The use of fire: from more than 400,000 years ago
Homo erectus must have been much helped by his taming of fire. This has probably happened by about 500,000 years ago - the date of the so-called Peking Man, a version of Homo erectus whose traces in north China are generally believed to show evidence of the use of fire. A much earlier date, of more than a million years ago, has been claimed for burnt fragments of animal bones found in a cave at Swartkrans in
Evidence at both these sites is disputed among scholars, but there is a consensus - from other locations in
At this early stage embers are borrowed (from a volcanic source, or a fire caused by lightning) and then are carefully tended, for it is not yet possible for humans to create a flame. The use of fire for cooking greatly increases the variety of food available to humans, just as its heat in winter extends their habitat.
It is not known how much of the diet of these early people is achieved by gathering fruits and berries, or scavenging dead animals. But hunting must have contributed some part of it. Fragments have survived of sharpened wooden spears, unlikely to have been used exclusively against other men. One such point, hardened in a flame, has even been found between the ribs of an elephant.
In or out of an ice age, clothing of some kind is also a necessity for early humans living as far north of
Unlike bones and stone tools, skin and fur do not easily survive in the ground. So it is impossible to put a date on man's first experiments with costume. However, the bones of large animals at human sites prove that they were butchered and eaten, and stone tools were well suited to the scraping of skins. It seems inconceivable that Peking Man did not from time to time, on a cold night, wrap some simple form of fur cloak around his shoulders.
Neanderthal man: from 230,000 years ago
Around 250,000 years ago Homo erectus disappears from the fossil record, to be followed in the Middle Palaeolithic period by humans with brains which again have increased in size. They are the first to be placed within the same genus as ourselves, as Homo sapiens ('knowing man').
By far the best known of them is Neanderthal man -- named from the first fossil remains to be discovered, in 1856, in the Neander valley near
The Neanderthals are widely spread through
Yet almost everything about them seems uncertain and controversial.
There is inconclusive evidence that the Neanderthals may have buried their dead (in one case, it has been suggested, even with flowers on the corpse). If they did have burial customs, that implies religion. Yet they have left no other trace of it.
There are skeletons of Neanderthals who lived for several years after serious injury, suggesting a social cohesion strong enough to protect the weak. But if they were so advanced socially, it seems odd to us that they should have left no art, decoration or jewellery. On the other hand a recent discovery of a Neanderthal flute surprised archaeologists, suggesting a more advanced level of culture than had been suspected.
It may be that the sense of uncertainty about Neanderthal man stems largely from our own eagerness to find early reflections of ourselves. It is perhaps only the lack of clear answers in that context which seems to blur Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.
Looked at in a different perspective, as small groups of interdependent humans subsisting in very difficult circumstances, the Neanderthals are an unprecedented success story.
Like Homo erectus before them, they seem to slip fairly suddenly out of the fossil record. About 35,000 years ago has been the conventional date for their demise, but recent finds of Neanderthal bones in
Homo sapiens sapiens: from 90,000 years ago
The first traces of modern humans are now dated tentatively as far back as 90,000 years ago in the
With Cro-Magnon man there begins the sudden development of art, which seems to be one of the defining characteristics of modern man. Cro-Magnon culture provides the paintings in such famous sites as Chauvet,
The humans of Cro-Magnon, and their predecessors in other parts of the world, are anatomically almost identical with people today. They differ in being taller and more muscular; some of their skeletal remains reveal (contrary to modern preconceptions) a larger brain than today's average. They are classed, with us, as Homo sapiens sapiens ('knowing knowing man').
The repetition does not imply doubly knowing. It is merely a method sometimes used in the binomial system of taxonomy to identify the central species in a genus. Thus Troglodytes troglodytes is the common wren, Bufo bufo the common toad, and Homo sapiens sapiens the common man.
Before following the development of modern humans from the Upper Palaeolithic period, about 35,000 years ago (and we are at this point more than 99.999% of the way through the story so far of the universe), there is one crucial turning point which has not been charted. The creation of stone tools goes back more than 2 million years; the use of fire at least 500,000; clothing cannot be dated, but must have been adopted in colder regions not long after animals with hide or fur were first scavenged and butchered.
But what of the most distinctive human quality of all? What of speech?
Words on the brain: from 1 million years ago?
All social animals communicate with each other, from bees and ants to whales and apes, but only humans have developed a language which is more than a set of prearranged signals.
Our speech even differs in a physical way from the communication of other animals. It comes from a cortical speech centre which does not respond instinctively, but organises sound and meaning on a rational basis. This section of the brain is unique to humans.
When and how the special talent of language developed is impossible to say. But it is generally assumed that its evolution must have been a long process.
Our ancestors were probably speaking a million years ago, but with a slower delivery, a smaller vocabulary and above all a simpler grammar than we are accustomed to.
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