the water through charcoal and boiling it and using it in tea with lemon.”
He sounds like the natural descendant of those nineteenth-century British explorers, men and women both, who marched presumptuously in when common sense should have kept them out. Eighty years ago one of his aunts arrived at Mombasa with the idea of touring the continental interior. Local officials, aghast at such madness, told her to go home; instead, she took a firm grip on her umbrella, hired a string of porters, and walked to Uganda. No doubt she approved of a nephew who chose to spend his life associating with dangerous animals and fever-laden mosquitos in the serene conviction that none of them would dare interrupt his work.
Leakey’s first diamond in the rough was, as we might expect, a chunk of somebody’s skull. It looked human—if compared to Dart’s semihuman Australopithecus—and was about 750,000 years old. This, as professionals say, hardened the evidence that the African evolutionary line had continued. Leakey’s man fitted nicely between ourselves and Dart’s bone-wielding cannibalistic baboon killers.
Between 1961 and 1964 the Leakeys uncovered some two-million-year-old bones. The skulls indicated a large brain and the reconstructed hands looked altogether human. But we have trouble granting the existence of humans two million years ago—humans of any sort—not to mention those who may have been sophisticated enough to invent a device still used by various people around the world. By Argentine cowboys, for example, and by Eskimos who use it to capture geese and ptarmigan. That is, the bola. For there is evidence in the form of stone spheres from Bed II at Olduvai that those people used bolas to hunt animals. The spheres, which have been deliberately worked, are the size of baseballs. They might have been nothing more than hammers or clubheads, or balls meant to be thrown individually, though it would be strange to spend so much time shaping an object that could be lost. The reason Leakey suspected they were bolas—the stones encased in hide and connected by thongs—is that they often are found in pairs, or in sets of three.
It’s a bit staggering to think that bolas may have been whirling across the earth for two million years.
A number of occupied sites have been located. At one of them the debris forms a curious pattern: a dense concentration within a rectangular area fifteen feet long by thirty feet wide. Outside this rectangle practically nothing can be found for three or four feet in any direction. The ground is bare. Then, beyond this vacant area, the artifacts show up again, though not as many. The explanation is simple. The littered rectangle was their home, surrounded by a protective thorn fence. Trash was tossed over the fence.
At another site there is a ring, about fifteen feet in diameter, consisting of several hundred stones. Occasionally the stones form a mound. The Okombambi tribe constructs shelters like this. For two million years they’ve been doing it. The mounds of rock support upright poles over which grass mats or hides are stretched to break the wind.
So the chronicle of humanity continues to lengthen. Now and again this record is frankly reassuring. In 1966 on the French Riviera, while a hillside was being excavated to make way for some luxurious apartments, the site of an ancient encampment was revealed. And there, 400,000 years old, lay a human footprint. It tells as much as anything. The footprint proves that we have tenure on earth as certainly as the whale and the crocodile. We, too, have taken part in the grand scheme.
Flipper-bearing lungfish moved ashore in East Africa—in East Africa or some other warm forest-clad land—where they turned into tree shrews which turned into apes. Then, fifteen or twenty million years ago, presumably when forests were dwindling because of a change in climate, some adventurous or desperate apes moved from the trees to the savannas. Here, anxious to see what was happening, because it could mean life or death, they spent most of their time upright.
And on the plain, unprotected, they learned the value of tools and the use of fire.
After that it was downhill all the way, or uphill—depending on your estimate of mankind—from omnivorous thighbone-wielding assassins to those erect Ice Age people with whom we can sympathize, who felt a previously unknown need to worship, to make music, to dance, and paint pictures.
Evidence that our Ice Age ancestors could appreciate music is tentative, unlike the vividly painted animals that register their love of graphic art, yet what seems to be a musical instrument still exists in southern France. In a cave at Pêche Merle a set of stalactites appears to have been worn down unnaturally, and when struck with a chamois-covered stick each column produces a different note. Ascribe this to chance or not, as you like.
At Le Tuc d’Audoubert, half a mile inside the cave, a pair of bison were modeled in high relief on a clay bank—the bull ready to mount the cow. The clay is now dry and deeply cracked, otherwise the animals seem unaffected by the millennia that have passed since they were formed. They surge with vitality. But the arresting thing about this tableau is not the elemental vigor of the bison or the skill with which they have been realized; more startling is the fact that the mud floor of the cave shows a ring of little heelprints, as though children had been dancing. In other words, these two animals were the central images of a ritual, a bison dance. And it is possible that the young dancers wore bison horns and pelts, just as in the eagle dance American Indians wear eagle feathers and represent themselves as eagles, circling, sweeping, fluttering.
Prehistorians agree that this grotto was the scene of a ritual, though some of them are not sure about the dancing; they favor a kind of backward march, a goose step in reverse, which is such an ugly concept that it may well be correct. Neither theory has been certified, however, so let’s assume the children were dancing.
In either case, why should this performance have been limited to children? The answer is fairly obvious. At an appropriate age each child was admitted to tribal membership, just as today the Church observes a rite of confirmation. Deep inside Le Tuc d’Audoubert these novitiates danced around a male and female bison, dancing from childhood toward the mysteries of adult life.
Not far away, in the cave known as Les Trois Frères, an entire wall is covered with snowy owls, rabbits, fish, muskoxen, mammoths, and so on—with arrows flying toward them from every direction. This complicated mural may very well illustrate something of profound mystic significance. The numinous spirit of life, for instance. But probably what it represents is more immediate and understandable: Hunger. Meat for the table.
Sex and the stomach, remarks one anthropologist, such are the dominant themes of most philosophy.
Still, in this same cave, cut into the rock twelve feet above the ground with a stone knife, we find a very different philosopher—a prancing round-eyed antlered Wizard who gazes emptily down upon today. Something about the position of his hands is strangely terrible and important, but what does the gesture signify? What is he telling us? If only we knew. All we can be sure of is that he has dominated this wall for thousands of years, dressed in a stag’s pelt with the tail of a horse.
Less enigmatic and threatening than the Wizard of Les Frères is the ivory Venus of Lespugue, who now holds court not in her original cave but in a glass cabinet at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, just a step from the Trocadéro métro. She is flanked by mirrors so that after pressing the minuterie button you have sixty seconds to contemplate her prodigious feminine melons, north and south. Unspeakably poised, tranquil as a water lily, this stained and fractured Aurignacian princess waits, more beguiling than your favorite movie actress. Modern sculpture seldom says as much.
Further evidence of man’s complex artistic roots turned up at La Genière, near Serrières-sur-Ain. Excavators came across a limestone plaque tucked into a layer of the Middle Stone Age, and on this limestone scrap had been engraved that popular subject the bison—engraved decisively, powerfully. Most unusual, however, was the fact that this one resembled a polychrome bison on a wall painting at Font-de-Gaume some 300 kilometers distant. So close indeed was the resemblance between these animals
