The Penguin History of the World

It is tempting but more hazardous to suggest that ritualized burial implies some view of an after-life. If true, though, this would testify to a huge power of abstraction in the hominins and the origins of one of the greatest and most enduring myths, that life is an illusion, that reality lies invisible elsewhere, that things are not what they seem. Without going so far, it is at least possible to agree that a momentous change is under way. Like the hints of rituals involving animals which Neanderthal caves also offer here and there, careful burial may mark a new attempt to dominate the environment. The human brain must already have been capable of discerning questions it wanted to answer and perhaps of providing answers in the shape of rituals. Slightly, tentatively, clumsily – however we describe it and still in the shallows though it may be – the human mind is afloat; the greatest of all voyages of exploration has begun.

Neanderthals of the later stages lived in developed groups. Not only did they care for the sick and bury their dead; they joined together in small bands, which co-ordinated effectively, hunted collectively, and had at least some form of communication with each other. By 100,000 years ago they had generated regional variations; their DNA shows, for instance, that some groups living in Europe had developed lighter skins than others. In Central Eurasia, a new species had emerged, the Denisovans, who were genetically different from their Neanderthal ancestors. Neanderthal man also provides our first evidence of a terrible human institution, warfare. It may have been practised in connection with cannibalism, which was directed apparently to the eating of the brains of victims. Analogy with later societies suggests that here again we have the start of some conceptualizing about a soul or spirit; such acts are sometimes directed to acquiring the magical or spiritual power of the vanquished.

In spite of their successes, the curtain started to come down on the Neanderthals around 60,000 years ago. After long and widespread domination they were not in the end to be the inheritors of the earth. Climatic change may have played a role in their demise. So may the way they hunted. Neanderthals lived life dangerously. The big game they concentrated on may not have been very cost-effective – a lot of young Neanderthal skeletons are buried with deadly injuries from hunting mammoth. The need for whole family groups to hunt together in order to be successful may also have deprived them of the time needed for specialization and learning. And it is possible that at the end they were out-competed in the battle for resources by their genetic cousins, emerging out of Africa – Homo sapiens, our species.

We were to be successors to Neanderthals and to all other types of humans living around the world when our expansion out of Africa began some 60,000 years ago. But genetic research shows that we still carry with us traces of these other forms of human life. We know that Homo sapiens and humans of what we broadly call Neanderthal groups interbred – up to 4 per cent of our own DNA is of Neanderthal origin. But was such intermingling common also with other groups, whose identity we still cannot trace for certain? It will still take a bit of time before we can determine where and with what results different groups of humans interbred after our ancestors left Africa. This is one of the most exciting fields of prehistorical research and one that is going to have great consequences for our understanding of humans living today. After the Neanderthal genome was mapped, it became clear that some of the most important disease-fighting genes that humans now have originate from outside our own species. Some researchers think that the very fact that we could interbreed with other human groups contributed massively to the peopling of the earth, because it provided the ‘hybrid vigour’ that helped us become ubiquitous on all continents save Antarctica.

Homo sapiens has been outstandingly successful, spreading all over Eurasia within 100,000 or so years of its first appearances in Africa (they are dated to about 160,000 BC) and eventually all over the world. But its origins are definitely African; we can now trace the male ancestry of every living man back to a common ancestor who lived in East Africa a little over 60,000 years ago. Its members are from the start anatomically identifiable modern humans, with smaller faces, a lighter skull and straighter limbs than the Neanderthals. At first a relatively small group entered the Levant and the Middle East, and mainly by following the coasts progressed to East and South-East Asia, eventually reaching Australasia in about 50,000 BC. By then, they were beginning to colonize Europe, where they were to live for thousands of years beside the Neanderthals. In about 15,000 BC they crossed a land bridge across what was to be the Bering Strait to enter the Americas.