Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Before we come to language itself, though, we need to consider why it developed. And this is where we return to the significance of meat-eating. As was outlined in Chapter 1, the brain size of Homo habilis showed a marked increase over what went before, and this was associated with an advance in stone tool technology. Important in the context of this chapter is the discovery of stone tools up to ten kilometres from the raw material source, which implies that, beginning with H. habilis, early man was capable of ‘mental maps’, planning ahead, predicting where game would be and transporting tools to those sites, presumably in advance. This is intellectual behaviour already far beyond the capacities of other primates. But we also know, from the archaeological remains at sites, that early man ate antelope, zebra, and hippopotamus. Searching for large animal prey would have pitted early humans against hyenas when scavenging, and against the prey itself when hunting. Some palaeontologists argue that this could not have been accomplished as solitary individuals or even, perhaps, as small groups. A relationship has been observed by some zoologists between brain volume and the average size of social groups among primates. There is even a view that brain size is correlated with what Steven Mithen calls social intelligence. According to one estimate, the australopithecines lived in groups with an average size of sixty–seventy individuals, whereas H. habilis groups averaged around eighty.¹ These provided the basic ‘cognitive group’ of early man, the group he had to deal with on an everyday basis, and the increasing size of this cognitive group would, say the palaeontologists, have stimulated the growth of man’s social intelligence. Distinguishing one group member from another, and one’s own kin within this wider group, would have become much easier once language had developed, and easier still once beads and pendants and other items of bodily adornment had been created, with which people could emphasise their individuality. Against this, George Schaller, who was mentioned at the beginning of Chapter 1, points out that lions hunt quite successfully in groups without language.

We do also see a marked change in technology in the Upper Palaeolithic, and in hunting technique, both of them changes that are difficult to imagine without language. In Europe at least a whole range of tools appear – including hafted tools, harpoons and spear throwers made of shaped antler and bone (the first ‘plastics’); at the same time we see the development of blades, produced as ‘standardised blanks’ that could be turned into burins, scrapers, awls or needles as required.²

In southern Africa we see a very different picture when comparing the remains excavated at Klasies River Mouth (120,000–60,000 BP) with the much younger Nelson Bay cave (20,000 BP). The latter contains more bones of large dangerous prey, like buffalo and wild pigs, and far fewer eland. By this time too, people had developed projectiles such as the bow and arrow that allowed them to attack prey at a distance. And there is an equivalent difference between the seal remains at Klasies and Nelson Bay. The age of the seals at Klasies indicates that ancient humans lived on the coast all through the year ‘including times when [food] resources were probably more abundant in the interior’.³ At Nelson Bay, however, the inhabitants timed their coastal visits to late winter/early spring when they could catch the infant seals on the beach, and then moved inland when it was more productive to do so.⁴ There is a final difference in these two sites as regards fishing. There are no fish among the debris at Klasies, while fish predominate at Nelson Bay. As we saw above, by now harpoons had been invented. Could such co-operation have been achieved without language? Could the concept of the harpoon barb be passed on without a word for it?