The Penguin History of the World

It remains true, though, that if nothing very general can be confidently said about the behaviour of hominins before man, still less can anything very precise be confirmed. We move in a fog, dimly apprehending for a moment creatures now more, now less, man-like and familiar. Their minds, we can be sure, are almost inconceivably unlike our own as instruments for the registration of the outside world. Yet when we look at the range of the attributes of Homo erectus it is his human, not pre-human, characteristics which are most striking. Physically, he has a brain of an order of magnitude comparable to our own. He makes tools (and does so within more than one technical tradition), builds shelters, takes over natural refuges by exploiting fire, and sallies out of them to hunt and gather his food. He does this in groups with a discipline which can sustain complicated operations; he therefore has some ability to exchange ideas by speech. The basic biological units of his hunting groups probably prefigure the nuclear human family, being founded on the institutions of the home base and a sexual differentiation of activity. There may even be some complexity of social organization in so far as fire-bearers and gatherers or old creatures whose memories made them the databanks of their ‘societies’ could be supported by the labour of others. There has to be some social organization to permit the sharing of co-operatively obtained food, too. There is nothing to be usefully added to an account such as this by pretending to say where exactly can be found a prehistorical point or dividing line at which such things had come to be, but subsequent human history is unimaginable without them. When an African relative of Homo erectus, perhaps possessing slightly larger and more complex brains than others, evolved into Homo sapiens it did so with an enormous achievement and heritage already secure in its grasp. Whether we choose to call it human or not hardly matters.

2 Homo Sapiens

The appearance of Homo sapiens is momentous: here, at last, is recognizable humanity, however raw in form. Yet this evolutionary step is another abstraction. It is the end of the prologue and the beginning of the main drama, but we cannot usefully ask precisely when this happens. It is a process, not a point in time, and it is not a process occurring everywhere at the same rate. All we have to date it are a few physical relics of early humans of types recognizably modern or closely related to the modern. Some of them almost certainly overlapped by more than 100,000 years the continuing life of other hominins. Some may represent false starts and dead ends, for human evolution must have continued to be highly selective. Though much faster than in earlier times, this evolution is still very slow; we are dealing with something that took place over perhaps 200,000 years in which we do not know when our first true ‘ancestor’ appeared (though the place was almost certainly Africa). It is not ever easy to pose the right questions; the physiological and technical and mental lines at which we leave Homo erectus behind are matters of definition, and occurred during the many millennia that variants of that species and early specimens of Homo sapiens all lived on the earth.

The few early human fossils have provoked much argument. There is no doubt that men of a new type expanded into Eurasia in the warm period between two glacial eras from about 250,000 to 180,000 years ago, an age climatically so different from ours that elephants browsed in a semi-tropical Thames valley and hippopotami swam in the Rhine. The ‘Swanscombe’ skull, named after the place where it was found, shows its possessor to have had a big brain (about 1,300cc) but in other ways not much to resemble modern man. It is likely that he represents a breed of Homo Heidelbergensis (named after the German city where remains were first found). These groups are descendants of some type of Homo erectus, and probably the ancestors of both the Neanderthals and ourselves (in their African forms). They spread fast throughout Africa and Eurasia, and reached levels of development not seen in earlier types of men. They were almost certainly the first species that learnt to kindle fire, with the momentous effects that had for humankind’s further development.