special, Dawn of Humanity, that
discusses this. They almost seem more like H. habilis or even
Australopithecus…and yet, here they are, roughly 250,000 years ago, or roughly
the same age as our own species. Huh. Scientists weren’t sure what they were
seeing with these guys. They had small brains, and were apparently designed for
climbing trees and rocks rather than running—which is a big divergence from
pretty much everybody since the emergence of H. erectus.
Despite their apparent atavism, they seemed, amazingly, to intentionally bury
their dead. The cave where they were found was so inaccessible that it required
special expert spelunkers to access; and yet, the skeletons of multiple H.
naledi individuals were found here—too many for it to have been an accident.
This suggests that the place was some kind of tomb, or ritual repository for
corpses. So with these guys, not only are we seeing an very ancient-looking
species at a very recent date, but they’re practicing the very modern behavior
of deliberate burial.
(16)
(17)
(18)
Species 8: The Red Deer Cave People
Last but not least, we have the Red
Deer Cave people, from what is now Guilin, Southwest China, right next door to
Guizhou, where I used to live:
Anyway, the Red Deer Cave people are the most recent pre-modern human
relatives that we know of, although they may technically represent a hybrid
group with both archaic and anatomically modern ancestors (19). The remains we
have currently are astonishingly recent—only 14,000 years old. By comparison,
the last Neanderthals probably lived around 35,000 years ago. This is a big
deal. Scientists are debating right now if they really are another species, hybrids, or
just weird-looking H. sapiens. But if either of the former two possibilities is the case, it would mean
that we shared the planet with our non-H. sapiens cousins far more recently than
anyone has heretofore dared to imagine.
Conclusion
So, the Red Deer Cave people
bring us to the date 14,000 years ago, or as I like to say, 14 KYA. Following
their passing—pending further discoveries—Homo sapiens is the last hominin*
standing. In geological terms, we have passed the Last Glacial Maximum (20),
which means that from now on, the ice sheets are receding into what we have
today.
Following the last glacial maximum, we have the planet, along with human
culture, gradually undergoing a trajectory into what it is today. The
paleolithic, which was characterized by big-game hunting, phased into the
Mesolithic, characterized by small-game hunting. This transition happened
between 14 and 10KYA. The Neolithic began between 10 and 7 KYA, when people
started the practice of sedentary agriculture, in places like the Near East and
New Guinea, and ended with the development of metal technology. Around this time
came the emergence of true civilization, with urban centers by 6kya and the
written word by 5kya. Of course, for some remote hunter-gatherer groups, the
Mesolithic never really ended until modern times. Even today, in some parts of
the world, there are people who can remember the first time they or anyone in
their culture saw metal.
To finish our journey through the days of cavemen, I’d
like to draw attention to a find from Jordan, dated to 14kya and therefore
contemporary with the Red Deer Cave People. Here, associated with what
archaeologists call the Natufian culture, we find the remains of an oven,
complete with 14,000-year-old bread crumbs and even traces of mustard seeds
(21):
Which is great, because I like to spread mustard on my bread too. I’m in good
company. Although there may be other evidence of cereal grains before this
point, this find is most significant to me because here we’re finding bread
crumbs, with a condiment still used today, that shared the planet with archaic
hominins. Crazy stuff, and a good place to finish our series as it really marks
the segue into the settled agricultural way of life that has been predominant in
human history to the modern age. *hominin=bipedal hominids**
**hominid=great ape
Sources:
1. https://www.pnas.org/content/107/14/6180
2.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24432604-300-44000-year-old-hunting-scene-is-earliest-painted-story-ever-found/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-man
4. https://www.bradshawfoundation.com/chauvet/venus_sorcerer.php
4. https://www.bradshawfoundation.com/chauvet/venus_sorcerer.php
5.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-28967746
6.
https://www.pnas.org/content/108/10/3888
7.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/neanderthals-cave-art-humans-evolution-science
8. https://www.facebook.com/tombjorklundart
9.
http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/last-homo-erectus-07934.html
10.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095927321006174?via%3Dihub
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denisovan
12.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2210461-oldest-denisovan-art-discovered-on-100000-year-old-bone-fragments/
13. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y20pXB20Mog
14.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/feb/21/hobbit-rewriting-history-human-race
15.
https://www.u-bordeaux.com/News/A-new-species-of-human-Homo-luzonensis-discovered-in-the-Philippines
16.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/09/150915-humans-death-burial-anthropology-Homo-naledi/
17. https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-latest-on-homo-naledi
18.
http://www.early-man.com/homo-naledi.html
19.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Deer_Cave_people
20.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Maximum
21.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/07/24/631583427/14-000-year-old-piece-of-bread-rewrites-the-history-of-baking-and-farming?t=1640114496180
