evidence indicated that by 1.5 million years ago our very ancient ancestors had developed home bases where they made tools, butchered game, shared food, and even (possibly) built simple shelters.
Or did they?
Various scholars pointed out flaws in the data from the DK Locality.27 For example, nearly half the identifiable animal bones came from crocodiles—an unlikely game animal for a small hominid armed with crude stone tools. Eighty-six percent of the crocodile bones were teeth, which crocodiles lose naturally. Other animal bones incised with cut marks from stone tools also showed evidence of being gnawed by hyenas or other carnivores. While stone flake tools and choppers showed evidence of hominid intent, it was far from certain that hominids had actually hunted game: they could have used stone tools to scavenge and scrape meat from dead game killed by other, more effective, nonhuman predators.
FIGURE 2. Site DK I, Olduvai Gorge. Redrawn from Leakey 1979.
And finally, the circular stone feature that Mary Leakey reluctantly concluded was an ancient shelter in fact consisted of chunks of the underlying bedrock jutting into the layers containing bone and stone tools. The circular pattern of bedrock blocks probably resulted from a combination of weathering and stones moved by tree roots. These were not shelter walls built by the ancient occupants of Olduvai Gorge. Mary Leakey had not found the oldest house on earth.
The archaeology of African sites dating between 2.6 and 1.6 million years ago provides a fragmentary and partial vista into the behavior of early hominids.28 While these ancestors made simple stone tools, ate meat, and carried raw materials and some food to sites, other behaviors remain unclear or in dispute. Some studies suggest that while certain Lower Stone Age sites in Africa might contain evidence for tool use and food preparation, the sites are not significantly different from the archaeological patterns potentially left by chimpanzees. Other paleoanthropologists see the same sites as evidence for hominid activity. There are relatively few of these older sites, and the archaeological evidence is frustratingly ambiguous.
It is like trying to see complex constellations on a cloudy night from the flickering light of a handful of stars. Based on such uncertain illuminations, it seems that these ancient sites were not yet homes.
. . .
The basic problem is this: there are no Paleolithic Pompeiis.29 A fundamental question that archaeologists always ask is “Are the constituents of a site really associated? Are the objects in situ and located in their original positions or rather are they out of context?” Ideally, every site would be like the ash-covered remains of ancient Pompeii: a moment frozen in time in the autumn of A.D. 79. In fact, only rarely are archaeological sites sealed deposits, intact and stilled.
A wide array of natural processes can modify or disturb an archaeological site. Bacteria and scavenging animals consume organic materials, leaving behind only indigestible stone, pottery, and bone. Flowing water—varying in volume from raindrops to flash floods—can move artifacts, cut through strata, or erode objects. Badgers, gophers, lizards, worms, and other burrowing animals change the soil matrix and move archaeological materials. As clay soils expand when wet and shrink when dry, archaeological objects are moved through the profile along with rocks and gravels.
While all archaeological sites are affected by these vagaries of preservation, the problem is most pronounced for sites from the dawn of humanity. Obviously, the oldest sites have the greatest opportunities for disturbance and decay. Further, such early sites usually have a relatively light material footprint. The sites are rarely the result of a permanent occupation because humans were highly mobile and nomadic; the archaeological record is correspondingly slight. And it may be ambiguous whether the objects and features in these early sites are the result of human actions. For example, charred wood may be from an ancient campfire or a lighting-struck tree. Cut marks on apparently butchered bones may prove to be tooth marks from nonhuman predators.
Consider the controversial site of Terra Amata, located in Nice on the French Riviera. The site was excavated over six months in 1966 after construction crews trenched into the archaeological deposit. Construction was suspended and a salvage excavation was begun, directed by Henry de Lumley.30
Terra Amata may have evidence of one of the earliest human dwellings, 350,000–450,000 years old. De Lumley and his team uncovered thousands of stone tools and flakes, an array of bones from fauna large and small, levels that contained a few postholes, small hearths, and blocks of stone and oval clusters of archaeological materials that de Lumley interpreted as the remains of ancient huts 7–15 × 4–6 meters in size. Further, de Lumley interpreted the archaeological strata as forming thin, discrete layers that represented annual reoccupations of Terra Amata by mobile hunters and gatherers camped during successive springtimes on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea. De Lumley identified eleven of these layers and interpreted them as separate “living floors.”
But de Lumley’s interpretation was challenged by the analysis of the stone tools and flakes, research conducted by Paola Villa, then a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley. One aspect of Villa’s project involved conjoining stone tools and flakes, literally fitting back together the stone pieces that fly off as a core is struck with a hammer stone. Through careful analysis, Villa reconstructed the way tools were made, and in the process she made an awkward discovery.
Some conjoinable flakes came from Terra Amata’s different living floors. The discrete layers de Lumley had proposed were cross-cut by stone fragments from the same original core.
This led some scholars to dismiss Terra Amata as the fanciful reconstruction of archaeological imagination, an impression made somewhat worse by incomplete reporting on the excavation.31 Other archaeologists simply erased Terra Amata from the list of ancient European sites.
That seems too dismissive. Although the evidence for vertical movements of flakes undermines the idea that Terra Amata contained eleven seasonal encampments, it does not mean that Terra Amata is archaeologically irrelevant. For example, even the cautious and critical Villa concluded that Terra Amata “is a site with material diffused through deposits 1.5–2.0 meters thick. Features such as hearths, post-holes, and alignments of [limestone] blocks were preserved, but site formation processes have resulted in partial mixing of the residues of probably separate occupation episodes.”32
So here is what we may infer: Terra Amata was a home base dating to between 450,000 and 350,000 years ago, a place that members of the genus Homo (but not Homo sapiens) modified by building fires and simple structures—probably windbreaks—and where they made stone tools and prepared food. In this narrow and spartan sense, Terra Amata was a home.
Other sites present similarly ambiguous evidence of home. For example, at the site of Bilzingsleben, in eastern Germany, excavations uncovered a small lakeside site that may contain evidence of three elliptical shelters dating to 418,000–280,000 years ago.33 Travertine blocks and large animal bones were placed to anchor windbreaks. Small features of burned earth and charcoal are associated with each dwelling, as are activity areas consisting of elephant bones and anvils formed from blocks of travertine. Stone tools from Bilzingsleben are clearly artifacts: pebble tools, hammer-stones, knives, scrapers, points, and other flake tools. Fauna remains include rhino, beaver, red deer, elephant, and bear; none of the bones show gnaw marks, yet some of the elephant foot bones have geometric cut marks incised with a stone tool. An intriguing circular pavement of stones pressed into the softer underlying sediments was partially excavated on the edge of the site; measuring nine meters in diameter, it is clearly an archaeological feature.34
Given this archaeological assemblage, one would think that Bilzings- leben would handily pass every conceivable objection to its authenticity.
