Old Stone Age would not have noticed any cultural change at all. The human world that individuals entered at birth was the same as the one they left at death. There was variation in events, of course — feasts, famines, local triumphs and disasters — but the patterns within each society must have seemed immutable. There was just one way to do things, one mythology, one vocabulary, one set of stories; things were just the way they were.
It is possible to imagine exceptions to what I have just said. The generation that saw the first use of fire, for instance, was perhaps aware that its world had changed. But we can’t be sure how quickly even that Promethean discovery took hold. Most likely, fire was used, when available from wildfires and volcanoes, for a long time before it was kept. And then it was kept for a very long time before anyone learnt it could be made. Some may remember the 1981 film Quest for Fire, in which the lithe figure of Rae Dawn Chong scampers about in nothing but a thin layer of mud and ashes. The film was based on a novel published in 1911 by the Belgian writer J. H. Rosny.20 Rosny’s original title was La Guerre du Feu — The War for Fire — and the book, more than the film, explores deadly competition between various human groups to monopolize fire in much the same way that modern nations try to monopolize nuclear weapons. Throughout the hundreds of centuries when our ancestors tended a flame but could not make one, putting out their rivals’ campfire in an Ice Age winter would have been a deed of mass murder.
The first taming of fire is hard to date. All we know is that people were using fire by at least half a million years ago, possibly twice that.21 This was the time of Homo erectus, the “upright man,” who was much like us from the neck down, but whose braincase had only about two-thirds the modern capacity. Anthropologists are still debating when Homo erectus first appeared and when he and she were superseded, which is largely a matter of defining that evolutionary stage. Scholars are even more divided on how well erectus could think and speak.
Modern apes, whose brains are much smaller than those of erectus, use simple tools, have wide knowledge of medicinal plants, and can recognize themselves in a mirror. Studies using non-verbal language (computer symbols, sign language, etc.) show that apes can employ a vocabulary of several hundred “words,” though there is disagreement on what this ability says about ape communication in the wild. It is clear that different groups of the same species — for example, chimps in separate parts of Africa — have different habits and traditions, passed on to the young just as in human groups. In short, apes have the beginnings of culture. So do other intelligent creatures, such as whales, elephants, and certain birds, but no species except humankind has reached the point at which culture becomes the main driver of an evolutionary surge, outrunning environmental and physical constraints.
The bloodlines of man and ape split about 5 million years ago, and as I mentioned, hominids making crude stone tools appeared some 2 million years later. It would therefore be foolish to underestimate the skills of Homo erectus, who, by the time he was toasting his callused feet at a campfire half a million years ago, was nine-tenths of the way along the road from an ancestral ape to us. With the taming of fire came the first spike on the graph of human numbers. Fire would have made life much easier in many environments. Fire kept caves warm and big predators away. Cooking and smoking greatly increased the reliable food supply. Burning of undergrowth extended grazing lands for game. It is now recognized that many supposedly wild landscapes inhabited down to historic times by hunter-gatherers — the North American prairies and the Australian outback, for instance — were shaped by deliberate fire-setting.22 “Man,” wrote the great anthropologist and writer Loren Eiseley, “is himself a flame. He has burned through the animal world and appropriated its vast stores of protein for his own.”23
About the last big thing the experts agree on is that Homo erectus originated in Africa, the home of all early hominids, and by a million years ago was living in several temperate and tropical zones of the “Old World,” the contiguous Eurasian landmass. This is not to say the Upright Man was thick on the ground, even after he tamed fire. Perhaps fewer than 100,000 people, scattered in family bands, were all that stood between evolutionary failure and the 6 billion of us here today.24
After Homo erectus the evolutionary path gets muddy, trodden into a mire by rival tribes of anthropologists. One camp, that of the “multiregional” hypothesis, sees Homo erectus evolving by fits and starts into modern humanity wherever he happened to be through gene diffusion, otherwise known as mating with strangers. This view seems to fit well with many of the fossil finds but less well with some interpretations of DNA. Another camp — the “Out of Africa” school — sees most evolutionary change taking place on that continent, then erupting over the rest of the world.25 In this second view, successive waves of new and improved humans kill off, or, at any rate, outcompete, their forerunners wherever they find them, until all the lowbrows are gone. This theory implies that each new wave of African man was a separate species, unable to breed with other descendants of the previous kind — which may be plausible if different types evolved without contact for long periods but is less likely over shorter spans of time.26
The debate over the path of human progress gets most heated when we reach our controversial cousins, the Neanderthals. These lived mainly in Europe and northwest Asia in quite recent times — well within the last one-twentieth of the human journey. A Neanderthal Gauguin, thawed out from a receding glacier today, might wake up and ask, “Who were we? Where did we come from? Where did we go?” The answers would depend on whom he approached. Experts cannot even agree on his scientific name.
In round figures, Neanderthals appear about 130,000 years ago and disappear about 100,000 years later. Their “arrival” date is less certain than their departure, but it seems they evolved at about the same time as early examples of what is thought to be our modern kind — often called Cro-Magnon, after a rockshelter in the lovely Dordogne region of southern France, where the human fossil record is the richest in the world.
Ever since they were first identified, Neanderthals have been the butt of what I call “palaeo-racism,” lampooned as cartoon cavemen, a subhuman, knuckle-dragging breed. H. G. Wells called them the “Grisly Folk” and made an unflattering guess at how they might have looked: “an extreme hairiness, an ugliness… a repulsive strangeness in his… low forehead, his beetle brows, his ape neck, and his inferior stature.”27 Many have claimed that Neanderthals were cannibals, which could be true, for so are we — later humans have a long record of cannibalism, right down to modern times.28
The first Neanderthal skeleton was unearthed in 1856 from a cave in a valley near Düsseldorf, Germany. The place had been named after the composer Joachim Neumann, who had rather affectedly rendered his surname into Greek as “Neander.” Englished, Neanderthal is simply “Newmandale.” Fitting enough: a new man had indeed come to light in the dale, a new man at least 30,000 years old. Not that Neanderthal Man’s seniority was recognized immediately. The French, noting the skull’s thickness, were inclined to think it had belonged to a German. The Germans said it was most likely from a Slav, a Cossack mercenary who had crawled into the cave and died.29 But just three years later, in 1859, two things happened: Darwin published On the Origin of Species and Charles Lyell, visiting the gravels of the River Somme (to become infamous, not sixty years later, as a human slaughterhouse), recognized chipped flints as weapons from the Ice Age.
Once the scientists
