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Although many scientists remained sceptical about Solecki’s interpretation, the prevailing view during the 1970s was that Neanderthals were advanced enough to be the most likely direct ancestors of Homo sapiens.

CHAPTER 17

SAPIENS

TRACING THE ORIGINS of modern humans—Homo sapiens—has involved as much controversy as the search for ancient humans. The focus of attention for many decades was on Europe. It was there that the first discoveries were made of the remains of anatomically modern people with an advanced culture dating back 40,000 years that seemed to separate them from all other early human species. In 1868, French workers building a railway at Les Eyzies de Tayac, a village in the valley of the Vézère River in the Dordogne, uncovered the first specimens in a small rock shelter known in the local patois as ‘Cro-Magnon’. The name ‘Cro-Magnon’ became attached not just to the dead occupants buried in the shelter but eventually to the whole population of early modern humans living in Europe during the Upper Palaeolithic period.

The abilities and talents of Europe’s Cro-Magnons, when compared to Neanderthals, were prodigious, making them worthy candidates as founder-members of Homo sapiens. They ushered in an era of spectacular innovation, producing a range of tools and artefacts far more sophisticated than anything previously found. Their toolkit included long, thin blades of stone, struck off from specially chosen cores and modified further to turn them into specialised knives, scrapers and tools for piercing and engraving. As well as using stone, they worked bone, ivory and antler to manufacture needles, beads and other objects. They also produced composite tools made of several parts, such as harpoons with detachable heads. Most remarkable of all was their artistic endeavour. In what has been described as a ‘creative explosion’, Cro-Magnons made engravings and sculptures of animals and humans and painted the walls of subterranean caves with vivid images of deer, horses, mammoths, wild cattle and other contemporary beasts.

All this was taken as evidence of a ‘human revolution’, a flowering of consciousness, which marked the emergence of modern humans. Europe’s cave paintings and carved figurines, in particular, were seen as the first stirrings of symbolic and abstract thought and also of language. Murals found in more than 200 caves in western Europe provided testimony of a great artistic outpouring over a period of 25,000 years. The Lascaux caves in the Dordogne, discovered in 1940, contained not only 2,000 figurines but obscure geometric and abstract signs. Bone plaques, found at Les Eyzies and elsewhere, were marked with rows of holes and notches thought to record days, lunar months and the changing seasons. Vulture bones retrieved from cave sites in the Pyrenees Mountains had been turned into flutes with complex sound capabilities. Burial practices had also become more complex, with bodies buried in graves along with goods that would have been considered to be useful in the afterlife. In sum, Europe’s Upper Palaeolithic achievements were used as a yardstick for defining modernity.

But a puzzle remained about the sudden appearance in Europe of Cro-Magnons and about who their ancestors were. There were marked physical differences between Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals. The range of their brain size was much the same: between 1,000 and 2,000 cubic centimetres, with an average of 1,350 cubic centimetres. But the Cro-Magnons had higher, more domed skulls, with small brow-ridges and prominent chins; they were taller, with longer legs.

They had linear body shapes like people accustomed to living in warm climates. By contrast, the Neanderthals had shorter, stockier frames, more like people adapted to living in cold climates.

Arguments over the origins of modern humans veered back and forth for much of the twentieth century. During the 1940s, the Germanborn anatomist Franz Weidenreich challenged Marcellin Boule’s verdict that Neanderthals were an evolutionary dead-end and