What was life like for the pre-‘modern’ man?

Close on the heels of President Elbegdorj gushing after his view of its floor, Lake Baikal stands in danger of losing its World Heritage Site status, because of concerns over pollution by a pulp and paper mill. That would certainly be a shameful reflection on how we have treated the world’s deepest and oldest lake, that also holds one fifth of the world’s fresh water, but what appears stranger to me is that Baikal should have entered the list only in 1996. I do not know the criteria that are used to award such status to objects of nature and would think choosing some, and not others, is a somewhat arbitrary decision.

But so is the whole exercise of understanding and explaining the concept of heritage and identifying what is more significant than others. This is even truer when we talk about any ‘national’ heritage, as opposed to the more nebulous maybe but surely less contentious appellation of human heritage. Throughout human history, cultures have mingled, and what seems an integral and unique part of a local culture today may well have been an import millennia ago, and what today seems relatively modern may well have been known and practised in prehistoric times. Two recent reports that caught my eye have shown how far back history can be pushed.

The first appeared in the journal Science. It offers evidence that some facets of “modern” living are at least 800,000 years old. Archaeological excavations in Israel have thrown up evidence hinting at sophisticated thinking capabilities in our stone-age ancestors. Similar evidence was found earlier this century at the Hunsgi valley in Karnataka, a province in south India.

The present excavations at a site named Gesher Benot Ya’aqov on the shores of an ancient lake suggest that its inhabitants had divided their living space into a dining zone and a work zone about 790,000 years ago. This capacity for organising living and work space — a key element of human intelligence — has been believed to have emerged only about 100,000 years ago. An international team of researchers from Israel, Germany and the US has said the open-air encampment at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov shows that early humans used the site to make stone tools, butcher animals and control fire. This is also the earliest evidence of fire outside Africa.

The team suggests that these stone-age people were Homo erectus, a species that roamed from about 1.8 million years ago to about 160,000 years ago when Homo sapiens appeared. The clustering of the tools and remains of fish, crab and edible plants around two distinct zones in the encampment suggests that they carried out distinct activities at different locations — with the processing of food around a hearth. They fashioned their tools of limestone and basalt a short distance away. An archaeologist member of the team said in an interview following publication of the article, “We do not know if these people had a language and what else they were capable of doing. But they certainly inhabited a single space for some time, executing different types of activities restricted to a specific zone. This is modern behaviour.”

Homo erectus is our earliest ancestor that learnt to use fire, about 1.4 million years ago. Michael Petraglia, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford, who explored the Homo erectus tool-making sites in Karnataka,  has called the present results “extraordinary”. The concentration of food remains such as crab or fish bones around a hearth clearly shows what these early humans were consuming, Petraglia said. “The assertion that this is evidence for advanced cognitive abilities in early humans is reasonable.”

The dig in India in 2002 had discovered similar evidence almost of the same age at Isampur in the Hunsgi valley. The site contained discrete stone tool clusters that possibly represented the activities of individuals working on stone in different parts of the site. The team then suggested that early humans in Isampur had advanced thinking abilities similar to what Sharon and his colleagues have now observed at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov.
The high density of fish remains at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov also provides one of the earliest evidence for the consumption of fish by prehistoric people anywhere in the world. Consumption of  marine resources has generally been assigned only to modern humans — about 40,000 years ago.

Since there is no cogent explanation – nor, perhaps, is there any call for one – it must be a coincidence that another piece of archaeological work – this one reported in Nature --  also deals with life 800,000 years ago. This postulates that ancient humans lived in Britain at least 100,000 years earlier than previously suspected. The evidence from the Norfolk coast would also make them the oldest known human inhabitants of northern Europe.
The excavation at Happisburgh, exposed by recent coastal erosion, found 78 hand-crafted flint tools and flakes that their makers would have used for cutting or piercing. “These finds are by far the earliest known evidence of humans in Britain,” according to Chris Stringer of London’s Natural History Museum, and have “significant implications for our understanding of early human behaviour, adaptations and survival, as well as when and how [early hominids] colonised Europe after their first departure from Africa”.

The oldest hominid remains outside Africa are fossils from the Caucasus mountains, which date back 1.8 millon years. Ancient humans had reached the Mediterranean region 1.3 million years ago but there was no previous evidence of their presence in northern Europe before 700,000 years ago, when the British climate was briefly similar to that of the Mediterranean today.

The Happisburgh humans lived in colder and less hospitable conditions. The new flint artefacts are important not only because they are much earlier than other finds, but also because they are associated with a unique array of environmental data that gives a clear picture of the vegetation and climate.

The artefacts were dated through various techniques, including the rich assemblage of fossil plants and animals found with them. Geomagnetic analysis of the sediments showed that they were buried at a time when Earth’s magnetic field was opposite to today’s; this means they must be older than the field’s “reversal of polarity” 780,000 years ago. The most likely dates are at the end of an interglacial period either 830,000 or 950,000 years ago.

Happisburgh 800,000 years ago lay on the estuary of the ancient River Thames, which then turned north from its present course and drained into the North Sea Basin. Further south, a land bridge joined Britain to continental Europe. The Thames floodplain would have been predominantly grassland, supporting a wide range of herbivores, including mammoths, rhinos and horses, and predators such as hyenas, sabre-toothed cats – and human hunters. Competition for hunting would have been high, and safety a top priority for the hominids of this era. The humans of this era were probably scavengers and used the excavated flint tools to process animal carcasses for food. The researchers found evidence of large mammals including fossilised hyena dung, which must have been much ger than their modern counterparts - about the size of a lion.

The hominids -- who probably had large brains, comparable to those of modern humans – were likely to have lived in the forest. Because no human bones have yet been found, it is not clear which hominids occupied the site. They may well have been related to the people of similar antiquity from Atapuerca in Spain, assigned to the species Homo antecessor [Pioneer Man]. Happisburgh’s inhabitants were unlikely to be direct ancestors of modern Britons, who are descended from a much later wave of human migration out of Africa less than 100,000 years ago. 

Such revelations can only make us speculate what treasures of knowledge about our ancestry, the common human heritage that defies listing, may lie buried under the Mongolian steppes. A recent conference in Ulaan Ude brought together people from many countries who share their Mongol origin. Around the same time, there was this exhibition of photographs of the Mongolian diaspora organised by Tasam. I have arranged the exhibits in my mind in my own way. It begins with an almost unending camel caravan, symbolising the  moves of the diaspora, and ends with a wrinkled old woman teaching a young girl how to write the old Mongolian script, in an effort to span the past and the future. Who knows, as the two reports I have written about show, what scientists could yet unearth that would tell us about a movement in reverse, about who might have come from elsewhere to the present territory of Mongolia, and what evidence they left behind of their culture, at the time when a written language was not even a distant possibility. Looking at things from such a point of reference, whether Lake Baikal keeps its place in a list appears inconsequential. It would just be one other example of the human lack of conscience, irresponsibility, and cruelty to which men, animals, trees and water sources have fallen prey without respite. 


Footnote

Who can guess what will be unearthed and what we shall learn? An American biomolecular archaeologist and leading expert on ancient brewing, Patrick MacGovern, recently found evidence that inhabitants of a Neolithic village in China were brewing a type of mead, or fermented honey and fruit, with an alcohol content of 10 per cent. This was some 9,000 years ago, before the wheel was invented, but apparently the concept of the wheel of toil and relaxation was already there. The finding fits in with McGovern’s thesis that the development and adoption of agriculture, as opposed to nomadism and food gathering, was the result of an irresistible impulse toward drinking and intoxication. Consuming high energy sugar and alcohol was an adaptive step to survive in a hostile environment, with few natural resources. I am sure many here would agree.