Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [85]
From about 100,000 years ago, the pace of innovation accelerated further. New hunting and fishing technologies emerged. Stone points were hafted to make throwing spears, darts and other projectile weapons. Bones were carved into harpoons to facilitate large-scale fishing. Bone awls helped stitch together animal skins for clothing. Ochre plaques were etched with designs suggesting some form of notation. Bow and arrow technology was also developed during this period: researchers exploring Sibudu Cave in northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, have found bone arrowheads dating back to 64,000 years ago, fashioned for use with bows.
Given all this evidence, it now seems certain that by this time African hunter-gatherers had developed a form of articulate language. Scientists remain at odds about the evolution of language: No fossil record exists to help determine how and when vocalisation evolved into language. Some scientists maintain that its slow gestation must have started as far back as 2 million years ago, when early humans needing to cooperate to survive—in foraging for food, for example—turned signals into words. Words eventually gave birth to concepts and proto-language. Other scientists argue in favour of much later development. Paul Mellars, Professor of Pre-History and Human Evolution at Cambridge University, an expert on the evolution of human culture, maintains that it was not until about 100,000 years ago that humans began to fashion ‘simple calls’ into more complex language.
What is clear is that by 300,000 years ago, African hunter-gatherers had acquired the capacity to create and use symbols. ‘Symbolism is the Rubicon that had to be crossed for our ancestors to start becoming human’, writes Derek Bickerton in Adam’s Tongue. The use of symbols—such as body decoration—suggests a faculty for complex communication. Rudimentary language became increasingly needed to transmit information and learned behaviour among individuals and across generations. Indeed, so many hazards did early humans in Africa face that language became an essential tool for survival.
CHAPTER 18
EXODUS
LIKE EARLIER HUMAN relatives, Homo sapiens soon ventured out of Africa. During a warm climatic phase starting about 125,000 years ago, sapiens migrants moved northwards into the Levant, the lands of the eastern Mediterranean which had a similar environment to their African homeland. Evidence of their existence comes from the remains of individuals buried at cave sites at Jebel Qafzeh and Mugharet es Skhūl, dating back to about 100,000 years. Among the individuals discovered was a man at Skhūl buried with a large pig’s jaw in his arms and a child at Qafzeh buried with an antlered deer’s skull—the earliest known examples of symbolic burial. But as cold, dry conditions returned, this venture out of Africa eventually failed. By about 90,000 years ago, the Levant migrant community had died out.
The survival of the main African populations of Homo sapiens also became more precarious. From about 75,000 years ago, Africa headed into another period of intense cold. Forests shrank; savannahs dried out; the North African desert expanded; sea levels fell to more than 200 feet below their present level. The cold conditions were exacerbated by the eruption of Mount Toba in Sumatra about 74,000 years ago that covered the Indian subcontinent in ash and led to a ‘volcanic winter’ said to have lasted six years, affecting large parts of the world.
A hypothesis put forward by Stanley Ambrose of the University of Illinois in 1998 argued that the volcanic winter was so severe that it brought about a crash in population levels and caused a ‘bottleneck’ in human evolution. The effect on the world’s climate, according to Ambrose, persisted for 1,000 years. Other scientists doubted that the Toba eruption had such devastating