Beginnings in Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, or the non-European origins of culture in Europe
Already in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European scholars were searching for the origins of man in a past far remote from and in developments more complex than the simple picture painted â and accepted by most of their contemporaries â in the first chapter of the Jewish Bible. To most Europeans, Holy Scripture still was the only touchstone of truth, teaching that the earth and man came into existence when God created the universe on the morning of a momentous day in the year 4004 bc.
In 1698, an English medical doctor, Edward Tyson, visited the docks in London â famous as a place where other, non-European worlds entered Europe â having heard that a chimpanzee was displayed there. When the animal died, he asked permission to dissect it. He studied all its forms and functions and compared these with those of humans. Observing many differences, he yet considered the number of similarities to be greater and more significant. His conclusion, in a book called Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris, âOrang-Outang, or the Wild Wood Manâ (London 1699), was that a fundamental distinction between humans and certain simian types was scientifically untenable.1 Tyson scrupulously refrained from elaborating on the dangerous implications of his observations for the traditional, i.e. religious view of manâs history as the final, most perfect stage of Godâs creation. However, these cannot have escaped his more perspicacious readers.
In 1819, a young Dane, Christian Jurgensen Thomsen (1788â1865), was entrusted by the king with the task of classifying archaeological finds made in Denmark which by royal order were from now on to be sent to Copenhagen. Wondering how to comply with his instructions, Thomsen finally decided on a course of action that nowadays would be considered simple logic but at that time was not part of a Europeanâs mental framework: archaeological finds were mainly judged on their aesthetic merits and if they had none, were thrown away or otherwise destroyed. Thomsen, however, divided his objects according to their material and functional aspects. On the basis of this classification he concluded that the three earliest stages of manâs history should be termed the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, reflecting both growing technological skills and cultural progress. He presented this development as historically significant in itself, thus establishing the study of material culture and of manâs past before the invention of writing as a topic of empirical, scientific study rather than of aesthetics.2 Some scholars were enthusiastic but the general public could not yet share Thomsenâs grand vision, deeming the objects he had analysed too primitive to be considered proof of anything that could be termed culture.
In 1847, the Frenchman Jean Boucher de Perthes published a book called AntiquitĂ©s celtiques et antediluviennes, in which he described the findings of his excavations at Abbeville, on the Somme river. Although some acclaimed him as an original scientist, the larger public derided his ideas: how could one possibly accept that remnants of âantediluvial manâ remained and, moreover, remained in Europe?
In short, until well into the nineteenth century the above views and their implications were unacceptable, not to say repugnant, to most Europeans, even to the well-educated. âCivilizationâ, âcultureâ â these words and concepts referred to the marble temples and the great philosophical constructions of the ancient Greeks, to the powerful, legal structures of the Romans, to the high moral standards propagated by the Christians. Cave dwellers, whose features were more ape-like than human and who worked with âprimitiveâ stone tools, simply did not fit into the European self-image. Yet, the progress of archaeological research in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries eventually forced Europeans to drastically adjust that self-image, till the final, to many painful acceptance of the fact even that their ancestors had come from Africa, the continent viewed so long as a world of darkness, a world without culture.
Obviously, the question what distinguishes âhomoâ, man, from the chimpanzee â with the bonobo its nearest relative in the common âhominidâ ancestry, or pan-lineage â is much discussed, centring around such problems as what intelligence actually is, in relation to self-reflection, the ability to learn and to use that learning to improve oneâs existence, etc.3 According to the latest findings and the often widely diverging interpretations that have been given to them by palaeologists, forms of the genus âhomoâ who may have been the first to craft stone tools and later may have been the first to master the art of making fire and probably were also the first to engage in big game hunting, originated in Africa sometime between c.3,000,000 and 2,000,000 years ago, inhabiting large parts of the continent.4
Sometime around 1,800,000 years ago, later forms of âhomoâ, often called homo erectus, the âupright humanâ, moved out of the area in north-east Africa where, perhaps, migrations in search of food and a better clime had brought them, and into Eurasia, where recent finds have shown traces of him in Georgia but also in northern China. For all we now know, groups of them may have lived all over Eurasia.
Between 800,000 and 400,000 bc, some groups or perhaps only one, small group of homo erectus evolved into homo Heidelbergensis â where and when exactly is still under debate, but again Africa is a possibility â who, in turn, moved to Eurasia as well, as his name indicates, for the first fossils were found in 1908 near the German town of Heidelberg.
As late as c.400,000 years ago, another type of homo erectus, called Neanderthal-man, entered the scene, named after the valley near DĂŒsseldorf, in Germany, where his remains were discovered. Actually, he too inhabited the vast stretch of Eurasia from France and Spain to Uzbekistan. Fossils give us an idea of his appearance: very robust and stocky, on average between 1.55 and 1.65 metres tall, with short legs and a long torso enabling him to cope with the dearth of food resources in winter, when he survived on fat reserves accumulated by gathering in seasons of relative plenty. Neanderthal manâs brain-volume was, moreover, bigger than that of any other creature. He used these greater cranial capacities to develop a stone-based technology, consisting largely of prepared-core flaking, which indicates that he consciously planned his survival strategies.5
Influenced by the seasons, these earliest inhabitants of Eurasia, including Europe, travelled around their regions seeking semi-permanent shelter in caves. Gradually, âconsciousâ habitation grew, especially with the coming of fire. But scholars are divided over the question of whether they already could speak, in the sense of producing distinct words with unambiguous meanings; if not, they would have lacked much of the communicative capacity that can, for instance, organize a hunter society, though, of course, sign language, that is often said to predate speech, may have served them well.
Till the 1980s and 1990s, scientists believed that none of the genetic material of these more recent representatives of homo erectus survived in the present population of the world; whether they became extinct through natural causes or because they could not compete with newer types of hominids was much discussed. The debates were the more confused because scholars also were discussing the origins â again out of homo erectus-forms â and the culture of what they called homo sapiens, dating back to some 300,000 years ago. This species is now understood to be the ancestor of all modern humans. Where and when did homo sapiens originate?6 Also in (sub-)tropical Africa, from where groups of his species, too, started migrating in search of the kind of food that held the protein they needed. Fossils and DNA research show that small bands of them moved from present-day Eritrea to the Yemen â crossing the Red Sea, which at that time was partly dry land. From the Arab peninsula, men and women moved, gathering and hunting too, into Eurasia, reaching South Asia some 70,000 years ago. Adapting to the different climes they encountered, their skin colour took on a lighter or, conversely, a darker hue and some of them grew taller or, rather, became smaller; indeed, as recent as 2004 the remains of people of about one metre tall were discovered in Indonesia. Thus, the physical variety of homo sapiens was the result of multiple mutations.7
Only some 45,000 years ago â but again, new finds may alter this chronology â homo sapiens migrated from (West) Asia into Europe as well. In Europe, he is often called Cro-Magnon, named after the French site where he was discovered in 1868, though nowadays the description â(European) Early Modern Humanâ is more widely used because, anatomically and behaviourally, he belonged to the species of modern man. This migration happened at a specific âmomentâ in time and was perhaps instigated or at least facilitated by it.
Periodically, the climate on earth enters an âIce Ageâ. Some 40,000 years ago, North and West Europe as well as the regions around the Alps and the Pyrenees once again were in the grip of a long period of harsh weather, with glaciers rapidly expanding from the principal mountain ranges. But during the following millennia, this Ice Age came to a climatically inevitable end, and the world gradually started to get warmer again. Precisely in these centuries, the most recent variety of homo sapiens slowly moved to the Mediterranean and the Balkans or into the Danube corridor, and from there entered Central and Western Europe.
There is an ongoing dispute about what occurred between the older inhabitants and the new ones. Till recently, many scholars argued that the Neanderthal people were unable to resist the newcomers, and soon disappeared entirely. We now know that for thousands of years the two groups intermingled, which accounts for Neanderthal genes still present in modern humans, today. Slowly, however, Neanderthal people did become extinct. Perhaps, in the long run, their groups â which, it should be noted, in a single generation may never have numbered more than 150,000 people, in all of Eurasia! â turned out to be less capable of surviving and were displaced, whether through natural causes or as a consequence of large-scale genocide at the hands of the newcomers, who, for example, if they had the capacity of language, may have had a definite organizational advantage. However, when this âextinctionâ occurred and for how long before that the two species did live alongside one another is still being debated.
As proof of the changes that occurred in these millennia, archaeologists have found signs of a far more complex economy, society and culture. All over those regions of Eurasia where modern man now lived, big-game hunting as well as gathering clearly were the principal strategies for survival of these largely nomadic peoples; still, an early form of long-distance trade seems to have existed as well. Meanwhile, tools, both of stone and bone, and stone weaponry became more sophisticated: a more refined technology developed. Also, modern humans, including, that is, the ânew Europeansâ, looked for dwelling places other than caves. For example, open-air encampments with substantial huts made of wood and bone have been discovered on the plains of Bohemia and southern Russia as well as in France.
Even more fascinating is that âearly modern menâ started to create symbolic representations both of themselves and of the world around them.8 Paintings made with natural pigments â another technological innovation â have been found on the walls of caves, concentrated mainly in southern France and northern Spain. Until 1995, the most revealing were considered to be those discovered at Lascaux by a group of adventurous boys in the summer of 1940. Others of the same kind are situated in the Pyrenees and at Spanish Altamira. In 1995, a new and even more spectacular find was made in the ArdĂšche: there, cave paintings depict all kinds of animals hitherto unknown in early Europe; they seem to date as far back as 30,000 years. However, the discussion over the interpretation of these artefacts is not yet settled, and probably never will be, if only because the terms used are, in a sense, not yet applicable to those times. Was it âaestheticâ, art for artâs sake, or didactic, a means to instruct the young men and women of the tribe in t...