The Not so Daily Privateer

First, there was Africa: a window into what makes our species tick

Not every gene that makes us human (if you look at us from a genetic point of view) comes from Africa, but the area around Ethiopia can be called the Cradle of the Human Gene Pool.

All humans on the planet trace their ancestry back to a small group of humans living in Ethiopia around 200-265,000BP.  The first fossil human bones date to around 200,000BP (near Omo, Ethiopia) and recently, human tools were found nearby dating even further back - to around 265,000BP.  Many archaeologists have been puzzled by the lack of any significant behavioral change at around the time that humans arose, but now, it turns out, we're finding good evidence of those new human behaviors.  There's no evidence that we're performing music or even that we're speaking languages like we have today, but there are significant changes:

Most modern language capacities are in place - we could talk circles around Neanderthal and Homo erectus and Homo ergaster.

We have multi-part tools.  Doesn't sound like a big deal, but it's more than 2 million years from the first stone tools to making hafted tools and such.

We're expanding quickly out of Ethiopia, compared to previous versions of humans.

For a long time (the entire time I was in university and most of my teaching career), the oldest human living sites in Africa seemed to be in South Africa, like the famous caves at Swartkrans.  From around 135,000BP onward, South Africa was well-populated, a hotbed of human activity and innovation.  That's because it is on the edge of the one of the world's largest natural game preserves  - the Great Plain of the Serengeti.  A natural game preserve is a place where mountains and hills form natural boundaries that tend to hedge the game in.  The Serengeti region is huge and the humans who first found it, with their newly invented spears and other technologies, were very likely the "richest" humans on Earth at the time.  The general region is often referred to in anthropology literature as Swaziland, because the contemporary nation of Swaziland is roughly at the center of this region.  Homo sapiens style tools, often called "Levallois technology" are found in Swaziland all the way back to 200,000, although the fossil record starts somewhat later.

The point is that humans began to explore and fill up Eastern Africa by 200,000BP.  By 135,000BP, people had distributed themselves along the Mediterranean Coast of North Africa and into the Levant (the Middle East).   This is our first diaspora, our first burst of population growth (and resource use).  People did not look then as they do now (a complex topic on which more and more data is constantly gathered), but to say they look "generally African" is not terribly misleading.  There's a great DVD on this topic from National Geographic (from the Human Genome project).

Some people headed out of Africa toward India and Southeast Asia, but no one went to Europe at this time.

Interestingly, genes from these early African humans have been found in contemporary Australian aborigines, who certainly arrived in Australia by 60,000BP and whose ancestors were in the foothills of the Himalayas, in India, by 90-100,000BP. 

There is one truly fascinating fact, to me, about where these first humans ended up.  It turns out that by 125,000BP, FMHS (that's us) had located virtually every major source of flint in Africa and the Middle East.

Flint doesn't appear just anywhere.  If you or I had to go find some, we'd have quite a time finding it.  With satellites and stuff, it's easier to find, but back then, many different mental and practical abilities were involved in finding flint.

South Africa is one of the world's major flint-bearing regions (so is Europe, but more of that later).  Flint was the oil of its day.  Learning to use flint in a multitude of ways revolutionized human life.  By 125,000BP, the following tools and items (mostly made of flint or made with tools made of flint) appeared for the first time on Earth (some of these appeared somewhat earlier, but I'm trying to summarize what happened up until around 100-135,000BP):

The flint spearhead on a spear (made with flint raspers to ensure a truly balanced and symmetrical form; the rasper had been in use for quite some time, but not always made of flint - flint is sharper).  The spears were put together using cooked glues, usually from bitumin (tar).

Flint firestrikers.  Possibly the most important tool in the toolkit.

The flint drill.  Used for drilling holes in wood, stone, shell, bone and other materials to make such goods as ladders, bridges, boats, necklaces.

Flint punchers, burnishers and awls.  For leatherworking, to make travois, backpacks, clothing, sandals, other kinds of shoes.

Notably absent:  there were no bows and arrows - that's much much later.

Still, using my cultural imagination (and looking at how many humans and how farflung they are by 125,000), we see a world that looks very familiar.  I believe people were traveling quite a bit, and that they had boats of some kind.  Neither wood nor fiber artifacts are likely to survive for 100,000 years or more - especially if they get wet - so we may never know.  However, the coastal dwelling preferences of early humans make me believe that they had canoes.  The distance between their early settlements argues for a water-based method of transport, for one thing.

One big settlement was in modern Algeria, near flint mines.  Flint mining (as opposed to ground collection without having to mine) began in Algeria by at least 125,000BP.  Algeria has bigger deposits than the next region, which is a small area in Egypt, but nothing compared to the flint resources of Swaziland.

In Swaziland, by 125,000, there is good evidence for the use of ladders, to climb down sheer cliff faces to do flint mining, and for bridges.  They had to transport all the flint somehow, and that flint shows up all over Africa eventually.  While there is no evidence of symbol-use that bore specific meanings, people did begin to use red ochre to paint their bodies, including the bodies of the dead.  The first burials show up at this time, providing some early evidence of religious custom or belief.  If the Africans of Swaziland did indeed use ochre to mark things, none of the markings survive, but the ochre itself (which is a soft material) was sometimes incised (by 100,000BP) with what look like tally marks or some other marks indicating meaning.  Burials included grave goods, and beautifully made shell necklaces are found in Algeria and Israel from this time period.

The population was densest in South Africa, but people did not move around the horn of Africa up into West Africa until a much later date (the extreme dryness of the Kalahari desert probably blocked them at that time).  People didn't move south past Algeria much either - rainforest was difficult to adjust to, but people did find new natural game preserves in what is now the Sahara - it was grasslands back then.

Life was good.  When people can get enough to eat and have a sustainable lifestyle, life is good.  The population didn't grow very quickly in those days, but as it did grow, people moved out of more crowded places (like Swaziland) and into less crowded ones, eventually distributing themselves from Algeria east to Cambodia and Vietnam, but avoiding colder, northern places and very hot, wet places (interior rainforests for example).  Eventually, the world would grow crowded enough that new places would be sought out - although, as I will propose, there was more to this new diaspora than simply "it was too crowded."  It was in the next phase - the second movement out of Africa - that Europe and Northern Eurasia become populated, which is where I'm heading.

A link involving African Mousterian/Levallois technology.

The First Europeans - before 45,000BP

For now, we'll just go with some common sense notion of where Europe is, and I'll try and outline what I think I know about early Europeans.

If we start at the eastern end of Europe, there are a cluster of hominid finds in and around the Black Sea.  The earliest resemble Homo habilis back in Africa.  They are found near Dmanisi, Georgia.  Apparently, near the end of the first major ice age that affected our genus, pebble tool-using Homo habilis wandered both north and south from its homeland in Ethiopia.  They liked living near lakes and scavenging their food (they were not hunters, they had no tools remotely resembling hunting equipment).  When Homo habilis is found in Georgia, the contemporary Georgians call it  Homo georgensis or Homo georgicus.  Of the two names, it looks like "georgicus" is going to stick.  This is not a Homo sapiens.  It had a brain size of about 600 cc's (about 2.5 cups of brains).   Meanwhile, back in Africa (closer to the center of the hominid gene pool), evolution was proceeding apace.  The ice age saw increases in brain size, resulting in more sophisticated tool use.  A new species of larger brained, more capable hominids had evolved in Ethiopia and its surroundings:  Homo ergaster, our ancestor.

If we start at the western side of Europe, there are fascinating finds in the Pyrenees.  Technically, these finds are in the modern nation of Spain, but more importantly, so far no one is finding anything earlier in Western Europe besides those remains in the Pyrenees - a  significant mountain chain that divides southern France from Spain and is, from a Western European point of view, an ancient hominid homeland.  Most anthropologists believe that these Pyrenees-dwellers are ancestral to the famous Neanderthals, and its name is Homo antecessor.  Just a few years ago, the earliest dates on Homo antecessor seemed to be around 800-900,000 years ago, relatively recent compared to those finds in Georgia.  But, in 2008, new finds in the Pyrenees (near the bottom of the article) push the date for Homo antecessor in western Europe back to 1.2 million years ago.  Homo antecessor is fascinating for a lot of reasons, but I'm only going to mention that the species had a brain roughly the same size (but a different shape) as ours, is the population from which the first hominids in Great Britain likely descend, and it was not a Homo sapiens.  It is likely ancestral to Homo heidelburgensis (another of our ancestors, it seems) and to Neanderthal.

Around 300,000BP, the large-brained hominid known as Neanderthal began to take root in Europe.  Its ancestors had survived around one million years of intermittently very cold weather, and any number of other difficult circumstances.  There are debates about when Neanderthal first appeared (some people give 200,000BP, I'm no Neanderthal expert).  Initially, their behaviors and toolkit were not much different from their ancestors, but like Homo antecessor, they do appear to be much more actively engaged in procuring animal protein through various hunting strategies than, say, Homo habilis or Homo rudolfensis or Homo georgicus.  Meanwhile, over in Africa, in and around Ethiopia, Homo ergaster (also a hunter) is making the transition into being Fully Modern Homo sapiens (FMHS).  I can give you several strands of reasoning about dates for FMHS (and whether it arose solely in Africa), but for the purposes of this blog, it seems it's enough to say that the various genes we associate with ourselves (our brain size, its general construction, our facial features, our degree of sexual dimorphism, and perhaps more importantly, some of our unique behavioral and technological patterns) are apparent in Africa first and elsewhere later. 

Also in 2008, tools usually associated only with FMHS were discovered in Ethiopia, dating all the way back to 265,000BP - 65,000 years further back in time than the molecular biologists and the fossil hunters say they have evidence for FMHS.

That is, however, usually the way it goes.  Fossils are very rare, tools are not so rare.  I've learned to expect tools to be found first, and then, as populations grow and a variety of fossil-creating situations are encountered, eventually fossils are found.  The earliest fossil Homo sapiens are also from Ethiopia (Omo are) and date back to around 195,000BP.  By 165,000BP in Ethiopia, a number of FMHS are found.

Meanwhile, over in Europe, Neanderthal replaces earlier lineages of hominids and begins its long stay in many parts of Europe.

The two species, FMHS and Neanderthal, have their physical differences and their behavioral differences as well.  I believe that most physical anthropologists now believe that the two species are entirely separate and incapable of interbreeding.  However, not everyone agrees.  Almost as soon as the mtDNA experts announced their certainty that Neanderthal is not us, other people began to think of ways around the mtDNA evidence (there is a great deal of distance between our human mtDNA and their Neanderthal mtDNA).  This disagreement continues into the present time but it seems certain that there were enough differences, behaviorally and physically, between Neanderthal and the FMHS who finally arrived in Europe a mere 45,000BP, that we can treat Neanderthal as a distinct population.

What I wanted to mention in this entry, thoughl, is the problem of the Gingers.  It became breaking World News that Neanderthals had red hair (and freckles?) and since Europe remains one of the few places in the world where such coloration is common/arose, it is reasonable for some to be asking whether red hair and freckles in the FMHS came from interbreeding with Neanderthals (or, whether there is parallel evolution/common environmental conditions that preserve mutations for such coloring).  People with red hair and freckles have fair skin and do not usually tan well, great adaptations for a climate with a low amount of solar radiation.

Look familiar?  Well, that's supposed to be a reconstruction of a Neanderthal - not a FMHS.

Notice the receding chin and "wedge-shaped" face on the Neanderthal, who is also more pronated (face pulled foward) and has a lower forehead than the FMHS shown to the right.  Early FMHS in Europe looked, in terms of facial structure, much like the guy to the right - the red hair, in this new hypothesis, comes to him from his ancestors acquiring Neanderthal wives.

Yes, that's right - more FMHS men than women left Africa in the early times.   As a cultural anthropologist, I've been saying that for years.  Exploratory groups of all men or nearly all men are more common, in my view, than groups that have equal numbers of both sexes (and babies and children with them).  It's known from many sources that all male parties (not just war parties, for those of you who always think of war - war wasn't so common back in the day when it was nearly impossible to even locate fellow humans, much less start up continuing conflicts with them) often took off from a home base for months or years at a time.  Some of them went very long distances indeed, some of these parties did not come back.  If a man in one of this all male parties could find a female to mate with elsewhere, that would likely be a pretty cool thing, from his point of view.  Did Ginger babies result?  With no FMHS mtDNA (which of course comes only from Moms)?

Makes some sense, doesn't it?

At any rate, FMHS doesn't show up in Europe until a mere 45,000BP and that's really where I want to begin my story.  FMHS arrives in Eurasia (remember, there's no actual continent of Europe - but there are two continental plates that somewhat underpin both Europe and Asia - with the break running along the mountain lines, from the Pyrenees to the Alps to the Taurus to the Karkoram to the Himalayas).  It's a bit complicated.  It would probably be better to say that Europe and Asia are on one plate, with the southern parts of it riding over another plate:

Keep in mind that plate tectonics was only understood recently - in the second half of the 20th century, so I suppose there's an excuse for so many historians treating "Europe" as if it is a continent, when in fact it is a culture region.  A newer generation of historians, all of whom will have had basic science drilled into them as undergraduates, is already getting clearer on this.  Most historians know that the "boundary" between Europe and Asia has always been in dispute - as it should be:

 

Hopefully, you can see why most anthropologists now refer to Europe as a "cultural concept" or a "culture region" and not some sort of geologically determined area or zone.  To anyone arriving in the region 45,000, Europe and Asia were both part of a vast, new, unexplored region.

Homo georgicus and homo erectus, earlier forms of humans, had died out long before.  The Asian steppe was deserted, Neanderthal never went there.  Europe was already populated - by Neanderthal.   Did early FMHS in Eurasia think Neanderthal was weird, different and to be avoided as a source of potential mates?  Did Neanderthals dislike the newcomers?  They had very different language abilities, that's for sure.  But different language ability does not keep a modern FMHS from mating with another, although it is certainly a barrier to relationships, for some people.

The Real History of Eurasia - I

There is no continental landmass called Europe.  You were probably taught there was one, in grade school.  But check it out.  Now that plate tectonics are known, it's clear that there is no separate European continent.

Instead, there are two giant Eurasian continents:  northern and southern.  It's obvious where the two join together - you can follow the line from the Pyrenees, to the Alps, to the Taurus Mountains, then the Karkoram, and the Himalayas.

Maybe a map would help.  I'll find one for the next post in this series.

At any rate, I'm going to attempt to bring you all up to date on the real history of Eurasia, as far as I can reconstruct it, using every resource I can find.  At this point, I've read hundreds of articles from archaeology, molecular genetics, linguistics, cultural anthropology, folklore studies, ethnomusicology, and many, many subfields.  I know I haven't got it all right, but when the historians tell you to start studying European history at, say, 3800BP, that's just silly.  Academic historians at big universities (and some small ones) know better, but I keep encountering historians who know almost nothing about Indo-European (and the Proto-Boreal hypothesis so popular in European academia) or about the various migrations and traditions represented by the mitochondrial DNA evidence and the tool traditions.  They don't even know the climate history of Europe and still think of Europe as separate from Asia. 

I've got about 400 pages written on this topic, but am thinking if I can summarize it a little here, it will help the organization of this book I seem to be writing.

It's odd to say that Europe has been neglected recently.  Europeans writing about Europe get accused of Eurocentrism.  As I am not exactly a square peg European (I'm part European by heritage and I obviously was raised in an English-speaking culture), perhaps I can avoid that criticism.  I have absolutely no intention of glorifying Europe, although I do admire something about virtually every culture I study (which, after 30 years of professional work in anthropology, is quite a few).

Europe was once the New World, when people headed out of Africa around 60,000BP.  Something happened around 60-70,000BP that changed the course of all future human events, and much of the new style of living developed in Europe.  Its geography, climate and existing inhabitants, the ginger-haired Neanderthals, all played a role.  I have lots of views on what happened, they are fairly consistent and make sense, although many questions could be posed - and I wish you would.

Introduction - the Prehistory of Europe

This is a story about what is known of the very first humans to appear in what is now called Europe.  Sometimes these people are called Cro Magnons, which is not a very good name for them.  They weren't in France until somewhat later (the term Cro Magnon is derived from the name of the modern French hotel near where early Cro Magnons in France were found).  Still, these first Europeans are ancestral to those later French people.  Today, anthropologists have invented another, equally unhelpful term for them:  late fully modern Homo sapiens (late FMHS, for short).  That's because, when humans first appear in Ethiopia around 165,000BP, they clearly have the same distinctive set of Homo sapiens features (lacked by all previous models of hominines), but there are a few minor differences in appearance.  So we have early and late FMHS.  It is late FMHS that figured out a way to go to the New World, which at the time was Eurasia.

There are so many problems with the way prehistory connects (or doesn't connect) to history, that this is also an attempt to somehow join the two.  Surely, when the history of Europe begins, it shouldn't be disjointed from what happened immediately before.  History, as the professional historians usually define it, is the record of events based on written evidence.  Writing did not come to Europe until about 1,800BCE (3,808BP) but humans were in Europe by 45,000BP (roughly 43,000BCE).  That gives us almost 39,000 years of prehistory.  At this point, however, I'm going to point out that "Historians" don't own the word "history."

To the lay person, history means "all the things we know happened up until now."  A "history of Eurasia" would include all things we know about Eurasia - and if not, it would be indicate where it had ellipses.  Historians are beginning to do this - as they should.  But all too often, a history text begins with a huge leap - into the first known-from-writing "facts" about a place, when people already had a history there for millenia.

So I'm going to use the word "history" for all of it - there is no "prehistory," there's just history.

Recent work in linguistics, primarily by European linguists (particularly, Russians, Italians and Romanians) has provided a name for the earliest people in Europe:  the Boreals.  The claim of the linguists is that earliest people in Europe (45,000BP) spoke a language that was in the process of breaking off from Proto-World.  The African languages were going their way, over in Southern Asia, a group of languages we can call Malayo-Dravidian were breaking off from Proto-World.  In North Africa and the Levant, proto-Afro-Asiatic was shaping up.

Proto-Boreal would eventually give rise to the following major language families:

Indo-European

Kartvelian (Georgian/NaDene?)

Ural-Altaic

Northern/Central Amerindian

This is a controversial hypothesis, especially if seen only through the lens of rigorous linguistic analysis.  However, if the mtDNA and the archaeology is added in, it's a much stronger hypothesis.  Further, when we add in cultural processes (rarely done by archaeologists, linguists or molecular biologists), I think the picture is even more clear.

Genes, words and artifacts do not move about in any old way.  People don't survive and reproduce just any old way, either. 

The contemporary interest in climate history and the understanding of ecology that biology brings is also essential in composing a holistic hypothesis.  Indeed - the goal is to throw everything we have at the problems of history - and for me, bringing in what I know about the limits and ordinary processes of human culture is essential.

Culture is learned - and there's only so much of it.  How it changes over time is essential to understanding the past.  And there are only so many ways of changing it...