Introduction to Archaeology: The First People and Culture

The First People and Culture

Lesson Objectives: Model lifestyles of earliest hominid forms and Lower Paleolithic based on cultural remains and other evidence, understanding political issues.

What do the earliest archaeological remains look like? Remember this is archaeology class, so we will not discuss the details of different early hominid skeletal forms and which of the many species is an evolutionary dead end as opposed to a true human ancestor (not that all the paleoanthropologists can agree on this anyhow!). But the true archaeological remains are the result of cultural behavior, and they are mostly stone tools.

Was stone the earliest material made into tools? Probably not, but it is the only one preserved from as much as 2.5 million years ago. The tool forms are minimally flaked to have a sharp edge, and they are called pebble tools or Oldowan tools, after the famous Olduvai Gorge in East Africa investigated by Louis and Mary Leakey. It is highly likely that the very first tools were made of perishable materials such as plant fibers or bone. We know that chimps make and use tools in the wild, such as shaped grass stems for pulling termites out of their mounds and wads of leaves for sponges to drink water from small pools.

Who made the stone tools? This class will not go into hominid evolution, which is the realm of physical or biological anthropology class. Suffice it to say that the early human-like forms were first discovered in the early 20th century in South Africa; then the Leakeys spent 30 years in Tanzania, East Africa, looking for hominid remains he knew would be there because he had found the crude-looking but clearly manufactured stone tools. By the 1970s other now-famous researchers were discovering more remains, such as Donald Johanson’s find of the Lucy skeleton in Ethiopia at the Hadar site. Now we are up to a dozen species of australopithecines and counting, plus a few other taxonomic names. We do not know which one, if any, made the stone tools. Contemporaneous with many of these species at the 2.5 million year point, when the first stone tools appear, is another species, Homo habilis, which translates to “handyman” and is supposed to be the toolmaker. Do you need a larger brain and longer evolutionary history to know how to make tools? Apes have been taught flintknapping, so the answer is no. Might there be any prejudice against attributing tool-making behavior to hominid forms that look older or uglier or less like us? Maybe.

What other kind of very early archaeological evidence was found at the Laetoli site? Fossilized footprints of hominids, excavated by Mary Leakey, demonstrating archaeologically the bipedalism that the bones also showed. Mary was an archaeologist in England who teamed up with Louis to do paleoanthropology. The book shows a photo of her digging the footprints (p. 41); she was a colorful character in her own right (show family picture, p. 53, in color in Fagan 1985 of Mary with Louis, boys, dogs).

Where is the Swartkrans site and are there differences in interpretations of its evidence? It is in South Africa and has produced skull fragments and other hominid fossils. One investigator, Raymond Dart, who named the original Australopithecus africanus specimen, saw the fragments as broken in such a way as to suggest that not only were these early human creatures hunting lots of other animals, but they were hunting their own species as well. The many skulls had the bases broken away, often seen as a sign of cannibalism because this is how you process animal skulls from which you want to eat the brains (yummy, and very nutritious too!). Another investigator, Robert Brain, interpreted them as evidence that something else broke the bones, site formation processes acting upon them after they were deposited as remains of meals of other carnivores such as big cats.

Where is Koobi Fora and what is the evidence there? In Kenya, eastern Africa, where hominid remains, animal bones, and tools and stone fragments are arranged in enough proximity to suggest living floors where groups of early humans gathered. Today other Leakeys work there, first Louis and Mary’s son Richard and now his wife Maeve, and the hominid fossil discoveries are still coming.

How old are the first hominids, and what do these small archaeological traces tell us about them? The Oldowan tools now have been pushed back to 2.5 million years ago, and the footprints are fully a million years older. Without straying too far from archaeology, we can examine all the glamour of paleoanthropology and see again how the viewpoints of the investigator influence the interpretation. Many popular accounts of hominid discoveries include the soap opera details of the investigators’ lives—who disagrees with whom and who was sleeping with whom and how this influenced what got funded or published. Examples are Ancestral Passions (Morrell 1995), the story of the Leakey family and its discoveries, and Lucy: the Beginnings of Humankind (Johanson and Edey 1981), by Don Johanson, who is coming to speak on our campus this fall. There are many other popular accounts, and they do explain the science fairly well. Some even demonstrate the importance of archaeology in understanding how our earliest human-like ancestors lived. Johanson’s later book, Lucy’s Child (Johanson and Shreeve 1989), includes a chapter telling how he brought some famous archaeologists such as Lewis Binford out to East Africa to help understand the landscape archaeology of early hominid adaptations.

How do archaeologists evaluate entire landscapes in which people lived? They look for the available resources, whether stone for tools, other raw materials, animals and plants for food, or other environmental variables that might influence communication and travel and social aspects of life.

How can we reconstruct the life of the earliest human ancestors, and what are alternative viewpoints? Beyond which hominid was an evolutionary dead end and which gave rise to our genus and eventually our own species (physical anthropology debates which change yearly with each new discovery and pronouncement), there is great controversy on how they lived. Here is where some archaeology, including social reconstruction, is useful. Dart’s original interpretation portrayed our earliest ancestors as clever hunters who frequently killed for a living. The “Man the Hunter” model was popular into the 1960s, and was thought to explain humans’ rapid evolution, especially ever-increasing brain size. The need to plan and hunt and survive, as well as the efficient nutritional package provided by meat, was supposed to have been the driving force in human biological evolution. But studies of modern and historic hunter-gatherers began to show that most such peoples ate predominantly plants, often gathered by women, since meat is much harder to come by (it runs away, while plants do not!). The male bias and the meat bias were obvious. One alternative model, called “Woman the Gatherer” (Dahlberg 1981), suggested that foraging for foods other than meat, done by women, was what increased intelligence and drove hominid evolution. In this scenario the earliest artifacts were of fiber, were probably invented by women, and were probably containers, slings and strings made for carrying things that were gathered. Another model suggested that a three-foot-tall creature of Lucy’s type was not going to be hunting large game animals often, but that meat is easily available on the African savanna through scavenging, grabbing the remains of whatever was already killed by a lion or something else.

Is the scavenging model testable? Yes, to an extent, because we can see if the bones on possible living floors bear signs of human action. They might be broken open in a distinctive way to extract the marrow, something only humans would do. Further, they might have teeth marks from gnawing animals and cut marks from stone tools. Each is distinctive under magnification. If cut marks overlie chewing marks it suggests that something else killed and began eating the animal before hominids got it to eat.

Which reconstruction of australopithecine lifeways is the most popular? As detailed in Lucy (Johanson and Edey 1981) and many other introductory texts, the provisioning model (p. 62-63 in the textbook) seems to be the most popular. It portrays the hominid male as scavenger, gatherer, all-around guy who obtains the food and brings it back to camp where the female and kids are staying, supposedly increasing the reproductive success of the species. What keeps him coming back is supposed to be the hidden estrus cycle of the female. Women do not have monthly periods in which the sex organs become swollen and bright pink, as some monkeys and apes do, advertising fertility and sexual receptivity. The idea was that the attraction of sex at any time led to the early institution of monogamy. You can see the implication of this in the artist’s reconstruction of how the Laetoli footprints were made. Though we have three sets of footprints, larger and smaller, the painting shows the male hominid striding ahead, holding some kind of tool, while the female is the requisite number of paces behind, carrying the kid. What other interpretations could have been possible? Obviously many, including that the prints were made hours apart by individuals who did not even see each other.

What is the real evidence for all the models and what is sheer speculation? The only hard data are the bones, the tools, the footprints, and the landscape. First-level inference can tell us about scavenging or living floors, but there are alternative interpretations. What one scientist calls a living floor another may see as a cache of meat stored for future use but covered in rocks to prevent other animals from getting it. The supposed constant sexual receptivity of human females is a pretty sexist notion, and now it is clear that it is characteristic of many primates and that the marked estrus cycle is the derived characteristic, in other words, evolved later. The notion of monogamy does not jive with the social organization of ape troops (which are usually matrilineal—apes know their mothers and siblings but not their fathers). Nor is it supported by ethnographic analogy, since monogamy is a minority marriage type among human cultures. Nor does the ethnographic record support the idea of sedentary women staying home with the kids and waiting for food to show up with the hubby. We know that women hunt in many cultures, and even if the division of labor means that they are the plant gatherers, they work hard and move around; note this picture (Zihlman 1981:92) of a !Kung woman on a gathering trip from camp, carrying the child and the bag of plants obtained and seven months pregnant! She is averaging many km per day in obtaining the needed resources.

Why is it important to model the earliest human social organization? How can this have any importance for us today, so far removed from those small early creatures in our ancestry? Since characteristics are attributed to humans based on our supposed evolutionary past, it is crucially important to characterize the way we originally were. If monogamy or inactive women are part of the natural human condition, then they must be the right thing to do! Since the biases of the researchers and lack of any (let alone good) evidence are so obviously a part of the reconstruction, we must be cautious in accepting these speculations about early human-like lifeways.

What is the Paleolithic time period? We have already commented on the artificial division of time into classifications for making it easier to understand. We can see the obvious bias in naming time periods “Paleolithic,” “Mesolithic,” “Neolithic,” or Old Stone Age, Middle, and New! We further continue the division into the sacred Western number three as we classify cultural remains from the Upper, Middle, and Lower Paleolithic, or Early, Middle, and Late! Since those classifications have been used for so long, however, they are convenient.

What is the Pleistocene period? A geological term, this is the time of the Ice Age, during which most human evolution took place and most of the archaeological record was formed, beginning around 2 million years ago (see chart p. 67 of the book; it shows the “sudden” cooling of the earth). The Lower Paleolithic is the cultural name for what is happening during the geological time of the Lower and Middle Pleistocene. During this Ice Age large glaciers, ice sheets, covered northern latitudes (pictured on map, p. 76 of text), and world regional climates were much different, as we will explore.

What hominids and archaeological remains characterize the Lower Paleolithic? Some time around or shortly after 2 million years ago, hominids spread out of Africa into Europe and Asia. The most frequently described species is Homo erectus, but others have lately been suggested. For archaeology class we will not discuss the finer points of biological evolution and skeletal characteristics. Suffice it to say that the Lower Paleolithic hominids were in the genus Homo, so closer to physically modern humans. What concerns us here is their culture. It is generally assumed that during the Lower Paleolithic the stone tools get more sophisticated and the use of fire becomes known (though some are suggesting that fire may have been known to earlier australopithecines in East Africa, but the evidence is hard to tell from the remains of natural fires).

Why was the use of fire a good idea for moving into these new regions? Because spreading from equatorial African regions into colder areas may have required it for survival. Fire is equally useful in warm areas for cooking, protection from predators, chasing game, and other uses, however.

What are diagnostic Lower Paleolithic stone tools? Bifacially chipped “handaxes” (pictured on pp. 68, 92-4 of the book) are pear-shaped tools made on the stone core by chipping off the flakes on both sides. These are especially common at sites in Europe.

Where are some important Lower Paleolithic sites? Your book focuses upon classic sites, such as the Trinil site in Java where the first Homo erectus bones were found and named in the 19th century. It is a romantic story, about the Dutch army surgeon Eugene Dubois and his obsession with the bones. But there were no tools, and still-controversial dates in more recent years.

What is important at the site of Zhoukoudian? Another classic site with a romantic story, these caves near Beijing also produced many Homo erectus skeletons early in the 20th century. The bones are now lost, though we have casts, but also there was some good archaeology. Animal remains and fires suggest hunting and cooking of some 96 mammal species, including extinct deer, elephant, and bear, though Lewis Binford and others are now questioning the site formation processes and asking if these can also be the remains of scavenging killed meat. The stone tools here include types of choppers, scrapers, and even small points, but no handaxes.

What happened at the Terra Amata site, and where is it? On the French Riviera, it another classic site, saved from being destroyed by construction of apartments. (Is there is a stronger sense of stewardship of the past going on in Europe because they are saving the remains of their own ancestors, unlike in the U.S., where people are not often descendants of the native inhabitants?) It is famous for producing remains of both terrestrial animals and coastal species, both fish and shellfish. Original interpretations of features indicating structures, huts on the beach, are now under question with new reanalyses. You can see the excellent picture (p. 86) of the lithic refitting analysis, putting the flakes back together to see the original piece and how it was chipped. There was a hearth with a pattern of rocks on one side of it suggesting a windscreen. Why do we have less evidence of Paleolithic coastal dwellers in general? Because rising sea levels after the Pleistocene, from the melting of the glaciers, have drowned most of the original shoreline and any sites that may have been on it.

What was found at the East African sites of Kalambo Falls and Olorgesailie? The former produced Lower Paleolithic plant remains, such as nuts and seeds, and the latter had preserved bones of baboons presumably hunted by Homo erectus. Both had handaxes.

What important points should we remember about the Lower Paleolithic? First, there are many debates about which hominid species are present or which species names should be used. Some sites have bones and no archaeological remains; some have tools and animal bone but no hominid remains. It would be nice to classify everything neatly, but that is not possible. The map in the book on p. 64 shows other Lower Paleolithic sites not even discussed in the text which are yielding more fascinating evidence lately and probably will be described in greater length in the next edition of the book. One of these is Longgupo in south China, where the finds were a few teeth and some pebble or Oldowan-like tools, dating to just under 2 million years ago.

What about social organization during the Lower Paleolithic? Your book is clear in its opinion that there was a sexual division of labor, that men hunted because they were faster and larger and women gathered and did child care (p. 95). They are less certain about family structure, and say that monogamy or polygamy were both possible. What is the evidence for such statements? Are they testable hypotheses? There is no evidence, and we have not yet figured how to test them. By analogy, we can say there does not have to be a division of labor based on sex as much as on age, since children cannot do things adults can. But men can gather plants and nurture babies, and women can hunt, and the stereotypes given above for now just reflect Western biases.