| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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Feature The Symbol and the Spear
Some 26,000 years ago, a resident of a seasonal, open-air encampment in what is now the southern Czech Republic kneaded moist clay mixed from local soil into an exaggerated portrait of a woman. The so-called Black Venus of Dolni Vestonice I has a featureless, possibly masked, face, squared shoulders, pendulous breasts, and a belt beneath her broad hips. Only four inches tall, she is one of the earliest known depictions of a female figure, but what inspired her creation is cloaked in mystery. A jagged crack runs along her right hip, damage sustained when the clay figurine was fired in a kiln at temperatures up to 1,500 ºF. More than 700 figurines-nearly all depicting Ice Age animals such as lions, rhinos, and mammoths-were fired in the oval earthen kilns of Dolni Vestonice. At nearby sites of similar age, thousands more terracotta figurines and clay pellets have been excavated. Almost all the Vestonice figurines exhibit breaks and cracks-the shattering shock of the flames that baked them. Were the world's first ceramic artists also the world's worst craftsmen, or were these figures props for a pyrotechnic ritual? Elsewhere at Dolni Vestonice, a grave excavated in 1986 contained the skeletons of two young men and a woman. Inside the shallow burial pit lay bits of reindeer bones, and wolf and fox teeth. Red ocher powder had been sprinkled around each skull and between the legs of the female, who had a deformed spine and right leg. One male's hand had been placed atop the female's pelvis, while the other male's skull had been smashed at the time of burial. The case of Dolni Vestonice suggests that for the site's inhabitants, creation and destruction were conscious, connected acts. We will never know why these figurines were intentionally fractured or what meaning to take from the enigmatic triple burial, but in each instance we glimpse aspects of our own behavior: the urge to create, to innovate, and to communicate with abstract symbols. When and why did such human hallmarks emerge in our past? Many archeologists view the appearance of symbols in the archeological record of Europe about 40,000 years ago as a signal that people were suddenly behaving in recognizably modern ways. New types of stone tools designed for specific tasks appear, and bone becomes a preferred material for manufacturing tools. Ivory beads, pendants, and other ornaments invested with social or symbolic meaning adorn the bodies of the living and the dead. And people begin to represent elements of their world in portable figurines, engravings on rocks, and paintings on the walls of limestone caves. While fossils indicate that humans looking just like us had already existed for the previous 60,000 years, only with the advent of Upper Paleolithic technology, it seems, did they start acting like us. Human culture and society would never be the same. "In the last 50,000 years there's been essentially no change in the organism, but look what culture's done," says Academy Fellow and Stanford University archeologist Richard Klein. "Prior to 50,000 years ago, I think people behaved in rather strange ways." But behaviorally modern humans, suggests Klein, were "much better at extracting energy from nature and building it into people." About 50,000 years ago, they developed the capacity to innovate and to manipulate nature in new ways to exploit more resources and expand their range and numbers. And they penetrated and spread across Europe, which had been dominated solely by the Neandertals for about 200,000 years. Accompanying and perhaps facilitating the spread of the first modern humans across Europe was a distinctive stone-and-bone technology called the Aurignacian industry. Aurignacian tools include split-based spear points made of bone and stone engraving tools called burins. In the eyes of many archeologists, Aurignacian and later Upper Paleolithic tools, despite their wider variety and regional variability, fall easily into clear categories, unlike the more uniform Middle Paleolithic technology associated with Neandertals and, in the Middle East, with early anatomically modern humans. As opposed to the "one tool does all" approach to technology among Neandertals, says Klein, "When you get to modern humans, it's like going to a hardware store." In addition to accumulating genetic data, a sporadic sample of fossils suggests that modern human anatomy arose first in Africa. The archeological evidence remains too incomplete to indicate whether some African populations likewise emigrated, carrying the seeds for modern behavior that germinated into Upper Paleolithic culture, but some clues to innovative minds have recently emerged. Archeologist Stanley Ambrose, of the University of Illinois, sought signs of the relatively recent transition to food production in East Africa when he began excavating at Enkapune Ya Muto, a rock shelter near Lake Naivasha in Kenya's Rift Valley. But the site turned out to be older than Ambrose had anticipated. As he dug deeper he may have uncovered evidence for an earlier cultural watershed-the first glimmer of modern behavior. What Ambrose found was no fancy cutting-edge tool or weapon, but rather hundreds of disk-shaped beads fashioned from ostrich eggshell. They were concentrated as if crafted in quantity at a workshop, and radiocarbon dating of the eggshell itself revealed that these beads were made 40,000 years ago. Other sites in Tanzania and South Africa preserve ostrich eggshell beads from roughly the same period, so the behavior was widespread. But what did such beads signify? Modern !Kung-San hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari of southern Africa produce ostrich eggshell beads for a gift exchange system known as hxaro, which serves to strengthen social ties across a harsh and sparsely occupied landscape. Food is always shared among the !Kung-San and never exchanged as a gift, but these lightweight and portable beads are perceived as an appropriate gift for all occasions. Ambrose believes that these "little tokens of reciprocity" have a deep past and may have emboldened early modern people to strike out into riskier environments. Rather than being merely decorative, the beads provide a means of ensuring support and survival during hard times. "You have a symbolic way of making a web or a social safety net," says Ambrose. "It's like weaving a web of connections for reliance-literally lifelines between people. And the lifelines are strings of beads." Ambrose hypothesizes that such a system of exchange established mutual reliance among populations and enabled modern humans to prevail in competition for resources with populations that lacked such intricate social bonds. "I think this may have something to do with how we got out of Africa and replaced Neandertals," he says. "And it's quite a different explanation from the technology. I think they [modern humans] hunted better and they ate better, but it was because of socially mediated mechanisms of adaptation, not so much that they had better spears." Others still look to new technology, and weapons, for clues to why humans began behaving in modern ways. John Shea, of the State University of New York, Stony Brook, studies how stone tools were used by Neandertals and early modern humans in the Middle East. Unlike Europe, where the arrival of modern humans about 40,000 years ago introduced a dramatically different tool kit, in the Middle East both groups of people made identical kinds of tools. Shea believes that many of the pointed stone flakes were hafted onto poles and became the business end of thrusting spears, used in close quarters to dispatch injured prey. But at the onset of the Upper Paleolithic, which apparently occurred in the Middle East somewhat earlier than in Europe, modern humans began to make and use more effective projectile weapons-weapons that allowed them to bring down big game with greater accuracy and less risk. "The Upper Paleolithic people are absolutely dependent on hunting," says Shea. The combination of greater reliance on hunting and better hunting tools triggered stronger social relations. Using projectile weapons against large animals requires tightknit teamwork and coalitions, and Shea thinks that technology, subsistence, and sociality all reinforced each other and laid the foundation for modern human behavior 45,000 years ago. An important strategic incentive for modern humans to become better hunters, Shea surmises, was the chance to remove their chief rivals for resources, the Neandertals. After 75,000 years ago, Neandertals migrated to the Middle East, retreating from advancing glaciers in Europe. Like lions and hyenas on the savannas of Africa, Neandertals and modern humans competed intensively. They hunted similar food with similar technology, leaving no room for peaceful co-existence, Shea believes. Neandertals prevailed, and modern humans, who had long had the region to themselves, became archeologically absent from the Middle East for tens of thousands of years. Then they came back, armed with tools and tricks that let them reclaim their land and expand their range with unprecedented success. "It's not that modern humans hated Neandertals," says Shea, "but the strategy of allowing them to persist in the same region would be a losing strategy, whereas the strategy of removing them as competitors would be a winning strategy." Shea thinks that modern humans could have dealt with competitors in several ways, from assimilation to extermination. By 40,000 years ago, it's the Neandertals who had vanished from the Middle East-presaging their fate elsewhere in the ensuing 10,000 years. And Aurignacian tool-toting modern humans begin their rapid march westward across Europe. It's in Europe where Upper Paleolithic technology and culture seem to flourish. Ornaments such as beads and pendants of ivory, bone, and antler, and pierced seashells and animal teeth appear in the early Aurignacian of Europe, indicating an enhanced appreciation of aesthetic qualities. Some beads were painstakingly ground and polished with abrasive ocher to produce a lustrous sheen. Thousands of identical beads, each requiring an hour or two of labor, may have been sewn directly to garments. Their use for identification or simply visual impact continued for at least 10,000 years. At the Russian site of Sungir, about the same age as Dolni Vestonice, three burials, one of a 60-year-old male and a double grave with a boy and girl laid head to head, contained 10,000 ivory beads as well as hundreds of perforated animal teeth, ivory bracelets, disks, and figurines. For New York University archeologist Randall White, who has excavated Aurignacian sites in France and has experimentally recreated the technique of bead production, the plethora of personal ornaments that show up in European archeological sites from 35,000 years ago reflects "significant transformations in human society with the onset of the Aurignacian," including individual and group identities and defined gender and economic roles. While perhaps less striking and stunning than the carnivores and horses that decorate the dark passages of Grotte Chauvet (see page 26), such objects, says White, constitute "symbolic representations in material form," and that we should "see the teeth of animals the same way we see the [early human] paintings of animals." In southern Germany, further signs of a sophisticated symbolic capacity come from the site of Vogelherd. A famous delicate and diminutive horse carved from the inner layer of a mammoth tusk dates to at least 32,000 years ago. Figures of a mammoth and other animals from the same site possess a pattern of X's incised across the back, a recurring representation that signals some conventional meaning shared and understood by a group. Some of the Vogelherd figures are pierced, as if intended to be worn around the neck, perhaps as talismans or symbols of social identity. Of equal antiquity and even more intriguing is a foot-high ivory statuette from the German site of Hohlenstein-Stadel that depicts the head of a lion atop a human body, one of the few paleolithic pieces to combine animal and human forms. A series of parallel, linear incisions along the arms appears to be another marking with meaning. Some archeologists make cases for more ancient expressions of symbolism or such ritualistic behavior as the inclusion of grave goods. But these examples seem relatively crude and very rare compared to the widespread and abundant examples that coincide with the arrival of modern humans and the onset of the Aurignacian in Europe, and which continued through the successive cultural phases that inspired the fired clay figurines at Dolni Vestonice and the polychrome paintings in the caves of Altamira and Lascaux. Perhaps the most puzzling exception to the association of symbolism with modern humans is the Châtelperronian industry, a short-lived archeological oddity from western France and northern Spain dating to about 38,000 years ago. The tools include endscrapers and burins like those that characterize Upper Paleolithic technology, and in the Grotte du Renne at Arcy-sur-Cure, France, a Châtelperronian cultural layer included bone points, awls, and other tools, plus three dozen perforated or incised mammal canines and incisors and ivory beads and pendants. The presence of such tools and ornaments led archeologists to conclude that modern humans made the Châtelperronian, but a cranial fragment from Arcy and a partial skeleton associated with similar technology at the site of Saint-Césaire possess Neandertal anatomy. So whether by invention or imitation, the Neandertals created the Châtelperronian culture. Even if it was a precocious and desperate attempt to copy the more successful modern humans-what White calls the "last gasp of the Neandertals"-the fact that Neandertals could craft such tools and apparently decorative or symbolic objects raises questions about why they did not do it more often. After a century of collecting evidence and conceiving theories, we must still ponder what social or biological changes allowed modern humans to emerge, succeed, and spread, and to continue this essential urge of our species to represent and recreate the world through symbol and story. Blake Edgar is an associate editor of California Wild. He is collaborating with Richard Klein on a book about the archeology of modern human origins. |
Summer 1999
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