The Penguin History of the World

The next Ice Age then brings down the curtain. When it lifts, 130,000 or so years ago, in the next warm period, human remains again appear. There has been much argument about what they show but it is indisputable that there has been a great step forward. At this point we are entering a period where there is a fairly dense, though broken record. Creatures we can now call humans lived in Europe just over a hundred thousand years ago. There are caves in the Dordogne area which were occupied on and off for some 50,000 years after that. The cultures of these peoples therefore survived a period of huge climatic change; the first traces of them belong to a warm interglacial period and the last run out in the middle of the last Ice Age. This is an impressive continuity to set against what must have been great variation in the animal population and vegetation near these sites; to survive so long, such cultures must have been very resourceful and adaptive.

For all their essential similarity to ourselves, the peoples who created these cultures are still physiologically distinguishable from modern human beings. The first discovery of their remains was at Neanderthal in Germany (because of this, humans of this type are usually called Neanderthals) and it was of a skull so curiously shaped that it was for a long time thought to be that of a modern idiot. Now we know infinitely more about these our evolutionary cousins. In 2010 scientists were able to map the genome of Neanderthals, based on genetic material from the remains of three ancient skeletons. We now know that Homo Neanderthalis (as the Neanderthal is scientifically classified) had its ultimate origin in an early expansion out of Africa of very early forms of humans, possibly half a million years ago. Across many intervening genetic stages, there emerged a population of pre-Neanderthals, from which, in turn, the extreme form evolved about 200,000 years ago whose striking remains were found in Europe. European Neanderthals, in other words, developed roughly in parallel with Homo sapiens, the species to which we belong. Other forms of early humans related to the Neanderthals spread into Asia, probably as far as China. Evidently, this was for a long time a highly successful species.

The ancestors of Neanderthals and modern humans separated in Africa around 350,000 years ago. By then it is quite possible that some of their kind had already established themselves in Eurasia. One hundred thousand years ago, the artefacts of Neanderthal-type man had spread all over Eurasia and they show differences of technique and form. Neanderthals, like the different species which specialists refer to as anatomically modern, walked erect and had a big brain. They represent a great evolutionary stride and show a new mental sophistication we can still hardly grasp, let alone measure. One striking example is the use of technology to overcome environment: we know from the evidence of skin-scrapers they used to dress skins and pelts that Neanderthals wore clothes (though none have survived; the oldest clothed body yet discovered, in Russia, has been dated to about 35,000 years ago). Even this important advance in the manipulation of environment, though, is nothing like so startling as the appearance in Neanderthal culture of formal burial. The act of burial itself is momentous for archaeology; graves are of enormous importance because of the artefacts of ancient society they preserve. Yet the Neanderthal graves provide more than this: they may also contain the first evidence of ritual or ceremony.

It is very difficult to control speculation, and some has outrun the evidence. Perhaps some early totemism explains the ring of horns within which a Neanderthal child was buried near Samarkand. Some have suggested, too, that careful burial may reflect a new concern for the individual which was one result of the greater interdependence of the group in the renewed Ice Ages. This could have intensified the sense of loss when a member died and might also point to something more. A skeleton of a Neanderthal man who had lost his right arm years before his death has been found. He must have been very dependent on others, and was sustained by his group in spite of his handicap.