THE LIFE OF EARLY HOMO SAPIENS

Hunting and Gathering

Like their hominin predecessors, modern humans (Homo sapiens) were hunters and gatherers, though they were more advanced than earlier hominins because of their agility, their ability to move quickly into favorable locations, and their superior intelligence. Still, they subsisted as hunters and gatherers until around 12,000 years ago. They 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, mainly driven there by peoples living in settled societies. For example, researchers consider the present-day San peoples of southern Africa an isolated hunting and gathering remnant continuing their traditional mode of life. Modern scholars use the San to reveal how men and women must have lived hundreds of thousands of years ago. As late as 1500, hunters and gatherers occupied a third of the globe, including all of Australia, most of North America, and large tracts of South America, Africa, and North and Northeast Asia, and constituted as much as 15 percent of the world’s population.

The fact that hominin men and women 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 3 hours of foraging each day, thus affording time for other pursuits, such as relaxation, interaction, and friendly competitions with other members of their band. Scholars believe that these small bands were relatively egalitarian, and one scholar described foragers as “the original affluent society,” producing much and wanting little (Sahlins, p. 85). Men specialized in hunting and women in gathering and child-rearing, but men and women contributed equally to the band’s welfare. Some scholars believe that women even made a larger contribution than men did and enjoyed high status because the dietary staples were cereals and fruits, whose harvesting and preparation were likely women’s responsibility.

An extraordinary recent find of 10,000-year-old human fossil remains on the shore of Lake Turkana in Kenya provides an answer to a question that has intrigued researchers but had defied resolution for lack of evidence: Were human beings, living in what seventeenth- and eighteenth-century intellectuals termed a “state of nature,” peace-loving individuals, or—like their closest relatives, the chimpanzees—were they violent beings capable of carrying out warlike raids against other hunters and gatherers? Researchers found that ten of the twelve relatively intact skeletons had died violent deaths, and the partial remains of fifteen others suggested a massacre. Scholars at the site concluded that in this incident—the only such incident known so far—a group of hunters and gatherers were the victims of “inter-group violence” (“Inter-Group Violence,” p. 394).

Cultural Forms

Despite the remorselessly nature-bound quality of life for early humans, the first Homo sapiens communities made an evolutionary breakthrough. They developed cultural forms that reflected a consciousness of self, a drive to survive, an appreciation of beauty, and an ability to manipulate information symbolically.

Few of the cultural achievements of early Homo sapiens communities have engaged modern-day observers more than their artistic endeavors. Accomplished drawings have come to light in many areas but have been most fully studied in Europe. The ability to draw enabled Homo sapiens peoples to understand their environment, to bond among their kin groups (groups related by blood ties), and to articulate important mythologies. Such behaviors gave individuals an adaptive advantage in surviving in extremely challenging circumstances.

“Look, Daddy, oxen!” That is what the daughter of Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola cried to her father as she looked up at the ceiling of a deep cave that he was exploring one summer afternoon on his property at Altamira, Spain. As he looked up, Sautuola could not believe what he saw. Arranged across the ceiling of the huge chamber were more than two dozen life-size figures of bison, horses, and wild bulls, all painted in vivid red, black, yellow, and brown. He did not think that anyone would believe these fabulous images were tens of thousands of years old, but he knew in his heart that they were. That was in 1879. Only in 1906 did the world accept that the Altamira paintings were the work of early humans and were at least 17,000 years old. Even today, with researchers having found more than 50,000 works of art by early humans in Europe, these paintings compel wonder and awe at the innate artistic abilities unique to humans. (See Interpreting Visual Evidence: Prehistoric Art.)

The images were rendered on cave walls over a period of 25,000 years, and they changed very little during that long time. The earliest figurative art now would appear to be found in a cave in Borneo. It features a spindly-legged, thick-bodied wild cow, drawn in reddish ocher, and is at least 40,000 years old. Like this wild cow, the subjects of most ancient art are large game—animals that early humans would have considered powerful symbols. The artists rendered these animals with a striking economy of line, frequently painting 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 35,000 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 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 between different image forms, serving as artistic transitions in the caves. But they are accomplished with such consummate skill that one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated painters, Pablo Picasso, is alleged to have exclaimed that the Ice Age artists left him little to do.

We can only speculate what the images meant to ancient humans. Scholars have rejected an initial explanation that they were decorative, for the deep caves were not the ancients’ homes and had no natural light to render the images visible. Perhaps the images had a social function, helping the early humans define themselves as separate from other parts of nature. Among other interpretations is a theory that they were the work of powerful shamans, individuals believed to hold special powers to understand and control the mystifying forces of the cosmos.

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

The caves of early men and women also resounded to 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 concluded that this seemingly primitive instrument was capable of making harmonic sounds comparable to those of modern-day flutes, no small achievement for these early humans, whose artistic prowess must have provided much enjoyment to listeners and viewers.

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.

Language

Few things set humans off from the rest of the animal world more starkly than their use of language, whose genesis and evolution spark heated controversies. Scholars do agree, however, that the cognitive abilities involved in language development marked an evolutionary milestone.

It is important to distinguish between meaningful vocal-utterance speech, possessed by many precursor hominins, and natural language (the use of sounds to make words that when strung together convey complex meaning to others), which is unique to modern humans. The development of language necessitated a large brain and complex cognitive skill to create word groups that would convey symbolic meaning. Verbal communication thus required an ability to think abstractly and to communicate abstractions. Language was a huge breakthrough, because individuals could teach words to offspring and neighbors and could use them to integrate communities for survival. Language also 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 many more than 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 in language (syntax), individuals can express endless 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 proto-language (earliest language) existing today belongs to two African peoples, the !Kung of southern Africa and the Hadza of Tanzania. As humans moved out of Africa and dispersed 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 cultural forms and language that enabled Homo sapiens to engage dynamically with their environments.