The first signs of undisputed intentional burial date to 120,000 to 90,000 years ago, at the Qafzeh and Skhul caves in Israel.30 The bones contained in these ‘graves’ were very similar to modern humans but here the picture becomes complicated by the arrival of the Neanderthals. From about 70,000 years ago, both the Neanderthals (whose remains have never been found in Africa or the Americas) and Homo sapiens were, at least sometimes, burying their dead. This of course is a very significant development, perhaps the next purely abstract idea after the standardisation of tools. This is because intentional burial may indicate an early concern with the afterlife, and a primitive form of religion.
The old image of the Neanderthals as brutish and primitive is now much outmoded. Quite a lot is known about their intellectual life and although it was simple compared with our own, the advance it represented on life forms that went before is clear. While they were alive, the Neanderthals developed more or less in parallel with modern humans. The latest excavations in Spain show that Neanderthals for example knew enough to ‘settle’ in areas of greatest biotic diversity.31 The picture is, however, muddied by the emergence of anatomically modern humans, who seem to have arisen in Africa between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago and then spread out across the globe. They are believed to be descended from archaic H. sapiens, or H. heidelbergensis, with smaller teeth, no brow ridges, and a brain size of between 1,200 and 1,700 cc. And so from then, until around 31,000 years ago, when we find the last traces of the Neanderthals, these two forms of humanity lived side-by-side, and such artefacts as remain could belong to either. The French palaeontologist, Francesco d’Errico, concludes that both Neanderthals and H. sapiens showed evidence of ‘modern behaviour’.32
Until about 60,000 years ago, for example, we find thick ash deposits, burnt bone and charcoal becoming very common in both open and cave sites.33 Middle Palaeolithic people had fire, it appears, but they did not yet build elaborate hearths. (Middle Palaeolithic applies to the period of the Neanderthals and the fifth kind of stone hand-axe – blade tools, dating to 250,000–60,000 BP – years before the present.) Only at around 60,000 years ago do we find controlled fire, proper hearths – at Vilas Ruivas in Portugal and at Molodova on the Dnestr river in Russia – significantly associated with windbreaks made from mammoth bones. In fact, it seems that here the first undisputed use of fire may have been not so much for cooking as for defrosting the huge carcasses of large mammals frozen in winter, and which other scavengers, like hyenas, would have been unable to touch.34
Some of the Neanderthal sites, especially in the Middle East, seem to show individuals who have been buried, and one was associated with flower pollen. This is disputed, however, and it is not at all clear whether these are ritual burials. In these so-called Neanderthal graves, more than one individual lies with his or her head resting on his or her arm, so in theory these people could have died in their sleep and just have been left where they were (though the practice has not been found among earlier hominids). Other burials have been accompanied by the remains of red ochre, or with goat horns stuck into the ground nearby. Though many archaeologists favour naturalistic explanations of these discoveries – i.e., the apparent association is accidental – it is quite possible that the Neanderthals did bury their dead with an associated ritual that implies some form of early religion. Certainly, at this time there is a sudden increase in the recovery of complete or nearly complete skeletons, which is also suggestive.35
In assessing the significance of these burials it is important to say first that the sample size consists of about sixty graves only and so, given the time-frame involved, we are talking about an average of two burials per thousand years. With that qualification in mind, there are three further factors worth discussing. One is the age and sex of the bodies buried. Many were children or juveniles, enough to suggest that there was a ‘cult of the dead’, in particular of children, who were buried with more ceremony than adults, designed perhaps to ensure their rebirth. At the same time, more males than females were buried, hinting that males enjoyed higher status than females. A third factor is that in one case of a Neanderthal discovered in the Shanidar caves in northern Iraq the man was blind, suffered from arthritis and had his right arm amputated just above the elbow. This individual lived till he was forty, when he was killed by a rock fall; so until this point, his colleagues had evidently looked after him.36 The amputation of his arm also implies some medical knowledge, and this idea was further fuelled by the discovery of a second individual at Shanidar, dated to around 60,000 BP, who had been buried with no fewer than seven species of flower, all of which had medicinal properties. These included woody horsetail (Ephedra), which has a long history of use in Asia to treat coughs and respiratory disorders, and as a stimulant to promote endurance on protracted hunting forays.37 Were these medicinal herbs/flowers placed in the graves as substances to help the dead on their journey to the next world, or were they, as critics claim, simply used as bedding, or, even more prosaically, blown into the caves by the wind, or buried by rodents?
The consensus now among palaeontologists and archaeologists is that, prior to about 60,000–40,000 years ago, archaic H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis did not show symbolic behaviour and had a fairly limited capacity to plan ahead. Paul Mellars, of Cambridge, distinguishes three major changes at the transition to the Upper Palaeolithic. There was first a distinct shift in stone technology – in the Middle Palaeolithic ‘tools do not appear to have been produced with clearly defined preconceived “mental templates” about the final, overall form of the finished tools’, whereas in contrast the Upper Palaeolithic tools, the fifth kind, besides being smaller and better controlled, are far more standardised, their shapes conforming to ‘clearly preconceived morphological “norms”.’38 Mellars also distinguished a change in bone technology, from the use of random fragments to the shaping of bone. And, third, from unstructured to highly structured – even rectangular – settlements. He argues that all this amounted almost to a ‘culture’ with ‘norms’ of behaviour. By and large, he says, these changes reflect the growth of long-term planning, strategic behaviour on the part of early humans of this period, in which individuals are anticipating behaviour in the future.39 He says that he does not think this could have been accomplished without language.
Other palaeontologists believe that the emergence of complicated tool-making is, in brain terms, analogous to speech and that the two activities emerged at the same time. In modern experiments, for example, James Steele and his colleagues found that, on average, 301 strikes were needed to form Acheulian biface hand-axes (the third kind, associated with H. erectus), taking 24 minutes. Such a sequence, they argue, is like constructing sentences, and they point out that damage to Broca’s area in the brain results in impairment to both language and hand and arm gestures.40 Language is considered more fully in the next chapter.
The period we have been covering, say 400,000–50,000 years ago, has been identified by Merlin Donald, professor of psychology at Queen’s University in Toronto, as possibly the most momentous stage in history. Donald has identified four stages in the development of the modern mind, involving three transitions. The first mode he calls ‘episodic’ thinking, as is shown in the great apes. Their behaviour, he says, consists of short-term responses to the environment; their lives are lived ‘entirely in the present’, as a series of concrete episodes, with a memory for specific events in a specific context.41 The second form of thinking/behaving, typified by H. erectus, is ‘mimetic’. For Donald, the world of H. erectus is qualitatively different from all that went before and this is what makes it so important. Erectus lived in a ‘society where cooperation and social coordination of action were central to the species’ survival strategy’.42 Without language, Erectus nonetheless slowly developed a culture based on mimetics – intentional mime and imitation, facial expression, mimicry of sounds, gestures etc. This was a qualitative change, says Donald, because it allowed for intentionality, creativity, reference, co-ordination and, perhaps above all, pedagogy, the acculturation of the young. It was a momentous change also because minds/individuals were no longer isolated. ‘Even highly sophisticated animals, such as apes, have no choice but to approach the world solipsistically because they cannot share ideas and thoughts in any detail. Each ape learns only what it learns for itself. Every generation starts afresh because the old die with their wisdom sealed forever in their brains . . . There are no shortcuts for an isolated mind.’43 Even so, mimesis was slow – it probably took Erectus half a million years to domesticate fire and three-quarters of a million to adapt to the cold.44 But Donald is in no doubt that many cultural artefacts had been produced by Erectus before language and the next transition, to ‘mythic’ thinking, which necessitates language. The shift to mimesis was the great divide in history, Donald says – it was, as he puts it, ‘The Great Hominid escape from the nervous system.’45 The later transitions are considered below.