Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [78]
Subsequent discoveries in Africa and Europe began to point to a large-brained species intermediate between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens that survived until 100,000 years ago. In Africa, specimens have been found over a vast area ranging from the sand dunes of Saldanha near Cape Town, to Lake Ndutu in Tanzania, to Ethiopia. In 1976, members of Jon Kalb’s team exploring the Middle Awash region found a partial skull at Bodo with a brain volume of about 1,250 cubic centimetres, dated to about 600,000 years ago. Scientists use both names—heidelbergensis or rhodesiensis—to describe the same species.
At the beginning of Africa’s Middle Stone Age, about 280,000 years ago, Homo rhodesiensis/heidelbergensis achieved a further breakthrough in toolmaking, supplanting the old Acheulean technology that had endured in Africa for a million years. Hitherto, toolmakers had relied principally on chance to strike a suitable flake. Now, using a new method known now as the Levallois technique, named after the suburb of Paris where examples were first found, rhodesiensis began to produce flakes from carefully prepared cores that were designed for specific purposes—for cutting, scraping or piercing. Another type of stone tool developed by Middle Stone Age Africans was the stone point, flakes that were retouched along both faces to make a point suitable for a spear tip.
They also made copious use of mineral pigments such as red ochre. Excavating a site near Kenya’s Lake Baringo dating back 285,000 years ago, Sally McBrearty of the University of Connecticut uncovered huge quantities of red ochre, together with grindstones used to process it into powder. McBrearty believes that the inhabitants of Baringo used ochre for symbolic purposes, possibly to decorate their bodies. A site at Twin Rivers in Zambia, dating from the same period, yielded pieces of hematite and limonite—the sources of red and yellow ochre—that indicated that they had been used as chunky crayons.
In Europe, heidelbergensis immigrants went their own way, gradually diverging from African populations. Their range was extensive. Remains have been found in England, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary and Italy. A tibia (shinbone) and two teeth dug up at Boxgrove in southern England date back to around 500,000 years and represent the oldest human known from the British Isles. The tibia suggests that it belonged to a heavily built, muscular individual nearly six feet tall. Skulls and skeletal bones from the Spanish site at Atapuerca paint a similar picture. Some individuals there had brain sizes falling in the modern human range of 1,200 to 1,500 cubic centimetres. Wooden spears dating back 400,000 years ago, found buried in a peat bog in Schöningen in Germany, show that heidelbergensis groups were involved in hunting large animals. They had also begun to construct rudimentary shelters. Sites at Terra Amata in southern France and Bilzingsleben in Germany have yielded evidence of foundations of large oval huts, constructed about 400,000 years ago, where domestic fire was used.
The climate they endured was subject to devastating swings between glacial and interglacial periods. At the peak of the Ice Ages, glaciers advanced as far south as England and Germany. Adapting to the harsh environment, heidelbergensis developed more muscular bodies with stubby legs and wider chests, better able to conserve heat, slowly evolving into the most famous of early humans, the Neanderthals.
The Neanderthals, the first fossil humans to be discovered, suffered decades of public derision as the result of a description that the French scientist Marcellin Boule gave of a Neanderthal skeleton unearthed near La Chapelle-aux-Saints in 1908. Boule decided that the Neanderthals were