Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Studies of H. erectus skulls found in China show around a dozen tantalising – and highly controversial – similarities with those of Mongoloids and native Americans. These similarities include a midline ridge along the top of the skull, a growth of the lower jaw which is especially common among Eskimos, and similar shovel-shaped incisors. Taken together, these traits suggest that Chinese H. erectus contributed some genes to later Asian and native American Homo sapiens, though this evidence is very controversial.⁹ At the same time, it is important to stress that no trace of H. erectus or H. neanderthalensis has ever been found in America or, for that matter, above the 53° north parallel. This suggests that only H. sapiens successfully adapted to very cold weather. Mongoloid people are adapted to cold, with double upper eyelids, smaller noses, shorter limbs, and extra fat on their faces. Charles Darwin, in his travels, encountered people at Tierra del Fuego who didn’t need much clothing.¹⁰

Excavations by Russian (Soviet) archaeologists tell us a little about what Homo sapiens was capable of at that time. Some Asian scholars claim that s/he was in the region as early as 70,000–60,000 years ago and that modern humans evolved independently and separately in Asia. However, the fossil evidence for both claims is very thin.¹¹ Most likely, modern humans arrived in Siberia between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago, after evolving in Africa. Certainly, traces of human settlement do not occur in north-east Siberia until around 35,000 years ago, when there is an ‘explosion’ of sites which record their presence. This may have had something to do with the changing climate.¹²

All over the world, and not just in Siberia, more sophisticated artefacts began to occur after about 35,000 years ago – new stone tools, harpoons, spear points and, most important perhaps, needles, for making sewn and therefore tailored garments.¹³ In Europe, north Africa and western Asia, Neanderthals made and used some sixty types of stone tools.¹⁴ These are referred to collectively as the Mousterian industry (after the site of Le Moustier in south-west France). Levallois-Mousterian tools have been found in Siberia but very few north of 50° and none at all above 54°. This could mean that during the time the Neanderthals were alive the climate was worse than later, or that they never managed to conquer the cold (or of course that their sites, which exist, have simply not been found). If they never managed to conquer the cold, whereas modern man did, this could be due to the invention of the needle, which resulted in tailored clothing, possibly similar to the modern Eskimo parka. (Three of the women depicted on Siberian art are shown wearing clothing which suggests this garment.) Bone needles have been dated back as far as 19,000 BP at least in Europe, and to 22,000–27,000 BP at the Sungir site near Moscow, where the decorations on the clothing, which had not disintegrated to the same extent as the skin on the remains, allowed archaeologists to reconstruct the shirts, jackets, trousers and moccasins that these people wore.

Homo sapiens’ move into Siberia may have had something to do with a change in climate: as was mentioned above, it was much drier in the last ice age, producing vast expanses of steppe-tundra (treeless plains with arctic vegetation) in the north, and taiga, or coniferous forest, in the south. This move to the north and east appears to have followed an explosion of sites in eastern Europe and the Russian plain, along three great rivers – the Dnestr, the Don and the Dnepr, and was associated with an increase in big game hunting. The migration reflected the development of portable blade blanks, artefacts that were light enough to transport over large distances and were then turned into tools of whatever kind were needed – knives, borers, spear heads as the case might be. At first these people lived in depressions scooped out of the soil but, around 18,000–14,000 years ago, they began to build more elaborate structures with mammoth bones as foundations, topped with hides and saplings. They decorated the mammoth bones with red ochre and carved stylised human and geometric designs on them. Many of the camp sites, most of which are in locations sheltered from the prevailing northern winds, were relatively permanent, which shows, say some palaeontologists, that these primitive societies could resolve disputes and had an emerging social stratification.¹⁵ The settlements, such as they were, supported populations in the thirty to one hundred range and, quite clearly, must have had language.