Homo Sapiens
Archaeologists distinguish anatomically modern humans (homo sapiens) from other members of the genus homo by a number of anatomical features, most notably a relatively slender build, a head with a large cranium (and forebrain) with a face tucked underneath it, small teeth and jaws, and a larynx situated lower in the throat. The earliest fossilized remains showing these features come from Ethiopia, and have been most recently dated as about 195,000 and 160,000 years old. What archaeologists term “behavioral modernity” developed after anatomical modernity, though whether this was gradual or the result of a sudden “cognitive revolution” about 50,000 years ago is hotly disputed. Behavioral modernity includes long-range planning, development of new technologies such as the bow and arrow, the wide use of symbols in burials and personal adornment, more complex speech, and broad networks of social and economic exchange.
Some scholars see the development of cognition and brain complexity as a social and cultural as well as a physical process. Some of this operated at the individual level: individuals who had better social skills were more likely to mate than those who did not – this has been observed in chimpanzees and, of course, in humans from more recent periods – and thus to pass on their genetic material, creating what biologists term “selective pressure” that favored the more socially adept. For humans, being socially adept includes being able to understand the motivations of others – that is, recognizing that they have internal lives that drive their actions. Such social skills were particularly important for females: because the period when human infants are dependent on others is so long, mothers with good social networks to assist them were more likely to have infants who survived. Cooperative child rearing required social skills and adaptability, and may itself have been an impetus to increasing complexity in the brain. Selective pressure may have also operated in the realm of language. As we know from contemporary research on the brain, learning language promotes the development of specific areas of the brain. Neurological research thus supports the argument of paleolinguists that gradually increasing complexity in language led to more complex thought processes, as well as the other way around.
Some of these social and cultural factors operated at the group level: as it developed, speech and other forms of communication allowed for stronger networks of cooperation among kin groups and the formation of larger social groupings. Family bands that were more socially adept had more contacts with other bands, and developed patterns of exchange over longer distances, which, as with trade in later periods, gave them access to a wider range of products and ways of using them and thus greater flexibility to meet any challenges to survival, including dramatic changes in climate. This was also the case with less utilitarian products, such as pigments and beads, which might have stimulated better forms of communication and higher levels of creativity as well as reflecting them. As Marcia-Anne Dobres and others have pointed out, new technologies and ways of using them were (and are) not simply invented to solve problems or address material needs, but also to foster social activities, convey world views, gain prestige, and express the makers’ ideas and sense of identity.
However and whenever behaviorally modern humans emerged, they did what homo ergaster did before them and what humans have done ever since: moved. First across Africa, and then into Eurasia, initially sporadically and then more regularly. They used rafts or boats to reach what is now Australia by at least 50,000 years ago and perhaps earlier, which required traveling across nearly 40 miles of ocean. During the last ice age, when much of the world’s water was in glaciers, a wide land bridge connected Northeast Asia and North America across what is now the Bering Strait. Humans moved to this area, Beringia, 20–25,000 years ago, and then stopped. New DNA analysis indicates that a human population lived in genetic isolation here for 5,000 years or so, and then some continued on to North America and others migrated back to Eastern Asia. Those in the Americas moved quickly, because by 15,000 years ago humans were already in southern South America, 10,000 miles from Beringia. Some scholars think that people came to the Americas much earlier, using rafts or boats along the coasts, but finding evidence for this is extremely difficult because ancient coastlines were submerged with the final melting of the glaciers between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago. Rising seas did not end migration, however, as humans responded by building boats, sailing to increasingly remote islands, including those in the Pacific, the last parts of the globe to be settled.
Eventually human cultures became widely diverse, but in the Paleolithic period people throughout the world lived in ways that were similar to one another, in small groups of related individuals – what anthropologists often refer to as “bands” – who moved through the landscape in search of food. Paleolithic peoples have often been called hunter-gatherers, but recent archaeological and anthropological research indicates that both historical and contemporary hunter-gatherers have depended much more on gathered foods than on hunted meat. Thus it would be more accurate to call them gatherer-hunters, and most scholars now call them foragers, a term that highlights the flexibility and adaptability in their search for food. Most of what foragers ate were plants, and although they did hunt large game, much of the animal protein in their diet came from foods scavenged or gathered, such as animals killed by other predators, insects, shellfish, small animals caught in traps, and fish and other sea creatures caught in weirs and nets. Paleolithic knotted and woven nets and baskets disintegrated long ago, but evidence of of them survives as impressions on fired clay fragments of storage containers from around 30,000 years ago, and knotting is probably much older than that.
Most foraging societies that exist today or did so until recently have some type of division of labor by sex, and also by age, with children and older people responsible for different tasks than adult men and women. Men are more often responsible for hunting, through which they gain prestige as well as meat, and women for gathering plant and animal products. This led earlier scholars to assume that in Paleolithic society men were also responsible for hunting, and women for gathering, an assumption that led to the familiar “man the hunter/woman the gatherer” dichotomy. Human remains provide some evidence for this, as skeletons and teeth indicate the type of tasks the person performed while they were alive, and in some places there are gender differences. But in many Paleolithic sites male and female skeletons show little evidence of sexually differentiated work. Archaeologists studying human remains often assumed that those buried with hunting tools such as projectile points and blades were male, but recently developed techniques that analyze tooth enamel have determined that many of these were female. (This is a good example of the way assumptions about gender can shape research findings.) In some of the world’s more recent foraging peoples, such as the Agta of the Philippines, women hunt large game, and in numerous others women are involved in certain types of hunting, such as driving herds of animals toward a cliff or compound or throwing nets over them. Where women hunt, they either carry their children in slings or leave them with other family members, suggesting that cultural norms, rather than the biology of lactation, is the basis for male hunting. The gender division of labor was most likely flexible, particularly during periods of scarcity, and also changed over time.
Both hunted and gathered foods were cooked, a task made easier in many cultures with the invention of clay pots, themselves “roasted” in a fire at a temperature high enough to make them watertight. Because organic materials from the Paleolithic survive only very rarely, it is difficult to speculate about clothing and other soft material goods, although bone needles for sewing and awls for punching holes in leather can give us some indications. Clothing and headgear were often decorated with beads made from shells, ivory, animal teeth, and other hard materials, and from the placement of these in undisturbed burials archaeologists can see that the clothing of men and women was often different, as was clothing in some places at different stages of life. Thus gender and age had a social meaning.
Paleolithic Society and Spirituality
Small bands of humans – 20 or 30 people was a standard size for foragers in harsh environments – were scattered across broad areas, but this did not mean that each group lived in isolation. Their travels in search of food brought them into contact with one another, not simply for talking, celebrating, and feasting, but also for providing opportunities for the exchange of sexual partners, which was essential to group survival. Today we understand that having sexual relations with close relatives is disadvantageous because it creates a greater risk of genetic disorders. Earlier societies did not have knowledge of genetics, but most of them developed rules against sexual relations among immediate family members, and sometimes very complex rules about allowable partners among more distant relatives. Some natural scientists argue that incest taboos have a biological or instinctual basis, while most anthropologists see them as cultural, arising from desires to lessen intergroup rivalries or increase opportunities for alliances with other lineages. Whatever the reasons, people sought mates outside their own band, and bands became linked by bonds of kinship, which in a few places has been traced through the study of bone chemistry and DNA. Mating arrangements varied in their permanence, but many groups seem to have developed a somewhat permanent arrangement whereby a person – more often a woman than a man – left her or his original group and joined the group of a mate, what would later be termed marriage.
Stereotypical representations of Paleolithic people often portray a powerful fur-clad man holding a club and dragging off a (usually attractive) fur-clad woman by her hair, or men going off to hunt while women and children crouch around a fire, waiting for the men to bring back great slabs of meat. Studies of the relative importance of gathering to hunting, women’s participation in hunting, and gender relations among contemporary foraging peoples have led some analysts to turn these stereotypes on their heads. They see Paleolithic bands as egalitarian groups in which the contributions of men and women to survival were recognized and valued, and in which both men and women had equal access to the limited amount of resources held by the group. This may also be a stereotype, overly romanticizing Paleolithic society as a sort of vegetarian commune. Social relations among foragers were not as hierarchical as they were in other types of societies, but many foraging groups from more recent periods had one person who held more power than others, and that person was almost always a man. In fact, anthropologists who study such groups call them “Big Man” societies. This debate about gender relations is often part of larger discussions about whether Paleolithic society – and by implication “human nature” – was primarily peaceful and nurturing or violent and brutal, and whether these qualities are gender-related. (See the later section on the origins of patriarchy for more on this debate.) Like much else about the Paleolithic, sources about gender and about violence are fragmentary and difficult to interpret; there may simply have been a diversity of patterns, as there is among more modern foragers.
Whether peaceful and egalitarian, violent and hierarchical, or somewhere in between, heterosexual relations produced children, who were fed as infants by their mothers or by another woman who had recently given birth. Breast milk was the only food available that infants could easily digest, so mothers nursed their children for several years. Along with providing food for infants, extended nursing brings a side benefit: it suppresses ovulation and thus acts as a contraceptive. Foraging groups needed children to survive, but too many could tax scarce food resources. Many groups may have practiced selective infanticide or abandonment. They may also have exchanged children of different ages with other groups, which further deepened kinship connections between groups. Other than for feeding, children were most likely cared for by other male and female members of the group as well as by their mothers, as they are in modern foraging cultures.
Within each band, and within the larger kin group, individuals had a variety of identities; they were simultaneously fathers, sons, brothers, and mates, or mothers, daughters, sisters, and mates. Each of these identities was relational (parent to child, sibling to sibling, mate to mate), and some of them, especially parent to child, gave one power over others. The interweaving of these relationships and their meaning varied from culture to culture, but one’s status in one relationship affected one’s status in the others, and often changed throughout one’s life. A woman’s situation as daughter or sister in a specific kin group, for example, shaped her relationship with her mate; her becoming a mother often further altered her status vis-à-vis the father of her child or other kin group members. A man’s relationship with his father and his status in the kin group often changed when he took a mate, and in some areas changed again if he became the father of a son. Judging by later ethnographic parallels, how kin groups were defined and understood varied tremendously, but they remained significant power structures for millennia, and in some areas still have influence over major aspects of life, such as an individual’s job or marital partner.
Burials provide evidence of social differentiation and social connections. The people who buried a young adult woman near Bordeaux in southern France about 19,000 years ago, for example, dressed her in clothing, covered her with ochre pigment, and placed her in a container made of stone slabs, along with a few perforated shells, a bead, some tools made of bone and stone, bones of antelope and reindeer, and 71 red deer canine teeth that had holes drilled in them for stringing and may have been on a necklace. Red deer did not live near Bordeaux at this time of worsening climate, so the teeth had most likely been brought there over many years through networks of exchange, perhaps given as gifts in marriages or in trade for other goods. Something about this young woman or her death led those who buried her to decide to include so many valuable grave goods; through this they referenced both her individual identity (and perhaps high social position) and her links to a social network that ranged across time and space.
Bands of foragers may have been exogamous, but as humans spread out over much of the globe, kin groups and larger networks of interrelated people often became isolated from one another, and people mated only within this larger group. Thus local exogamy was accompanied by endogamy at a larger scale, and over many generations humans came to develop differences in physical features, including skin and hair color, eye and body shape, and amount of body hair, although genetically there is less variety among them than among chimpanzees. Language also changed over generations, so that thousands of different languages were eventually spoken. Groups created widely varying cultures and passed them on to their children, further increasing diversity among humans.
Over time, groups of various sizes came to understand themselves as linked by shared kinship and culture, and as different from other groups. Words were devised to describe such groups, which in English include people, ethnic group, tribe, race, and nation. Shared culture included language, religion, foodways, rituals, clothing styles, and many other factors, whose importance in defining membership in the group changed over time (though language was almost always important). Because of extensive intermarriage within the group over many generations, the differences between groups were (and are) sometimes evident in the body, and were (and are) often conceptualized as blood, a substance with deep meaning. Kinship ties included perceived and invented ones, however, as adoption and other methods were devised to bring someone into the group, or traditions developed of descent from a common ancestor. At the heart of all such groups was a conscious common identity, which itself enhanced endogamy as people chose (or were required) to marry within the group. These groups came into being, died out, morphed into other groups, split, combined, lost and gained in significance, and in other ways changed, but their fluidity and the fact that they were constructed through culture as well as genetics does not make them any less real. They came to have enormous significance later in world history, but developed before the invention of writing and appear to have been everywhere.
The burial of the young woman in southern France was a social occasion, and it was also a way to express ideas and beliefs about the material world and perhaps an unseen world beyond. Paleolithic mortuary rituals created social and political messages, and conveyed (and possibly distorted) cultural meaning (as have funerals ever since). They marked membership in a group, which might have been understood to continue after death took one from the realm of the living. Together with paintings and decorated objects, burials suggest that people thought of their world as extending beyond the visible. People, animals, plants, natural occurrences, and other things around them had spirits, an animistic understanding of the spiritual nature and interdependence of all things. The unseen world regularly intervened in the visible world, for good and ill, and the actions of dead ancestors and the spirits could be shaped by living people.
Rock art from around the world and a wide array of ethnographic evidence suggests that ordinary people were thought to learn about the unseen world through dreams and portents, while messages and revelations were also sent more regularly to shamans, spiritually adept people who communicated with or traveled to the unseen world. Shamans created complex rituals through which they sought to ensure the health and prosperity of an individual, family, or group. These included rituals with gender and sexual imagery, and shamans in some places may have constructed a transgender role through which they harnessed power that crossed gender boundaries, just as they crossed the boundary between the seen and unseen world. Many cave paintings show groups of prey or predator animals, and several include a masked human figure usually judged to be a shaman in a gesture or pose assumed to be some sort of ritual. Sometimes the shaman is shown with what looks like a penis, and such figures used to be invariably described as men. More recently the suggestion has been made that these figures may have been gendered male, but could have been a woman wearing a costume, as gender inversions are often part of many types of rituals and performances. Or the figure – and the actual shaman who it may have represented – was understood as a third gender, neither male nor female, or both at the same time. Shamans in many cultures wore masks that gave them added power, and were understood to take on the qualities of the animal, creature, or spirit represented by the mask; transcending boundaries was thus their role.
Interpreting what certain objects that appear to have had ritual purposes might have meant to those who made or possessed them is just as contentious as other aspects of early human history. For example, small stone, ivory, bone, or clay figures of women, often with enlarged breasts, buttocks, and/or stomach, dating from the later Paleolithic period (roughly 33,000–9,000 BCE) have been found in many parts of Europe. These were dubbed “Venus figures” by nineteenth-century archaeologists, who thought they represented Paleolithic standards of female beauty just as the goddess Venus represented classical standards (Figure 3.1). Some scholars have interpreted them, as well as later Neolithic figurines of women, as fertility goddesses, evidence of people’s beliefs in a powerful female deity. Others view them as aids to fertility, carried around by women hoping to have children – or perhaps hoping not to have more. Perhaps they were made by women looking at their own bodies in mid-life, with the rounded form of most women who have given birth, and represent hopes for good health during aging. Or they were sexualized images of women carried around by men, a sort of Paleolithic version of the centerfold in a men’s magazine. Or perhaps they might have represented different things to different people. Small clay figurines of women from Mesoamerica and coastal Ecuador in the second millennium BCE have been similarly interpreted in a range of ways: as fertility emblems, ritual objects, models of sexuality, and aids to pregnancy.
Figure 3.1 Venus of Willendorf, c. 23,000 BCE.
This small limestone figurine of a woman, made about 25,000 years ago, was unearthed at an archaeological site at Willendorf, Austria. Its large breasts and stomach, and the plaited hair that continues across the face, have given rise to many theories, but like all “Venus figures,” who made it and for what purposes are unknown. Wikimedia Commons. Source, Bjørn Christian Tørrissen.
The painted, carved, and otherwise decorated objects and locations from the later Paleolithic may have had ritual purposes, but they are also products of imagination, reason, pride, mischeviousness, and a range of emotions (including boredom). Objects modified in a particular way or by talented individuals – what we might now call “luxuries” or “art” – conveyed status and prestige, which is why they show up in burials, including those of women.