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
