Early Man in the New World

If we do not try to apply the core-versus-flake theory too broadly and too strictly, it suggests a fascinating picture of two kinds of men and two kinds of life through the first two-thirds of the Great Ice Age. One kind dominated during the cold of the glaciations; the other, during the warmth of the interglacials. For the flake tools of the Clactonian and Levalloisian peoples are found mainly with the fossils of cold-loving animals in the north and east of Europe, and the core tools of the Abbevillian and Acheulean peoples with warmer-blooded animals in the west and south.

Science accepted Mortillet’s system of orderly cultures and the theory of successive core and flake industries, and for fifty years tried to apply it to new discoveries both in Europe and elsewhere. Though the system has had to be modified in parts, and in parts abandoned, its terms are still used, and used in a way that is confusing because the terms are no longer exact. In Africa the various types of tools resemble only approximately those of Europe, and they do not seem to correspond in time. The hand ax may have spread from Spain into almost all Africa, or, more probably, from Africa into Spain, as well as southern India, but there are plenty of flaked tools, too, in these regions. Central and northern Asia seem to be devoted to the flake, and to eschew the hand ax in favor of a kind of chopping tool made out of a core. Asia, like Africa, has tools made out of large, smooth pebbles.

Dating Early Man in Europe

One good thing can be said for Mortillet’s modified sequence of Abbevillian, Acheulean, Mousterian, Aurignacian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian. It may not be complete enough, and it may not apply too well to the world outside Europe; but it is chronologically sound locally. It is a succession of cultures along a time scale. If an archaeologist finds two or more varieties of paleolithic tools in a new site, he finds, for example, Acheulean beneath Mousterian, or Mousterian beneath Aurignacian. Similarly, when he comes upon Abbevillian and Acheulean in separate terraces of the same river, he always finds the Abbevillian in a higher terrace than the Acheulean, and, as we have explained on pages 51 and 52, the higher terrace is always the older.

Dating these cultures in terms of our years is another matter. The first step is fairly simple. If the tools are found with the fossils of a warmth-loving animal like the hippopotamus, they belong to an interglacial period; if they are found with the fossils of an animal like the hairy mammoth, which could survive a harsh climate, they belong to a glacial time. The species of animal may determine which glacial or which interglacial. If the tools are found in the gravel of a certain river terrace, then they belong to the geological period when the material of the terrace was being laid down. The terraces often contain fossils, and this may cross-date the terrace materials with cave deposits. But scientists are often faced with the problem of picking the right glacial or interglacial period on scanty evidence, and the still more difficult problem of setting the period in the terms of our years. There is room here for much disagreement. Glaciologists do not agree as to the age or the length of the various glacials and interglacials (see illustration, page 55). Some prehistorians accept and use the dates of one glacialist; some choose another’s. They do not all concur as to which culture came in which glacial period.

True Tools—Deceptive Skulls

Men who practiced Abbevillian culture had some flaked tools—which they may have used for scraping—but their best-recognized output was a crude hand ax. It was not too well formed. Undoubtedly they also used wood and bone, but we have no sure evidence of this. Some assign Abbevillian culture to the first interglacial period, about 500,000 years ago. Some move it up 200,000 years, into the second interglacial. Some even place it in the third. Perhaps it lasted through all three. At any rate, the men who made it liked a fairly warm climate. As neither they nor their Acheulean successors made fire or controlled it effectively, the early Europeans probably retreated to Africa during the glaciations.

The Acheulean hand ax was thinner and better, and it is found with various kinds of scrapers and cleavers. Probably it was this culture that left us part of a very crude wooden spear at Clacton-on-Sea, in England, though some date it a little later. The earliest association of human remains with tools in Europe is that of the Swanscombe skull and Acheulean tools in Pleistocene gravels of the Thames in Kent.

We are not too sure about the physical appearance of the men of Abbevillian and Acheulean times. For the Abbevillian there is possibly a fragment of jaw, a most interesting one, to be sure, but not actually found with any kind of artifact. For Acheulean times there are no dependable skeletons to help us, and not even complete skulls. In fact, there are not as many candidates for the position as we thought we had a decade or so ago.

Galley Hill man turned out to be a case of mistaken identity. He has a thick skull and a few other primitive traits—a fossil type of modern man, perhaps, but not nearly as old as we once thought. His bones lacked a fluorine mineral content typical of other fossils that belonged in the interglacial deposits where the Galley Hill skull reposed, eight feet below the surface.

The same fluorine test—which fortunately applies to such fossilated things as bone, antler, and ivory—exposed an even more notorious impostor, expelling him from the select corps of early men. This was Piltdown man, alias Homo eoanthropus dawsoni, alias Eoanthropus, alias Dawson’s Dawn Man. It was demonstrated to be a fake and a forgery that led its discoverer to try to match a reasonably human skull to the jaw of an ape. The jaw and its teeth had been modified by the faker—not Dawson—to make it appear less apelike. Both jaw and skull had been artfully treated with chemicals to appear as antiquated as the unusual assortment of fossils with which they were salted into early interglacial deposits. Many of the fossils, while authentic in their own right, also were chemically stained and planted. And tools were added to complete the assemblage. The latter included a bone pick thoughtfully carved from the femur of an elephant, but it was carved with a modern steel knife, as careful scrutiny under a powerful lens disclosed, and not with the stone flakes of prehistoric man. (See illustration, page 74.)

The British scientists Kenneth Oakley, J. S. Wiener, and Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark exposed the forgery in a most conclusive manner.[9] In laying the ghost of Piltdown, these authorities resolved four decades of controversy as to his place in human evolution. Although Piltdown’s contribution to human evolution now is known to have been nil, his contribution to physical anthropology has been considerable. As the academic dust settled on this issue, the anthropologists returned to their laboratories with greater confidence in their science and with somewhat sharper tools in their research kits. It is unlikely that any new hoax will ever acquire the same importance as Piltdown.

Ancestors from Heidelberg and Swanscombe?

We still have at least four authentically early human fossils from which European men may have descended. Each has its own interesting story.[10]

The fragment of jaw found under 80 feet of sand at Mauer, Germany, we call Heidelberg man, although he is the least human of the lot. He seems also to be the most ancient, perhaps belonging to the first interglacial period. At least the bones of horses, elephants, bears, and other animals found at the same level in the sand pit derive from the early stages of the Ice Age. Heidelberg man clearly lacks a chin, and his molar teeth are reminiscent in some ways of cattle rather than men or even monkeys, for that matter. This is an important clue, for the same thing, “taurodontism,” occurs much later among some of the Neanderthals.

Heidelberg was not found with or near any stone tools. He seems to belong to that part of the Pleistocene in which the Abbevillian tools were made. Although he shares a few physical traits with Neanderthal man, who lived much later and made excellent tools, some specialists point out that the Heidelberg jaw bears an even closer resemblance to the early man-apes of South Africa, who had no toolmaking tradition.

For the long, cool, and somewhat arid second interglacial period, we have two good prospects, both probably females. One of these is from Swanscombe. In 1936, A. T. Marston found there among the undisturbed Middle Gravels a fragment of fossil skull. Except for its unusual thickness, it was not unlike an equivalent portion in the skull of modern man. Marston’s discovery was all the more exciting since this fragment fitted very well with another, obviously from the same skull, which he had found in place the previous year, only a few paces away. The two pieces, from the left side and back of the skull, provided the earliest undisputed evidence for a very early form of modern man. Twenty years later, in 1955, Mr. J. Wymer recovered a third fragment, from the right side of the same skull. The spots from which the three fragments of the Swanscombe skull were recovered mark a triangle, the sides of which measure 24, 49, and 51 feet. Near the Swanscombe bones and at the same level were found more than two hundred stone flakes as well as four small hand axes of Acheulean type, a stone knife, and fragments of other tools. As we have mentioned, the gravels appear to be an undisturbed deposit. Accordingly, they are now adequately protected and the object of a most intensive and careful excavation. From them may come yet more information about this ancient ancestor.[11]

This is early man, indeed. Swanscombe, from all the evidence now available, is very close physically to modern man, closer than many fossil men from the third interglacial period. And judging from the accompanying stone tools, we may say that Swanscombe was culturally as well as physically human.

Until additional remains of Swanscombe are recovered, we cannot with certainty assign these remains to a precise place among man’s ancestors. There are a few who suspect that the facial bones, should these be recovered, would place Swanscombe closer to Neanderthal than to modern man. However profitless such a conjecture may seem, it is at least suggested by our third early European fossil, the Steinheim skull.

Twenty-three feet beneath the surface in a gravel quarry at Steinheim, Germany, this now famous skull was found. First reported in 1933 by Curator Fritz K. H. Berckheimer, of the nearby Stuttgart Natural History Museum, this skull was well within a layer of gravels which now are believed to be of second interglacial age. Steinheim is now considered more or less a contemporary of Swanscombe, perhaps just slightly less ancient. In the Steinheim skull there is a strong resemblance to the Swanscombe skull and to that of modern man. But most of the right side of the Steinheim face is intact, along with a few molar teeth, and in these there is little likeness to Homo sapiens.

Given the Swanscombe bones alone, probably no anatomist would dream of constructing for it a Neanderthal-like face. But in the Steinheim skull there can be no mistake. Here we find a skull of reasonably modern shape but equipped with enormous bony ridges over the eye sockets, a markedly broad nose, and a somewhat projecting mouth—all suggestive of Neanderthal. In the main, even these features may be somewhat closer to an early type of modern man. It has been asked: Could Steinheim be an ancestor to both Neanderthal and modern man?

Putting the Neanderthal in His Place

Neanderthal man was a latecomer. We will mention him here but wait until farther along to take a closer look at him. He came to Europe late in the third interglacial period. His culture was advanced and his remains are diverse, numerous, and well studied. His bones differ so distinctly from those of modern man that at most he can be considered a distant cousin, only marginally ancestral. But his remains immediately precede those of modern man in Europe, and the stone tools of his Mousterian culture are found directly under those of modern types of early Europeans.

It was, therefore, with something akin to relief that anthropologists received the findings of Mlle. Henri-Martin at Fontechevade. This was in 1947, some 90 years after Neanderthal had been academically accepted for what he was, an effectively extinct kind of non-sapiens man. At Fontechevade, in Charente, west central France, is a cave in which the litter of millenniums discloses a cultural record ranging from that of recent Frenchmen back through the Old Stone Age, which includes the tools and debris of the Neanderthals’ Mousterian culture. The Mousterian materials were bottommost, resting upon what seemed to be the cave floor. Mlle. Henri-Martin noted that this “floor” was in fact a thick layer of stalagmite deposit, and she began excavating. Upon breaking through this culturally sterile layer, the archaeologist came to more than 20 feet of additional deposits above the actual floor. In these lower levels, the cultural debris represented quite a different tool-manufacturing tradition, the Tayacian. This featured crude flake tools, rather than worked cores. With the flake tools there were fragments of fossil mammals, dating the deposit as third interglacial. There also was a human skullcap and a fragment of a second skull. Not much to go on, but it was sufficient to show that these were the remains not of Neanderthal man but of something closer to modern man in most respects, and perhaps to Swanscombe. Here, for the first time, was clear and unmistakable proof that a more modern form of man definitely preceded the brutish Neanderthal. Fontechevade man resembled Homo sapiens more than Neanderthal—the first evidence that the latter was not our direct ancestor.

These four early men—Heidelberg, Swanscombe, Steinheim, and Fontechevade—are of unquestionable antiquity. There are many other fossil men from Europe, equally interesting but less reliably dated. In addition there are hosts of Africans and Asians who, perhaps, are really of greater consequence in human evolution. None of these is dated as well as the early Europeans, whose bones and stone tools can be assigned to rather specific periods within the sequence of glacial and interglacial phases of the Ice Age.

Ancient Man in Java and China

In the 1880’s a Dutch Army surgeon named Eugène Dubois decided to go to Java to find a kind of ape-man that the great German scientist Ernst Haeckel had envisioned fifteen years before. In 1891, beneath ancient deposits of the Solo River, Dubois discovered what he was looking for—or perhaps a slight improvement on it. What he found was the skull top, two molar teeth, and a thigh bone of a thing which was much more man than ape, but which received the name Pithecanthropus erectus (erect ape-man). For some years the skullcap of this Java man—a handier name—stood alone as the only fossil of really ancient man. Now it has been joined by portions of two other adults from the same geological level and the cranium of a child and portions of a rugged, robust male skull from a still older level, the discoveries of G. H. R. von Koenigswald. Reconstructions of Java man give us a fellow with a low sloping forehead, no chin, not much room for brains, and a very prominent ridge of bone above his eyes. This human of 300,000 or more years ago probably looked a good deal like the most primitive of modern men, the native Australians, who seem to have miraculously and uniquely survived without much change from the beginnings of Homo. Java man left no tools with his bones, but the massive Patjitanian stone choppers and crude flakes found in southern Java are thought to be of about the proper age.

Java man has a slightly younger relative in Peking man, also beetle-browed. The first finds were made in 1929, about forty miles southwest of Peking in the Choukoutien Cave, on Dragon Bone Hill. Since then parts of about forty men and women have been dug out. We now have four skulls that are more complete than those of Java man. We also have 148 teeth and thirteen jaws, and some odd pieces of other skulls. We have fire hearths and a large number of implements, ranging from eoliths to hammerstones and crude choppers and scrapers. We also have some fossil bones of monkey, baboon, ostrich, rhinoceros, and mammoth, besides animals common to China today. The most interesting bones, of course, are those of man himself, and our concern with them is increased by the odd and disturbing fact that the thigh bones had been cracked for their marrow as only a man could crack them, and the skulls had suffered violence. If Peking man was not a cannibal, he had a neighbor who was. And that is probably true for the Abbevillian and Acheulean times of Europe. But at least Peking man, like Java man, stood erect.

“Giant Ape”—a Mythical Ancestor?

Behind Java and Peking man, it was once supposed, a giant ancestor lurked. Ideas of giants occur in the myths and folklore of most peoples, but here the germ was planted by reputable scientists. It began between 1935 and 1939, when von Koenigswald discovered in a Hong Kong apothecary’s shop three molars that had six times the volume of our teeth and were greater than the equivalent teeth in any other man or ape, living or fossil. Their owner obviously was related to man, but how closely we cannot guess. He was promptly dubbed “giant ape,” Gigantopithecus. Then, in Java in 1941, von Koenigswald recovered part of a massive jaw with a few huge teeth intact. Their great size again prompted a fanciful name, “the giant man of ancient Java,” or Meganthropus palaeojavanicus.

Professor Franz Weidenreich speculated that the Hong Kong teeth would require a beast twice the bulk of a gorilla, while the jaw and teeth of the Java “giant” indicated an ancient man half again as large as a gorilla. Gorillas stand, quite uncomfortably, five and a half feet or so; some weigh more than 600 pounds. Further evidence appeared in 1957, when Pei Wenchung reported the discovery in Kwangsi Province, China, of a jaw bone with teeth, which he claimed to be Gigantopithecus. Pei added that it was closer to man than any other ape yet discovered, and he must have been 12 feet tall.[12]

The logic of including giants among our ancestors stems in part from the fact that many Pleistocene mammals were larger than their modern descendants. What these great teeth and jaws mean, we do not yet know. In the complete absence of such clues to stature as thigh and other bones, there are few who would now speculate that the huge teeth mean more than a fossil ape of otherwise moderate proportions. There is not always an exact correlation between size of teeth and stature, as comparisons among modern man, Peking and Java man, and South African man-apes indicate. The smallest teeth occur among some of the tallest humans; the largest teeth are found among some of the smaller man-apes.

“Java” Men in Africa and Europe?

Halfway around the world, at Ternifine, near Oran, in Algeria, Professor Camille Arambourg recovered a portion of a youthful skull and three jaws in 1954-55. He called these Atlanthropus.[13] This was not a valid new genus, however, for there are strong resemblances between these jaws and those of Peking and Java man. Here is an African cousin of Pithecanthropus. (There are others. A fragment of jaw found near Rabat, in Morocco, also is thought to resemble Java man.) The Ternifine jaws seem to belong to the second interglacial period. At the bottom of an ancient spring from which Arambourg recovered his fossils, he also found a number of stone tools, including fist axes of the Acheulean type. This perhaps is the earliest association of Acheulean artifacts with human bones. You will recall that Acheulean fist axes also were found with Swanscombe. Have we, then, a single type of culture for two quite different kinds of men? Our accumulating evidence is beginning to make it clear that some half-brained form of man closely related to our Java “ape-man” was widely distributed across the inhabitable regions of the Old World during the long second interglacial period.

Man-Apes or Ape-Men in Africa

While Sunday supplements and scientists alike were occupied with Dubois’s “missing link” and his Peking cousin, primate fossils of even greater consequence were being recovered in southern Africa by Professor Raymond Dart and the late Dr. Robert Broom. In 1925, Dart named them Australopithecines or “southern apes.”[14] Arousing little scientific curiosity at first, they were considered by some as a parallel, perhaps profitless, line of evolution. By 1950, such fossils were becoming impressively abundant. A bewildering array of names was assigned to them, without scientific justification. The first had been called Australopithecus africanus; later, another species, prometheus, was added. Others were labeled as distinct genera, taking note of their near-human features—Telanthropus, Plesianthropus, and Paranthropus (with two species, robustus and crassidens). In 1959, a new and important form was added, Zinjanthropus boisei. Zinj is the Arab name for East Africa. Expert opinion now inclines toward lumping these all together, possibly under our own genus, Homo, or at most, within a single genus, Australopithecus. Their status of “ape” is being reassessed: man-apes, some still maintain; ape-men, say others; a few believe they included the earliest true men.

The dividing line between ape and man is drawn partly upon physical grounds, but the greatest difference is a cultural one. Men possess and transmit culture, a process ordinarily regarded as involving language. Men make tools; apes do not. The smallest, crudest, and perhaps earliest of the Australopithecines have long been championed by Dart, who argues most persuasively that they were at least tool users, if not toolmakers. With their remains were those of other animals, a source of bones for picks and clubs, teeth for cutting and scraping, and so on. Perceiving crude, ready-made tools of bone, tooth, and horn, Dart coined the term “osteodontokeratic” for this pre-Stone Age assemblage.[15] This nomenclature was criticized by physical and cultural anthropologists alike. Whether this “culture” of the Australopithecines is real or—as many believe—imagined, there is no doubt about the equipment of Zinjanthropus. Associated with his bones are stone tools of the Oldowan culture, an Abbevillian-level, “Pre-Chelles-Acheul” industry of worked stone flakes. In the words of his discoverer, Dr. L. S. B. Leakey, here was the oldest maker of stone tools so far known. By 1960, the skull of Zinjanthropus had not been fully studied. In certain of its features, it favors Paranthropus, Australopithecus, or Homo. On first glance it seems as nearly human as Java man, which Leakey says it predates.[16]

There are two main difficulties in placing the Australopithecines on the line of human evolution. Although they might be said to resemble man more than the apes, they actually resemble neither, for their features are so specialized that it is difficult to conceive of them as ancestral to either. It is difficult, too, to place them in geologic time. Except for Zinjanthropus, who clearly belongs to the upper part of the Lower Pleistocene, most of the Australopithecines have been recovered from caves, fissures, or other places where there is no stratification. They are all much too old to be placed in time by some of our more precise dating techniques, such as the radiocarbon method. Non-primate bones found with them are typical of animals that in Europe ranged all the way from the Mid-Pliocene to the Mid-Pleistocene. South Africa is a cul-de-sac, relatively untouched by the Ice Age. The abundance and variety of animals surviving today in most of Africa south of the Sahara are reminiscent of the Pleistocene elsewhere. The index fossils of other lands are not much use when it comes to dating Australopithecus.

Once suspected of being Middle Pleistocene at the earliest, the Australopithecines’ apparent lack of culture, their crude development, and relatively small brain capacity indicated to some authorities that they were too little and too late to have been ancestral to man. But given a greater time span-back, say, to the Late Pliocene—they could be regarded seriously as mans ancestors. Somewhat cautiously, Sir Wilfrid E. Le Gros Clark seems to agree with Dart that, as a whole, the Australopithecines may well include the stock from which our own genus was derived.[17]

Back of the Australopithecines are yet other fossils of great interest, forms intermediate between man and apes in various ways. These all are utterly lacking in culture, in our sense of the word. One of the more interesting fossils is Oreopithecus bambolii, quantities of which have been recovered from a lignite mine at Baccinello, Italy.[18] These fossils seem to date from about the Early Pliocene. More than ape or monkey, their teeth are definitely manlike—hominid rather than merely hominoid—and the size of their brains is about that of the larger chimpanzees or the smaller Australopithecines. Future studies surely will indicate if, and perhaps how, Oreopithecus is related to the South African man-apes, and to man.

The Progressive Neanderthal

Let us get back to Europe and the next culture in Mortillet’s scale. This is the Mousterian; we know it better by the name of the place in Germany—Neanderthal—where, in 1856, the first skeleton of the Mousterian Age was found. It took thirty years for this skeleton to win scientific recognition, but now we have about a hundred admitted specimens.

The Neanderthal was not a pretty spectacle. He had the low forehead and heavy brow ridges of Java and Peking man, and the same lack of chin. And yet he was the cleverest fellow by far that had ever lived, and the most sensitive, which may seem rather odd, since some of the earlier skulls found in England, Africa, Java, and Australia come nearer the modern type of what we call thinking man, Homo sapiens.

On the evidence we have, the Neanderthal seems to have been the inventor of religion. In his caves we find burials for the first time, and burials accompanied by tools for the dead man to use in the other world. We also find shrines made of the skulls of cave bears.

As a chipper of flint, he was much more skillful than those that had gone before. He soon gave up making tools which, like the hand ax, would serve a number of purposes, but none very well. He invented the stone spear point. There is still considerable argument about his flint work, or at least about the technique which he may or may not have developed.

When man began to make tools he pounded one rock with another. He hoped he would knock off just the right chip in the right spot. This is called the percussion method of flaking (see illustration, page 91). Some say the Neanderthal was not content with this. They think that he must have discovered how to place a piece of bone or very hard wood against a flint at the point where he wanted to knock off a flake, and then strike it with a hammerstone (see illustration, page 92). This might account for the small chips, or “retouches,” taken off the edge of some of his spear points as in the illustration below. Even the Acheuleans are occasionally credited with this invention because many of their hand axes are so symmetrical. There are those who say that the Neanderthal had progressed so far in flint work that he knew the art of pressure flaking—the third step in flint knapping—which involved the pressing off of small chips with the bit of wood or bone held in the hand (see illustration, page 93). It seems more likely that Neanderthals and men of Acheulean times used the anvil method of percussion flaking (lower drawing, page 91), not an inaccurate way of knocking off small chips.

The Neanderthal—with his Mousterian culture—seems to have invaded Europe from Asia toward the end of the third and last interglacial, anywhere from 80,000 to 125,000 years ago, and to have left from 15,000 to 100,000 years ago, depending on what authority you choose, and how that authority dates the last interglacial. Unlike his predecessors, the Neanderthal lived in caves; but that was probably because he was the first man in Europe to survive a glacial winter—tens of thousands of them.

The Neanderthal seems to have disappeared quite suddenly from Europe, taking his Australoid features with him. There are traces of him in Africa, and also in Palestine where he is thought to have produced a hybrid among the Mount Carmel people. Sir Arthur Keith said, in 1915, that the Neanderthal never left Europe, but was merely absorbed into the next peoples. We can see the Neanderthal profile on an occasional passer-by.

Most anthropologists are rather cool to the Neanderthal. They cast him quite outside the sacred ranks of our ancestors. They say he was not Homo sapiens—merely Homo neanderthalensis. This means that he was a sort of dead end, a blind alley, up which one sort of ape-man ran, while another was taking a turn that ended in his being master of the atom but not of the atomic bomb. Other anthropologists do not agree. Like Keith, they take the Neanderthal into the sacred circle—at least at stud.

Radiocarbon Dates for the Mousterian

However early the Mousterian culture may have begun, the later stages fall within the range of one of the archaeologist’s most interesting and precise techniques for dating. This is the radiocarbon, or Carbon 14, method.[19] Much simplified, it depends upon the following phenomena: Most plants are radioactive, and so are all animals that depend directly or indirectly upon these plants for food. This radioactivity is found in a rare form of carbon called radiocarbon, or Carbon 14. While a plant or an animal is alive, it contains a constant proportion of this radioactive material. Radiocarbon is always breaking down and disappearing, but while a tree or a bird or another animal lives, this material is being renewed. When this same tree or animal dies, it stops acquiring new radiocarbon, and therefore its radioactivity decreases. Heartwood from a 4,000-year-old sequoia tree is appreciably less radioactive than the living outer layer. Antlers shed by a buck in the last spring are more radioactive than any reindeer antlers left in a cave in France by Old Stone Age hunters 17,000 years ago.

After death, radiocarbon disappears at a rate of speed that can be measured. This rate may seem strange to most laymen. It is based on what physicists call “half-lives.” The half-life of radiocarbon is 5,568 years, give or take a few. This means that after 5,568 years, half the radiocarbon is gone. If the material weighed a pound at the death of the plant or animal, only half a pound would be left. After another half-life of the same length, only a quarter of a pound would remain. And so on and so on. With highly refined techniques, what is left of this radioactive substance can be detected in matter 60,000 to 70,000 years old,[20] and it can be measured and its age determined, with a few percentage points of error, up to at least 50,000 years ago. The scientist must be sure, however, that the material—such as wood, charcoal, peat, antler, shell, bone, or hair—has not been exposed to contamination that would add radiocarbon.

This method of dating, developed by Willard F. Libby in the late forties, supplied archaeologists with fairly close estimates of the age of sites containing wood, charcoal, shell, or bone.

Neanderthal is the first of our early men to have lived within the range of radiocarbon dating. To be more precise, his Mousterian culture has left traces that can be measured. We have several radiocarbon measurements that tell us how recently Neanderthal was around; his oldest cultural materials are beyond the present range of radiocarbon measurement. At Godarville, Belgium, Mousterian artifacts were found underlying an accumulation of peat that dated from more than 36,000 years ago. Since the stone tools were deposited before the peat, they must be at least as old. Charcoal from an ancient hearth in a Libyan cave at Haua Fteah, associated with Levalloiso-Mousterian materials and about three feet or so above a Neanderthaloid jaw, was dated at 34,000 years, or possibly older. The archaeology of this cave suggests that the Neanderthal survived in North Africa until about 30,000 years ago. In Israel, south of Haifa in the Mount Carmel range, at a site called Mugharet-el-Kebara, a very small sample of charcoal, thought to correlate with a nearby Levalloiso-Mousterian deposit, furnished a date of more than 30,000 years.

In the Near East, archaeological excavation directed by Dr. Ralph S. Solecki, of the Smithsonian Institution, turned up yet more material that helps us date the Neanderthal. In the Zagros Mountains of northern Iraq, at Shanidar Cave, in Shanidar Valley, there is a remarkable deposit of both the tools and the bones of early man. The cave contained a dozen feet or so of Upper Paleolithic remains overlying a deep Mousterian deposit. The bottom level of the Upper Paleolithic materials has been dated at over 34,000 years. How much older the Mousterian layers may be we cannot yet be sure. From depths of 14½ and 23 feet below the surface and within the Mousterian deposit, adult skeletons have been recovered. These seem to be Neanderthaloid, as does the skeleton of a child, recovered at a depth of 26 feet. The estimate is that the shallower of the skeletons may be about 45,000 years old, the lower adult perhaps 60,000.[21]

Homo sapiens—New or Old?

The relationship of all these forms of early man is much disputed. For many, many years they were all supposed to be barren offshoots of our ancestral tree. Nobody could find the particular breed of ape-man from which we were descended. Now science is inclined to lump most of them together in one way or another. There are many theories and many genealogies. Swanscombe man plays grandfather to Homo sapiens. Java man and Peking man become the forebears of the Mongoloid. Other men from Java father the Australian, and even the Neanderthal. The Neanderthals breed out their crudeness in some sort of union with Homo sapiens. Or all of them are admitted to the ranks of Homo, with Neanderthal a degenerate offshoot without issue.

The earlier picture was simpler and more dramatic. From Pithecanthropus erectus to Homo neanderthalensis—Java man to the Neanderthal—these creatures bore no relation to our own happy breed. Then, quite suddenly, came Homo sapiens in the person of the Cro-Magnon. He was the kind of tall fellow with a well domed, narrow Nordic head whom Hitler identified with the better class of human beings. Except for the “Red Lady of Paviland,” the first specimens were found at Aurignac, France, in 1852, though nobody recognized the outstanding quality of the skulls until the find at Cro-Magnon, France, in 1868 (see illustration, page 89).

For many years the French clung to what Hooton calls the rather chauvinistic myth that here, in the waning years of the Great Ice Age, we find a superior kind of man that was predominantly a product of the French area. Certainly he was a remarkable person in many ways. For one thing, he discovered art. He painted on the walls of his caves and carved on pieces of bone and elephant ivory pictures of mammoths, bison, and boars, and he made sculptures of fat women in stone. Also, he began to fish in the swift streams that ran off from the glaciers. He hunted reindeer and made use of their antlers as tools. For quite a time he was supposed to represent the peak of achievement by early man.

Before long, however, the Cro-Magnon became only a factor in a broader culture, described as the Aurignacian, and soon the Aurignacian suffered from scientific fission. Through this whole period and, indeed, until the end of the Old Stone Age, new tools in the form of blades, chisellike burins, and implements of reindeer bone make their appearance; but they vary in shape and in the time of their emergence. Some of these tools divide what was formerly called the Aurignacian into three parts: the Châtelperron, the Middle Aurignacian, and the Gravettian. The Châtelperron people developed a narrow, curved blade out of a tool vaguely Mousterian. The Middle Aurignacians appeared as invaders with thin blades and scrapers notched or narrowed halfway along each side. Finally, a people who had hunted mammoths in southern Russia—the Gravettians—turned up in France as the inventors of a thin, narrow, and straight blade made by carefully detaching sliver after sliver from a well shaped core of flint. Sometimes one edge was blunted to make it handier to use; occasionally the point of a blade or other tool was chipped off diagonally to produce a chisellike engraving tool. Another type of tool, the Font Robert point with a stem, also appeared (see illustration, page 101).