The Penguin History of the World

We know little about the collapse of this great human achievement. The light is never more than dim in the Upper Palaeolithic and the darkness closes in rapidly – which is to say, of course, over thousands of years. Nevertheless, the impression left by the violence of the contrast between what was before and what came after produces a sense of shock. So relatively sudden an extinction is a mystery. We have no precise dates or even precise sequences: nothing ended in one year or another. There was only a gradual closing down of artistic activity over a long time which seems in the end to have been absolute. Some scholars have blamed climate. Perhaps, they argue, the whole phenomenon of cave art was linked to efforts to influence the movements or abundance of the great game herds on which the hunting peoples relied. As the last Ice Age ebbed and each year the reindeer retreated a little, men sought new and magical techniques to manipulate them, but gradually as the ice sheets withdrew more and more, an environment to which they had successfully adapted disappeared. As it did, so did the hope of influencing nature. Homo sapiens was not powerless; far from it, he could adapt, and did, to a new challenge. But for a time one cultural impoverishment at least, the abandonment of his first art, was a consequence of adaptation.

It is easy to see much that is fanciful in such speculation, but difficult to restrain excitement over such an astonishing achievement. People have spoken of the great cave sequences as ‘cathedrals’ of the Palaeolithic world and such metaphors are justified if the level of achievement and the scale of the work undertaken is measured against what evidence we have of the earlier triumphs of man. With the first great art, the hominids are now left far behind and we have unequivocal evidence of the power of the human mind.

Much else that is known of the Upper Palaeolithic confirms the sense that the crucial genetic changes are behind and that evolution is now a mental and social phenomenon. The distribution of major racial divisions in the world which last down to early modern times appears already broadly fixed by the end of the Upper Palaeolithic. Geographical and climatic divisions had produced specializations in skin pigment, hair characteristics, the shape of the skull and the bone structure of the face. In the earliest Chinese relics of Homo sapiens the Asian regional characteristics are discernible. All the main regional groups are established by 10,000 BC, broadly speaking in the areas they dominated until the great resettlements which were one aspect of the rise of European civilization to world domination after AD 1500. The world was filling up during the Old Stone Age. Men at last penetrated the virgin continents, where none of their ancestors or relatives had been.

Already around 50,000 years ago the first humans reached Australia, roughly at the same time as men of our kind settled in Europe. They were the descendants of people who had mainly followed the coasts from the Middle East, becoming skilled gatherers of protein-rich seafood in the process. It is now thought likely that they used boats to travel onwards to the new continent, although the sea-level in the Indonesian archipelago then would have been significantly lower than what it is today, opening up a world of land-bridges and calm seas. After reaching Australia by island-hopping through the Timor and Banda seas, they spread out very quickly. The then lush landscape suited them; it had huge lakes and rivers, with a number of now-extinct species that could be hunted for food, such as the giant wombat-like marsupial Zygomaturus (similar in size to a modern pygmy hippopotamus) and a 450-pound kangaroo, the Procoptodon.

Human colonization of the last new world began much later. An Asian people, probably in several small but closely related groups, arrived in America by crossing a land bridge to Alaska from North Asia some 17,000 years ago. They brought with them tools and techniques developed in a region between the Altai Mountains and the Amur valley in southern Siberia over the previous millennia. They then spread all over the Americas, first following the coasts and then, only slightly later, beginning to penetrate the interior. Some among the first Americans soon learnt how to build small boats. Others became experts at hunting mammoth and mastodon. The first finds of human habitation in Chile date back to 11,000 BC; parts of the US upper mid-west and possibly small areas of the Atlantic coast were populated roughly at the same time.