Part 3

The next men we have to talk about are all members of a related group. These are the Neanderthal group. “Neanderthal man” himself was found in the Neander Valley, near Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1856. He was the first human fossil to be recognized as such.

Some of us think that the neanderthaloids proper are only those people of western Europe who didn’t get out before the beginning of the last great glaciation, and who found themselves hemmed in by the glaciers in the Alps and northern Europe. Being hemmed in, they intermarried a bit too much and developed into a special type. Professor F. Clark Howell sees it this way. In Europe, the earliest trace of men we now know is the Heidelberg jaw. Evolution continued in Europe, from Heidelberg through the Swanscombe and Steinheim types to a group of pre-neanderthaloids. There are traces of these pre-neanderthaloids pretty much throughout Europe during the third interglacial period--say 100,000 years ago. The pre-neanderthaloids are represented by such finds as the ones at Ehringsdorf in Germany and Saccopastore in Italy. I won’t describe them for you, since they are simply less extreme than the neanderthaloids proper--about half way between Steinheim and the classic Neanderthal people.

Professor Howell believes that the pre-neanderthaloids who happened to get caught in the pocket of the southwest corner of Europe at the onset of the last great glaciation became the classic Neanderthalers. Out in the Near East, Howell thinks, it is possible to see traces of people evolving from the pre-neanderthaloid type toward that of fully modern man. Certainly, we don’t see such extreme cases of “neanderthaloidism” outside of western Europe.

There are at least a dozen good examples in the main or classic Neanderthal group in Europe. They date to just before and in the earlier part of the last great glaciation (85,000 to 40,000 years ago). Many of the finds have been made in caves. The “cave men” the movies and the cartoonists show you are probably meant to be Neanderthalers. I’m not at all sure they dragged their women by the hair; the women were probably pretty tough, too!

Neanderthal men had large bony heads, but plenty of room for brains. Some had brain cases even larger than the average for modern man. Their faces were heavy, and they had eyebrow ridges of bone, but the ridges were not as big as those of Java man. Their foreheads were very low, and they didn’t have much chin. They were about five feet three inches tall, but were heavy and barrel-chested. But the Neanderthalers didn’t slouch as much as they’ve been blamed for, either.

One important thing about the Neanderthal group is that there is a fair number of them to study. Just as important is the fact that we know something about how they lived, and about some of the tools they made.

OTHER MEN CONTEMPORARY WITH THE NEANDERTHALOIDS

We have seen that the neanderthaloids seem to be a specialization in a corner of Europe. What was going on elsewhere? We think that the pre-neanderthaloid type was a generally widespread form of men. From this type evolved other more or less extreme although generally related men. The Solo finds in Java form one such case. Another was the Rhodesian man of Africa, and the more recent Hopefield finds show more of the general Rhodesian type. It is more confusing than it needs to be if these cases outside western Europe are called neanderthaloids. They lived during the same approximate time range but they were all somewhat different-looking people.

EARLY MODERN MEN

How early is modern man (_Homo sapiens_), the “wise man”? Some people have thought that he was very early, a few still think so. Piltdown and Galley Hill, which were quite modern in anatomical appearance and _supposedly_ very early in date, were the best “evidence” for very early modern men. Now that Piltdown has been liquidated and Galley Hill is known to be very late, what is left of the idea?

The backs of the skulls of the Swanscombe and Steinheim finds look rather modern. Unless you pay attention to the face and forehead of the Steinheim find--which not many people have--and perhaps also consider the Ternafine jaws, you might come to the conclusion that the crown of the Swanscombe head was that of a modern-like man.

Two more skulls, again without faces, are available from a French cave site, Fontéchevade. They come from the time of the last great interglacial, as did the pre-neanderthaloids. The crowns of the Fontéchevade skulls also look quite modern. There is a bit of the forehead preserved on one of these skulls and the brow-ridge is not heavy. Nevertheless, there is a suggestion that the bones belonged to an immature individual. In this case, his (or even more so, if _her_) brow-ridges would have been weak anyway. The case for the Fontéchevade fossils, as modern type men, is little stronger than that for Swanscombe, although Professor Vallois believes it a good case.

It seems to add up to the fact that there were people living in Europe--before the classic neanderthaloids--who looked more modern, in some features, than the classic western neanderthaloids did. Our best suggestion of what men looked like--just before they became fully modern--comes from a cave on Mount Carmel in Palestine.

THE FIRST MODERNS

Professor T. D. McCown and the late Sir Arthur Keith, who studied the Mount Carmel bones, figured out that one of the two groups involved was as much as 70 per cent modern. There were, in fact, two groups or varieties of men in the Mount Carmel caves and in at least two other Palestinian caves of about the same time. The time would be about that of the onset of colder weather, when the last glaciation was beginning in the north--say 75,000 years ago.

The 70 per cent modern group came from only one cave, Mugharet es-Skhul (“cave of the kids”). The other group, from several caves, had bones of men of the type we’ve been calling pre-neanderthaloid which we noted were widespread in Europe and beyond. The tools which came with each of these finds were generally similar, and McCown and Keith, and other scholars since their study, have tended to assume that both the Skhul group and the pre-neanderthaloid group came from exactly the same time. The conclusion was quite natural: here was a population of men in the act of evolving in two different directions. But the time may not be exactly the same. It is very difficult to be precise, within say 10,000 years, for a time some 75,000 years ago. If the Skhul men are in fact later than the pre-neanderthaloid group of Palestine, as some of us think, then they show how relatively modern some men were--men who lived at the same time as the classic Neanderthalers of the European pocket.

Soon after the first extremely cold phase of the last glaciation, we begin to get a number of bones of completely modern men in Europe. We also get great numbers of the tools they made, and their living places in caves. Completely modern skeletons begin turning up in caves dating back to toward 40,000 years ago. The time is about that of the beginning of the second phase of the last glaciation. These skeletons belonged to people no different from many people we see today. Like people today, not everybody looked alike. (The positions of the more important fossil men of later Europe are shown in the chart on page 72.)

DIFFERENCES IN THE EARLY MODERNS

The main early European moderns have been divided into two groups, the Cro-Magnon group and the Combe Capelle-Brünn group. Cro-Magnon people were tall and big-boned, with large, long, and rugged heads. They must have been built like many present-day Scandinavians. The Combe Capelle-Brünn people were shorter; they had narrow heads and faces, and big eyebrow-ridges. Of course we don’t find the skin or hair of these people. But there is little doubt they were Caucasoids (“Whites”).

Another important find came in the Italian Riviera, near Monte Carlo. Here, in a cave near Grimaldi, there was a grave containing a woman and a young boy, buried together. The two skeletons were first called “Negroid” because some features of their bones were thought to resemble certain features of modern African Negro bones. But more recently, Professor E. A. Hooton and other experts questioned the use of the word “Negroid” in describing the Grimaldi skeletons. It is true that nothing is known of the skin color, hair form, or any other fleshy feature of the Grimaldi people, so that the word “Negroid” in its usual meaning is not proper here. It is also not clear whether the features of the bones claimed to be “Negroid” are really so at all.

From a place called Wadjak, in Java, we have “proto-Australoid” skulls which closely resemble those of modern Australian natives. Some of the skulls found in South Africa, especially the Boskop skull, look like those of modern Bushmen, but are much bigger. The ancestors of the Bushmen seem to have once been very widespread south of the Sahara Desert. True African Negroes were forest people who apparently expanded out of the west central African area only in the last several thousand years. Although dark in skin color, neither the Australians nor the Bushmen are Negroes; neither the Wadjak nor the Boskop skulls are “Negroid.”

As we’ve already mentioned, Professor Weidenreich believed that Peking man was already on the way to becoming a Mongoloid. Anyway, the Mongoloids would seem to have been present by the time of the “Upper Cave” at Choukoutien, the _Sinanthropus_ find-spot.

WHAT THE DIFFERENCES MEAN

What does all this difference mean? It means that, at one moment in time, within each different area, men tended to look somewhat alike. From area to area, men tended to look somewhat different, just as they do today. This is all quite natural. People _tended_ to mate near home; in the anthropological jargon, they made up geographically localized breeding populations. The simple continental division of “stocks”--black = Africa, yellow = Asia, white = Europe--is too simple a picture to fit the facts. People became accustomed to life in some particular area within a continent (we might call it a “natural area”). As they went on living there, they evolved towards some particular physical variety. It would, of course, have been difficult to draw a clear boundary between two adjacent areas. There must always have been some mating across the boundaries in every case. One thing human beings don’t do, and never have done, is to mate for “purity.” It is self-righteous nonsense when we try to kid ourselves into thinking that they do.

I am not going to struggle with the whole business of modern stocks and races. This is a book about prehistoric men, not recent historic or modern men. My physical anthropologist friends have been very patient in helping me to write and rewrite this chapter--I am not going to break their patience completely. Races are their business, not mine, and they must do the writing about races. I shall, however, give two modern definitions of race, and then make one comment.

Dr. William G. Boyd, professor of Immunochemistry, School of Medicine, Boston University: “We may define a human race as a population which differs significantly from other human populations in regard to the frequency of one or more of the genes it possesses.”

Professor Sherwood L. Washburn, professor of Physical Anthropology, Department of Anthropology, the University of California: “A ‘race’ is a group of genetically similar populations, and races intergrade because there are always intermediate populations.”

My comment is that the ideas involved here are all biological: they concern groups, _not_ individuals. Boyd and Washburn may differ a bit on what they want to consider a “population,” but a population is a group nevertheless, and genetics is biology to the hilt. Now a lot of people still think of race in terms of how people dress or fix their food or of other habits or customs they have. The next step is to talk about racial “purity.” None of this has anything whatever to do with race proper, which is a matter of the biology of groups.

Incidentally, I’m told that if man very carefully _controls_ the breeding of certain animals over generations--dogs, cattle, chickens--he might achieve a “pure” race of animals. But he doesn’t do it. Some unfortunate genetic trait soon turns up, so this has just as carefully to be bred out again, and so on.

SUMMARY OF PRESENT KNOWLEDGE OF FOSSIL MEN

The earliest bones of men we now have--upon which all the experts would probably agree--are those of _Meganthropus_, from Java, of about 450,000 years ago. The earlier australopithecines of Africa were possibly not tool-users and may not have been ancestral to men at all. But there is an alternate and evidently increasingly stronger chance that some of them may have been. The Kanam jaw from Kenya, another early possibility, is not only very incomplete but its find-spot is very questionable.

Java man proper, _Pithecanthropus_, comes next, at about 400,000 years ago, and the big Heidelberg jaw in Germany must be of about the same date. Next comes Swanscombe in England, Steinheim in Germany, the Ternafine jaws in Algeria, and Peking man, _Sinanthropus_. They all date to the second great interglacial period, about 350,000 years ago.

Piltdown and Galley Hill are out, and with them, much of the starch in the old idea that there were two distinct lines of development in human evolution: (1) a line of “paleoanthropic” development from Heidelberg to the Neanderthalers where it became extinct, and (2) a very early “modern” line, through Piltdown, Galley Hill, Swanscombe, to us. Swanscombe, Steinheim, and Ternafine are just as easily cases of very early pre-neanderthaloids.

The pre-neanderthaloids were very widespread during the third interglacial: Ehringsdorf, Saccopastore, some of the Mount Carmel people, and probably Fontéchevade are cases in point. A variety of their descendants can be seen, from Java (Solo), Africa (Rhodesian man), and about the Mediterranean and in western Europe. As the acute cold of the last glaciation set in, the western Europeans found themselves surrounded by water, ice, or bitter cold tundra. To vastly over-simplify it, they “bred in” and became classic neanderthaloids. But on Mount Carmel, the Skhul cave-find with its 70 per cent modern features shows what could happen elsewhere at the same time.

Lastly, from about 40,000 or 35,000 years ago--the time of the onset of the second phase of the last glaciation--we begin to find the fully modern skeletons of men. The modern skeletons differ from place to place, just as different groups of men living in different places still look different.

What became of the Neanderthalers? Nobody can tell me for sure. I’ve a hunch they were simply “bred out” again when the cold weather was over. Many Americans, as the years go by, are no longer ashamed to claim they have “Indian blood in their veins.” Give us a few more generations and there will not be very many other Americans left to whom we can brag about it. It certainly isn’t inconceivable to me to imagine a little Cro-Magnon boy bragging to his friends about his tough, strong, Neanderthaler great-great-great-great-grandfather!

Cultural BEGINNINGS

Men, unlike the lower animals, are made up of much more than flesh and blood and bones; for men have “culture.”

WHAT IS CULTURE?

“Culture” is a word with many meanings. The doctors speak of making a “culture” of a certain kind of bacteria, and ants are said to have a “culture.” Then there is the Emily Post kind of “culture”--you say a person is “cultured,” or that he isn’t, depending on such things as whether or not he eats peas with his knife.

The anthropologists use the word too, and argue heatedly over its finer meanings; but they all agree that every human being is part of or has some kind of culture. Each particular human group has a particular culture; that is one of the ways in which we can tell one group of men from another. In this sense, a CULTURE means the way the members of a group of people think and believe and live, the tools they make, and the way they do things. Professor Robert Redfield says a culture is an organized or formalized body of conventional understandings. “Conventional understandings” means the whole set of rules, beliefs, and standards which a group of people lives by. These understandings show themselves in art, and in the other things a people may make and do. The understandings continue to last, through tradition, from one generation to another. They are what really characterize different human groups.

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF CULTURE

A culture lasts, although individual men in the group die off. On the other hand, a culture changes as the different conventions and understandings change. You could almost say that a culture lives in the minds of the men who have it. But people are not born with it; they get it as they grow up. Suppose a day-old Hungarian baby is adopted by a family in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and the child is not told that he is Hungarian. He will grow up with no more idea of Hungarian culture than anyone else in Oshkosh.

So when I speak of ancient Egyptian culture, I mean the whole body of understandings and beliefs and knowledge possessed by the ancient Egyptians. I mean their beliefs as to why grain grew, as well as their ability to make tools with which to reap the grain. I mean their beliefs about life after death. What I am thinking about as culture is a thing which lasted in time. If any one Egyptian, even the Pharaoh, died, it didn’t affect the Egyptian culture of that particular moment.

PREHISTORIC CULTURES

For that long period of man’s history that is all prehistory, we have no written descriptions of cultures. We find only the tools men made, the places where they lived, the graves in which they buried their dead. Fortunately for us, these tools and living places and graves all tell us something about the ways these men lived and the things they believed. But the story we learn of the very early cultures must be only a very small part of the whole, for we find so few things. The rest of the story is gone forever. We have to do what we can with what we find.

For all of the time up to about 75,000 years ago, which was the time of the classic European Neanderthal group of men, we have found few cave-dwelling places of very early prehistoric men. First, there is the fallen-in cave where Peking man was found, near Peking. Then there are two or three other _early_, but not _very early_, possibilities. The finds at the base of the French cave of Fontéchevade, those in one of the Makapan caves in South Africa, and several open sites such as Dr. L. S. B. Leakey’s Olorgesailie in Kenya doubtless all lie earlier than the time of the main European Neanderthal group, but none are so early as the Peking finds.

You can see that we know very little about the home life of earlier prehistoric men. We find different kinds of early stone tools, but we can’t even be really sure which tools may have been used together.

WHY LITTLE HAS LASTED FROM EARLY TIMES

Except for the rare find-spots mentioned above, all our very early finds come from geological deposits, or from the wind-blown surfaces of deserts. Here is what the business of geological deposits really means. Let us say that a group of people was living in England about 300,000 years ago. They made the tools they needed, lived in some sort of camp, almost certainly built fires, and perhaps buried their dead. While the climate was still warm, many generations may have lived in the same place, hunting, and gathering nuts and berries; but after some few thousand years, the weather began very gradually to grow colder. These early Englishmen would not have known that a glacier was forming over northern Europe. They would only have noticed that the animals they hunted seemed to be moving south, and that the berries grew larger toward the south. So they would have moved south, too.

The camp site they left is the place we archeologists would really have liked to find. All of the different tools the people used would have been there together--many broken, some whole. The graves, and traces of fire, and the tools would have been there. But the glacier got there first! The front of this enormous sheet of ice moved down over the country, crushing and breaking and plowing up everything, like a gigantic bulldozer. You can see what happened to our camp site.

Everything the glacier couldn’t break, it pushed along in front of it or plowed beneath it. Rocks were ground to gravel, and soil was caught into the ice, which afterwards melted and ran off as muddy water. Hard tools of flint sometimes remained whole. Human bones weren’t so hard; it’s a wonder _any_ of them lasted. Gushing streams of melt water flushed out the debris from underneath the glacier, and water flowed off the surface and through great crevasses. The hard materials these waters carried were even more rolled and ground up. Finally, such materials were dropped by the rushing waters as gravels, miles from the front of the glacier. At last the glacier reached its greatest extent; then it melted backward toward the north. Debris held in the ice was dropped where the ice melted, or was flushed off by more melt water. When the glacier, leaving the land, had withdrawn to the sea, great hunks of ice were broken off as icebergs. These icebergs probably dropped the materials held in their ice wherever they floated and melted. There must be many tools and fragmentary bones of prehistoric men on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea.

Remember, too, that these glaciers came and went at least three or four times during the Ice Age. Then you will realize why the earlier things we find are all mixed up. Stone tools from one camp site got mixed up with stone tools from many other camp sites--tools which may have been made tens of thousands or more years apart. The glaciers mixed them all up, and so we cannot say which particular sets of tools belonged together in the first place.

“EOLITHS”

But what sort of tools do we find earliest? For almost a century, people have been picking up odd bits of flint and other stone in the oldest Ice Age gravels in England and France. It is now thought these odd bits of stone weren’t actually worked by prehistoric men. The stones were given a name, _eoliths_, or “dawn stones.” You can see them in many museums; but you can be pretty sure that very few of them were actually fashioned by men.

It is impossible to pick out “eoliths” that seem to be made in any one _tradition_. By “tradition” I mean a set of habits for making one kind of tool for some particular job. No two “eoliths” look very much alike: tools made as part of some one tradition all look much alike. Now it’s easy to suppose that the very earliest prehistoric men picked up and used almost any sort of stone. This wouldn’t be surprising; you and I do it when we go camping. In other words, some of these “eoliths” may actually have been used by prehistoric men. They must have used anything that might be handy when they needed it. We could have figured that out without the “eoliths.”

THE ROAD TO STANDARDIZATION