Though the museum opened in 1819, Thomsen did not publish his research and theories until 1836, and then only in Danish. This, a Guide Book to Northern Antiquities, was translated into German the following year and appeared in English in 1848, four years after Chambers had published Vestiges. Thus the three-age system gradually spread across Europe, radiating out from Scandinavia. The idea of cultural evolution paralleled that of biological evolution.
At much the same time, scholars such as François de Jouannet became aware of a difference in stone tools, between chipped implements found associated with extinct animals, and more polished examples, found in more recent local barrows, well after the age of extinct animals. These observations eventually gave rise to the four-age chronology: old Stone Age, new Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age.
And so, by May 1859, when Evans and Prestwich returned from their visit with Boucher de Perthes in Abbeville, the purpose, importance and relevance of stone hand-axes could no longer be denied, or misinterpreted. Palaeontologists, archaeologists and geologists across Europe had helped build up this picture. There was still much confusion, however. Édouard Lartet, Cuvier’s successor in Paris, was convinced about the antiquity of man, as was Prestwich. But Lyell, as we have seen, opposed the idea for years (he sent a famous letter to Charles Darwin in which he apologised for his unwillingness ‘to go the whole orang’). And Darwin’s main aim, when he published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, in the same year that Prestwich and Evans returned from France, was not to prove the antiquity of man: it was to show how one species could transform into another, thus building on Chambers and destroying the need for a Creator. But, in completing the revolution in evolutionary thinking that had begun with Peyrère and de Maillet, and had been popularised so much by Chambers, the Origin confirmed how slowly natural selection worked. Therefore, though it wasn’t Darwin’s main aim, his book underlined the fact that man must be much older than it said in the Bible. Among the many things natural selection explained were the changes in the palaeontological record. The very great antiquity of man was established.
Once this was accepted, ideas moved forward rapidly. In 1864, an Anglo-French team led by Edouard Lartet and Henry Christy, a London banker-antiquary, excavated a number of rock shelters in Perigord in France, and this led, among other things, to the discovery of an engraved mammoth tusk at La Madeleine, showing a drawing of a woolly mammoth. This piece ‘served to remove any lingering doubts that humankind had coexisted with extinct Pleistocene animals’.19
What was now the four-age system served as the basis for organising the great archaeological exhibition at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1867, where visitors could promenade room by room through the pre-history of Europe. Scientific archaeology had replaced the antiquarian tradition. ‘One could now envisage a cultural history independent of the written record, reaching back to Palaeolithic times by way of the iron-age cemeteries of France and Britain, the Bronze-Age lake dwellings of Switzerland, and the Neolithic kitchen middens of Denmark . . .’20 When Charles Lyell finally came round to the new view, in his Geological Evidences for the Antiquity of Man (1863), his book sold 4,000 copies in the first weeks and two new editions appeared in the same year.
Since then, as we shall see in Chapter 1, ancient stone tools have been found all over the world, and their distribution and variation enable us to recreate a great deal about our distant past and the first ideas and thoughts of ancient humankind. In the century and a half since Prestwich and Evans confirmed de Perthes’ discoveries, the dating of the original manufacture of stone tools has been pushed back further and further, to the point where this book properly starts: the Gona river in Ethiopia 2.7 million years ago.
PART ONE
LUCY TO GILGAMESH
The Evolution of Imagination
1
Ideas Before Language
George Schaller, director of the Wildlife Conservation Division of the New York Zoological Society, is known to his fellow biologists as a meticulous observer of wild animals. In a long and distinguished career he has made many systematic studies of lions, tigers, cheetahs, leopards, wild dogs, mountain gorillas and hyenas. His book, The Last Panda, published in 1993, recorded many new and striking facts about the animal the Chinese call the ‘bear-cat’. He found that on one occasion a sick panda had gone freely to a human family in the Wolong area, where it was fed sugar and rice porridge for three days, until it recovered and returned to the forest.1
In the late 1960s Schaller and a colleague spent a few days on the Serengeti plain in Tanzania, East Africa, where they made a simple observation which had escaped everyone else. In the course of those few days, they stumbled across quite a lot of dead meat ‘just lying around’. They found dead buffalo, the butchered remains of lion kills, and they also came across a few incapacitated animals that would have been easy prey for carnivores. Smaller deer (like Thompson’s gazelles) remained uneaten for barely a day but larger animals, such as adult buffalo, ‘persisted as significant food resources’ for about four days.2 Schaller concluded from this that early humans could have survived quite easily on the Serengeti simply by scavenging, that there was enough ‘ruin’ in the bush for them to live on without going hunting. Other colleagues subsequently pointed out that even today the Hadza, a hunter-gathering tribe who live in northern Tanzania, sometimes scavenge by creeping up on lions who have made a kill and then creating a loud din. The lions are frightened away.
This outline of man’s earliest lifestyle is conjectural.3 And to dignify the practice as an ‘idea’ is surely an exaggeration: this was instinct at work. But scavenging, unromantic as it sounds, may not be such a bad starting-point. It may even be that the open African savannah was the type of environment which favoured animals who were generalists, as much as specialists, like a hippopotamus, for example, or a giraffe, and it is this which stimulated mankind’s intelligence in the first place. The scavenging hypothesis has, however, found recent support from a study of the marks made on bones excavated at palaeontological sites: animals killed by carnivores do show tool marks but fewer than those butchered by humans. It is important to stress that meat-eating in early humans does not, in and of itself, imply hunting.4