Why the West Rules--For Now (11 page)

The details I have emphasized so far make Neanderthals sound not so different from Peking Men, but there is more to the story than this. For one thing, Neanderthals had big brains—even bigger brains than ours, in fact, averaging around 1,520 cc to our 1,350 cc. They also had wider neural canals than the Turkana Boy, and these thick spinal cords gave them more manual dexterity. Their stone tools were better made and more varied than Peking Men’s, with specialized scrapers, blades, and points. Traces of tar on a stone point found embedded in a wild ass’s neck in Syria suggest that it had been a spearhead attached to a stick. Wear patterns on tools suggest that Neanderthals used them mostly for cutting wood, which rarely survives, but at the waterlogged German site of Schöningen four beautifully carved seven-foot-long spears turned up near heaps of wild horse bones. The spears were weighted for thrusting, not throwing; for all their smartness, Neanderthals may not have been coordinated enough to use missile weapons.

The need to get up close to scary animals may account for Neanderthals’ rodeo-rider injuries, but some finds, especially from Shanidar Cave in Iraq, hint at entirely different qualities. One skeleton showed that a man had survived with a withered arm and deformed legs for years, despite losing his right forearm and left eye (in her bestselling novel
The Clan of the Cave Bear
, Jean Auel based her character Creb—the disabled spiritual leader of a Neanderthal band living in Crimea—on this skeleton). Another man at Shanidar had crippling arthritis in his right ankle, but also managed to get by, at least until a stab wound killed him. Having bigger brains doubtless helped the weak and injured to help themselves; Neanderthals could definitely make fire at will and could probably turn animal skins into clothes. All the same, it is hard to see how the Shanidar men could have coped without help from able-bodied friends or family. Even the most austere scientists agree that Neanderthals—by contrast with all earlier kinds of
Homo
and their contemporaries at Zhoukoudian—showed something we can only call “humanity.”

Some paleoanthropologists even think that Neanderthals’ big brains and wide neural canals allowed them to talk more or less like us. Like modern humans they had hyoid bones, which anchor the tongue and let the larynx make the complex movements needed for speech. Other scholars disagree, though, noting that Neanderthal brains, while big, were longer and flatter than ours, and that the speech areas were probably
less developed. They also point out that although the relevant areas survive on the bases of only three skulls, it looks as if Neanderthals’ larynxes were very high in their necks, meaning that despite their hyoid bones they could vocalize only a narrow range of sounds. Maybe they could just grunt single syllables (what we might call the “me Tarzan, you Jane” model), or maybe they could express important concepts—“come here,” “let’s go hunting,” “let’s make stone tools/dinner/love”—by combining gestures and sounds (the
Clan of the Cave Bear
model, where Neanderthals have an elaborate sign language).

In 2001 it began to look like genetics might settle things. Scientists found that one British family that for three generations had shared a speech disorder called verbal dyspraxia also shared a mutation on a gene called FOXP2. This gene, it turned out, codes for a protein influencing how the brain processes speech and language. This does not mean that FOXP2 is “the language gene”: speech is a bewilderingly complex process involving countless genes working together in ways we cannot yet fathom. FOXP2 came to geneticists’ attention because sometimes it just needs one thing to go wrong for a whole system to crash. A mouse chews through a two-cent wire and my twenty-thousand-dollar car won’t start; FOXP2 malfunctions and the brain’s elaborate speech networks seize up. All the same, some archaeologists suggested, maybe random mutations producing FOXP2 and related genes gave modern humans linguistic skills that earlier species, including Neanderthals, lacked.

But then the plot thickened. As everyone now knows, deoxyribonucleic acid—DNA—is the basic building block of life, and in 2000 geneticists sequenced the modern human genome. What is less well known is that back in 1997, in a scene reminiscent of
Jurassic Park
, scientists in Leipzig, Germany, extracted ancient DNA from the arm of the original Neanderthal skeleton found in the Neander Valley in 1856. This was an extraordinary feat, since DNA begins breaking down immediately upon death, and only tiny fragments survive in such ancient material. The Leipzig team is not about to clone cavemen and open a Neanderthal Park, so far as I know,
*
but in 2007 the process of
sequencing a draft of the Neanderthal genome (which was completed in 2009) produced a remarkable discovery—that Neanderthals also had the FOXP2 gene.

Maybe this means that Neanderthals were as chatty as us; or maybe that FOXP2 was not the key to speech. One day we will surely know, but for now all we can do is observe the consequences of Neanderthals’ interactions. They lived in bigger groups than earlier types of ape-men, hunted more effectively, occupied territories for longer periods, and cared about one another in ways earlier ape-men could not.

They also deliberately buried some of their dead, and perhaps even performed rituals over them—the earliest signs of that most human quality of all, a spiritual life,
if
we are interpreting the evidence correctly. At Shanidar, for instance, several bodies had definitely been buried, and the soil in one grave contained high concentrations of pollen, which might mean that some Neanderthals laid a loved one’s body on a bed of spring flowers. (Rather less romantically, some archaeologists point out that the grave was honeycombed with rat burrows, and that rats often carry flowers into their lairs.)

In a second case, at Monte Circeo near Rome, construction workers in 1939 exposed a cave that had been sealed by a rockfall fifty thousand years ago. They told archaeologists that a Neanderthal skull sat on the floor in the middle of a circle of rocks, but because the workers moved the skull before experts saw it, many archaeologists harbor doubts.

Finally, there is Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan. Here Hallam Movius (he of Movius Line fame) found the skeleton of a boy encircled, he said, by five or six pairs of wild goat horns. However, the deposits at Teshik-Tash are full of goat horns, and Movius never published plans or photographs of the finds to convince skeptics that these particular ones were in a meaningful pattern.

We need clearer evidence to lay this question to rest. Personally, I suspect that there is no smoke without fire, and that Neanderthals did have some kind of spiritual life. Perhaps they even had medicine women and shamans like Iza and Creb in
The Clan of the Cave Bear
. Whether
that is right or not, though, if the time machine I invoked earlier could transport you to Shanidar as well as to Zhoukoudian, you would see real behavioral differences between Eastern Peking Man and Western Neanderthals. You would also be hard-pressed to avoid concluding that the West was more developed than the East. This may already have been true 1.6 million years ago, when the Movius Line took shape, but it was definitely true a hundred thousand years ago. Again the specter of a racist long-term lock-in theory rears its head: Does the West rule today because modern Europeans are the heirs of genetically superior Neanderthal stock, while Asians descend from the more primitive
Homo erectus
?

BABY STEPS

No.

Historians like giving long, complicated answers to simple questions, but this time things really do seem to be straightforward. Europeans do not descend from superior Neanderthals, and Asians do not descend from inferior
Homo erectus
. Starting around seventy thousand years ago, a new species of
Homo
—us—drifted out of Africa and completely replaced all other forms.
*
Our kind,
Homo sapiens
(“Wise Man”), did interbreed with Neanderthals in the process. Modern Eurasians share 1 to 4 percent of their genes with the Neanderthals, but everywhere from France to China it is the same 1 to 4 percent.
^†
The spread of modern humans wiped the slate clean. Evolution of course continues, and local variations in skin color, face shape, height, lactose tolerance, and countless other things have appeared in the two thousand generations
since we began spreading across the globe. But when we get right down to it, these are trivial. Wherever you go, whatever you do, people (in large groups) are all much the same.

The evolution of our species and its conquest of the planet established the biological unity of mankind and thereby the baseline for any explanation of why the West rules. Humanity’s biological unity rules out racebased theories. Yet despite the overwhelming importance of these processes, much about the origins of modern humans remains obscure. By the 1980s archaeologists knew that skeletons more or less like ours first appeared around 150,000 years ago on sites in eastern and southern Africa. The new species had flatter faces, more retracted under their foreheads, than earlier ape-men. They used their teeth less as tools, had longer and less muscular limbs, and had wider neural canals and larynxes positioned better for speaking. Their brain cavities were a little smaller than Neanderthals’ but their skullcaps were higher and more domed, leaving room for bigger speech and language centers and stacked layers of neurons that could perform massive numbers of calculations in parallel.

The skeletons suggested that the earliest
Homo sapiens
could walk the walk just like us, but—oddly—the archaeology suggested that for a hundred thousand years they stubbornly refused to talk the talk.
Homo sapiens
tools and behavior looked much like those of earlier ape-men, and—again like other ape-men, but utterly unlike us—early
Homo sapiens
seemed to have had just one way of doing things. Regardless of where archaeologists dug in Africa, they kept coming up with the same, not particularly exciting, kinds of finds. Unless, that is, they excavated
Homo sapiens
sites less than fifty thousand years old. On these younger sites
Homo sapiens
started doing all kinds of interesting things, and doing them in lots of different ways. For instance, archaeologists identify no fewer than six distinct styles of stone tools in use in Egypt’s Nile Valley between 50,000 and 25,000
BCE
, whereas before then a single fashion prevailed from South Africa to the shores of the Mediterranean.

Humans had invented style. Chipping stone tools this way, rather than that way, now marked a group off as different from their neighbors; chipping them a third way marked a new generation as different from their elders. Change remained glacial by the standards we are used to, when pulling out a four-year-old cell phone that can’t make movies, locate me on a map, or check e-mail makes me look like a fossil, but it was meteoric compared to all that had gone before.

As any teenager coming home with hair dyed green or a new piercing will tell you, the best way to express yourself is to decorate yourself, but until fifty thousand years ago, it seemed that almost no one had felt this way. Then, apparently, almost everyone did. At site after site across Africa after 50,000
BCE
archaeologists find ornaments of bone, animal tooth, and ivory; and these are just the activities that leave remains for us to excavate. Most likely all those other forms of personal adornment we know so well—hairstyles, makeup, tattoos, clothes—appeared around the same time. A rather unpleasant genetic study has suggested that human body lice, which drink our blood and live in our clothes, evolved around fifty thousand years ago as a little bonus for the first fashionistas.

“
What a piece
of work is a man!” gasps Hamlet when his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern come to spy on him. “How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!” And in all these ways, how unlike an ape-man. By 50,000
BCE
modern humans were thinking and acting on a whole different plane from their ancestors. Something extraordinary seemed to have happened—something so profound, so magical, that in the 1990s it moved normally sober scientists to flights of rhetoric. Some spoke of a Great Leap Forward;
*
others of the Dawn of Human Culture or even the Big Bang of Human Consciousness.

But for all their drama, these Great Leap Forward theories were always a little unsatisfactory. They required us to imagine not one but two transformations, the first (around 150,000 years ago) producing modern human bodies but not modern human behavior, and the second (around 50,000 years ago) producing modern human behavior but leaving our bodies unchanged. The most popular explanation was that the second transformation—the Great Leap—began with purely neurological changes that rewired the brain to make modern kinds of speech possible, which in turn drove a revolution in behavior; but just what this rewiring consisted of (and why there were no related changes to skulls) remained a mystery.

If there is anywhere that evolutionary science has left room for supernatural intervention, some superior power breathing a spark of divinity into the dull clay of ape-men, surely it is here. When I was (a lot) younger I particularly liked the story that opens Arthur C. Clarke’s science-fiction novel
2001: A Space Odyssey
(and Stanley Kubrick’s memorable, if hard to follow, movie version). Mysterious crystal monoliths drop from outer space to Earth, come to upgrade our planet’s ape-men before they starve into extinction. Night after night Moon-Watcher, the alpha ape-man in one band of earthlings, feels what Clarke calls “
inquisitive tendrils
creeping down the unused byways of his brain” as a monolith sends him visions and teaches him to throw rocks. “The very atoms of his simple brain were being twisted into new patterns,” says Clarke. And then the monolith’s mission is done: Moon-Watcher picks up a discarded bone and brains a piglet with it. Depressingly, Clarke’s vision of the Big Bang of Human Consciousness consists entirely of killing things, culminating in Moon-Watcher murdering One-Ear, the top ape-man in a rival band. Next thing the reader knows, we are in the space age.