The Penguin History of the World

Before groups of Homo sapiens left Africa, the species had gone through a very long development – longer, in fact, than the time it has now spent outside Africa. Over about 100,000 years mankind slowly developed the means that would propel us to become the dominant species. Not all of this happened as linear progress. Our ancestors were few in numbers and often lived a precarious existence, even compared to other human species that existed on the continent. One scholar has compared our development there with small candles flickering. Even if humans were already capable of transmitting learning, most of these attempts were snuffed out, with its tribe, through some cataclysmic event. It seems, however, that at some point, less than 100,000 years ago, Homo sapiens in East Africa reached a critical threshold, in which accumulation of innovations and contact between groups became permanent. Some of this is probably linked to the development of language, which even in its most rudimentary forms facilitated learning and memory. About 65,000 years ago almost all of the means needed for expansion existed in Africa: complex tools, long-distance transport, ceremonies and rituals, nets, traps and fishing gear, cooking and huts. Some of these skills were undoubtedly picked up from interaction with genetically different groups of humans. There would be ‘bottlenecks’ in later human development, both before and after the first groups left Africa, in which our population may have been reduced to a few thousand individuals. But some form of continuity would survive.

Much remains speculative in assessing the reasons for the timing and pattern of the diffusion of Homo sapiens and palaeoanthropologists remain cautious about the fossil record; some of them do not like to assert without qualification that we are all descendants from a small number of humans who left Africa roughly at the same time. Nevertheless, most agree that from about 50,000 years ago to the end of the last Ice Age in about 9000 BC we are at last considering plentiful and expanding evidence of men of modern type. This period is normally referred to as the ‘Upper’ Palaeolithic, a name derived from the Greek for ‘old stones’. It corresponds, roughly, to the more familiar term ‘Stone Age’, but, like other contributions to the chaotic terminology of prehistory, there are difficulties in using such words without careful qualification.

To separate ‘Upper’ and ‘Lower’ Palaeolithic is easy; the division represents the physical fact that the topmost layers of geological strata are the most recent and that therefore fossils and artefacts found among them are later than those found at lower levels. The Lower Palaeolithic is therefore the designation of an age more ancient than the Upper. Almost all the artefacts which survive from the Palaeolithic are made from stone; none is made from metal, whose appearance made it possible to follow a terminology used by the Roman poet Lucretius by labelling what comes after the Stone Age as the Bronze and Iron Ages.

These are, of course, cultural and technological labels; their great merit is that they direct attention to the activities of man. At one time tools and weapons are made of stone, then of bronze, then of iron. None the less, these terms have disadvantages, too. The obvious one is that within the huge tracts of time in which stone artefacts provide the largest significant body of evidence, we are dealing for the most part with hominids. They had, in varying degree, some, but not all, human characteristics; many stone tools were not made by men. Increasingly, too, the fact that this terminology originated in European archaeology created difficulties as more and more evidence accumulated about the rest of the world which did not really fit in. A final disadvantage is that it blurs important distinctions within periods even in Europe. The result has been its further refinement. Within the Stone Age scholars have distinguished (in sequence) the Lower, Middle and Upper Palaeolithic and then the Mesolithic and the Neolithic (the last of which blurs the division attributed by the older schemes to the coming of metallurgy). The period down to the end of the last Ice Age in Europe is also sometimes called the Old Stone Age, another complication, because here we have yet another principle of classification, simply that provided by chronology. Homo sapiens appears in Europe roughly at the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic. It is in Europe, too, that the largest quantity of skeletal remains has been found, and it was on this evidence that the distinction of the species was long based.