Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Still more deductions can be made about the origin of language from examination of the sudden appearance of early humans in difficult environments, in particular the very cold parts of the world, notably Siberia. Siberia is important because the conquest of cold was man’s greatest achievement before the invention of agriculture, and because it was the jumping-off point for what turned out to be the greatest natural experiment in mankind’s history – the peopling of America. And, we may ask, would any of this have been possible without language? Many sites in greater Siberia have been dated to at least 200,000 years ago and their very existence raises the question of fire (again) and of clothing. The climate was so harsh that many palaeontologists feel that the land could not have been occupied without man wearing ‘tailored’ clothing. However rough this tailoring would have been, it nevertheless implies the invention of the needle very early on, though nothing has ever been found. In 2004 it was reported by biologists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology at Leipzig, in Germany, that body lice are different from hair lice. Mark Stoneking and his colleagues infer that body lice ‘probably evolved from hair lice when a new ecological niche – clothing – became available’. Based on the rate of mutation, they date this to 75,000 BP.⁵

To conquer Siberia and Australia, early humans would have needed not only needles, to make clothes, but in the case of Australia rafting vessels, and in both places an elaborate social structure, involving kin and not-kin (and an appreciation of the differences). All of which would have required elaborate communication between individuals – i.e., language.⁶ Experiments show that group decision-making grows less effective in assemblies of more than six. Larger groups can therefore exist only with a hierarchy and this too implies language. By ‘communication’, we mean proto-languages, which probably lacked both tenses and subordinate clauses, where the action and thought is displaced from the face-to-face here-and-now.⁷

Some time between 25,000 and 10,000 years ago, the area of sea that now separates Siberia from America – the Bering Strait – was land, and ancient man was able to walk from Eurasia to Alaska. In fact, during the last ice age that part of the world was configured quite differently from the way it is now. Not only was the land that is now submerged above water but Alaska and parts of what is now Yukon and the Northwest Territories, in Canada, were separated from the rest of the Americas by two gigantic ice sheets. Beringia, as this area is known to palaeontologists and archaeologists, stretched as an unbroken landmass from deepest Siberia across the strait and for three or four hundred miles into north America. Then, around 10,000 BP (though it was of course a very gradual process), the seas rose again as the world warmed up and the glaciers melted, and what we now call the Old World was cut off from the New and from Australia. Earth was effectively divided into two huge landmasses – Eurasia and Africa on the one hand, the Americas on the other. Early man then set about developing on the two landmasses, each for the most part unaware of the other’s existence. The similarities and the differences in the course of that independent existence tell us a great deal about humanity’s fundamental nature.

Mys Dezhneva (or Uelen), the easternmost point of Siberia, is 8,250 miles from the Olduvai Gorge, as the crow flies. The route taken by early man was anything but straight, however, and a journey of 12,000 miles would be nearer the mark. It is a very long way to walk. Such archaeological and palaeontological remains as have been found place H. erectus in Asia from 800,000–700,000 years ago, associated with primitive tools of the Oldowan kind and, from 400,000–350,000 years ago, with the use of fire. H. erectus cave sites contained many charred bones of animals – deer, sheep, horses, pigs, rhinoceros – showing that s/he used fire for cooking as well as warmth. What is less clear is whether H. erectus knew how to start fires, or only preserved naturally occurring flames, though there are sites with deep charcoal deposits, which do suggest that hearths were kept burning continuously.

The latest evidence suggests that modern humans left Africa twice, first around 90,000 years ago, through Sinai into the Levant, an exodus which petered out. The second exodus occurred around 45,000 years later, along a route across the mouth of the Red Sea at the ‘Gate of Grief’ in Ethiopia. Humans reached the Middle East and Europe via the valleys of Mesopotamia, and south-east Asia by ‘beachcombing’ along the coasts. (This cannot quite be squared with the most recent evidence that early humans reached Australia around 60,000–50,000 BP.)⁸