The Life of Early Homo sapiens

Language

Few things set Homo sapiens apart from the rest of the animal world more starkly than their use of language. Although the beginnings and development of language are controversial, scholars agree that the cognitive abilities involved in language development marked an evolutionary milestone. Some earlier hominins could express themselves by grunting, but natural language (the use of sounds to make words that convey meaning to others) is unique to modern humans. The development of language required a large brain and complex cognitive organization to create word groups that would convey symbolic meaning. Verbal communication required an ability to think abstractly and to communicate abstractions. Language was a huge breakthrough, because individuals could teach words and ideas to neighbors and offspring. Language thus enhanced the ability to accumulate knowledge that could be transmitted across both space and time.

Biological research has demonstrated that humans can make and process many more primary and distinctive sounds, called phonemes, than other animals can. Whereas a human being can utter fifty phonemes, an ape can form only twelve. Also, humans can process sounds more quickly than other primates can. With fifty phonemes it is possible to create more than 100,000 words; by arranging those words in different sequences and developing rules in language, individuals can express countless subtle and complex meanings. Recent research suggests that use of complex languages occurred about 100,000 years ago and that the nearest approximation to humanity’s earliest language existing today belongs to two African peoples, the !Kung of southern Africa and the Hadza of Tanzania. These peoples make a clicking sound by dropping the tongue down from the roof of the mouth and exhaling. As humans moved out of Africa and spread around the globe, they expanded their original language into nineteen language families, from which all of the world’s languages then evolved. (See Map 1.3.) It was the development of language and the cultural forms discussed later in this section that allowed Homo sapiens to engage dynamically with their environments.

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Map 1.3 is titled, “Original Language Family Groups.” Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene come from the Alaskan region of North America. Amerind comes from Central America. Afro-Asiatic comes from North Africa, Niger-Kordofanian comes from West Africa, Nilo-Saharan comes from northern East Africa, and Khosian comes from southernmost Africa. Uralic-Yukaghir comes from Scandinavia, and Indo-Hittite comes from northern mainland Europe. Caucasians comes from the area around Turkey. Dravidian comes from southern India. Altaic comes from north Asia, Chukchi-Kamchatkan from northeast Asia; Sino-Tibetan, Miao-Yao, and Austroasiatic from China; Daic from Southeast Asia; Indo-Pacific from the area of Papua New Guinea; and Australian from Australia.

MAP 1.3 | Original Language Family Groups

Hunting and Gathering

Although these early humans were developing language skills that distinguished them from their hominin relatives, like their predecessors they remained hunters and gatherers until around 12,000 years ago (for almost 95 percent of our existence). As late as 1500 CE, as much as 15 percent of the world’s population still lived by hunting and gathering. Early homo sapiens hunted animals, fished, and foraged for wild berries, nuts, fruit, and grains, rather than planting crops, vines, or trees. Even today hunting and gathering societies endure, although only in the most marginal locations—often at the edge of deserts. Researchers consider the present-day San peoples of southern Africa as an isolated remnant continuing their traditional hunting and gathering modes of life. Modern scholars use the San to reveal how men and women must have lived hundreds of thousands of years ago. The fact that hominin men and women (going back to Homo erectus and habilis and beyond) survived as hunters and gatherers for millions of years, that early Homo sapiens also lived this way, and that a few contemporary communities still forage for food suggests the powerful attractions of this way of life. Hunters and gatherers could find enough food in about three hours of foraging each day, thus affording time for other pursuits such as relaxation, interaction, and friendly competitions with other members of their bands. Scholars believe that these small bands were relatively egalitarian compared with the more male-dominated societies that arose later. It is traditionally assumed that men specialized in hunting and women specialized in gathering and child-rearing. Some scholars believe that women even made a larger contribution and had high status because the dietary staples of the community were cereals and fruits, whose harvesting and preparation were likely women’s responsibility. The recent find in the Peruvian Andes of a biological female buried 9,000 years ago with all the accoutrements of a hunter—projectile points, hide scrapers, meat chopping tools—has encouraged scholars to reexamine previously excavated evidence in the Americas to see if researchers relied on biases about sex-linked roles when identifying males and females. The result suggests that anywhere from one-third to one-half of hunters may have been biologically female. There is clearly much more to be discovered, and much to be unlearned, about gendered roles and gender expression in hunting and gathering societies.

Paintings, Sculpture, and Music

The ability to draw allowed Homo sapiens to understand their environment, to bond among their kin groups (groups related by blood ties), and to articulate important mythologies. Accomplished artwork from this era has been found across Afro-Eurasia. For instance, in a deep cave at Altamira in Spain more than two dozen life-size figures of bison, horses, and wild bulls, all painted in vivid red, black, yellow, and brown, are arranged across the ceiling of the huge chamber. More than 50,000 similarly stunning works of art have been found in caves across Europe and elsewhere. The images on cave walls accumulated in some instances over a period of 25,000 years, and they changed little in that time.

The earliest figurative art now would appear to be found in a cave in Sulawesi. It features three wild pigs, although two of them are quite damaged, and two handprints, all drawn in reddish/purplish ocher. Uranium-thorium dating of the mineral deposits overlaying the paintings suggests they are 45,500 years old, more than 5,000 years older than the next-oldest cave painting, a cow in nearby Borneo. Like the Sulawesi pigs and Bornean cow, the subjects of most ancient art are game—animals that early humans would have considered powerful symbols. The artists rendered these animals in such a way that the natural contours of the cave wall defined a bulging belly or an eye socket. Many images appear more than once, suggesting that they are works from several occasions or by several artists. And some, like the horses and lions of Chauvet cave in France from more than 30,000 years ago, appear in overlapping, layered images that might have evoked a sense of motion, especially when viewed by flickering torchlight in the dark of a cave. The remarkably few human images show hunters, naked females, or dancing males. There are also many handprints made by blowing paint around a hand placed on the cave wall, or by dipping hands in paint and then pressing them to the wall. There are even abstract symbols such as circles, wavy lines, and checkerboards; often these appear at places of transition in the caves.

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A Paleolithic flute made of animal bone. The flute has four holes placed at an equal distance apart along its length.

Scholars have rejected an initial theory that these paintings were decorative, for the deep caves were not homes and had no natural light to render the images visible. Perhaps the images helped the early humans define themselves as separate from other parts of nature. Alternatively, they might have been the work of powerful shamans, individuals believed to hold special powers to understand and control the forces of the cosmos. The subjects and the style of the paintings are similar to images engraved or painted on rocks by some hunting and gathering societies living today, especially the San and the !Kung peoples of southern Africa. In those societies, paintings mark important places of ritual: shamans make them during trances while mediating with the spirit world on behalf of their communities.

Paintings were not the only form of artistic expression for early humans. Archaeologists have also unearthed small sculptures of animals shaped out of bone and stone that are even older than the paintings. Most famous are figurines of rotund, and perhaps pregnant, women. Statuettes like the so-called Venus of Willendorf, found in Austria, demonstrate that successful reproduction was a very important theme. Other sculptures represent animals in postures of movement or at rest.

The caves of early men and women also echoed with the strains of music. In 2008, archaeologists working in southwestern Germany discovered a hollowed-out bone flute with five openings that they dated to approximately 35,000 years ago, roughly the same time that humans began to occupy this region. When researchers put the flute to musical tests, they also concluded that the instrument was capable of making harmonic sounds comparable to those of modern-day flutes.

Only Homo sapiens had the cognitive abilities to produce the abundant sculptures and drawings of this era, thus leaving a permanent mark on the symbolic landscape of human development. Such visual expressions marked the dawn of human culture and a consciousness of men’s and women’s place in the world. Symbolic activity of this sort enabled humans to make sense of themselves, nature, and the relationship between humanity and nature. That relationship with nature—which had remained static for hundreds of thousands of years of hunting and gathering—would change with the agricultural revolution.