Scientists agree that the African savanna was the cradle of early humanity. But what was so special about the African savanna? The landscape was one of rolling woodland, open plains and occasional high mountain ranges. Like an inverted bowl, flat coastal plains rose steeply to an interior plateau between 1,200 and 4,000 feet above sea level to form the highlands. Two million years ago, several species of the genus Homo (man: comprising all manlike creatures that ever walked on their hind legs) existed side-by-side in the lush Garden of Eden that is now Africa, until a shakedown left only a single species. It didn’t happen overnight, but it was on this highland plateau that Homo sapiens (thinking man) first appeared more than 250,000 years ago. It is this ancient ancestor with whom we shall attempt to relate.
Then, between 700,000 and 900,000 years ago, the first small bands of modern people migrated north from Africa, together with the many types of animals they hunted. (As Pliny the Elder aptly put it, “Always something new out of Africa.”) And it now appears that another evolutionary crisis occurred within the last 60,000 years and that all of us, all five billion of us, are descended from the survivor of that crisis. A statistician somewhere calculated that this primeval Eve was our 10,000th great-grandmother.2
During the last 35,000 or so years before written history, adaptation changed to adaptability. When we began to express and separate our inner and outer worlds through the use of symbols (language), we had adapted, by something that happened in our brain, to limitless adaptability. We could now shape and define our world and communicate knowledge to others of our kind, we could express what we felt, we could project ourselves into tomorrow’s situations and we could remember what happened yesterday, and derive lessons from the experience. We could devise tools and thereby improve our situation. We continued to grow and improve as was, and is, human nature. In all this, the key is adaptability.
One of the core things that separates the human world and the animal world is that animals dwell in a kind of instinctive present. By contrast, as a result of our adaptability, we alter history. Alone among all creatures on earth, mankind has a sense of destiny.
The principle of adaptability has taken us from the Old Stone Age to the Computer Age, from silica chips to silicon chips, from crossing the Bering Strait to landing on the moon. As a result, it is no longer our nature to live instinctively. Except for a few scattered pockets of people living primitive lifestyles in isolated areas of the world, that particular phase of our evolution disappeared millenniums ago. That is why it is so important for us, as modern day practitioners of early life skills, to study and re-learn the skills that were an inherent part of the lives of our ancient ancestors. We cannot walk into the wilderness and expect our DNA to take over and save us from an unfamiliar environment.
Although we cannot observe our ancestors directly, or look for thoughts lost 100,000 years ago, especially when there are no written records, we can use common sense to figure out what kinds of behavior would have been useful or productive to early communities and families. Across the long march of time love and loyalty, trust and sharing, agreement on the rules and a strong sense of belonging are what worked just as they work in modern tribal communities. The greed, exploitation, selfishness, callousness and aggression which propel current movers and shakers would have been suicidal in a tribal context, as they are today, in the long run.
What can a people so removed from our world teach us? And does it matter that our conception of our ancient ancestors is correct? I think it matters a great deal. We can’t even begin to tackle constructively the multiple, interlocking problems threatening our species and our planet today without some grasp of who and what we are, how we got that way and what does or does not work for us.
Neanderthal
Let’s begin by taking a look at Homo sapiens, the Neanderthal.
Today, we take for granted cultural differences among people in different areas. Every modern human population has its characteristic house style, implements and art. For instance, if you were shown chopsticks, a bottle of Coors beer, and a boomerang and asked to associate one object each with China, Colorado and Australia, you would have no trouble. No such cultural variation is apparent for Neanderthals. Even tools from 40,000 look essentially the same as tools from 100,000 years ago. They lacked innovation. For a people that had no writing or other way of transmitting information and a life expectancy of only thirty-five years, it stands to reason that their technological progress would stagnate. Yet, they were the first people to use fire on a regular, everyday basis. Nearly all Neanderthal caves have small areas of ash and charcoal indicating a simple fireplace.
Neanderthals looked much the same no matter where they came from. Neanderthal women stood about five feet tall, and the men five feet six inches, according to anthropologist Erik Trinkaus of the University of New Mexico. They were heavily built, with large, powerful bones and muscles. Their weight was at least twenty pounds heavier than a modern person of comparable height. Although they walked basically as we do, they moved irregularly—as Trinkaus puts it, “more like a halfback doing broken field running than like a sprinter.”
A Neanderthal’s handshake would have been bone-crushing. They had big faces, prominent brow ridges and their lower jaws sloped backwards, leaving very little chin. In adult Neanderthals, the front teeth were worn down from using their teeth as a third hand, like a vise. By the time they were in their thirties, their teeth were often worn to the roots.
Cartoons depict a Neanderthal male, club in hand, dragging his female by the hair, an attitude that portrays early man as savage and crude, yet more and more material has come to light suggesting the opposite. As busy as they must have been, Neanderthals seemingly made time for kindness. They placed flowers, such as thistle and hollyhock in graves, indicting a possible belief in a life beyond the present, and they cared for their elderly. One fossil from the Shanidar cave in Iraq was a physical wreck, with a clubfoot and withered arm. Yet, the fellow survived to 30, implying that Neanderthals had a well-developed social conscience and cared for those who probably contributed little to the economy of the group. In fact, many skeletons of older Neanderthals show signs of severe impairment such as withered arms, healed but incapacitating broken bones, tooth loss and severe osteoarthritis. Only care by younger clan members could have enabled the older members of the group to stay alive.3
Hunters and gatherers usually live in small isloated roving bands. In fact, until the rise of civilization, man lived in communities so small that every adult knew everyone else. These communities were intimate and people came to have the same ways of doing things. They mated with and lived almost entirely with others like themselves. They remained in that community and had a strong sense of solidarity. These communities had no writing, but we know about their life because it is the same as most contemporary uncivilized communities.
In a small, intimate community all people were known as individuals. Men and women were seen as persons, not as parts of mechanical operations, the way we see so many of those around us today. Also, the groupings of people within the primitive community depended on status and role, not on mere practical usefulness. There were fathers, mothers, older people and spiritual leaders; each kind of person was accorded prestige.
The original human society was one of kinship, and cooperation was essential to secure food and shelter and for defense against foes, human and otherwise. But the essential order of society, the glue which held people together, was morality. Each pre-civilized society was held together by largely undeclared but continually realized ethical concepts.