Beneath the Tate Modern

An unassuming door in the Power Hall of the Tate Modern leads to a subterranean world that few have ever seen or, indeed, will ever see. The oil tanks feeding the former power station are due to be converted to gallery space as part of the Tate's 11-storey extension project. On 5 July 2009, as part of an open day, small groups of local residents and their friends were allowed down into the massive underground complex which had never previously been open to the public.





















© Christopher Seddon 2009

Telstar

It is quite unusual to be able to see a movie, leave the cinema and walk down the road to where the action took place. Anybody intending to see Nick Moran's newly-released "Telstar" might therefore want to see it at the otherwise-unprepossessing Holloway Odeon.

Starring Con O'Neill as maverick record producer and songwriter Joe Meek and Kevin Spacey as his business partner Major Banks, the movie tells the story of Meek's rise and fall, beginning with his 1962 hit single Telstar. Named for and inspired by an early communication satellite, this instrumental track was recorded by Meek's band The Tornadoes at his makeshift recording studio, located above a leather goods shop at 304 Holloway Road, a few minutes walk away from the Odeon.

Telstar reached No 1 on both sides of the Atlantic, but Meek's success was short lived. Hampered by paranoia, drug use, depression and a ferocious temper, his career began to falter and he fell into debt. Many of his problems likely arose from being an openly gay man in an era when homosexuality was barely tolerated.

The downward spiral ended in tragedy on 3 February 1967 when Meek shot his landlady after an argument about unpaid rent and then turned the gun on himself.


Holloway Odeon.


Poster promoting "Telstar" at Holloway Odeon'


304 Holloway Road today - now a convenience store.


Privately-manufactured plaque marking the location of the studio. Above can be seen a satellite dish, an ironic commentary on how satellite communication soon became commonplace.

© Christopher Seddon 2009

The Circle, Shad Thames

Located just off Jamaica Road, Bermondsey, these attractive residential blocks were among the first redevelopment projects in the Shad Thames region.





© Christopher Seddon 2009

Prehistory Google Map

View Prehistory in a larger map

© Christopher Seddon 2009

Brilliant Buildings Google Map

View Brilliant Buildings! in a larger map

© Christopher Seddon 2009

City Hall, London

Designed by Lord Foster and opened in 2002, City Hall is the headquarters of the Greater London Authority. Located near Tower Bridge, the 45 metre high steel and glass structure is not to everybody's taste and former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone once referred to it as a "glass testicle". More than one commentator has noted that the building is a statement on transparent government!











© Christopher Seddon 2009

Paradigm shift

The concept that there is such a thing as prehistory, an era undocumented by written records, is actually quite recent. In 1650 James Ussher, Anglican Archbishop of Armagh, famously calculated from Biblical texts that the Earth had been created in 4004 BC. In 18th Century Europe, when Carl Linnaeus coined the term Homo sapiens, this date was still widely accepted. Most believed that the earliest part of human history was fully recorded in the texts of ancient Greek and Roman historians and in the Old Testament itself. The Abrahamic religions held that Earth and time were created simultaneously and that it was therefore meaningless to speak of earlier times, because time itself did not exist. Even to ask what God had been doing before He created the world was considered poor form and the religious reformer John Calvin said that the answer should have been “making Hell for the curious” (the remark is often erroneously attributed to St. Augustine).

In astronomy, the work of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton eventually relegated the Earth from the centre of the Universe to the 3rd rock from the Sun; humanity’s demotion from somewhere “a little lower than the angels” to what the American biologist and author Jared Diamond has described as “just another species of big mammal” required a paradigm shift of equal proportions.

Like Galileo, many of the early workers in the field were flying in the face of religious orthodoxy, though this was not always the case and indeed Linnaeus, who was responsible for formally assigning humans a place in the animal kingdom alongside apes and monkeys, went out of his way to fit his work into God’s scheme of things. In fact the study and classification of the natural world was always considered a perfectly respectable pursuit, one that went back to Classical times. Such studies, with a view to achieving a better understanding of the works of God, were known as natural theology.

The first attempt at a systematic classification of the natural world was made by Aristotle, who believed that everything in the universe had its place in a Great Chain of Being or Scala Naturae (“Ladder of Nature”), being ranked from the lowest to the highest. The hierarchy began with God at the top, followed by angels, then kings, princes, and so on through to ordinary people, animals, plants, minerals etc.

Within this chain, Aristotle divided the various species of living organisms into two groups – animals and plants. Animals were further divided into three categories - those living on land, those living in the water and those living in the air, and were in addition categorised by whether or not they had blood (broadly speaking, those “without blood” would now be classed as invertebrates, or animals without a backbone). Plants were categorised by differences in their stems.

Aristotle’s system remained in use for hundreds of years but by the 16th Century, knowledge of the natural world had reached a point where it was becoming inadequate. Many attempts were made to devise a better system, but it was not until 1735 that the Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus published the first edition of Systema Natura (“System of Nature”), in which he proposed a hierarchical classification of the natural world, dividing it into the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms. Each kingdom was further subdivided by class, order, genus and finally species. Species were arranged within the higher groupings on the basis of physical similarities, each grouping being named on the basis of a defining feature. In addition, Linnaeus adopted the system of binomial nomenclature first proposed over a century earlier by Gaspard Bauhin, under which a species is assigned a generic name and a specific name. The generic name refers to the genus and the specific name represents the species itself.

Within the Linnaean system, the Mammalia (mammals) are the class of animals that suckle their young. It is said that Linnaeus adopted this aspect as the defining feature of the group because of his strongly-held view that all mothers should breast feed their babies. He was strongly opposed to the then-common practice of “wet nursing” and in this respect he was considerably ahead of his time.

The mammals were divided into eight orders, including the Primates; these in turn were divided into two genera: the Simia (monkeys, apes, etc) and Homo (man), the latter containing a single species, sapiens – hence Homo sapiens, meaning (some would say ironically) “wise man”.

As originally conceived, the Linnaean system did not accord equal status to apparently equal divisions; thus the Mineral Kingdom was ranked below the Plant Kingdom; which in turn sat below the Animal Kingdom. Similarly the classes were assigned ranks with mammals ranking the highest and Insecta (insects) and Vermes (worms) the lowest. Within the mammals the Primates received top billing, with Homo sapiens assigned to pole position therein.

This hierarchy within a hierarchy reflected Linnaeus’ belief that his system reflected Aristotle’s Chain of Being, with Mankind at the top. Indeed the term “primate” survives to this day as a legacy of that view. Never the most modest of men, Linnaeus claimed that “God creates, Linnaeus arranges”.

Linnaeus’ classification system, as set out in the 10th edition of Systema Naturae, published in 1758, is still is considered the foundation of modern taxonomy and it has been modified only slightly in that we now regard all equivalent divisions as being equal.

The Linnean Taxonomy shows us where humans fit into the grand scheme of things, but it has nothing to tell us about how we got there. Linnaeus did not believe that species changed. His thinking was still firmly rooted in that of Plato, who believed that every type of object in the universe was represented by an immutable Form, from which all instances of that object were derived; thus for example all cats were derived from the Form of a Cat. Plato’s Theory of Forms explicitly rejected evolution: the Form of one species of animal could never evolve into that of another.

Others, though, were already beginning to question this view. The existence of extinct organisms in the fossil record represented a serious problem for creationism. Fossils had been known for centuries and it was becoming clear that they represented in many cases life forms that no longer existed. The English canal engineer William Smith and French naturalist Georges Cuvier were among those who recognised that rocks of different ages preserved different assemblages of fossils, implying a sequence of events more complex than could be accounted for by the Biblical account of a single great flood.

In 1796 Cuvier put forward a possible solution known as catastrophism, which was a modified form of creationism. He proposed that extinctions had been caused by periodic catastrophes, of which Noah’s flood was the most recent and the only one where humans had been present. New species replaced those that had been wiped out, created ex nihil by God. No species contemporary with humans had ever become extinct, as breeding populations of all of these had been taken aboard the Ark.

However the creationists were by now on increasingly shaky ground. In 1797 a man named John Frere presented evidence suggesting that humans had been contemporary with now-extinct animals. He had been contemplating the problem of what we now recognise as tools from the Stone Age. These artefacts had been known for centuries but – in the absence of any concept of prehistory – they were not thought to be of human origin and were thought to be thunderbolts or the work of elves.

Frere wrote to the Society of Antiquaries of London submitting some flint artefacts found at Hoxne, Suffolk. These had been found twelve feet below the ground and were associated with bones of extinct animals. Frere suggested that the artefacts were “weapons of war, fabricated and used by a people who had not the use of metals. The situation in which these weapons were found may tempt us to refer them to a very remote period indeed, even beyond that of the present world.”

Even before Curvier published his theory, the Scottish geologist James Hutton was formulating the principles of what later became known as uniformitarianism. Hutton’s Investigation of the Principles of Knowledge was published in 1794 and The Theory of the Earth the following year. Hutton argued that geological principles do not change with time and have remained the same throughout Earth’s history. Changes in the Earth’s geology occurred gradually and were driven by volcanic action rather than floods and other biblical catastrophes. It was clear that the Earth must be much older than 6,000 years for these changes to have occurred.

Unfortunately, Hutton’s writing style was so obscure that his books attracted little attention in his lifetime. Not until the 1830s did his theories did not gain widespread acceptance, when they were popularised by fellow Scot Sir Charles Lyell. Lyell, who also coined the word “Uniformitarianism”, published Principles of Geology between 1830 and 1833.

In the meantime, the evidence for the antiquity of mankind was growing. In 1813 the Danish historian Vedel Simonsen suggested that the weapons and implements of the earliest inhabitants of Scandinavia had first been made of stone, then of bronze and finally of iron. Then, in 1816 Christian Jürgensen Thomsen became the first curator of the Danish National Museum of Antiquities in 1816. His first task was to classify artefacts in the collection and to put them in some semblance of order.

Thomsen hit on the idea of classifying them on the basis of the material from which they were made and followed Simonsen’s suggestion that the iron artefacts must be more recent than those made from bronze, which in turn must be more recent than those of stone. Thus was born the Three Age System, whereby the pre-literate past was divided into the now familiar Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages. A guidebook to the museum was translated into English in 1846, after which the Three Age system was widely adopted.

A year later, a French customs official named Jacques Boucher de Perthes published his conclusions regarding the stone implements that he had collected some years earlier from gravel pits in the Somme valley. The implements were clearly of human manufacture and associated with the remains of extinct animals, again suggesting that humans and now-extinct animals had once co-existed.

In 1859 the geologist Sir Joseph Prestwich and archaeologist John Evans visited Boucher de Perthes in France. They were convinced by his findings and on returning to Britain gave a series of presentations to the Royal Society, the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Institution in London. What they termed the Antiquity of Man was widely accepted, finally confirming that the human past extended back way beyond the reach of the earliest written records. This was a landmark moment in the acceptance of prehistory as a valid concept, but it was largely overshadowed by another pivotal event in our understanding of humanity’s origins: 1859 also saw the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (usually simply referred to as The Origin of Species).

The son of a wealthy doctor, Darwin was born in 1809. An unwilling medical student, he studied at Edinburgh and Cambridge before being appointed Naturalist and gentleman companion to Captain Robert Fitzroy of the barque HMS Beagle, joining the ship on her second voyage. Darwin sailed round the world in the Beagle between 1831 and 1836. He studied finches and turtles on the Galapagos Islands – he found different turtles had originated from one type, but had adapted to life on different islands in different ways.

Darwin developed the theory of natural selection between 1844 and 1858. The theory was as the same time being independently developed by Alfred Russel Wallace and in 1858 Darwin presented The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection to the Linnaean Society of London, jointly with Wallace’s paper. Wallace’s independent endorsement of Darwin’s work leant much weight to it. Happily, there were none of the unseemly squabbles over priority that has bedevilled so many joint discoveries down the centuries. The Origin of Species was published the following year and promptly sold out.

The theory of evolution by natural selection is based on four assumptions. Firstly, all organisms reproduce; secondly there has to be a mode of inheritance whereby parents transmit characteristics to offspring; thirdly, there has to be variation in a population, i.e. the individuals in it will all differ slightly from each other; and fourthly there must be competition for limited resources.

The differences between individuals in a population mean that some might be able to compete more effectively than others. These ones are more likely to go on to reproduce and transmit their advantageous traits to their offspring, which in turn would be more likely to reproduce themselves. Adaptive or advantageous traits are characteristics that help an individual survive, e.g. an elephant’s trunk, which enables it to forage in trees, eat grass, etc; colour vision helps animals to identify particular fruits, etc; bright distinctive colour schemes are plants’ adaptations to help them to be located. Eventually, a species might become so changed by the accumulation of adaptive traits within its ranks that it could be considered to have evolved into a new species.

The mechanism by which these traits are transmitted was unknown in Darwin’s time; not for another century would the role of DNA as the “molecule of inheritance” be confirmed.

Darwin hinted that his theory might throw light on human origins, but it was not until his second work The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, published in 1871, that he proposed that humans had evolved from apes. This was a number of years after his friend and advocate Thomas Henry Huxley had put forward the idea in Evidence as to Man’s place in Nature, published in 1863. Darwin was characterised as “the monkey man” and caricatured as having a monkey’s body. But after his death in 1882, he was given a state funeral and is buried in Westminster Abbey near Sir Isaac Newton. An admittedly-dubious BBC poll ranked Charles Darwin as the 4th greatest Briton of all time, behind Sir Winston Churchill, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and (inevitably) Princess Diana, but ahead of Shakespeare, Newton and David Beckham.

The transformation of mankind’s view of itself was complete: from chosen beings created in 4004 BC in God’s image, to a primate species which had evolved from apes at some unknown time in the distant past. The questions, of course, had barely begun.

© Christopher Seddon 2009

Tower Bridge

Part suspension bridge and part bascule bridge, Tower Bridge opened in 1894, having taken eight years to beuild. So iconic has this bridge become that non-Londoners frequently refer to it as London Bridge, which is actually the next bridge upstream.







© Christopher Seddon 2009

Trellick Tower

Designed by Ernő Goldfinger, Trellick Tower in North Kensington was commissioned by the Greater London Council in 1966 and completed in 1972. The 322ft late Modernist towerblock is now a Grade II* listed building, but Goldfinger's work has not always been to everybody's taste.

Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, was definitely not a fan and it is no coincidence that 007's most memorable opponent was named Auric Goldfinger. Auric's real-life counterpart failed to see the funny side when the original novel came out and threatened to sue. As part of a rather bizarre out-of-court settlement, Ernő Goldfinger eventually accepted six copies of the book!











© Christopher Seddon 2009

Ron Richards (Record producer) 1929-2009

Ron Richards, record producer and family friend, who died 30 April 2009.

Obituary in the Independent - 11 June 2009


Obituary in the Times - 15 June 2009

Google maps

Brilliant Buildings!


Human Prehistory


© Christopher Seddon 2009

Toba Catastrophe Theory

74,000 years ago, the Earth experienced the largest volcanic event of the last two million years when a supervolcano beneath Lake Toba in northern Sumatra erupted with a Volcanic Explosivity Index intensity of 8 (“Ultra-Plinean”), ejecting 2,800 km3 of magma, with around 800 km3 of this falling as ash. In comparison, Krakatoa, Tambora and Mount Pinatubo would have seemed like firecrackers. Much of the ash was blown north-west by the wind and the Indian subcontinent and part of the Malay Peninsula were blanketed in ash. Now known as Youngest Toba Tuff (YTT), these deposits ranged in depth from 15cm to as much as 6m at one site in Central India.

The effects of the explosion would have been to cause a “volcanic winter”, during which temperatures worldwide may have fallen by 3-5 degrees Celsius for several years. In 1998, Stanley H Ambrose suggested that the eruption caused a bottleneck in human populations (Ambrose, 1998). Geneticists Lynn Jorde and Henry Harpending believe the world population of anatomically modern humans fell to as few as 5,000-10,000 individuals.

Could this really have happened; could Homo sapiens really have teetered on the brink of extinction?

In the aftermath of the eruption, conditions for life would have become very harsh and the Indian subcontinent would certainly not have been the healthiest of places to be! But were any anatomically modern humans there? The first evidence of Homo sapiens outside of Africa are the 110-90,000 year old fossil remains found in the Levant. This migration seems to have petered out; the migrants either died without issue or (less likely) returned to Africa. The migration(s) believed to have given rise to the world’s present-day non-African population occurred much later. Estimates vary as to the timing, with some authorities claiming it was as long ago as 80,000 years ago but most opting for between 50-60,000 years ago, long after the Toba eruption.

Stephen Oppenheimer is among those who do believe that modern humans were already in India and Malaysia when Toba erupted. He believes the migrants left the Horn of Africa 80,000 years ago.

Oppenheimer claims the Toba eruption resulted in the extinction of human life in India, leaving a “genetic furrow” that is visible in Asia’s genetic record to this day. This arose as the subcontinent was repopulated by settlers from both East and West Asia. Although descended from the same root lines of the single exodus, Indian maternal branch genetic (mtDNA) lines are completely different from those of the Far East and mostly different from those in the West.

Oppenheimer also draws on archaeological evidence from Kota Tampan in the Lenggong Valley, Malaysia where stone tools were found in the 1960s. These were covered by volcanic ash, now known to be from the Toba eruption. The large pebble-tools, fashioned on one side only were thought to be the work of an earlier human species but in the absence of fossil remains the matter could not be settled one way or the other.

Work by Prof. Zuraina Majid, of the University of Science in Penang suggests that the local pebble-tool culture may have persisted continuously right up until only 7,000 years ago. If so, the possible implication is that the earlier pebble-tools were actually made by modern humans. Support for this view came in 1990 with the discovery of Perak Man, a 10,000 year old anatomically-modern human found in the same context as the pebble tools (Oppenheimer, 2003).

But not everybody accepts the bottleneck theory. Gathorne-Hardy & Harcourt-Smith (2003) point out that if Toba has caused a bottleneck in the human population, it would have also affected other species, especially other, more environmentally sensitive taxa with more specialised ecological requirements. These would have been expected to suffer at least a similar population crash leading to many becoming extinct. But there is no evidence for mammal extinction associated with Toba.

In 2007 dramatic evidence was presented that suggested that not only were modern humans in India at the time of the Toba eruption, but that they survived the catastrophe. A team led by Michael Petraglia of the University of Cambridge recovered stone artefacts from both above and below the 2.55m thick ash deposit near Jwalapuram, in the Jurreru River valley of southern India.

There appears to be a strong element of technological continuity between the two sets of artefacts and together with the presence of faceted unidirectional and bidirectional bladelike core technology, they suggest closer affinities to African Middle Stone Age traditions such as Howieson’s Poort than to those of the contemporaneous Eurasian Middle Paleolithic. The latter are typically based on discoidal and Levallois techniques. This, together with the behavioural flexibility needed to survive the catastrophe, suggests that modern humans were already in India at the time of the eruption (Petraglia et al, 2007).

In addition, there are recent genetic studies that do support the presence of modern humans in India 74,000 years ago (Kivisild et al, 2003; Metspalu et al, 2004).

Petraglia’s interpretations are also a problem for the Kota Tampan pebble tools being made by modern humans. If the Indian settlers were using a technology derived from the African MSA, why were their counterparts in Malaysia using far more primitive tools?

Human remains found in the context of ash from Toba are the one thing missing; the matter cannot be considered to be settled until such time as these come to light; but on the balance of probabilities it does seem likely that the effects of the Toba eruption were not as deleterious as some have supposed.

References:

Ambrose S H (1998): Late Pleistocene human population bottlenecks, volcanic winter, and differentiation of modern humans, Journal of Human Evolution 34 (6): 623–651

Gathorne-Hardy F.J. & Harcourt-Smith W.E.H. (2003): The super-eruption of Toba, did it cause a human bottleneck? Journal of Human Evolution 45 (2003) 227–230

Kivisild T, Rootsi S, Metspalu M, Mastani S, Kaldma K, Parik J, Metspalu E, Adojaan M, Tolk H-V, Stepanov V, Golge M, Usanga E, Papiha S S, Cinnioglu C, King R, Cavalli-Sforza L, Underhill P A & Villems R (2003): The Genetic Heritage of the Earliest Settlers Persists Both in Indian Tribal and Caste Populations, Am. J. Hum. Genet. 72:313-332.

Metspalu M, Kivisild T, Metspalu E, Parik J, Hudjashov G, Kaldma K, Serk P, Karmin M, Behar D M, Gilbert M T P, Endicott P, Mastana S, Papiha S S, Skorecki K, Torrioni A & Villems R (2004): Most of the extant mtDNA boundaries in South and Southwest Asia were likely shaped during the initial settlement of Eurasia by anatomically modern humans, BMC Genet. 2004; 5:26

Oppenheimer S (2003): Out of Eden, Constable.

Michael Petraglia, Ravi Korisettar, Nicole Boivin, Christopher Clarkson, Peter Ditchfield, Sacha Jones, Jinu Koshy, Marta Mirazón Lahr, Clive Oppenheimer, David Pyle, Richard Roberts, Jean-Luc Schwenninger, Lee Arnold, Kevin White (2007): Middle Paleolithic Assemblages from the Indian Subcontinent Before and After the Toba Super-Eruption, Science 317, 114.

© Christopher Seddon 2009

Southgate Tube Station

One of the most notable of the many tube stations designed for the London Underground by Charles Holden, Southgate Tube Station opened in 1933. It is now a Grade II listed building and retains much of its original appearance.

© Christopher Seddon 2009

Alexandra Palace transmission mast

The BBC began transmitting from Alexandra Palace in 1936. Transmissions were interrupted by the war with the closedown occurring in the middle of a Mickey Mouse cartoon. During the war, the transmitter was used to jam the radio navigation system used by the Luftwaffe (a forerunner of GPS). TV transmissions resumed after the war and continued until 1956, when operations were relocated to Crystal Palace. The transmitter is still used for local analogue television transmission, local commercial radio and DAB broadcasts.

© Christopher Seddon 2009

White Heat Cold Logic: British Computer Art 1960-1980

The period from 1960 to 1980 was underlain by Harold Wilson’s Utopian vision of a Britain “forged from the white heat of technology”. In an era before computers became just another domestic appliance and IT staff were banished to the basements of large companies, computing was seen as a glamour industry with a key role to play in the contemporary arts.

White Heat Cold Logic is aimed at recounting the history of digital and computer-based arts in the United Kingdom from their origins in the 1960s up to the advent of personal computing and graphical user interfaces around 1980.

The editors of this much-needed book argue forcefully against the woeful neglect by contemporary art galleries of British computer art from this heroic period, when artists needed to build their own machines, collaborate with computer scientists and learn complex computer languages rather than simply boot up their Mac or PC. Aside from their relevance to the then-contemporary art scene, the academic papers that make up this attractive illustrated volume will appeal to anybody with an interest in the social and political history of that time.

(A shorter version of this book review appeared in Art World Magazine www.artworldmagazine.com Issue 11 June/July 2009.)

© Christopher Seddon 2009

High and Over, Amersham

High and Over is a Grade I listed building in Amersham, Bucks. Designed by Amyas Connell and built in the late 1920s, the Y-shaped country house and the smaller Sun Houses nearby were controversial at the time, but are now admired as fine examples of the Modernist style. Originally a single dwelling, High and Over was divided into two units in the 1960s. Local legend has it that the building had to be camouflaged during World War II because enemy bombers were using it as a landmark to help them find their targets.





© Christopher Seddon 2009

Empress State Building, Earls Court

Named for the Empress Theatre which formerly stood on the site in Lillie Road, the Empress State Building was constructed in 1961. Originally intended as a hotel, it has thoughout its existence been used as an office building. People of a certain age (including myself!) will recall exterior shots of the building featuring in the 'Sixties SF series Space Patrol. After it became vacant in 1997, plans were put forward for its use as a hotel, and thought was given to its demolition. Fortunately refurbishment turned out to be a cheaper option and this was carried out between 2001-03, with extra floors being added at the top. However it continued to be used as office space and currently the building is occupied by Metropolitan Police and Transport for London.

© Christopher Seddon 2009

The Singing Neanderthals (2005), by Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Reading, is a leading figure in the field of cognitive archaeology and a Fellow of British Academy. In 1996, drawing together many diverse strands, he described the possible evolutionary origins of the human mind in his seminal The Prehistory of the Mind: A Search for the Origins of Art, Science and Religion, in which he proposed that full consciousness only arose when the previously-separate cognitive domains that make up the mind became integrated by a process he described as “cognitive fluidity” (Mithen, 1996). Subsequent archaeological discoveries in Africa forced Mithen to revise some of his timescales without affecting the validity or otherwise of his theory (McBrearty & Brooks, 2000). However Mithen, who is himself a lover of music, felt that its role in the development of language had largely been dismissed as “auditory cheesecake”, as Steven Pinker had described it.

Mithen pleaded guilty to himself failing to consider music in his 1996 work. Accordingly, in The Singing Neanderthals, he set out to redress the balance. He begins by considering language.

Language is a very complex system of communication which must have evolved gradually in a succession of ever more complex steps generally referred to as proto-language. But what was the nature of this proto-language? There are two schools of thought – “compositional” and “holistic”. The compositional theories are championed by Derek Bickerton, who believes that early human species including the Neanderthals had a relatively large lexicon of words related to mental concepts such as “meat”, “fire”, “hunt”, etc (Bickerton, 1990). These words could be strung together, but in the absence of syntax, only in a crude fashion. Mithen, however, favours the holistic view, which is championed by linguist Alison Wray. Wray believes that proto-language comprised utterances that were holistic i.e. they conveyed complete messages. Words – where the utterances were segmented into shorter utterances – only occurred later.

Mithen presents evidence that there is a neurological basis for music and that this is distinct from language. He draws on a variety of sources: studies of brain-damaged patients, individuals with congenital impairments, brain activity scans and psychological tests carried out on both children and adults.

Just as definite regions of the brain are involved with language, and that damage to these regions can selectively or totally impair linguistic skills, so is the case for music. The musical regions appear to be primarily located in the right hemisphere of the brain, in regions corresponding to the Broca’s area on the left. However there does seem to some linkage between the linguistic and musical regions.

Infant directed speech (IDS) – that is to say the way in which adults and indeed quite young children speak to infants – has a musical quality that infants respond to. Mithen believes that infants have a highly-developed musical ability, but that this is later suppressed in favour of language. For example, infants often have perfect pitch, but very few adults do. Relative pitch is better that perfect pitch for language acquisition, as the latter would result in the same word spoken by two speakers being interpreted as two different words.

This Mithen argues may give us an insight into how Early Humans, such as Homo erectus and the Neanderthals communicated with one another. He falls back on the notion that “Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny”, i.e. our developmental history mirrors our evolutionary history. He rejects the notions that music arose from language or that language arose from music. Instead, he argues, music and language both evolved from a single system at some stage in our primate past.

A central point of Mithen’s theory is emotion, which he believes underpin our thoughts and actions. A fear response, for example, was necessary to force a flight response from a dangerous predator. Conversely, happiness was a “reward” for successfully completing a task. There are four basic emotions – happiness, sadness, fear and anger, with more complex emotions such as shame and jealousy being composite of these four. Emotions were crucial for the development of modern human behaviour and indeed for the development of any sapient species. Beings relying solely on logic, such as Vulcans, could never have evolved.

Experiments suggest that apes and monkeys and humans – and by implication Early Humans – all share the same basic range of emotions. Now Mithen pulls together two ideas – firstly, music can be used to both express and manipulate human emotions; secondly the vocalizations of primates serve much the same function in these animals. For example vervet monkeys use predator-specific calls to warn others of their kind. Thus a human would shout “get up the nearest tree, guys, there’s a leopard coming” but a vervet would utter a single specific “holistic” call conveying the same meaning. The difference is that the human utterance is referential, referring to a specific entity and instructing a specific response – a command”. By contrast the vervet monkey is using its utterance to manipulate the emotions of its fellows – the call is associated with a specific type of danger, inducing fear. The fear achieves the caller’s desired effect by inducing its fellows to climb into the trees for safety.

Mithen believes that in Early Humans, living in groups, extended child-rearing and the increased use of gestural communications led to an extention of the “holistic and manipulative” vocalization of monkeys and other primates into a communication mode he refers to as “Hmmmmm” – Holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical and mimetic”, with dance and mime being added to the repertoire. He cites a circular arrangement of animal bones at a Middle Pleistocene Homo heidelbergensis (the common ancestor of both modern humans and the Neanderthals) site at Bilzingsleben, in Germany and claims it was a demarcated space for song and dance routines, in other words a theatre. As with the vocalizations of vervet monkeys, Hmmmmm was intended to manipulate the actions of others. It was more complex than the vocalizations of any present-day non-human primate, but less so than that of modern humans. (For another viewpoint on the role of hominin group living in language evolution, see Dunbar (1996).)

The Hmmmmm of the large-brained Neanderthals was richer and more complex than that of earlier humans. It enabled them to survive in the harsh conditions of Ice Age Europe for 200,000 years, but their culture remained static and their scope for innovation limited by the lack of a true language which would have enabled complex ideas to be framed. Indeed, the sheer conservatism, lack of innovation, symbolic and artistic expression in the Neanderthal archaeological record is, to Mithen, proof that they lacked language. He dismisses the “problem” of the Châtelperronian culture, where there is indeed evidence of innovation and symbolic behaviour. Although the archaeological record is ambiguous with some claiming that the Châtelperronian horizon predates the Aurignacian horizon and the arrival of modern humans (Zilhão et al, 2006), Mithen believes this is incorrect and the Châtelperronian is a result of Neanderthal acculturation from modern humans. The coincidence of independent origin just before the arrival of modern humans is just too great to be believed, he states.

If Neanderthals lacked language, how did Homo sapiens acquire it? Mithen believes that language as we know it came about through the gradual segmentation of holistic utterances into smaller components. Though initially holistic, utterances could be polysyllabic, for example suppose “giveittome” was a holistic, polysyllabic utterance meaning “give it to me”. But if there was also a completely different utterance, “giveittoher”, meaning “give it to her”, then in time the “givitto” part would become a word in its own right. That two random utterances could have a common syllable or syllables that just happened to mean the same thing, and that this could happen often enough for a meaningful vocabulary to emerge strikes me as being implausible. However Mithen cites a computer simulation by Simon Kirby of Edinburgh University in support. Mithen also claims that Kirby’s work is turning Chomsky’s theory of a Universal Grammar on its head. Chomsky claimed that it was impossible for children to learn language without hard-wired linguistic abilities already being present, but Kirby’s simulations apparently suggest the task is not as daunting as Chomsky believed.

Language would have been the key to the “cognitive fluidity” proposed in Mithen’s earlier work (Mithen 1996) as the basis of modern human behaviour. Language would have enabled concepts held in one cognitive domain to be mapped into another. Derek Bickerton believes that language and the ability for complex thought processes arose as a natural consequence of the human brain acquiring the capacity for syntax and recursion (Bickerton, 1990, 2007) but if these capacities were also required for “Hmmmmm” then if the Kirby study is to believed, a changeover to full language could have occurred gradually and without any rewiring of the brain. Mithen argues that this was the case and that the first wave of modern humans to leave Africa, who established themselves in Israel 110-90,000 years ago (Lieberman & O’Shea, 1994; Oppenheimer, 2003) were still using “Hmmmmm”. By 50,000 years ago, “Hmmmmm” had given way to modern language and at this point modern humans left Africa, eventually colonising the rest of the world and replacing the Eurasian populations of archaic humans. That language was crucial to the emergence of modern human behaviour has also been suggested by Jared Diamond (Diamond, 1991).

“Hmmmmm”, for its part, did not disappear and music retains many of its features.

To sum up, this is a fascinating theory that clearly demonstrates that music is as much a part of the human condition as is language. Its main weakness as a theory is that it cannot, by definition, be falsified since all the “Hmmmmm”- using human species such as the Neanderthals are now extinct.

Another problem for me is the idea that anatomically-modern humans got by with “Hmmmmm” for at least 100,000 years and only gradually drifted into full language by the method outlined above. Given that creoles can arise from pidgins in a single generation, this seems implausible, unless we allow some change in the mental organization of modern humans occurring after then.

Mithen mentions the FOXP2 gene, which has been shown to have a crucial role in human language. One study suggested the human version of this gene emerged some time after modern humans diverged from Neanderthals (Enard et al, 2002). Supporters of a “late emergence” for modern human behaviour such as Richard Klein cited have cited this as evidence that otherwise fully-modern humans did in fact undergo some form of “mental rewiring” as late as 50,000 years ago (Klein & Edgar, 2002). However it has since been shown that the Neanderthals had the same version of the gene that we do (Krause et al, 2007), weakening the “late emergence” argument.

References:

Bickerton D (1990): “Language and Species”, University of Chicago Press, USA.

Bickerton D (2007): “Did Syntax Trigger the Human Revolution?” in Rethinking the human revolution, McDonald Institute Monographs, University of Cambridge.

Diamond J (1991): “The Third Chimpanzee”, Radius, London.

Dunbar R (1996): “Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language”, Faber and Faber, London Boston.

Wolfgang Enard, Molly Przeworski, Simon E. Fisher, Cecilia S. L. Lai,
Victor Wiebe, Takashi Kitano, Anthony P. Monaco & Svante Paabo (2002): Molecular evolution of FOXP2, a gene involved in speech and language, Nature, Vol. 418 22 August 2002.

Klein R & Edgar B (2002): “The Dawn of Human Culture”, John Wiley & Sons Inc., New York.

J. Krause, C. Lalueza-Fox, L. Orlando, W. Enard, R. Green, H. Burbano, J. Hublin, C. Hänni, J. Fortea, M. de la Rasilla (2007): The Derived FOXP2 Variant of Modern Humans Was Shared with Neandertals, Current Biology, Volume 17, Issue 21, Pages 1908-1912.

Daniel E. Lieberman and John J. Shea (1994): Behavioral Differences between Archaic and Modern Humans in the Levantine Mousterian, American Anthropological Association.

McBrearty S & Brooks A (2000): “The revolution that wasn’t: a new
interpretation of the origin of modern human behaviour”, Journal of Human Evolution (2000) 39, 453–563.

Mithen S (1996): “The Prehistory of the Mind”, Thames & Hudson.

Mithen S (2005): “The Singing Neanderthal”, Weidenfeld & Nicholson.

Mithen S (2007): “Music and the Origin of Modern Humans”, in Rethinking the human revolution, McDonald Institute Monographs, University of Cambridge.

Oppenheimer S (2003): “Out of Eden”, Constable.

João Zilhão, Francesco d’Errico, Jean-Guillaume Bordes, Arnaud Lenoble, Jean-Pierre Texier and Jean-Philippe Rigaud (2006): Analysis of Aurignacian interstratification at the Châtelperronian -type site and implications for the behavioral modernity of Neandertals, PNAS August 15, 2006 vol. 103 no. 33.

© Christopher Seddon 2009

Ida

Unveiled on 19 May 2009 in a blaze of publicity by Mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg at the American Museum of Natural History, “Ida” is the 47 million year old fossil remains of an Eocene primate.

Named for the six-year-old daughter of Norwegian palaeontologist Jørn Hurum, “Ida” is being touted as “the eighth wonder of the world”, “the missing link in human evolution”, “the lost Ark of archaeology” and “the scientific equivalent Holy Grail”. It is claimed that “Ida” will “be in all textbooks for the next hundred years” and it will affect palaeontology “like an asteroid falling to earth” (ironic because there is already an asteroid named Ida).

Others have said that the find “confirms” Darwin’s theory of evolution. Technically this is correct, but no more so than my dropping an apple and seeing it hit the ground would “confirm” Newton’s theory of gravity. I’d also like to know how something that has been found can be described as a “missing link”.

Shunning more prestigious publications such as Nature, Hurum and his collaborators published on 19 May 2009 in PLoS ONE, the open access journal of the Public Library of Science. “Ida” received the systematic name of Darwinius massilae (Darwin's creature from the Messel pit), to celebrate the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth. The paper was immediately available over the internet for download, and was accompanied by a TV documentary entitled Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor: The Link.

So what exactly is “Ida”, why has she caused so much excitement and is it justified?

The fossil was recovered in 1983 by a private fossil hunter at the Messel Pit, a disused quarry 35 kilometres from Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany. The fossil was split into two parts, which were sold separately. One part was sold to Dr. Burghard Pohl of the Wyoming Dinosaur Center at Thermopolis, Wyoming; the other part to a private collector. In 2007 the latter became available for sale and was purchased for a substantial price by the Natural History Museum of the University of Oslo (Norway). The two pieces were subsequently re-assembled and are in an astonishingly good state of preservation, 95% complete and missing only the left rear leg. Such is the state of preservation that the outline of the soft body and the contents of the digestive system are clearly discernable.

“Ida” is a juvenile female, retaining some of her deciduous teeth. Her sex is implied from the lack of a baculum, or penis bone. It is believed that she was about 9-10 old at the time of her death. She had a healed fracture of the distal end of her right forearm. This would have hampered her movements and possibly contributed to her death. Her climbing abilities would have been impaired. Unable to drink from water trapped by tree leaves, she would have had to venture down to the lake to drink. This would have been her undoing – in the Eocene the region was tectonically active and large quantities of carbon dioxide were sporadically released. This would have immediately suffocated anything in and around the water. “Ida” would then have fallen into the water and been preserved in the sediment deep at the bottom.

Her unusual state of preservation does give us considerable insight into the anatomy of an Eocene primate, but Hurum and his collaborators are claiming that “the skeleton’s features clarify morphologies that have been given critical weight in primate phylogeny, and call into question accepted wisdom about the origin of higher primates.”

Although genetic and other evidence now suggests that primates first evolved as long ago as 85 million years, primates of the modern aspect (i.e. possessing all the features of modern primates such as nails rather than claws) are more recent and first appeared around 55 million years ago. Traditionally the primates are divided into two groups, the prosimians (lemurs, lorises, bush-babies, aye-ayes and tarsiers) and simians or anthropoids (monkeys, apes and humans). However it is now believed that tarsiers are more closely related to the anthropoids than they are to the other prosimians. Accordingly most authorities now divide the primates into two suborders, the Strepsirrhini (“wet nosed”) and Haplorrhini (“dry nosed”) based on the defining feature of a rhinarium, the wet, naked surface around the nostrils of most mammals (e.g. cats and dogs). The Strepsirrhini possess this feature, but it is absent in the Haplorrhini. Among the living primates, the Strepsirrhini comprise the prosimians minus the tarsiers; the Haplorrhini comprise the tarsiers, monkeys, apes and humans.

In addition, fossil primates of the modern aspect are all believed to belong to one group or the other. 47 million years ago, there were two main primate groups in existence – the tarsier-like omomyoids and the larger lemur-like adapoids. The former are often claimed to be ancestral to the haplorrhines and the latter to the strepsirrhines. However it should be noted that these relationships are not universally accepted and attempts to resolve the issue have been stymied by the lack of conclusive fossil evidence.

Hurum and his collaborators are claiming that conclusive evidence now exists, and that it overturns the orthodox position. Darwinius massilae is claimed to be an adapoid, but it is also linked to the haplorrhines – and by implication, to humans – on the basis that it lacks a “grooming claw” and a “tooth comb” of lower incisors and canines, two features that are characteristic of strepsirrhines. By implication, the adapoids are haplorrhines, not strepsirrhines; and thus they rather than the omamyoids could be ancestral to the later anthropoids, including humans.

My view is that this is certainly interesting, but it is hardly earth-shattering to the man in the street. Furthermore the evidence is hardly conclusive – the fact that Darwinius massilae lacks two features characteristic of strepsirrhines doesn’t automatically make it a haplorrhine.

In short, “Ida” is a spectacular fossil of considerable interest to palaeontology, but she has been massively oversold. She is not another Lucy, Homo floresiensis, Taung Child or Turkana boy. This kind of hype is just “bad science” – once the hoo-hah has died down, people will say “what was all that about”, with the worry that discoveries of considerably greater significance could be ignored by the general public in the future. This has happened in the past. In 1973, the long-period comet Kohoutek was hyped as “the comet of the century”. Comets are notoriously unpredictable and in the event, Kohoutek failed to live up to public expectation, though it was observed from the Skylab space station – the first comet ever to be observed from space. Less than three years later though, a genuinely great comet did appear, Comet West. But the media, having got its fingers burned once, ignored it and as a result, very few people saw it.

Reference:

Jens L. Franzen, Philip D. Gingerich, Jorg Habersetzer, Jørn H. Hurum, Wighart von Koenigswald, B. Holly Smith (2009): Complete Primate Skeleton from the Middle Eocene of Messel in Germany: Morphology and Paleobiology, PLoS One.

© Christopher Seddon 2009

de la Warr Pavilion, Bexhill

Constructed in 1935, the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, East Sussex was one of Britain's first Modernist public buildings.

The seafront building was the brainchild of Herbrand Sackville, 9th Earl de la Warr, Mayor of Bexhill. The Earl, who was a socialist, persuaded Bexhill council to develop the site as a public building. A competition was announced in the Architects Journal in February 1934 and run by the RIBA. The requirement was for an entertainment hall to seat at least 1500 people; a 200-seat restaurant; a reading room; and a lounge. Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff were selected from over 230 entrants. Construction work began in January 1935 and the building was opened on 12 December of the same year.

The building was damaged when a nearby hotel was bombed during the war and it was neglected during the postwar era. However in 1986 it was awarded Grade I listed building status and three years later a Trust was formed dedicated to restoring the building to its former glory. These efforts were eventually successful and with the aid of a £6 million Lottery grant the building was restored and converted into a contemporary arts centre. This opened in 2005, as the building marked its seventieth anniversary.

© Christopher Seddon 2009

Centre Point

One of the first skyscrapers in London, Centre Point was built as a speculative office development by property developer Harry Hyams. Designed by Richard Seifert and constructed between 1963 and 1966, it is now a Grade II listed building.

Centre Point became a cause célèbre with the political Left throughout the 1970s as Hyams left the building empty for many years, wanting to let it out on a long lease to a single tenant. With property prices rising, he could afford to wait. The building was eventually let out to the CBI in 1980.



© Christopher Seddon 2009

Benedict Arnold

Regarded by most Americans as an arch traitor, Benedict Arnold spent the latter years of his life at an address in Gloucester Place, Central London, a fact commemmorated by this plaque which I came across by complete accident. The house is less than a mile away from the US Embassy, whose website draws attention to both it and the plaque. Despite the considerable improvement in relations between Britain and the US since the War of Independence, the website makes it fairly clear that it does not endorse the sentiments on the plaque!



© Christopher Seddon 2009

Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language(1996), by Robin Dunbar

Robin Dunbar (born 1947) is a British anthropologist and evolutionary biologist specialising in primate behaviour.

His 1996 work Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language pulls together his work on the social group sizes of various primates, including humans and the correlation with neocortex size relative to body mass. Although not intended as a work of popular science, the book’s style is very accessible and it may be read by non-specialists as well as academics.

The work appears to have been a considerable influence on the science-fiction novel Evolution, by Stephen Baxter.

The following is a chapter-by-chapter summary of this work:

Chapter 1. “Talking Heads”.
Describes the experience of being groomed by a monkey from the viewpoint of one of its peers: notes the similarities with the innuendoes and subtleties of everyday social experience of humans. The social life of humans, with its petty squabbles, joys and frustrations, is not unlike that of other primates. But there is one major difference – human language.

Curiously, when humans talk, most of the conversation is social tittle-tattle. Even in common-rooms of universities, etc, conversations about cultural, political, philosophical and scientific matters account for no more than a quarter of the conversation. The Sun devotes 78% of its copy to “human interest” stories and even the Times only devotes 57% to serious matters. Our much-vaunted capacity for language seems to be mainly used for exchanging information on social matters [anybody doubting Dunbar’s assertion needs look no further than Facebook]. Why should this be so?

Chapter 2. ”Into the Social Whirl”.
The answer may lie with our primate heritage. Monkeys and apes are highly sociable, their lives revolving around the small group of individuals with whom they live. They could not exist without their friends and relations.

Our ape ancestors faced disaster 10 million years ago as the climate became dryer and colder, causing their forest habitat to retreat. Monkeys became a nuisance, able to eat unripe fruit because their stomachs contain enzymes to neutralise the tannin that they contain that would give apes and humans an upset stomach. About 7 million years ago, one population of apes found itself forced out onto the savannahs bordering the forests. Mortality would have been desperately high but those that survived did so because they were able to exploit the new conditions.

All primates have had to deal with predators ranging from various felids, canids, monkey-eating eagles and even other primates. There are two main ways of dealing with primates. One is to be larger than any likely predator; the other is to live in a large group. The latter option reduces the risk in a number of ways: more eyes to detect a marauding predator; strength in numbers – a large group can drive off or even kill a predator; finally a large number of group-members fleeing in different directions will confuse a predator, often for long enough for all to get away.

But group living has disadvantages too. Social animals have to strike a balance between the dangers of predators and the problems of social tensions. The primate solution is for small groups to form coalitions within the larger overall living group. Such alliances take many forms, depending on the overall social and sexual dynamics of the species concerned. In all cases, however, grooming is the key to maintaining these alliances.

Primate alliances are built on the ability of animals to form inferences about the suitability and reliability of potential allies, but apes and monkeys can also practice deception and manipulative behaviour. They can do this because they can calculate the effect their actions are likely to have.

Chapter 3. “The Importance of Being Ernest”.
Grooming takes up a considerable amount of a monkey’s time, typically 10% though it can be as much as 20%. Grooming apparently releases endorphins, but while this encourages animals to groom it isn’t the evolutionary reason for it. One problem among social animals is “defection”, i.e. where one fails to return a favour. A solution is to make defection expensive, and grooming requires a considerable investment of time. Building alliances therefore requires commitment and it is therefore usually better to maintain existing relationships than try to build new ones.

In addition to grooming, monkeys use vocalisation to maintain their alliances. Monkeys make contact calls when moving through dense vegetation to enable the animals to keep track of one another. But subtle differences have been found in the utterances made by vervet monkeys depending on whether they are approaching a dominant animal or a subordinate one. Other calls were given when spotting another vervet group, or when moving out into open grassland. When these calls were recorded and played back, monkeys would look up when hearing calls from animals dominant over them, but ignore those from subordinates. Vervets also make a variety of predator warning calls which depend on the type of predator spotted. Other species use contact calls to keep in touch with preferred grooming partners.

But does any species, other than humans, have language? Attempts to teach apes to use language since the 1960s have produced unconvincing results, the oft-cited cases of Washoe, Kanzi etc notwithstanding. Human communications are on another level. What are they used for and why did they evolve?

Chapter 4. “Of Brains and Groups and Evolution”.
While bigger brains generally mean a smarter animal, the rule doesn’t always hold good because the size of the animal must also be taken into account. For example, whales and elephants have larger brains than humans, but they have to deal with a far greater muscle-mass than a human brain. When the relative brain-size is computed, it can be seen that the distributions for various groups of animals lie on different plains. Dinosaurs and fish lie below birds, which in turn lie below mammals. But among the mammals, there is also a hierarchy: marsupials lie at the bottom, followed by insectivores, then ungulates, then carnivores and finally at the top, primates. Here again there are levels: the prosimians at the bottom and the monkeys and apes at the top. The human brain is about nine times the size of the brain of a typical human-sized mammal and twelve times that of a human-sized insectivore [if such a species existed].

Why is this? It could not be due to chance, because of the high energy budget of a large brain, which is 20% of total in humans despite accounting for just 2% of total body mass. 1970s theories focussed on the need for greater problem-solving abilities; for example fruit eaters need bigger brains than herbivores, because supplies of fruit are harder to find.

Finding brightly-coloured fruit does require colour vision, which in turn requires more brain-power to process the input. Primates possess superior colour vision to other mammals [but so do birds and insects]. However this theory fails to explain why not all fruit eaters have large brains.

That social complexity might be linked to primate brain size was considered but not taken seriously until 1988, when British psychologists Dick Byrne and Andrew Whiten proposed what has become known as the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis. This is based on the fact that monkeys and apes are able to use very sophisticated forms of social knowledge about each other. This knowledge about how others behave is used to predict how they might behave in the future and relationships are based upon these predictions.

The main problem with the theory was that many thought it was too nebulous to test. One problem for Dunbar was confounding factors: fruit eating primates require larger territories than leaf-eaters because the fruit is more widely-spaced. But many fruit-eaters such as baboons and chimpanzees are larger than leaf-eating monkeys and live in larger groups. There are four factors – body-size, brain-size, group-size and fruit-eating. The problem was to ensure that correlation between any two of these factors was not a consequence of both being correlated for quite distinct reasons with a third.

Dunbar decided to consider not the total brain size but the neocortex, which is the “thinking” part of the brain, where consciousness arises. The neocortex comprises the “grey matter” popularly associated with intelligence and it surrounds the deeper white matter in the cerebrum. In small mammals such as rodents it is smooth, but in primates and other larger mammals it has deep grooves (sulci) and wrinkles (gyri) which increase its surface area without greatly increasing its volume.

Dunbar then correlated the size of the neocortex against group size. He chose this as a measure of social complexity because of the volume of data available from field workers on many primate species and because it is a simple numerical value rather than a subjective assessment. Also group size is a measure of social complexity – the larger the group, the more relationships there are to keep track of. Dunbar found that there was a very good fit between the data and the ratio of neocortex volume to total brain volume. The findings provided support for the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis – large brains were linked to the need to hold large groups together. Dunbar was also able to find the same the same correlation between neocortex ratio and group size in non-primate mammals such as vampire bats and some of the larger carnivores.

But just how does neocortex size relate to group size? There are possibilities beyond simply keeping track of social relationships. One is that the neocortex/group size correlation is more to do with quality rather than quantity of intra-group relationships. The Machiavellian hypothesis suggests that the key is the use primates make of their knowledge of others. There are two interpretations: firstly the relationship might be with the size of coalitions primates habitually remain rather than total group size, though larger coalitions are required in larger groups. The second is that primates need to be able to balance conflicting interests – playing one off against another, keeping as many happy as possible.

Research showed that primates form “grooming cliques”, with grooming occurring outside these groups being perfunctory and lacking enthusiasm; and distress calls from non-members likely to be ignored. Grooming seemed to be the glue that held coalitions together. When data about grooming clique size was combined with the data about group size and neocortex ratio, a good fit was found. As group size increases, so larger coalitions are required for mutual protection when living in these large groups.

Since humans are primates, it should be possible to predict group size for humans. The number turns out to be approximately 150 – Dunbar’s Number, as it is now known. Modern living – with millions living in cities – makes this prediction hard to test. However when considering hunter-gatherer societies – which is how we lived in pre-agricultural times, the largest grouping is a tribe, typically numbering 1500-2000 people who all speak the same language or dialect. Within tribes, smaller groupings known as clans can sometimes be discerned. Clan size - with very little variation – averages 150.

150 turns up elsewhere – early Neolithic villages typically had a population of around that number; religious communities such as the Hutterites and the Mormons lived in groups of 150; businesses can function informally with fewer than 150 employees, but require a formal management structure when the headcount exceeds this; army companies typically number around 150 men and so on.

The number of close friends and relatives people have tends to be around 11-12 with a fair degree of consistency. This corresponds to the “grooming clique” in primate societies, suggesting a neurological basis. Finally the maximum number of faces people can put a name has been found to be around 1500-2000 – suspiciously close to the size of a tribe in traditional societies.

Returning to grooming, a problem arises in that the larger primate group size is, the larger the grooming cliques need to be, and the more time needs to be devoted to grooming. Baboons and chimps have a group size of 50-55 individuals, and the amount of time they spend grooming is close to the upper limit of time that can be so spent without making inroads into the time needed to feed etc. If humans relied on grooming, then 40% of the day would have to be devoted to this activity.

The solution, Dunbar suggests, was language, which enabled several individuals to be “groomed” at once. When it comes to social networking, language has other advantages over grooming in that detailed information can be exchanged about individuals not actually present. Language is a “cheap and ultra-efficient form of grooming”. Dunbar rejects the conventional explanation of language evolving as a means to co-ordinate activities such as hunting more efficiently and suggests instead that it evolved primarily to allow humans to exchange social gossip.

Chapter 5. “The Ghost in the Machine”. Language is for communication [contra Bickerton, 1990], somebody trying to influence the mind of another individual. We also consider implications of what people are saying, their body language, etc. We assume everybody behaves with conscious purpose and try to divine their intentions, often extending this to animals and even inanimate objects. Philosophers however doubted if consciousness existed outside of the human world.

Rene Descartes assumed that while humans had minds, animals – which lack language – did not and were nothing more than automatons. However in the second half of the 19th Century Darwin and his contemporaries began to reconsider the emotional and mental lives of animals. A view eventually emerged that since it was not possible to see into the minds of animals, studies should focus on their observable behaviour. The result was the psychological school known as “Behaviourism”, which held sway right up until the 1980s.

Since then, however, attention has switched to “Theory of Mind”. This means the ability to understand what another individual is thinking, to ascribe beliefs that might differ from one’s own and to believe that that individual does experience those beliefs as mental states. Furthermore ToM enables individuals to handle “orders of intentionality” or beliefs about what another believes; for example “I believe x” is first-order intentionality, “I believe that he believes X” is second-order and so on. Humans can at most handle six orders, as in the following sentence due to Dan Dennett:

“I suspect [1] that you wonder [2] whether I realise [3] how hard it is for you to be sure that you understand [4] whether I mean [5] to be saying that you can recognise [6] that I can believe [7] you want [8] me to explain that most of us can only keep track of five or six orders.”

In the 1980s it was discovered that children are not born with a theory of mind and that this does not develop until 4 - 4 ½ years old. Up until then they will fail the so-called “false belief test” which asks if the child is aware that somebody can hold a false belief. For example, the child is shown an object such as a doll or some sweets being put in a particular place in the presence of another individual called (say) Fred. Fred then leaves and the object is moved. Fred returns and the child is asked where they think Fred thinks the object is. Very young children fail the test by saying they think Fred thinks the object is in the new location. They cannot grasp that Fred doesn’t know the object has been moved and that he would assume it was still in its original location. Only older children, with ToM, pass this test. Autism is a failure to develop ToM.

Tests have been carried out on animals to see how their ToM compares with humans and to see if they have self-awareness. An early test was the mirror test, to see if an animal could recognise that a reflection of itself in a mirror was not another individual. Chimps can readily pass such tests, other great apes appear to be competent but gibbons and monkeys invariably fail, as do non-primates such as elephants and porpoises. The validity of this approach has been questioned, as animals do not encounter mirrors in the wild [though of course they might see their reflections in water].

“Tactical deception” is where one individual tries to exploit another by manipulating its knowledge of a situation. To practice tactical deception, an individual must have at least second-order intentionality. It appears to be virtually absent from the prosimians, rare in New World monkeys, but common among the socially-advanced Old World monkeys (baboons, macaques) and chimpanzees. The frequency with which species practiced tactical deception was found to show a good fit with relative neocortex size.

Dunbar reasoned that in species with a large relative neocortex size, low-ranking males should be able to use their brains to exploit loopholes in the system and mate with females, gain access to bananas, etc. Tests showed that this was the case; for example a low-ranking male would feign disinterest in a box containing a cache of bananas in the hope that a higher-ranking male who arrived on the scene shortly after would conclude that the box was locked.

Tests aimed at showing whether apes and monkeys have ToM have involved obtaining a food reward from a baited box and two human assistants, one of whom is not present when the bait is moved. The ape or monkey then had to choose which assistant they wanted to open a box. Chimps did reasonably well at the test, though less so than six-year-old children. This and other tests led researchers to conclude that chimps had limited theory of mind, but monkeys completely lacked it.

Chimps seem to be able to go to third-order intentionality on occasions, but humans can readily surpass this. Humans can envisage people and situations that do not exist in actuality – a prerequisite for producing literature. Humans are able to detach themselves from their immediate surroundings. Dunbar argues that this is a pre-requisite for both science and religion, though some of his colleagues object to the comparison! However both require one to question the world as we find it, which in turn requires third-order intentionality at minimum.

If fourth-order intentionality and above is required for science and religion, it is no mystery why only humans have these things. But if third-order intentionality will suffice, could apes not also have science and religion? It is conceivable, but the main problem is that apes lack language and so could not transmit their ideas to their peers.

Chapter 6. “Up through the Mists of Time”.
Five million years ago, one ape lineage seems to have made more use of the woodlands that lie beyond the edges of the shrinking forests. Animals travelling between the trees here are more exposed to the sun and Peter Wheeler has calculated that an animal walking upright under these conditions receive up to a third less heat from the sun, especially around the middle of the day. They also benefit from the slightly breezier conditions at heights above three feet. Also these upright apes could have shed body hair over the parts of their bodies not exposed to direct sunlight and improved cooling properties by sweating through the skin. A naked biped ape would expend half the amount of water on sweating compared with a furry quadruped ape.

Bipedalism begun fairly early in the hominid lineage, because “Lucy”, 3.3 my old, was already bipedal as inferred from the shape of the pelvis and the articulation of the knee and hip joints. The Laetoli footprints in Tanzania, 3.5 my old, were also made by bipeds. Quite likely these early hominids were naked although they were still more apes than humans.

In their new woodland habitat, these apes had to contend with greater predation, and in response they grew larger and increased their group size. While Lucy was a diminutive 4ft tall, the Narikitome Boy had reached a height of 5ft3 at age 11 and would have topped 6ft had he survived to adulthood. But how do we know their group size increased? The link with neocortex size offers a clue, and the link with grooming time might offer a clue as to when language evolved.

Archaeologists [in 1996] favoured a recent date of 50,000 years ago – the date of the [now abandoned] Upper Palaeolithic Revolution. Anatomists [even then] favoured a date of around 250,000 years ago, co-incident with the emergence of Homo sapiens. This was based on the fact that an asymmetry between the two halves of the brain could be detected at this point. In modern humans, the left hemisphere – where the language centres are located – is larger than the right. This, they argued, was evidence for the appearance of language.

To try to resolve the issue, Dunbar and Leslie Aiello tried to solve the group size issue and find the group size threshold that precipitated language. They reasoned it must lie somewhere between the 20% maximum grooming time for any existing primate and the predicted grooming time of 40% for humans, possibly 30%. They then discovered that in primates and carnivores [but obviously not elephants and whales], neocortex ratio is directly related to total brain size [I assume that means a linear relationship]. Given that estimates for cranial capacity were available for extinct hominids, it was possible to calculate the predicted group sizes. These remained within the ranges of existing apes at first, but rose above this with the appearance of genus Homo. 150 was reached 100,000 years ago, but by 250,000 years ago group sizes would already have reached 120-130, and grooming time would have hit a prohibitive 33-35%. But even 500,000 years ago, group sizes were at 115-120 with corresponding grooming times of 30-33%. [Rather confusingly, Dunbar then cites this time as coinciding with the emergence of Homo sapiens, having dated this event to 250,000 a short while previously. In 1996, humans from this far back were generally lumped together as archaic Homo sapiens; the term Homo heidelbergenis is now generally preferred.]

Homo erectus [then described as the predecessor to our own species] had a predicted group size of 100-120, with grooming time requirements of 25-30%. Dunbar and Aiello took the view that H. erectus lacked language. They also noted no drastic jump in grooming time at any point, which they take to mean that language emerged gradually over a long period of time.

As group sizes increased, so vocalisation began to supplement grooming; probably this process began two million years ago, with the emergence of Homo erectus. As time passed, so the meanings conveyed by the vocalizations increased, though the purpose would have remained largely social. Humans were exploiting the greater efficiency of language as a bonding mechanism to allow themselves to live in larger groups without increasing the amount of time required for social networking. Interestingly, modern hunter-gatherers spend around 3.5 hours for women and 2.7 hours for men on social interaction in a 12 hour day, or about 25%, compared to the 20% maximum observed for other primates.

On this view, the Neanderthals must also have possessed language. They did not become extinct for lack of language, but lacked the technological and cultural sophistication of the incoming Cro-Magnons. Later, the Native Americans and Australian Aborigines suffered the same fate [basically Dunbar is advancing an Upper Palaeolithic version of the Guns, Germs and Steel argument advanced by Jared Diamond (Diamond, 1997)].

What drove the increase in human group size? Baboons can get by with group sizes of 50, why can’t we, especially as we are larger and can carry defensive weapons? Indeed, hunter-gatherers typically live in temporary camps of around 30-35 individuals. Dunbar puts forward three possibilities:

Firstly, our forbears may have occupied more open habitats than those of baboons and needed greater protection. Gelada monkeys live in very open habitats with high risk of predation. They live in groups of 100-250 [so why don’t geladas have bigger brains than humans?].

The second possibility is that human groups were threatened by rival human groups, and bigger group sizes were needed to fend them off.

The third possibility is that following the emergence of Homo erectus, humans became nomadic and left Africa. In unknown territory, they would have had to wonder further to find resources and they would have encountered hostile residents determined to exclude them. This does occasionally happen with hamadryas baboons. Migrants are always at a disadvantage, but one solution is to establish reciprocal alliances with neighbouring groups. This happens with the !Kung San of the Kalahari, who live in communities of 100-200 individuals, but these are dispersed into smaller family-based groups of 25-40. This is known as a fission-fusion system, because members are constantly coming and going. The same characteristic is seen with chimpanzees – the primary community is around 55, but foraging parties often only occupy 3-5 individuals. That we share this characteristic with chimpanzees suggests it emerged very early in our history.

Dunbar opts for this third theory.

The theory that language emerged to facilitate social bonding should be testable. Investigating conversations in various informal situations, Dunbar and his students discovered that conversation groups did not typically exceed four. Conversation groups start when two or three people start talking. Others join in, but once the number of participants rises above four it is difficult to hold everybody’s attention and the group tends to fissions as two distinct conversations start. At any one time, only one person will normally be speaking and the others will be listening, just as at any one time only one ape or monkey will be doing the grooming. If the speaker corresponds to the “groomer” then they are “grooming” up to three others rather than only one, meaning group size could potentially treble. The group size of 55 for chimps and baboons becomes very close to the “Dunbar Number” of 150.

The limit of four people in a conversation group arises from the distance apart people must stand if they form a circle. Once the diameter of the circle increases beyond a certain point, it is not possible for everybody to hear everybody else clearly without shouting, assuming normal background noise levels. The critical distance turns out to be two feet, and it is difficult for more than four people to all remain within this distance of each other.

The researchers also learned that as per Dunbar’s predictions, 60-70% of the conversations concerned social topics. Politics, religion, work etc took up no more than 2-3% and even sport and leisure topics accounted for barely 10%.

Taken together, this data supports Dunbar’s theory that language evolved primarily to facilitate social bonding.

The expensive tissue hypothesis is based on the enormous energy costs of running a brain, which in humans takes up 20% percent of the total energy budget. But total energy production of mammals is a function of size and humans generate no more energy than any other mammal of that size, despite having a brain nine times larger than a typical human-sized mammal. Where does the energy to run the brain come from? Clearly it must come from savings elsewhere [unlike governments, humans have to balance the books]. In addition to the brain, the biggest energy consumers are the heart, kidneys, liver and gut – indeed these use up between them 85-90% of the body’s energy budget. The heart, kidneys and liver cannot be downsized, which leaves only the gut. With a smaller, less-efficient gut, humans have to eat high energy easy to assimilate foods. Meat is one such food, and the shift from the predominantly vegetarian diet of the australopithecines to one with higher meat content seems to have corresponded to the initial increase in brain size. Initially this would have come from scavenging, but the second phase of brain expansion, 500,000 years ago seems to correspond to the beginnings of organized hunting. Aiello and Wheeler believe that big brains only became possible with a switch to meat eating.

But big brains had another cost – the problem of getting a large brained infant down the narrow birth canal. The problem was solved by what is in effect premature birth, with a huge investment required by the parents in post-natal care. Women couldn’t do it all on their own; men had to do their bit. The tendency to male-female pair bonding was the result. Sexual dimorphism, considerable in even australopithecines, reduced. Differences in canine teeth, pronounced in cases of sexual dimorphism, almost vanished. Human males are only slightly larger than females. The implications are a shift from a strongly polygamous mating system to one that is only mildly so. Harem groups became smaller, with males having to make do with two females, and many having to get by with just the one! Provisioning more than one female would also have been expensive [a trend that has continued to the present day].

Chapter 7. “The First Words”. There are three competing theories for the origins of language. The first states that the earliest languages were gesture-based; the second that it arose from monkey-like vocalizations; and the third is that it arose from music.

The gestural theory arises from the fact that fine motor control used for speech and aimed throwing is generally located in the left hemisphere of the brain. In addition to fine motor control, precise control of breathing is required and for this it was necessary for the monkey’s dog-like chest to change to the flattened chest characteristic of apes. When the body’s weight is on the arms, it restricts the chests ability to expand and contract and monkeys can only breathe once with each stride.

When apes adopted a climbing lifestyle, the monkey rib-cage was a major problem. In monkeys, the shoulder blades prevent the arms swinging in a circle, which prevents them from reaching above their heads while climbing. Eventually the scapula moved round to the back of the ribcage and arm-joints became positioned on the outer edge of the chest. The flattened rib cage of the apes was the result, which had the additional benefit of freeing the constraints on breathing.

The anatomical changed permitted aimed throwing. Chimps could out-throw Olympic athletes, but their accuracy is poor because they lack the fine motor control of humans. But our fine motor control, so the theory goes, could also be used to control speech.

The problems with this theory are language involves conceptual thinking, which is quite different to aimed throwing; the complexity possible with gestures is limited; and gestures require people to be in visual contact. Communication would be impossible after dark, when one might have expected a lot of social gossip to take place.

But why did fine motor control evolve in the left hemisphere? Dunbar suggests it is because the right hemisphere was already fully utilised processing emotional information. He speculates the speech evolved in the left hemisphere because there was room there, and fine motor control evolved there later – either for the same reason or because the left side is associated with conscious thought, which is required for aimed throwing. This is the reverse of the sequence of events required by the gesture theory. The reason the majority of us are right-handed is because sensory and motor control nerves from one side of the body cross over to the other side of the brain; the left hemisphere controls the right hand side of the body, and vice-versa.

There is a greater sensitivity to visual cues on the left hand side of the visual field. This lateralization seems to have appeared very early on and fossil trilobites tend to have more scars on the right side, suggesting pursuing predators attached more frequently from the left hand side.

Lateralization of language in the left hemisphere meant that this side became the seat of consciousness, where as emotional behaviour was seated in the right hemisphere [as Dunbar points out, this was the basis of Julian Jaynes’ theory about “bicameral minds” (Jaynes, 1976)].

It turns out that music and poetry are located in the right side. This also suggests that the theory of a musical origin for language cannot be correct.

Dunbar turns to the vocalizations of monkeys as the origins of language [a conclusion that Bickerton (1990) rejects]. He considers the predator-specific calls of vervets and also conversational patterns of gelada monkeys. The calls of these animals appear to be timed in anticipation of others rather than in simple response, just as human conversation is carried on by one individual anticipating the end of the speaker’s phrase or sentence rather than simply waiting for them to stop speaking. The vervet’s calls are an archetypal proto-language in which arbitrary sounds can be used to refer to specific objects, and overtones can be applied to increase the information content. Formalizing sound patterns to carry more information is but a small step; language is but a further small step [though Bickerton would disagree].

If it is accepted that the beginnings of language were the vocalizations of primates, there are still alternative views on the next step. One theory is that language arose out of song-and-dance rituals designed to co-ordinate the emotional states of group members [c.f. Mithen, 2006]. While Dunbar believes language arose to exchange social gossip, he considers this alternative viewpoint.

No society lacks song-and-dance, which on the face of it odd. Much has parallels with bird-song, which is used to defend territory or advertise for a mate. Maasai warriors, Maoris, All Blacks and Scots Guards use ritual song and dance (the Haka, bagpipes, etc) before going into battle. But song is also used in churches and bars in circumstances not associated with battle. Here Dunbar considers the “crowd effect” which leads to groups of people being amenable to far more extreme and intolerant views than individuals. Psychologists identified this phenomenon in the 1960s and referred to it as a “risky shift”. It led to the Crusades, Northern Ireland, Rwanda and Yugoslavia [the Nazis were of course consciously exploiting the phenomenon back in the 1930s at Nuremberg, though Dunbar does not mention this].

Dunbar believes that the explanation is that song and dance is an expensive activity. Deep bass tones are particularly difficult to produce. They are associated with a large and powerful body. Even among humans, there is a tendency to assume powerful, successful people to be tall. In every US presidential election since the war, the taller candidate has won. [The sequence was broken in 2000, when George W Bush (6ft) defeated Al Gore (6ft1) and subsequently held off the challenge of an even taller man, John Kerry (6ft4), in 2004. However in 2008 the taller candidate won when Barack Obama (6ft2) defeated John McCain (5ft9).] People often comment on how small the Queen is [she was positively dwarfed by Michelle Obama (5ft11)]. There is no doubt that smaller people have to work harder to get to the top and have to be fairly bloody-minded. But, as Napoleon and others have shown, it certainly can be done.

It does however appear to be almost universal that deep voices are needed to create a lasting impression. The peculiar deep voice associated with Margaret Thatcher is about half an octave below her natural voice. Thatcher’s advisers encouraged her to lower her voice after she became Tory leader in 1975.

Trying to hold together a group of 150 people is difficult even now and it must have been even harder 250,000 years ago in the woodlands of Africa. Song and dance would have had a role to play. The activity would have stimulated endorphin production. Chris Knight believes that the use of ritual to coordinate human groups by synchronising emotional states is a very ancient feature of human behaviour, coinciding with the rise of human culture and language. Ritual language would have been required to co-ordinate such activities, and this may have been the final stimulus for the evolution of language [I have to say I’m dubious; such organized rituals would surely have required the participants to already be behaviourally modern]. Dunbar is unconvinced and believes this use for language only came later. He believes song-and-dance may well have preceded language, but it was at first informal, unstructured and spontaneous, like chanting at football matches. [This probably explains why attempts by clubs and fan groups to orchestrate the atmosphere at football clubs with schemes such as “singing sections” invariably fail; also fans tend to devote at least as much time to chants abusing the referee or rival teams as they do to songs encouraging their own side.]

If language evolved to facilitate group cohesion, then who spoke first – men or women? In most primate species, females form the core of society. Males typically leave their birth group at puberty, often wondering from group to group in search of enhanced mating opportunities. Chimps [though not bonoboes] are an exception.

If early human societies were matriarchal [like the bonoboes] then language may have evolved first among females, and Chris Knight believes this was principally to help keep the men in line and ensure they invested in them and their children. This would explain that among modern humans women are generally better at verbal communication and have better social skills than men [says who?].

But in fact human society seems to be patriarchal. Evidence for this is that among most [but not all, e.g. the Karen people of Burma – see Wells (2002)] traditional societies, brides move to the village of their new husband, a system known as patrilocality. But most of these societies live in conditions where men control all the resources needed for successful reproduction, such land and hunting grounds. In more equitable societies, such as hunter-gatherers and modern industrial societies, female kinship and alliances are much stronger and matrilocality (where the man moves) may be the norm. [Does this explain the strongly sexually-differentiated culture in one particular work place with which I was familiar? On one occasion the women seemed to be in unusually high spirits all day but refused to share the reason for their good humour with any of the men. It eventually emerged that one of their numbers had just got engaged – to a man she’d already been living with for some years. At least the question of who had to move where after the marriage did not arise!]

Among Central African hunter-gatherers, Y-chromosomal genes are more widely distributed than X-chromosomal genes, which tend to be clustered, suggesting women remain close to their kin-groups, whereas men move across wide areas. A similar picture emerges from the impoverished east end of London in the 1950s, where women were dependent on the support of female kin in order to reproduce successfully and men tended to live closer to their in-laws than to their own parents.

Female kin-bonding may have been a more important force in human evolution than is often supposed [possibly because the people doing the supposing were mostly men]. The pressure to evolve language may have come from the need to form and service female alliances rather than male hunting activities.

Chapter 8. “Babel’s legacy”.
Languages change with surprising speed, the Romance languages for example having all arisen from Latin within two millennia (and having emerged as distinct languages well before that).

The Tower of Babel actually did exist and was a seven-stage ziggurat built some time during the 6th/7th century BC in what is now Iraq during the second flowering of Babylonian culture. Dunbar suggests that the Biblical story is a folk memory of a time when everybody in the world spoke the same language, but I am highly dubious. Even if we accept as late an emergence for human language as 50,000 years ago, it is inconceivable that a folk memory could persist for such a period of time. Dunbar cites the Norse legend of Ragnarok - the end of the world - as a possible folk memory. This legend tells of a world fire followed by the Fimbulvetr, a great winter lasting three years. This he equates to the folk memory of a period of global cooling. He cites a “little ice age” that affected northern Europe around 1000 BC. A more likely explanation is the eruption of Thera in the Mediterranean in 1600 BC, which would have produced a “volcanic winter” - a period of global cooling induced by dust and aerosols ejected into the upper atmosphere. These would also have led to spectacular sunsets around the world, possibly accounting for the “world fire”. At all events, the timescales are vastly different. The Babel legend is more likely a metaphor for poor project management of the kind that continues to bedevil large projects to the present day.

Dunbar then discusses the origins of the Indo-European languages, supporting Marija Gimbutas’ Kurgan Hypothesis. As I have already discussed this topic in this articleI will skip this section. Dunbar goes on to discuss attempts to reconstruct Nostratic, other linguistic superfamilies and the so-called “proto-World” [which might be ancestral to these superfamilies, but almost certainly wasn’t the first language ever spoken, since behaviourally-modern humans were probably living in Africa for at least 150,000 years before migrating to other parts of the world (McBrearty & Brooks, 2000)].

Why do languages change? This is followed by a section on language change that is also covered by my article about Indo-European origins, before asking the central question of just why does this happen? Dunbar notes that the vocalizations of other animals also show regional variations which he equates with linguistic dialects. He speculates on a common cause and believes there must be an evolutionary purpose for it.

Most higher organisms, including humans, tend to favour kin over non-kin. Bill Hamilton showed that there are two ways of getting one’s genes into the next generation. One is to reproduce oneself and the other is to help a relative to reproduce. This principle is known as kin selection. But how does one identify kin? One way is by accent and dialect – if these are the same as your own, then in pre-industrial times they were likely to be related to you. If a group migrates, then over a few generations the language will gradually change to a distinctive dialect. The group will thus gain a distinct identity.

There is some evidence to suppose dialects evolve faster in regions of higher population density. In pre-agricultural times, the rate of language change might have been much slower.

Chapter 9. “The Little Rituals of Life”.
This chapter is concerned with sexual section, first proposed by Charles Darwin, of which the peacock’s tail is the classic example.

Leda Cosmides was able to show that people could solve the so-called “Wason Selection” test with a far higher success rate if it was framed as a social problem rather than in terms of pure logic. She believes that humans have an inbuilt social problem-solving ability which recognises social contract situations and detects violations. Without such a mechanism, human social groups would collapse, with everybody acting in their own interest. Co-operation is essential to the survival of not only a group, but its individual members, so there is evolutionary pressure to develop such mechanisms for policing rules established for the common good. Dunbar believes that language is an important part of this system.

Language may ensure the bonding of a group in a number of ways. In addition to enabling one to keep track of friends, it can also be used to exchange information about cheats. Finally it may be used to influence what people think about us, i.e. for reputation-management. You can flatter people or be rude to them, depending on circumstances. But which function was the crucial one driven by evolutionary pressure, and which were the ones that were convenient spin-offs?

A study carried out for Dunbar showed that only 5% of conversation time is devoted to criticism and negative gossip, with a similar amount of time being spent on giving advice on how to handle social situations. Most of the time was devoted to who is doing what etc, suggesting that “policing” cheats might not have been languages primary function. While a primary function might not be one that’s needed that often, Dunbar argues it is a very expensive mechanism considering there is the far cheaper option of simply beating up the cheats! Indeed the problem of cheats is a consequence of living in large groups, which would not have happened without language in the first place.

Another study did show that while single sex groups were likely to simply exchange gossip, in mixed-sex groups there was a considerable increase in discussions about work, academic matters, politics etc with men showing the greater increase. A further study showed that of the time devoted to social gossip, men spent far more time talking about themselves than did women.

Dunbar interpreted the results as a “vocal lek”. A lek is a display area where males gather to advertise their qualities to potential mates. It is common among antelope and some birds, such as the peacock, which do not pair for life. Each peacock will defend a small territory in an area frequented by females, displaying whenever one approaches. The females wonder from one male to another before making their choice. In the “vocal lek” the men were basically trying to impress the women.

Body language and eye contact play a key part in initiating new relationships, especially for women. This [unsurprisingly] is an ancient primate habit. In species where one male controls a harem, such as the hamadryas baboon, even if a rival male is more powerful than the harem male, he will only move in if a female’s body language indicates she is not particularly interested in her current male. Normally the females follow the male closely, but sometimes they will delay and the male stops and looks back. Rival males can detect such subtle cues.

Males also need to advertise their fitness to reproduce, and in hunter-gatherer societies, one way they may do this is by hunting large mammals. From a purely economic point of view, hunting a large antelope makes much less sense than putting out a dozen or so traps, but a successful kill with all the attendant dangers is far more impressive. Dunbar draws a comparison with chivalric tales of medieval Europe when aspiring young men had to prove their worth by performing difficult tasks such as killing dragons, rescuing sleeping beauties, etc. Risk-taking tasks have the advantage that they are difficult to cheat and thus provide a good demonstration of one’s fitness to father somebody’s children.

Geoff Miller has suggested that the evolution of the human brain was driven mainly by the demands for sexual advertising – both to catch a prospective mate and hang on to them in the face of subsequent competition. A modern male can do this by making his partner laugh – an activity which triggers endorphin release. A study has shown that women are more likely to smile or laugh than man, and more likely to do so in response to men. But unfortunately for any aspiring female comedians, men are more likely to laugh in response to other men. While this may reflect a male-dominated society, Dunbar thinks it is far more likely to be a way women access the relative merits of their current partner against other males that happen to be on the scene. A man’s ability to make a woman laugh may be as good a test of fitness as any other.

Men and women differ considerably in the way they learn accents: men will tend to pick up the regional working-class accent; women by contrast tend to pick up a more neutral middle-class accent, the so-called Received Pronunciation or RP. One explanation is that women can improve their reproductive chances by hypergamy, or marrying up the social scale, whereas less well-off men need to be seen to belong in their environment in order to tap into the social network. Being poor with the wrong accent is a disasterous state of affairs.

But this is changing and a survey of dating agencies and personal ads show that women now want “new men” rather than rich but otherwise unreconstructed men; this is a reflection of the greater economic independence of women, and that the general levels of wealth and comfort are far higher now than they were in earlier times. With less pressure on hypergamy, Dunbar feels that women will eventually abandon RP and adopt the regional accents of men.

Sexual selection can lead to intense selection for males possessing certain traits, causing them to proliferate. This, according to Geoff Miller, was what led to the second phase of brain expansion in humans: a need to keep ones mate entertained.

Dunbar extends this theory to invoke the role of language in making people laugh, in turn triggering endorphin release.

While the ideas proposed in this chapter might not have been the main driving force behind language and large brains, they might have been valuable components that were added into the system as it developed and indeed may have driven them to levels beyond what might have occurred on the social bonding model on its own.

Chapter 10. “The Scars of Evolution”.
This final chapter summarises the work and ends with a few cautionary tales. In particular teleconferencing seems less effective if there are more than four participants. While this limitation came about from the number of people that could stand in a circle and hear each other, it seems to have become hard wired into our brains. Finally there was the case of a medium-sized company which happened to have 150 employees. The company began to struggle when it moved into new premises without a tea room, where much of the synergy that had made the company so successful in the past had been generated.

References:

Aiello L C & Dunbar R I M (1993): "Neocortex Size, Group Size and the Evolution of Language", Current Anthropology, Vol 34, No 2 (April 1993) pp. 184-193.

Baxter S (2002): “Evolution”, Gollancz.

Bickerton D (1990): “Language and Species”, University of Chicago Press, USA.

Diamond J (1997): “Guns, Germs and Steel”, Chatto and Windus.

Dunbar R I M (1996): “Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language”, Faber and Faber, London Boston.

Jaynes J (1976): “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”, Mariner Books, USA.

McBrearty S (2007): “Down with the Revolution”, in Rethinking the human revolution, McDonald Institute Monographs, University of Cambridge.

McBrearty S & Brooks A (2000): “The revolution that wasn’t: a new
interpretation of the origin of modern human behaviour”, Journal of Human Evolution (2000) 39, 453–563.

Mithen S (2005): “The Singing Neanderthal”, Weidenfeld & Nicholson.

Wells S (2002): “The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey”, Penguin.

© Christopher Seddon 2009

Wedmore Court, London N19

Although it will probably never attain Grade I Listed status, the slightly retro Scandinavian style of this small North London private estate has stood the test of time rather better than the Toytown architecture that was typical of 1980s and 1990s speculative housing developments.

Constructed in 1986 on land formerly owned by British Rail, Wedmore Court comprises just over 50 houses and flats. The estate is run by Wedmore Court Management, a limited company wholly-owned by the residents, who also own the freehold of the flats through a sister company, Wedmore Gardens Limited.

© Christopher Seddon 2009

BT Tower, London

One of the most iconic buildings of 1960s London, the Post Office Tower as it was then (and widely still is) known was Britain's tallest building when it opened in 1965. Although still in use as a communications facility, its microwave horns are now redundant but cannot be removed following the 177-metre high tower's Grade II listing in 2003.

Sadly the tower has not been open to the public since 1981 and its famous revolving restaurant is now used only for BT corporate functions.



© Christopher Seddon 2009

The Prehistory of the Mind: A Search for the Origins of Art, Science and Religion(1996), by Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Reading and is a pioneer in the field of cognitive archaeology, which is the branch of archaeology that investigates the development of human cognition.

Mithen’s 1996 work The Prehistory of the Mind: A Search for the Origins of Art, Science and Religion is an ambitious attempt to bring to bear an interdisciplinary approach to the evolutionary origins of the human mind. The book is aimed at the non-specialist and was generally well-received upon its publication.

The following is an extended summary of Mithen’s book:

Chapter 1: “Why ask an archaeologist about the human mind?” Mithen touts his book as an archaeologist’s approach to a problem normally tackled by psychologists and neurologists.

There have been major two spurts of brain enlargement in humans and proto-humans – one between 2.0 and 1.5 million years ago (Homo habilis) and a lesser one at 500,000 to 200,000. One is linked to the development of tool-making, but there was no great advance at that time. Brains had already reached present-day size when two dramatic transformations occurred. One was a “cultural explosion” at 60,000 – 30,000 years ago (art, complex technology and religion) and the other was at 10,000 years ago (agriculture). Brains are expensive to run in terms of the body’s energy-budget, so what were they used for before the cultural explosion? What was going on between the major enlargement spurts? What caused the cultural explosion? How did language and consciousness arise? When did modern intelligence arise – indeed what is modern consciousness?

Chapter 2: “The Drama of our Past”. Mithen presents prehistory from 6 million years ago to the present day as a play in four acts.

Act 1 6-4.5 million years ago features the common ancestral ape (“the missing link”). Nothing much happens during this act.

Act 2 4.5-1.8 million years ago. Starts in Africa – initially Chad, Kenya, Ethiopia and Tanzania for Scene 1; enlarges to include South Africa for Scene 2. Act opens with Australopithecus ramidus, the first of the australopithecines who is joined by A. anamensis 300,000 years later. Both live in wooded environments and are principally vegetarian. At 3.5 million years ago, they are replaced by Lucy (A. afarensis) who can both walk upright and climb trees. She is on-stage for 0.5 million years, then leaves and nothing happens until Scene 2 opens at 2.5 million years ago. Right at the end of Scene 1 we see primitive stone tools (Omo industrial complex), but we cannot see who made them. A rush of actors appear with Scene 2 – gracile australopithecines (A. africanus) in the South and robusts in both East and South. The first humans (Homo habilis, etc) are seen at 2.0 million years. They carry tools, stone artefacts known as the Oldowan industry. Habilis butchers animals but we cannot see if they have been hunted or merely scavenged. The remaining australopithecines become more and more robust.

Act 3 1.8 million – 100,000 years ago. The act begins with a grand announcement: “The Pleistocene begins”. Ice sheets form in high latitudes. Scene 1 – the Lower Palaeolithic. The Homo habilis actors exit and are replaced by Homo erectus who is taller and bigger-brained. The robust australopithecines skulk around in the background until 1 million years ago. H. erectus appears simultaneously in East Africa, China and Java. Erectus persists in East Asia until 300,000 years ago but elsewhere we see actors with more rounded skulls referred to as archaic Homo sapiens. By 500,000 years ago the stage expands to include Europe and a new actor, the large Homo heidelbergensis. New tools join the Oldowan tools in this act, pear-shaped hand-axes that are first seen in East Africa at 1.4 million years ago but soon spread to all parts of the stage except south-east Asia where no tools are seen (possibly they used bamboo). Scene 2 – the Middle Palaeolithic. This scene opens 200,000 years ago though the distinction is blurred and is gradually being phased out. However new tools are replacing the hand-axes and include those made by the Levallois method, which show regional variation. At 150,000 years ago Homo neanderthalensis appears in Europe and the Near East. Like other actors he has to deal with frequent and dramatic changes to the scenery as Ice Ages come and go and vegetation changes from tundra to forest. For all this, tool kits change very little for a million years. Brain size is modern but there is still no art, religion or science.

Act 4 100,000 years ago to present day. Scene 1 covers 100,000 to 60,000 years ago. Homo sapiens sapiens [at the time of writing it was still believed that modern humans and Neanderthals were subspecies rather than separate species] joins a cast that includes archaics and Neanderthals. In the Near East, Homo sapiens sapiens bury their dead (as indeed to the Neanderthals) but also place parts of animal carcasses on the bodies as grave goods. In South Africa ochre is used and bone is used to make harpoons (first use of anything other than stone or wood). In Scene 2, beginning 60,000 years ago) Homo sapiens sapiens builds boats and reaches Australia. Blade technology appears where flakes are removed from prepared prismatic cores. 40,000 years ago we enter the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe and the Late Stone Age in Africa. Diverse props are made from new materials including bone and ivory. Beads; necklaces; animal and human carvings; cave paintings, bone needles used to sew clothes. For about 10,000 years the Neanderthals may be trying to mimic Homo sapiens sapiens but then they fade out, leaving Homo sapiens sapiens alone on the world stage. Cave art flourishes in Europe as the Ice Age is at its height 30,000 – 12,000 years ago. As the ice retreats the scenery fluctuates between cold/dry and warm/wet and the stage expands to take in the Americas. Scene 3 begins with the Holocene. Agriculture appears in the Near East, towns and cities appear, empires rise and fall; carts become cars and tablets become word processors as the final curtain falls.

Chapter 3. “The Architecture of the Modern Mind”. By exposing the architecture of the modern mind and taking it apart we can learn much about how it evolved.

Can the mind of a young child be regarded as a sponge, soaking up knowledge, or is it better thought of as a computer? A computer can take in data, run a program to process it and output the result. Could a young child’s mind be thought of as running a general-purpose learning program to process the knowledge they are soaking up? In fact this analogy is not a good one. Children do more than process data – they think, create and imagine.

In 1979 the US archaeologist Thomas Wynn published an article claiming the modern mind existed 300,000 years ago, before anatomically modern man. He suggested that phases of mental development of a child reflect phases of the cognitive evolution of mankind (the ideas that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”). Wynn consulted child psychologist Jean Piaget, who believed that mind is like a computer and runs a small set of general purpose programs to control entry of new information and restructure the mind so that it passes through a series of developmental phases. According to Piaget, the last phase is reached at 12 when child acquires “formal operational intelligence” and can think about hypothetical objects and events. As such intelligence is required to make a hand-axe with the maker needing to be able to visualise the finished produce, Wynn concluded the makers of such hand-axes, who lived 300,000 years ago, must possess modern minds.

However Mithen is dubious and believes that the events in Act 4 must have required further cognitive developments. Wynn’s reasoning is sound, therefore Piaget must be wrong. In fact Piaget’s ideas of general-purpose learning programs are now widely disputed by psychologists who have instead begun to liken the mind to a Swiss Army knife, with specialised devices to perform different tasks.

Psycho-linguist Jerry Fodor’s book “The Modularity of the Mind” was published in 1983. According to Fodor, the mind has two parts – input systems and cognition or central systems. The input systems are a series of discreet modules with dedicated architectures that govern sight, hearing, touch, etc. Language is also regarded as an input system. However the cognitive or central system has no architecture at all – this is where “thought”, “imagination” and “problem solving” happen and “intelligence” resides.

Each input system is based on independent brain processes and they are quite different from each other, reflecting their different purposes. These systems are localized in specific areas of the brain. The input systems are mandatory, if for example somebody sits behind you on the bus and spends the entire journey gassing away on their mobile, you cannot switch off the hearing module. However this has the advantage of saving time that would otherwise spent on decision-making.

Fodor believes that the input systems are “encapsulated”, i.e. they do not have direct access to the information being acquired by other input systems. What one is experiencing at a given time in one sensory modality does not affect any of the others.

A second feature of the input modules is that they only have limited information from the central systems. Fodor cites a number of optical illusions such as the Muller-Lyre arrows, which continue to apparently differ in length even when one is fully aware that this is not the case. The input modules are essentially “dumb” systems that act independently of the cognitive system and each other. To sum up, they are encapsulated, mandatory, fast-operating and hard-wired. Perception is innate, i.e. hard wired into the mind at birth.

The central cognitive systems are very different to the “dumb” input systems. According to Fodor, they are “smart”, they operate slowly, are unencapsulated and domain-neutral, i.e. they cannot be related to specific areas of the brain.

The Fodorian view is that evolution has given the modern human mind the best of both worlds: input modules that can enable swift, unthinking reactions in situations of danger (predators, etc) or opportunity (prey, etc) on one hand; and a slower central cognitive system, to be used when there is time for quiet contemplation, integrating information of many types and from many sources.

Also published in 1983 was Howard Gardner’s “Frames of Mind: The theory of Multiple Intelligences”. Gardiner was as much concerned with practical issues such as devising educational policies for schools as with philosophy of the mind and he put forward a very different architecture to Fodor. The entire mind is a Swiss army knife, with seven “blades”: linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinaesthetic and two forms of personal intelligence, one for looking into one’s own mind and one for looking outwards into the minds of others. Gardner’s modules are smart, interact with each other, and can be used for problem solving. The smartest people are those who can use the modular domains synergistically e.g. by use of metaphor and analogy.

Mithen speculates the two approaches are closer than might at first appear to be the case. Fodor’s non-modular central system might appear that way because its modules function so smoothly the modularity within simply cannot be discerned.

In 1992 the evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (abbreviated to “C&T” by the author) entered the fray with an essay published in “The Adapted Mind”, co-edited with Jerome Barkow. On their view, the human mind evolved under selective pressures during Pleistocene. We remain adapted to this, as it ended so recently. The mind is like a Swiss army knife with many blades, each designed by natural selection to deal with problems faced by hunter-gatherers. The modules are “Fodor type”, i.e. hard-wired, but are “content rich” and possess not just algorithms for solving problems but a built-in knowledge-base. Some are activated at birth – e.g. those for making eye-contact with mother; others need a little time, such as language-recognition.

Hunter-gatherers would have needed specific modules for specific tasks, as more a more general purpose reasoning would have been prone to making errors – e.g. committing incest or failing to share food with kin, if indeed they could make a decision about anything at all, and thus the Swiss army knife model was selected for.

C&T believe children could not learn complex subjects rapidly without content-rich mental modules pre-programmed to do so (cf. Noam Chomsky’s theory about built-in grammar systems).

The dedicated systems are also used to make rapid decisions e.g. run if faced with a lion rather than weigh up the pros and cons of the situation and getting eaten.

Looking at the lifestyle, C&T predict the modules that would be needed: face-recognition, spatial relations, rigid object mechanics, fear, social exchange, emotion, kin-orientated motivation, effort allocation and recalibration, childcare, social awareness, friendship, grammar, communications, theory-of-mind etc. These modules are grouped together in domains called “faculties”.

But does this model explain the existence of a genius like Einstein? Could a mind purpose-built for life as a hunter-gatherer expand the boundaries of human knowledge? Mithen considers present-day hunter-gatherers and note all think of the natural world in social terms – anthropomorphic (animals with human-like characteristics) and totemic (kinship with animals and plants) thinking. This contradicts C&T which assume different “blades” would be used for the natural and social world and would not think about the natural world as if it were a social being. Children will anthropomorphise a cat and interact with a doll as if it is a living person. How can this be squared with content-rich modules? The human passion for analogy and metaphor is a problem for C&T. How can this be resolved?

Mithen then considers child development and four domains of instinctive intelligence – language, psychology, physics and biology.

1) Language has already been considered.

2) Psychology – children possess a “Theory of mind”, i.e. they can predict what others are thinking (autism is the absence of this ability). Alan Leslie and others developed this idea originally put forward by Nicholas Humphrey “The social function of intellect” – such ability will be selected for when individuals live in a group. Such behaviour could not be learned by young children from experience alone and thus must be innate (i.e. the content must be there already). Humphrey believes that the biological purpose of reflexive consciousness is to model the mind of another individual – in other words reflect on how we ourselves would feel in a given situation.

3) Biology. Children realise that animals have an immutable “essence” – a three-legged dog that can’t bark is still a dog; putting striped pyjamas on a horse doesn’t transform it into a zebra, etc. Scott Atran (1990) notes among all known cultures certain concepts are universal: vertebrates, flowering plants, sequential naming conventions (e.g. spotted shingle oak); taxa that are morphologically similar; higher taxa such as birds and fish; trees and grass. Such “natural history intelligence” would be vital to hunter-gatherers.

4) Physics. Young children instinctively understand solidity, gravity and inertia. Children understand the difference between living and inanimate things. There are obvious advantages to having this knowledge from Day 1.

So how do we resolve the paradox of children applying inappropriate rules of psychology, biology and language when playing with inanimate objects?

Mithen goes back to the notion of “ontology recapitulates phylogeny”. The evidence for content-rich modules comes from studies of children aged 2-3. Developmental psychologist Paula Greenfield suggests before that age the Swiss army knife modules aren’t there – instead there is only a simple general-purpose learning program. The language explosion begins at 2, suggesting the content-rich modules only cut in then. Prior to that the child’s mind is like that of a chimpanzee. The child’s has metamorphosed from a computer program to a Swiss Army knife.

However, according to Annette Karmiloff-Smith, the final stage of mental development has yet to come. Her 1992 work “Beyond modularity” attempts a synthesis of Piaget’s and Fodor’s work. Her view is that the dedicated content-rich modules kick-start the development of cognitive domains. Rather than having mental modules grouped in faculties, Karmiloff-Smith has domains comprised of micro-domains. Cultural development shapes these domains and while hunter-gatherers didn’t need a maths domain, one could develop in a modern child under appropriate cultural conditions.

After modularisation, the modules begin working together. Karmiloff-Smith describes this as representational redescription (RR). RR results in multiple representations of similar knowledge and consequently knowledge becomes applicable beyond the special purpose goals for which it is normally used and perceptual links across domains can be forged. Thoughts can arise that had previously been trapped in one domain.

Developmental psychologists Susan Carey and Elizabeth Spelke have proposed a similar idea. “Mapping across domains”, or duplicating the same data in different domains, is a fundamental feature of cognitive development and one that might account for cultural diversity. This can be compared to Gardner’s view of smartest people using the different domains synergistically, as exemplified by use of analogy and metaphor.

Margaret Boden’s 1990 work The Creative Mind explores how we can account for creative thought and concludes this arises from what she describes as the transformation of conceptual spaces. Boden’s conceptual spaces are similar to cognitive domains. Transformation of one of these involves the introduction of new knowledge, or new ways of processing the knowledge that is already contained within the domains.

The evidence for thought requiring knowledge from multiple cognitive domains is overwhelming and it is clearly a critical feature of mental architecture. To account for it, Paul Rozin argued that the processes of evolution should result in a host of modules within the mind. But rather than add more modules as C&T suggested, Rozin believed that accessibility between the modules is a critical feature in both child development and evolution.

Basically partial de-modularisation appears to be essential for creative thought and a fully-developed modern mind.

But the French anthropologist and cognitive scientist Dan Sperber believes we can have it both ways – full modularity and creativity. He believes we have a module of meta-representation or MMR. This holds metadata, representations of representations, which can be updated as new data becomes available. For example new data about cats is matched against a meta-cat is used to update the meta-cat. The MMR thus acts as a clearing-house for new ideas. Ideas that cannot find a home stay in the clearing-house.

“Mischief can occur in the clearing-house” – ideas about dogs can get mixed up with ideas about inanimate objects, thus a stuffed toy can be made to represent a real dog. But this crossover shouldn’t happen according to C&T – it could lead to errors like eating a plastic banana. In fact this doesn’t happen, however fevered our imagination we can (on the whole) distinguish it from reality. Can C&T’s ideas (full modularity) be reconciled with Karmiloff-Smith, Carey, Spelke (partial modularity) and Sperber (clearing-house)? Mithen believes they can in an evolutionary context.

Chapter 4. “A new proposal for the mind’s evolution”. The mind is likened to a cathedral built in several architectural phases. Mithen adopts the premise of ontology recapitulates phylogeny, due to E. Conklin in 1928, documented by Stephen Jay Gould in 1977 and drawn on by Thomas Wynn. Mithen also considers and rejects neoteny however useful this is for morphological development of modern humans.

Phase 1. Minds dominated by a general intelligence. Such minds have a single “nave” in which all the services take place; these are the thought processes. Fodor’s input modules are present for delivering information to the nave, but it lacks the complex cognitive systems Fodor sees in the modern mind. This is a nave of simple general intelligence, similar to that of young (>2 years old) children. The behaviour is simple, the rate of learning slow, errors frequent and complex behaviour patterns cannot be acquired.

Phase 2. To the central nave are added chapels of specialised intelligence or cognitive domains. Just as the addition of side chapels to Romanesque cathedrals in the 12th Century reflect increasing complexity of church ritual, so these chapels reflect increasing complexity of mental activity. Some of the modules found in the chapels were present in the original nave, but they have now been grouped together in the appropriate chapel.

There are four chapels of specialised intelligences – social (group behaviour, intentionality (“mind-reading”)), technical (tool-making, etc), natural history (weather, geography, animal behaviour, etc) and language. The first three are totally separate from the nave and each other, divided by thick walls. Thought, when it occurs, is confined to that domain. If a thought is required that requires more than one domain – e.g. a tool for hunting a particular animal – it happens in the general intelligence. Accordingly thought and behaviour at such “domain interfaces” is far simpler than within a single domain.

The relationship of the language chapel (which Fodor saw an input module) to everything else is unknown at this stage.

Such minds are similar to those of children aged 2-3 as described by Karmiloff-Smith.

Phase 3. Direct access is possible between the chapels and indeed a new “superchapel” corresponding to Sperber’s MMR may also be present. Experience gained in one domain can now influence that in another. This is the synergistic interaction of Gardner’s theory – metaphor and analogy become possible. The nave acquires a greater complexity in its services: this central service is Fodor’s central cognitive system of the mind. It’s like a Gothic cathedral rather than a Romanesque one, where there are no thick walls between the chapels and sound, space and light interact. The mind now possesses “cognitive fluidity.”

How did all this come about? Mithen turns to the chimpanzee.

Chapter 5. “Apes, monkeys and the mind of the missing link”. The mind of the common ancestor of humans and modern chimpanzees (the so-called “missing link”) is assumed to be equivalent to that of the latter. Mithen believes the case for chimp intelligence has been overstated. He concedes that they can make and use rudimentary tools (termite sticks, loo paper, etc) but offspring are slow to pick ideas up. This indicates the absence of a “technical intelligence”. There is no chimp “culture” as such. While different groups of chimps use different tools (e.g. some use termite sticks, some don’t) this is purely because nobody in a particular group ever discovered the technique – it is the absence of a problem-solving approach rather than the presence of culture.

Chimps have only basic natural history intelligence. They are good at making foraging decisions based on a continually-updated mental map of known resources. They will sometimes move hammer-stones and nuts considerable distances to anvil stones. But they lack the ability to make creative and flexible use of their knowledge – for example one group, while playing with a juvenile duiker (a type of small antelope) killed it but failed to eat it because they normally hunt the more abundant colobus monkeys.

On the other hand the social intelligence of chimps and their Machiavellian scheming is well-documented. They clearly have a theory of mind and practice deception (though it only appears to work for other chimps and not humans). Examples of deception include a subordinate male placing his hand over his erect penis so it remains visible to the target female, but concealed from a nearby dominant male.

Chimpanzees appear to have a conscious awareness of their own minds but this only extends to social interactions, not to tool-making or foraging.

Chimp linguistic skills are rudimentary. They can create sentences and use grammar but only the most limited way. Indeed bird song is more analogous to human speech and convergent evolution has probably given birds a dedicated speech module. Song plays a major role in the social life of birds, much more so than vocalisation in non-human primates.

Chimps have a moderately good general intelligence, a specialised social intelligence domain and a domain for mapping resource distribution – a very basic natural history module. Tool-making and foraging use the same mental processes – general intelligence and seem well integrated, albeit limited. However the integration between social and tool-making skills is poor – for example adults rarely tutor offspring about making and using tools, despite the obvious benefits of doing so.

The chimp’s mind is mid-way between Phase 1 and Phase 2. There is a general intelligence and the first “chapel”, one for social intelligence.

Monkeys also have a complex social life, but it is simpler than that of chimps. They get confused by their own reflections. They have no concept of self. They have no theory of mind.

The common ancestor of monkeys, apes and lemurs – the Notharctus - lived 55 million years ago and was probably even more primitive, possessing general intelligence only. This could handle simple learning rules for reducing food acquisition costs and facilitating kin recognition. There was as yet no social module and Nothartcus interaction with the social world was probably no more complex than their interaction with the non-social world (similar to present-day lemurs). Their minds were Phase 1.

Chapter 6. “The mind of the first stone toolmaker”. Mithen now moves on to consider the australopithecines and Homo habilis [which he uses as a convenient catch-all for the various human species then existing]. He looks at the tools – the Omo tools (australopithecines) are little more than smashed stone nodules, possibly even within the range of modern chimps. The Oldowan-type flakes used by H. habilis are more advanced and include sharp flakes for butchery and nodules that can be used for breaking open bones for marrow. They are beyond anything a chimp could produce as they require some knowledge of fracture dynamics, but they are still very simple and show no attempt at the imposition of a preconceived form, the finished product reflecting the character of the original nodule, the number of flakes, and the order in which they were detached. The materials worked were mainly quartzite and basalt – more demanding than stripping leaves off twigs to make termite sticks, but less so than working material such as cherts (flints). So it would appear that H. habilis had only rudimentary technical intelligence.

Mithen now considers natural history intelligence. It is accepted that H. habilis consumed more meat than does a chimp. There are many sites aged 2.0 – 1.5 million years with a mixture of animal bones and stone artefacts. From where these animal bones can be identified (which isn’t often) it appears H. habilis’ diet included zebra, antelope and wildebeest. The bones show butchery cut marks. Additionally, the relatively large brain implies a high-quality diet in terms of calories, given brains are very expensive to run in terms of energy requirements.

In the 1980s there was much often acrimonious debate about how the bone fragments should be interpreted. Glenn Isaacs (late 1970s) proposed the sites represented home bases where food was brought from various locations and shared; and infants were cared for. This implies prolonged infant dependency and linguistic communication. But Lewis Binford published the seminal Bones: Ancient Men and Modern Myths in 1981. In this he argued there was no evidence for the transporting and consumption of large quantities of meat. Instead they were marginal scavengers, taking leftovers at the bottom of the hierarchy of meat eaters on the African savannah. Other models were proposed but no firm conclusions reached, partly because of the poor archaeological record but also because H. habilis probably had a diverse lifestyle with flexibility between hunting and scavenging as circumstances dictated.

What would be the cognitive implications of flexible meat eating? To the chimps ability to build mental resource maps and move tools around would be required the ability to form hypotheses about carcass/animal location. Also habilis took the food to the tools (rather than just the other way round). For all this the range of environments exploited was very narrow compared to later humans and was probably tied to edges of permanent water sources. The behavioural flexibility implying full-blown natural history intelligence was absent.

Mithen goes on to consider social intelligence in Homo habilis. Among living primates there is a relationship between brain size and group size. This was pointed out by Robin Dunbar who believed it is also a measure of social intelligence. Dick Byrne found deception occurs more frequently with larger brains - the larger and more complex the social scene, the more devious one must be to win friends and influence people. But does this rule apply to extinct primates like australopithecines and H. habilis? The latter was more advanced than living primates with tool-making and rudimentary natural history modules. However these were such recent developments that Mithen believes the rule probably holds good. Dunbar plugged estimated brain sizes for australopithecines and H. habilis into a formula derived from living primates to obtain group sizes of 67 for australopithecines and 82 for H. habilis, compared with 60 for chimps. These group sizes are what Dumbar refers to as “cognitive groups” whom one “knows socially” as opposed to the total group size.

Circumstantial evidence supports the larger group sizes. Two factors make primates live in larger groups. Firstly there is a better chance of beating off predators, or at least somebody else getting eaten. Skulls pierced by leopards prove that H. habilis did get eaten by predators. The other advantage is when food comes in large, unevenly distributed parcels. These are difficult to locate and too much for small groups to eat. A bigger group increases the probability of locating such a parcel, and there is enough to go round, so it can be shared with the rest of the group. So it would appear that there were selective pressures acting in favour of an enhanced social intelligence for H. habilis.

H. habilis could probably handle higher levels of intentionality than their predecessors. Modern humans can track five or six levels of intentionality. Chimps can manage two; the increased social intelligence of H. habilis could probably manage three or four.

Did H. habilis have language capability? Fully-developed language requires fully-developed mental modules for language, as we know from the development of children’s linguistic abilities. In modern humans Broca’s area is associated with grammar and Wernicke’s area with comprehension. The 2 million year old H. habilis specimen from Koobi Fora (KNM-ER 1470) is well-preserved and has been examined by Phillip Tobias who believes that Broca’s area is present and Dean Falk confirms this. By contrast there is no evidence for Broca’s area in australopithecines. Terrence Deacon has argued that the pre-frontal cortex in early humans has been disproportionately enlarged and that this would lead to a re-organisation of connections within the brain favouring the development of linguistic capacity – but it’s not clear how far this process had developed 2 million years ago.

Robin Dunbar found that as primate group size increases so does the percentage of time spent grooming. If grooming time goes above 30% there isn’t enough time to look for food. Vocalising means more than one group member can be “groomed” simultaneously and thus grooming time can be reduced. From the inferred group size for H. habilis, grooming time is 23% and there would likely have been selective pressure to reduce grooming time by use of vocalisation. This may have been no more sophisticated than the chattering of baboons or purring of cats.

To sum up, though H. habilis is clearly an advance on the common ancestor, the basic design is the same and the “chapels” are as yet incomplete.

Chapter 7. “The multiple intelligences of the Early Human mind”. Act 3 from 1.8 million to 100,000 features a better archaeological record. Detailed and accurate reconstructions of past behaviour can often be made, but it seems almost bizarre in nature. “Early Human” lumps together Homo erectus, heidelbergensis and neanderthalensis.

Once again, Mithen considers technical, natural history, social and speech. Technical intelligence increased with the development of the hand-axe, which often show 3D symmetry indicating the “knapper” was intent on imposing form on the artefact rather than just creating a sharp edge as in the Oldowan tradition. This is very difficult and requires forward planning. The Levallois method (typically used by the Neanderthals) requires even more technical skill. In neither case can the procedure be reduced to a series of fixed rules that can be followed by rote and both visual and tactile clues must be used to monitor the artefact’s constantly changing shape and adjust plans for how it should develop. Tougher-to-work materials such as quartzite and chert are now used. Different types of artefacts are made from different materials.

Natural history intelligence improved – H. erectus was able to cope with conditions outside the African savannahs where there is more seasonality. From Wales to South Africa we find Early Humans – but very dry and very cold environments were too much for them and they didn’t reach Australia or the Americas. Early humans gathered, scavenged and hunted in a flexible manner.

In the glaciated landscapes of Europe, the Neanderthals flourished for over 200,000 years – an impressive achievement. The frequent environmental changes as glaciers advanced and retreated meant available foods changed and this made life even harder. 70-80% died before 40. Given their technology was primitive compared with modern humans they must have had at least as good natural history intelligence as that of modern humans in order to survive.

Mithen then poses four questions:

1) Why were bone, antler and ivory not used for tool-making? Because Early Humans could not think of animal parts (catered for under natural history) in the tool-making technical domain.

2) Why were tools for specific tasks not made, e.g. spear points show little variation in the Old World although a considerable variety of animals were hunted? Mithen claims this was because Early Humans couldn’t cross-link technical intelligence with animal behaviour (natural history intelligence).

3) Why were no multi-component tools ever made, e.g. erectus never made hafted tools though the Neanderthals and others did occasionally? Such tools were usually made for specific types of prey – same explanation as 2) above.

4) Why so little variation both in time and space, over a million years and in Africa, Western Europe, the Near East and India toolkits show little variation. Again, this is because there was no integration between tool-making and prey availability.

The “social intelligence” of Early Humans must have been at least as good as chimps. Leslie Aiello and Robin Dunbar predict “social knowledge” group size of 111 (erectus) 131 (archaic sapiens) and 144 (Neanderthals) c.f. 150 for modern humans. Mithen believes that true figures were slightly lower as some brain power must have been needed for other domains. As with H. habilis, “large packet” limited availability foods would have favoured group living. However tensions could have risen in larger groups and during milder interglacial times, much smaller groups were favoured. Such flexibility in social relationships is at the heart of social intelligence. The proven care of disabled and elderly is further proof.

Four more questions.
1) Why do the settlements of Early Humans imply universally small social groups, contrary to Dunbar’s theories? The false assumption is that mind of Early Humans was like that of modern humans implies lack of social cohesion. But if technical and social intelligences were not integrated, tool-making and living activities might not have taken place at the same sites. The interpretation of archaeological record could be in error because the “social networking” sites are now invisible in the archaeological record.

2) Why do distributions of artefacts on sites suggest limited social interaction? (Knapping and butchery debris are strewn around all over the place suggesting no dedicated food-processing and tool-making areas.) There is no integration between social and technical, or social and natural history. Eating is not a social activity and food-distribution is handled by general intelligence.

3) Why is there an absence of items of personal decoration? (No beads, pendants, necklaces or cave art have been found. There is possible body painting with ochre in South Africa.) No integration between social and technical intelligence.

4) Why is there no evidence of ritual burial among early humans? Neanderthals buried their dead but there is no unequivocal evidence of grave goods (the supposed pollen evidence of burial flowers is flawed - the pollen was probably blown into the cave) and it was possibly no more than hygienic disposal. Possibly they could recognise ancestors, but if so absence of grave goods is even more puzzling. Presumably the explanation is the same as 3) above, i.e. no social purpose for artefacts.

Mithen considers language. Language can be inferred from brain size, brain shape and character of vocal tract. Brain size of Early Humans mostly falls within the range of modern humans. Recall Dunbar correlation between brain size, social group size, and required grooming time. Dunbar and Leslie Aiello predict grooming time is 40% by the time of archaic Homo sapiens. This is too high and would have required a language with significant social content to alleviate the problem – a “social language”. A general purpose language emerged later, but how much later Dunbar and Leslie do not make clear.

The pre-frontal cortex is responsible for language and reflecting on own and other mental states – central to social intelligence. Broca and Wernicke areas on Neanderthals identical to modern humans. 63,000 year old Neanderthal hyoid bone is identical in shape, muscular attachments and apparent positioning, suggesting Neanderthals possessed the anatomic capability for speech. Given the risk this implies of choking this suggests the mental ability would also have been present.

But was language used for other than social purposes, e.g. for teaching the Levallois Method? It sounds reasonable, but on the other hand H. erectus was a proficient tool maker and forager, despite being in all probability linguistically limited. Additionally such usage would have implied a greater integration between social, technical and natural history domains. Mithen concludes that language was purely social in function, supporting Dunbar.

Brain size increased from 750-1250 cc for early H. erectus to 1200-1750 cc for Neanderthals. Not gradual – there was a plateau between 1.8 million and 500,000 years ago followed by a rapid increase with the appearance of archaic Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals. H. erectus could probably make a wide range of sounds, but probably too simple to be described as a proper language. Aiello notes most complete H. erectus skeleton KNM-WT 15000 suggests muscle control necessary for regulation of respiration not present.

The Levallois method appears at end of brain expansion period (250,000 years ago) implying better technical intelligence but probably not a reflection of more intense social interactions.

The higher latitudes in Europe were occupied a million years after first H. erectus migration out of Africa. Early humans may have had cognitive ability to cope with the harsh Pleistocene European environment.

There was some improvement in natural history intelligence going from H. erectus to Neanderthals, but the biggest difference was increase in linguistic intelligence.

A Phase 2 mind has been achieved in the course of Act 3. The chapels are complete, but isolated and services going on in them can barely be heard elsewhere. There is still no cognitive fluidity.

Chapter 8. “Trying to think like a Neanderthal”. Mithen assumes Humphrey is correct and consciousness evolved as a mechanism to allow an individual to predict social behaviour of other group members. At some stage we became able to interrogate our own thoughts and feelings about how we would behave in certain situations. In other words consciousness arose as a part of social intelligence.

In a Phase 2 mind like a Neanderthal, therefore, consciousness existed only in the social domain and there was no conscious awareness of thought processes involved in technical and natural history domains. Nobody really understands consciousness. There appear to be two types – “sensation” – awareness of sights, sounds, itches, etc which Humphrey regards as “lower order” than that relating to reasoning and reflection of one’s own mental state. Mithen believes the Neanderthals possessed this latter “reflexive consciousness only in relation to the social world.

When making a stone tool they experienced what we experience when driving a car on autopilot while engaged in conversation, thought, etc. We negotiate roundabouts and traffic-lights etc successfully but have no memory of having done so at the end of the journey. This is what is described by Daniel Dennett as “rolling consciousness with swift memory loss”. We find it hard to imagine what it would have been like to have such a Swiss army knife mind but we should remember that we are only aware of a fraction of what is going on in our own minds – for example the complex processes required to generate grammatically-correct speech and the evasive action when knocking over a cup of coffee. Another example is that an epileptic can continue to play the piano during a petit mal seizure despite higher brain stem function being temporarily lost. If modern people can drive cars and play pianos without involving conscious awareness then Neanderthals making stone tools and foraging becomes more plausible.

We must accept that the monotony of industrial traditions such as hand axes and the absence of bone and ivory tools and of art is only explicable in terms of mentalities fundamentally different to our own.

Chapter 9. “The big bang of human culture: the origins of art and religion”. Act 4 sees the entry of fully-modern Homo sapiens sapiens at 100,000 years ago. In Scene 2, 60,000 – 30,000 years ago there is a cultural explosion. But early modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, had already been in existence for at least 40,000 years [in fact around 150,000 years following the redating of the Omo remains]. The start of Scene 2 rather than Scene 1 is taken as the Middle/Upper Palaeolithic transition. Archaeologists believe this is a cultural revolution – restructuring of social relations, the appearance of economic specialisation, a technical invention similar to that which caused the adoption of agriculture, and the origin of language - but Mithen rejects this and believes it marks the point at which “doors and windows are inserted into the chapel walls” – the development of the Phase 3 mind. But it doesn’t happen everywhere at once.

Colonization of Australia occurred 60,000 – 50,000 years ago; Blade core technology replaced Levallois technology in Near East 50,000 – 45,000 years ago; appearance of art in Europe dates to 40,000 – 30,000 years ago.

What is Art? Palaeolithic concept of art different from ours; art is culturally specific [art is in the eye of the beholder] and many cultures creating fine rock paintings do not have a word for “art”. Art from Europe in the era includes an ivory statuette from Hohlenstein-Stadel in southern Germany – a man with a lion’s head (totemism); animal figures in ivory including cats, mammoths, bison and horses also from southern Germany; v-shaped signs engraved on limestone blocks in caves in the Dordogne. Once thought to be vulvas, but not now thought to have any simple representational status. Items of personal adornment such as beads, pendants and perforated animal teeth are widely known. At La Souquette in south-west France ivory beads carved to mimic sea shell. A tradition of painting caves with animals, signs and anthropomorphic figures culminating with Lascaux 17,000 years ago. Chauvet 30,000 years ago contains 300 or more paintings of naturalistic and anatomically-correct animals including rhinos, lions, reindeer, horses and an owl. After 30,000 years ago, art is found in Africa and is generally a world-wide phenomenon by 20,000 years ago.

The European art appeared when the last ice age was at its peak and cannot be viewed as a product of favourable circumstances. Yet under similar conditions the Neanderthals [apparently] produced no art.

Visual symbols -
1) Can be arbitrary, e.g. “2” doesn’t look like two of anything.
2) The purpose is communication.
3) A symbol can refer to things distant in space and distance in time
4) The same symbol can mean different things to different people; e.g. a swastika wasn’t always associated with the Nazis and long predates Hitler.
5) Variability is permitted, e.g. variable handwriting.

Consider Australian Aborigines. Circle can mean campsite, fire, mountain, waterhole, women’s breasts, eggs, fruit, etc. As an Aborigine child grows up, they change from face value interpretation such as fish = fishing; to images in the Dreamtime tradition which must of course be learned. Greater metaphorical sense, often relating to Ancestral Beings. Some knowledge may require being in the know. Fish starts out being good to eat; later good to think; potent symbol of spiritual transformation of both birth and death. The two types of fish image are complimentary. Archaeologists can reconstruct face value “outside” meaning; but “inner” meaning requires access to the lost mythological world of the prehistoric mind – the origin, Mithen believes, of religion.

There are three requirements for art –
1) Making a visual image requires a mental template, e.g. I think I will draw a Boeing 747.
2) Intentional communication with something displaced in space or time, e.g. a mammoth that was killed last Tuesday in Ipswich.
3) Attributing meaning to a visual image not associated with its referent – e.g. the hoof-print of a pregnant female deer that passed 2 hours ago.

Art is only possible with cognitive fluidity. 1) is found in the technical intelligence domain (making objects of preconceived form such as hand-axes) and could be used for making art but wasn’t prior to modern humans. 2) is established as a feature of social intelligence as intentional communication as vital to Early humans as to Modern humans – this feature is common, indeed, to monkeys and apes. Finally 3) is a feature of natural history intelligence. A rock painting can be compared with a hoof-print; it is removed from the animal that has been painted. But this was not done before the appearance of modern humans.

The cultural explosion 40,000 years ago in Europe is explained by new connections between technical, social and natural history intelligence, which create a new synergistic cognitive process Mithen calls visual symbolism – or simply art. Evidence – art apparently did not evolve (like a child’s artistic skills) but emerged fully-fledged, the very first images possessing technical skill and emotional power. (Although there are images drawn by children and apprentices – the artists clearly had to learn.)

What of earlier art? 100,000 year old fossil nummulite from Tata in Hungary appears to have an incised line perpendicular to natural crack to make a cross. There is the incised red ochre in South Africa, etc. Mithen believes these relied on general intelligence only; that while the specialist domains had the necessary capability, they could not be brought into play. Thus art was very limited.

Not only is art made possible by cognitive fluidity the content is influenced. We see humans with animal heads. In southern Germany we see a human with a lion’s head – a being in the mythology of people of that time. It could be an animal with human attributes (anthropomorphism) or a human descended from a lion (totemism). Anthropomorphism is common in human society – cats, dogs, Mickey Mouse, etc. Totemism is “the other side of the coin” and was the core of social anthropology during the 19th Century. Major works produced between 1910-50 by pioneer social anthropologists such as Frazer, Durkheim, Pitt-Rivers, Ratcliffe-Brown and Malinowski. This was the foundation for Levi-Strauss’ The Savage Mind followed by surge of renewed interest from 1970. Levi-Strauss defined animals as “good to think” as well as good to eat. Totemism viewed as humanity brooding on itself and its place in nature. The study of natural species “provided non-literate and pre-scientific groups with a ready-to-hand means of conceptualizing relationships between human groups”.

Totemism is universal among (modern) hunter-gatherers; it requires cognitive fluidity (animals and people); based on the evidence it has been present since the start of the Upper Palaeolithic.

Landscapes appear to also be socially-constructed and full of meaning. The Aborigines are again a good example – e.g. wells are where ancestral beings dug in the ground, trees are where they placed their digging sticks and red ochre where they bled. In southwest France in Upper Palaeolithic times we find a range of topographic features universally associated with social and symbolic meanings by modern hunter-gatherers so this mindset certainly isn’t new. The social and natural worlds are one and the same for both modern and Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers. One consequence is that they expressed their view in art producing some of the finest art ever made.

In the Upper Palaeolithic, people hunted the same animals as their predecessors, but did so more efficiently. Early humans were predominantly opportunistic, hunting whatever was available but modern humans concentrated on specific animals at specific sites, e.g. reindeer. Some sites selected for ambush hunting, suggesting animal movements were better predicted, e.g. attacking at critical points along annual migration routes such as narrow valleys or river crossings. This is evidence of anthropomorphic thinking – though a reindeer doesn’t think as a human, imagining it does can still act as an excellent predictor to its behaviour. This has been tested in several studies of modern hunter-gatherers.

Modern humans also produced for the first time bespoke hunting weapons for different types of animal which would be impossible for a Swiss army knife minded human. Examples include weapons made from bone and antler, harpoons, spear-throwers, etc. A variety of projectile point is seen, with specific types being associated with particular prey at particular sites. Key to all this is blade technology where specialized multi-component tools can be made from standardised blanks. We also see a rapid evolution in technology as environmental conditions changed and building on the experience of earlier generations. Large points used for big game on tundra at height of ice age 18,000 years ago; shift to multi component tools and greater diversity of tools as conditions ameliorated and wider range of game became available. This is in stark contrast to the monotony of earlier technology and could only have happened with a connection between natural history and technical intelligences.

Art is used to store information, e.g. bones incised with parallel lines. Alexander Marshack’s microscopic studies suggest regular patterns that appear to be a system of notation. This was probably a visual recording device, probably environmental events such as moon-phases [my personal view is that these tallies recorded the female menstrual cycle]. Similar to notched engraved artefacts made by modern hunter-gatherers which are known to be mnemonic aids and recording devices, such as calendar sticks made by Yakut people of Siberia. John Pfeiffer describes cave paintings as a tribal encyclopaedia. Mithen has himself suggested that the way in which animals were painted relates to information acquired about movements and behaviour. In some cases animals are painted in profile but their hoofs in plan. Was this to facilitate identifying hoof prints or teaching children? Bird imagery dominated by migratory birds like ducks and geese. Again, modern hunter-gatherers in glacial environments use arrival and departure of these birds as harbingers of winter or spring. Paintings could also have fulfilled the same function as “trophy arrays” of the Wopkaimin of New Guinea, which are carefully arranged to act as a mental map of the local environment, an aide memoir for recalling info about environment and animal behaviour. Michael and Anne Eastham have suggested paintings and engravings in Ardeche, France served as a model or map of terrain around the caves.

Objects of adornment appear for the first time, requiring social and technical intelligence integration.

The anthropomorphic images seen earlier and grave goods suggest the Upper Palaeolithic people have beliefs in supernatural beings and possibly an afterlife. In other words, the first religion. What is religion? In his 1994 work “The naturalness of religious ideas” Pascal Bowyer notes that the most common and indeed possibly universal feature is a belief in non-physical beings. He also notes three other features common in religious ideologies:

1. Many societies believe in an afterlife.
2. Certain people within a society (e.g. shamans, priests) are especially likely to receive direct communication from supernatural agencies such as gods and spirits.
3. Performing certain rituals in an exact way can effect change in the physical world.

All these features seem to have been present in Upper Palaeolithic times. It is likely that anthropomorphic images seen in French caves are either supernatural beings or the shamans who communicated with them. French pre-historian Andre Leroi-Gourhan believes the painted caves are likely to reflect a mythological world as complex as the Australian Dreamtime. Bowyer believes supernatural beings typically have characteristics that violate instinctive knowledge of psychology, biology and physics (see Chapter 3). For example, bodies that don’t age and can pass through solid objects (ghosts) or are invisible. They nevertheless conform to some instinctive knowledge in that they have desires and beliefs like normal beings. The Ancestral Beings of the Australian Aborigines have weird characteristics like existing in both past and present; but they play tricks and practice deceptions. The various shenanigans of the Greek Gods provide a more familiar example. Bowyer argues the combination of violation and conformity characterises supernatural beings in religious ideologies. Some conformity is necessary for people to get their heads round things.

Mixing-up of knowledge of different types of entities in the real world – which would have once been trapped in separate domains – are the essence of supernatural beings. It could only happen in a cognitively fluid mind. The notion that some punters in a group can communicate with supernatural beings is a consequence of the belief that some people have a different “essence” than others. Essence is a “natural history” feature (instinctive biology) (chapter 3). Bowyer explains differentiating of people into different social roles exemplified by shaman as the introduction of “essence” into the social world – again, a consequence of cognitive fluidity.

Religious ideologies as complex as those in modern hunter-gatherer societies must have come into being about at the time of the Middle/Upper Palaeolithic transition and have remained with us ever since.

It is not surprising that with new abilities, humans rapidly colonised the world. An expansion began at 60,000 years ago with Australia being colonised by extensive sea voyages (Clive Gamble); then the North European plain; the arid regions of Africa; the tundra and forests of the far north after 40,000 years. Early humans entered but did not stay; modern humans colonized these regions and used them as stepping-stones to the Americas and the Pacific islands. This is all down to cognitive fluidity but it does not happen until well after the emergence of modern Homo sapiens sapiens.

Early modern humans had a degree of cognitive fluidity, but they hadn’t achieved full integration and had still partially Swiss army knife type minds. In the Near East remains of early modern humans in caves at Skhul and Qafzeh dating 100,000 – 80,000 years ago have stone tools almost identical to Neanderthals at Tabun (180,000 – 90,000 years ago) before the early moderns arrived and at Kebara after they left (63,000 – 48,000 years ago). But animal parts in human graves suggest religion/ritual activity (unlike Neanderthal burials) and people/animal association, probably totemic. The early moderns also hunted gazelles more efficiently – though using same spear types, they hunted on a seasonal basis and thus expended less energy; also their spears needed to be repaired less often. This suggests enhanced prey behaviour prediction, achievable only by anthropomorphic thinking. All this implies natural history and social integration. But the technical integration has not yet been achieved.

A similar conclusion is reached when evidence is considered from South Africa. Fossils in caves of Klasies River mouth and Border Cave are less well-preserved but date to same time period of 100,000 years ago. Some archaic features; likely to be original source of H. sapiens sapiens [this before discovery of the Herto remains (155ky) and redating of the Omo remains (200ky)]. Klasies river sequence runs from 100,000 – 20,000 years ago. At 40,000 years ago flake technology changes to blade technology at Middle/Upper Palaeolithic (or Middle to Later Stone Age on the African scheme). Prior to this, tools are similar to those made by early humans elsewhere in Africa during Act 3, even though made by early modern humans after 100,000 years ago. The layers corresponding to appearance of early modern humans contain significantly increased (though still quite rare) amounts of ochre, often used as crayons. Red ochre is entirely unknown prior to 250,000 years ago and extremely rare (a few dozen pieces) prior to 100,000 years ago. Chris Knight and Camilla Powers believe it used for body-painting, since no other art known prior to 30,000 years ago in South Africa [again, this predates discovery of 70ky old incised ochre pieces]. In Border Cave an infant is buried with a perforated Conus shell originating 80 km away. Grave dates 80,000 – 70,000 years ago. Small blades of high-quality stone, apparently designed for use in multi-component tools. Finally there is working of bone with multi-barbed harpoons found at Katanda, Zaire. These are 90,000 years old and are 60,000 years older than known comparable examples.

Mithen suggests that if one assumes that there is only one type of human in southern Africa after 100,000 years ago, then the mentality of these early modern humans is drifting in and out of cognitive fluidity. The benefits of partial cognitive fluidity are insufficient for the change to become “fixed” within the population. A degree of cognitive fluidity exists, but much less than that which arose at the start of the Upper Palaeolithic. It was however sufficient to give early modern humans the edge as they moved out of Africa and spread throughout the world.

The strongest evidence for replacement “Out of Africa” theory is limited genetic diversity of present-day humans, suggesting a recent and severe bottleneck and greater genetic diversity in Africa than elsewhere. One estimate suggests six breeding individuals for 70 years or 50 individuals in all; or 500 if the bottleneck lasted 200 years.

If the exodus comprised humans who were only partially cognitively fluid, they would have taken this condition – genetically encoded - with them as they expanded across the world. The integrated natural history and social intelligence gave them the competitive edge over earlier-type humans, pushing them into extinction.

The final step to full cognitive fluidity – integration of technical intelligence – was taken at different times in different parts of the world. This arose from parallel evolution and was perhaps inevitable as there was an evolutionary momentum towards full cognitive fluidity. As soon as adaptive pressures arose in each area, technical intelligence became part of the cognitive fluid mind and the final step to modernity was taken. [It is doubtful that cognitive fluidity could have arisen by parallel evolution as this would almost certainly have resulted in a degree of cognitive differences between different present-day populations. However in his more recent work, Mithen now suggests that full cognitive fluidity arose prior to Homo sapiens migration from Africa.]

Chapter 10. “So how did it happen?” Mithen believes language gradually broke down the barriers between the domains. He goes along with Robin Dunbar’s proposal that early humans’ language was used to send and receive social info only, unlike modern general-purpose language. But “snippets” of non-social content e.g. tool-making and animal behaviour crept in from two sources. The first source was from general intelligence at domain interfaces. Though limited, this could have permitted some vocalisation about the non-social world. Probably a small range of words, used predominantly as demands, with no more than two or three words strung together, in contrast to the grammatically-complex social language. The second source may have arisen from the specialized intelligences not being entirely isolated and some non-social thoughts about tool-making and foraging etc might have leaked through into the social domain.

As humans used non-social words, they would have entered the minds of other humans and invaded their social domains. There would have been a selective pressure to utilise this non-social information, as better hunting and tool-making decisions could have been made. There would have been a further selective pressure to add to one’s non-social vocabulary in order to question others about animal behaviour and tool-making, etc, and thus add to one’s knowledge. Possibly some happened to have particularly permeable walls between their specialised domains and this physical trait would have been heavily selected for. A general-purpose language would have evolved between 150,000 to 50,000 years ago.

Evidence survives in our conversation today which Robin Dunbar notes is still predominantly about social matters. We also ascribe “minds” to inanimate objects as implied by sentences like “the ball flew through the air” and “the book toppled off the shelf” which linguist Leonard Talmy argues implies the objects move under their own volition because the sentences are so like “the man entered the room”. Utterances use the same range of concepts and structures regardless of whether they refer to mental states, social beings or inanimate objects. Linguists believe that language was originally used for inanimate objects and by “metaphoric extension” were transferred to utterances about the social world. Mithen believes it was the other way around.

The social “chapel” was turned by the invasion of non-social material into one of Dan Sperber’s “superchapels” (chapter 3, MMR). The superchapel allows world-knowledge to be represented in two locations – it’s “home” domain and within the social domain, which now additionally contains non-social information. This multiple representation of data is a crucial feature of Annette Karmiloff-Smith’s ideas about how cognitive fluidity arises during development.

This helps us to understand apparently contradictory views held by hunter-gatherers and indeed any modern humans about the world. For example the Inuit on one hand think of the polar bear as a fellow kinsman, yet they kill and eat it. Deep respect for animals that are hunted, often expressed in terms of social relationships, yet no qualms about actually killing them appears universal among hunter-gatherers. This reflects the same bit of info being present in more than one domain. Another example is the Australian Aborigines and their attitude to landscapes. They exploit these with a profound knowledge of ecology (natural history) yet they view this same landscape as having been created by Ancestral Beings, who don’t follow the laws of ecology. Again the same info is represented in two different domains.

Sperber suggested that non-social info invading the social domain would trigger a cultural explosion, which Mithen claims occurred at the outset of the Upper Palaeolithic.

Mithen has followed Nicholas Humphrey’s argument that reflexive consciousness evolved as a critical feature of social intelligence and he believes a change in the nature of consciousness was a critical feature of the change to cognitive fluidity.

Consciousness was not accessible to thought in other domains. Early humans were not aware of their own knowledge of the non-social world other than via ephemeral rolling consciousness (see chapter 8). Language was the means by which social intelligence was invaded by non-social material and this made the non-social world available for reflexive consciousness to explore. This is the essence of the argument made by Paul Rozin in 1976 – his notion of accessibility was the “bringing to consciousness” of knowledge already in the human mind but located within the “cognitive unconsciousness”. Much mental activity remains closed to us even now; e.g. a potter often will be unable to explain how they throw a pot and can only demonstrate the process.

The new role for consciousness in the human mind is likely to be the one identified by Daniel Schacter in 1989 when he argued that consciousness is a global database integrating the output of modular processes. Such a mechanism is crucial in a modular system where different types of info are handled by different modules. Early humans had only general intelligence to perform this role. But because language acted as the means of delivering non-social thoughts into the social domain, consciousness could start to play the integrating role. Individuals could become introspective about their non-social thought-processes and knowledge, leading to the flexibility and creativity that characterises modern human behaviour.

Sexually-mature females were under selective pressure to achieve cognitive fluidity. Humans can only give birth to small-brained infants (typically 350 cc, no larger than an infant chimp). This is because of design issue of the pelvis – birth canal versus walking upright. There is a huge growth after birth hence massive post-natal dependency. This would have become pronounced during the second phase of brain expansion 500,000 years ago. According to Chris Knight mothers needed to provide good-quality food and Early Modern Human females solved the problem by extracting “unprecedented levels of male energetic investment” from the men and probably co-ordinated their behaviour to that end. A key element was a “sex strike” and use of red ochre as “sham menstruation”. This was the first use of symbolism and increase in ochre use after 100,000 years ago is cited as evidence. Mithen is sceptical about co-ordinated female action, but believes this was a social context in which food became critical in negotiating social relationships between sexes, and in this context snippets of language about food hand hunting may have been particularly valuable in the social language between males and females. Females may have needed to exploit this information in their dealings with men, and this might be why the first step towards cognitive fluidity was an integration of natural history and social intelligences, as seen in Early Modern Humans in the Near East.

The increased time between birth and maturity that arose as brain size increased also provided the time needed for connections between the specialised intelligence domains to be formed in the mind. In chapter 3 Annette Karmiloff-Smith argued a modern child passes through a domain-specific cognition phase and in Chapter 7 Mithen argued that cognitive development in young Early Humans ceased after the domains of thought had arisen and before any connections could be built. With regard to development, the source of cognitive fluidity must lie in a further extension of the period of cognitive development. The fossil record provides some evidence that child development in modern humans is much longer than that of early humans. This shows that Neanderthal children grew up quickly, developing robust limbs and large brain at an early age compared with modern humans. 50,000 year old fragments found at Devils Tower on Gibraltar are of a 3 to 4 year old child. Dental eruption occurred earlier and skull is 1,400 cc – nearly adult size. A two-year old Neanderthal found in Dederiyeh Cave in Syria possessed a brain the size of a six-year-old Modern human. Unfortunately we lack the skulls of children 100,000 years ago from the Near East and those of Upper Palaeolithic. Mithen believes they would show a trend towards increasingly-prolonged infant care over the time period 100,000 – 30,000 years ago.

Chapter 11. “The evolution of the mind”. There has been an oscillation over 65 million years between specialized and generalized ways of thinking.

Mithen believes that the earliest proto-primates, the plesiadapidiforms (Purgatorius, etc) had no general intelligence and that their minds were of the “Swiss army knife” type made up of hard-wired specialised behavioural modules that kicked in in response to specific stimuli and which were little modified by experience. This inability to learn is shared with cats, rats, etc, but not with modern primates who can identify general rules that apply in a set of experiments and use the general rule to solve a new problem. These animals declined because of competition from rodents about 50 million years ago.

The first modern primates included the lemur-like Notharctus who possessed larger brains (greater encephalization) and who appeared around 56 million years ago. The Notharctus probably possessed a general intelligence to supplement the specialist modules, but no dedicated social intelligence. The general intelligence could handle simple learning rules for reducing food acquisition costs and facilitating kin recognition. There was as yet no theory of the mind and Nothartcus interactions with their social world was no more complex than their interaction with the non-social world (similar to present-day lemurs). There is an about-turn from hard-wired behavioural responses to stimuli to a generalised mentality with cognitive mechanisms to allow learning from experience. However a larger brain had higher energy costs and these primates needed to exploit high-quality plant foods such as new leaves, ripe fruit and flowers.

About 35 million years ago more advanced primates such as Aegyptopithecus appeared. They were fruit eating quadrupeds and lived in tall trees of monsoonal rain forests. General intelligence superior to Notharctus and there is a specialised social intelligence domain. There is more complex social behaviour than non-social behaviour (see ch5) and a selective pressure to predict and influence behaviour of other group members. As argued by C&T those individuals with specialised mental modules for social intelligence would be able to solve social problems better. By 35 million years ago, general intelligence had reached its limits and the trend to ever-increasing specialisation of mental faculties had begun, which was to continue almost to the present day.

Andrew Whiten describes brain evolution as deriving from “spiralling pressure as clever individuals selected for yet more cleverness in their companions”. Nicholas Humphrey describes intellectual prowess correlated with social success and if this success means high biological fitness, then any inheritable trait that enables an individual to outwit their fellows will soon spread through the gene pool. The spiralling pressure probably continued 15 to 4.5 million years ago, a period in which the fossil record is poor and during which common ancestor of man probably lived, about 6 million years ago.

The fossil record improves at 4.5 million years ago. As seen in ch2 the best preserved australopithecine A. afarensis is adapted to joint arboreal and terrestrial lifestyle. Fossil record between 3.5 – 2.5 million years ago suggests brain-size remains constant. Why did spiralling pressure come to this hiatus? Probably two constraints applied: bigger brains require more fuel and need to be kept cool. Brains need 22 times more energy than muscle; and overheating by even 2 Celsius can impair their functioning. Australopithecines were probably mainly vegetarian and lived in equatorial wooded savannah. They couldn’t get enough to eat or keep cool.

But at 2 million years ago brain size begins to increase again. Meat-eating and bipedalism had provided the solutions to these problems. Bipedalism begins to evolve 3.5 million years ago, possibly in response to selective pressure to reduce thermal stress. By walking upright solar radiation from tropical sun can be reduced by 60%. The australopithecines’ tree-climbing tree-swinging ancestry pre-adapted them to bipedalism. Bipedalism is also more energy-efficient and australopithecines could forage for longer periods without food and water and in areas with less natural shade, and thus exploit foraging niches closed to predators more dependent on shade and water. The environmental changes occurring in Africa 2.8 million years ago led to more arid and open environments and thus bipedalism would have been advantageous.

Bipedalism required a bigger brain for the more complex muscle control it required. Dean Falk discusses how a network of veins covering the head was also selected for, providing a cooling system or radiator. Thus the overheating constraint was relaxed. Falk also suggests that once feet ceased to be used for manipulation areas of cortex used for foot control were freed up and were utilised to improve manual dexterity.

The new scavenging niche made it possible to obtain animal carcases and with more meat in the diet the gut size could be reduced releasing more energy to run the brain without changing the basal metabolic rate. Thus the second constraint on brain-size was relaxed.

Meanwhile the larger social groups needed to survive in open terrestrial habitats (partly as a defence against predators) meant better social intelligence was required, and this drove brain size up. In ch6 we saw Oldowan tools required more brainpower to make than those used by chimps. However the knowledge probably arose due to enhanced learning opportunities in larger group sizes rather than enhanced technical intelligence.

The distinct domains appear at 1.8 – 1.4 million years ago in response to continuing competition between individuals – removing the constraints on brain size triggered a cognitive arms race. However they may also reflect the appearance of a constraint on further growth of social intelligence. Nicholas Humphrey notes that a point comes when it is pointless devoting any more time to a social argument, so by 2 million years ago possibilities of enhancing reproductive success by enhancing social intelligence were played out, and new cognitive domains were evolved: natural history and technical intelligence. This would have permitted more efficient carcass and other food location, and better butchery techniques. Individuals with these faculties got a better diet and needed to spend less time exposed to predators on the savannah.

With the new domains, humans spread through much of the Old World, reaching Wales, South Africa and south-east Asia. The Swiss army knife mind was so successful there was no further brain enlargement between 1.8 million and 500,000 years ago. It is probable, though, that the minds of different types of human varied subtly in the nature of their multiple intelligences reflecting the diverse environments in which they lived.

The language domain probably began to evolve as far back as 2 million years ago. Mithen follows Robin Dunbar and Leslie Aiello’s argument that language evolved for social purposes only, and selective pressure to reduce grooming time. Anatomic changes required for speech were made possible by bipedalism, such as the descent of the larynx (Aiello). A spin-off from this was the ability to form the sounds of vowels and consonants. Changes in breathing patterns and reduced teeth size due to meat eating also helped as sound quality improved as did fine control of the tongue.

While H. erectus had better vocal ability than modern apes, they were very limited compared with modern speech. A large lexicon and grammar rules did not appear until the next phase of brain enlargement 500,000 – 200,000 years ago, though this remained a social language. Why did this second phase happen?

One possibility was a further expansion of social group size. It’s not clear why. Aiello and Dunbar believe that as the global human population increased so the need for defence against other groups of humans increased. The opportunity so created was however used. As described in ch10 the scope of language spread to the non-social world, leading to cognitive fluidity. Possibly this evolved because the mind had by 100,000 years ago specialisation had reached its limits. Although it only fully developed in modern humans, it may have begun with the last of the Neanderthals, but before it could fully develop they were pushed into extinction by modern and fully cognitively fluid humans.

The minds of today’s humans may have other new domains in response to cultural pressures that begun with the adoption of agriculture, e.g. a maths domain.

We can see an alternation over 65 million years between specialized and generalized intelligences. If we started and finished with general purpose minds, why was there a phase of specialist domains with limited integration? Quite simply the mind developed in a piecemeal fashion, with a general purpose intelligence to keep it running and specialist modules being added on later. Once the latter were working properly they were integrated into the whole, using language and consciousness as the glue. The whole undertaking was far too complex to undertake in one hit, c.f. writing a complex multi-modular computer program.

Art, religion and science are unique achievements of the modern mind. Science has 3 critical properties. Generating and testing hypotheses. Chimps can do this in their social interactions when practicing deception, with social intelligence. Early humans did so for resource distribution, using natural history intelligence. Using tools for problem-solving, e.g. telescopes, microscopes, pencils and paper for making records. Integrated natural history and technical intelligence used for tool making in Upper Palaeolithic. Cave paintings were the DVDs of their day. Use of metaphor and analogy is the third feature of science. Some of these require only one domain, but the most powerful cross boundaries and require cognitive fluidity. Examples include the heart as a pump, atoms as solar systems, clouds of electrons, wormholes, “selfish” genes, “well-behaved” equations – or minds as Swiss army knives or cathedrals.

Epilogue: “The origins of agriculture”. Agriculture arose independently in many parts of the world around 10,000 years ago. How animals reproduced has been known as long as natural history intelligence has existed, 1.8 million years. We also know a good deal about the animals hunter-gatherers hunted. But it is only recently that we have learned about exploitation of plant foods. Charred plant remains found at 18,000 year old sites in Wadi Kubbaniya, to the west of the Nile Valley indicate finely ground plant mush used, probably to wean infants. Roots and tubers have been exploited, possibly all the year round, from permanent settlements. At Tell Abu Hureyra, Syria, occupied by hunter-gatherers between 20,000 – 10,000 years ago, 150 edible plant species have been identified. At both sites technology for grinding and pounding plant material has been found. To sum up, both botanical knowledge and technology to support agriculture was in place at these sites well before agriculture itself was practiced. Why? A degree of compulsion must have been involved.

Agriculture has many disadvantages – being tied to a particular place leads to sanitation problems, the rise of disease, social tensions, depletion of resources such of firewood. Bones and teeth indicate health of early farmers poorer than hunter gatherers. Yet 10,000 years ago agriculture was widely adopted with a wide range of crops being brought under cultivation – wheat and barley in south-west Asia, yams in West Africa, taro and coconuts in south-east Asia.

There are two conventional explanations for the near-simultaneous switch to agriculture. One is that by 10,000 years ago population levels had got too large to be sustained by hunter gathering. This theory is not plausible or supported by the evidence. Hunter-gatherers can limit population by infanticide. Population in a mobile society is limited by difficulties of carrying young children around.

Other possibility was rise in temperature at the end of the last ice age, which was preceded by global climatic fluctuations lasting 5,000 years between warm/wet conditions and cold/dry conditions. In south-west Asia, the first farming communities are seen at Jericho and Gilgad are seen with wheat, barley, sheep and goats. But the wild ancestors of these cereals had grown and been exploited by hunter gatherers in the same places (e.g. Abu Hureyra). The stratified sequence of plant remains has been studied by archaeo-botanist Gordon Hillman and is very informative about changeover from hunter gathering to agriculture. Between 19,000 and 11,000 years ago, climate in south-west Asia improved as European ice sheets retreated, leading to warm/wet conditions especially during the growing season. During this time hunter gatherer punter factor increased exploiting more productive food plants and predictably-moving gazelle herds. Evidence suggests a wide range of plants exploited. But at 11,000 – 10,000 years ago drier and even drought conditions returned. Fruit trees could not survive drought and wild cereals could not survive dry cold conditions. Small-seeded legumes are more hardy but require detox to make them edible. At 10,500 years ago Abu Hureyra was abandoned. When people returned 500 years later they adopted agriculture. Similarly in the Levant at around 13,000 – 12,000 years ago hunter gatherers switched from a mobile to a sedentary life-style, probably in response to a short abrupt period of aridity which resulted in dwindling, less predictable food supplies. This period of building settlements yet retaining the hunter gatherer lifestyle is known as the Natufian and lasted up until 10,500 when true farming settlements appear. The settlements were often extensive and included underground storage pits and terraced huts. There was an expanded range of bone tools, art objects, jewellery and ground stone tools. Stands of wild barley intensively exploited.

There was a point of no return as described by Ofer Bar-Yosef and Anna Belfer-Cohen. Once the sedentary lifestyle had been adopted it was necessary to increase food production, because constraint on having children had been relaxed. Hence agriculture.

But the last ice age wasn’t the only one experienced by humans. Earlier human types didn’t adopt agriculture – but they lacked the mental means.

1) Tools for harvesting and processing plants required an integration of technical and natural history intelligence.
2) Animals and plants were used as a medium for acquiring prestige and power. This required integration of social and natural history intelligence. Eg meat and bones from bison, reindeer and horses, hunted on the tundra-like environment, were stored on the Central Russian plain 20,000 – 12,000 years ago. Access to these resources came increasingly under the control of particular dwellings and hence individuals – who thus used them as a source of power. Similarly in southern Scandinavia 7,500 – 5,000 years ago where people hunted red deer, pigs and roe deer. They appeared to focus on red deer – these were scarce, but the carcases were larger. There was more meat to give away, providing prestige and power. When this was not available day to day needs could be catered for by exploiting plants and fish. Red deer antlers and teeth necklaces are prominent grave goods suggesting these animals were important to these people. It would seem that agriculture was a means for some individuals to gain and maintain power. Brian Hayden favours this explanation and argued that competition between individuals using food resources to wage their competitive battles provided the motives and the means for the development of food production. Hayden felt evidence in the Natufian culture of long distance trade of prestige items and abundance of jewellery, stone figurines and architecture were evidence of social inequality, reflecting the emergence of powerful individuals. To maintain their power base these individuals had to continually introduce new prestige items and generate the economic surplus they needed to maintain power. Many first domesticates were prestige items like dogs, gourds, chilli peppers and avocados rather than resources for feeding a large population.
3) Social relationships with plants and animals, i.e. social and natural history integration. Evidence includes injured reindeer kept alive until injuries healed and the loving care a gardener gives to his plants.
4) Manipulating plants and animals – technical and natural history. This is basically treating them as artefacts to be manipulated. E.g. burning parts of forest as environmental management to encourage plant growth and attract game; leaving a bit of yam in the ground to allow the yam to grow again.

Summary:

Steven Mithen’s basic premise is that in order to fully understand the mental architecture of a modern human, we need to look at the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens. As an archaeologist, he has used archaeological evidence as the main pillar of his work. He has supported this with evidence from anthropology, linguistics, evolutionary psychology, developmental psychology and primatology.

Mithen believes that are two basic types of intelligence. The first, which appeared early in primate history, is “general intelligence”, a capacity for non-specific learning which can be applied to a wide range of problems. Later there appeared more specialised intelligences for particular tasks – a social intelligence for dealing with social interactions; a linguistic intelligence; a technical intelligence for tool-making; and finally “natural history” intelligence for dealing with the natural world.

In early humans, such as the Neanderthals, these various intelligences were isolated from one another, which restricted the range of thoughts available to the early human mind. Modern Human Behaviour is a “package” of behaviours generally accepted by anthropologists to include the use of abstract thought, symbolic behaviour (such as art, creative expression and religion), use of syntactically-complex language and the ability to plan ahead. This, according to Mithen, did not emerge until humans attained “cognitive fluidity” which enabled the various intelligences or cognitive domains to interact synergistically. Finally, cognitive fluidity permitted reflexive consciousness of the modern type. Language acted as the means of delivering non-social thoughts into the social domain and consciousness could start to play the integrating role. Individuals could become introspective about their non-social thought-processes and knowledge, leading to the flexibility and creativity that characterises modern human behaviour.

That language is intimately linked to modern thought processes has also been suggested by Derek Bickerton, though the Bickerton theory of how modern human behaviour arose differs in a number of details from that of Mithen; in particular Bickerton sees the proto-language of early humans as being entirely distinct from modern language, which evolved primarily as a means of representing concepts rather than a means of communication (Bickerton, 1990). In his later work The Singing Neanderthal, Mithen rejects Bickerton’s compositional (word-based) proto-language and claims that the utterances of early humans were holistic (Mithen, 2005).

The notion of humans initially possessing compartmentalised minds is to some extent reminiscent of Julian Jaynes’ theory of “bicameral minds” proposed two decades before Mithen’s theory (Jaynes, 1976).

In his book, Mithen claimed modern human behaviour did not arise until after anatomically modern humans left Africa, based on the then-prevalent view that the earliest evidence for it is seen in Europe around 40,000 years ago (e.g. Diamond, 1991; Klein, 1999; Klein & Edgar, 2002). However this view has been challenged (McBrearty & Brooks, 2000; McBrearty, 2007; Henshilwood et al, 2004; Lewin & Foley, 2004; Oppenheimer, 2002), with clear evidence for a far earlier emergence in Africa. Mithen now accepts an earlier date, predating the migrations from Africa (Mithen, 2007). This revised timescale doesn’t really affect the validity or otherwise of Mithen’s theory.

However Mithen’s theory is not without its problems and some of the evidence he puts forward in its support is unconvincing. In particular, he suggests that Early Humans (Homo erectus, H. heidelbergensis and the Neanderthals) did not use bone, antler and ivory for tool-making was because they could not think of animal parts (catered for under natural history) in the tool-making technical domain. In other words Mithen is saying that Early Humans were aware that bone, antler and ivory were of organic material, but some kind of cognitive demarcation dispute prevented them from utilising such material for tool-making. But even chimpanzees will use organic material such as sticks for tools (e.g. termite sticks). Mithen seems to be implying that once modularity developed, the ability to use such materials was lost, which strikes me as being implausible. It seems more likely that Early Humans did make tools with organic materials on occasions, but these have failed to survive in the archaeological record.

Mithen then asks why tools were not made for hunting specific types of prey. He attributes this to a lack of integration between the technical intelligence (tools) and natural history intelligence (prey). This question could really be restated as “why are Mode 2 (Acheulian) and to some extent the Mode 3 (Mousterian) technologies of Early Humans primitive in comparison to the Mode 4 (blade) and Mode 5 (microlith) technologies of Modern Humans?”

Clearly this suggests that Early Humans were less cognitively advanced than later humans, but was this solely due to domain isolation?

To conclude, Mithen’s theory is well-argued and the existence of multiple intelligences in early humans is a strong possibility. Personally, though, I am somewhat sceptical as to whether anatomically-modern humans ever had this type of brain. It seems far more likely that “cognitive fluidity”, assuming it did not exist in earlier humans, is a characteristic of Homo sapiens and emerged with it. Derek Bickerton believes that the ability to use syntax in speech and thought is characteristic of our species (Bickerton, 2007): possibly it is this that provided Mithen’s “cognitive fluidity” (though as noted above, Mithen has criticized Bickerton’s theory). The braincase of modern humans is globular, in contrast to the long, low braincases of other human species. This change in shape may have arisen from the need to accommodate the neural anatomy that was responsible for the change in human mental organization to that of the modern type.

References:

Bickerton D (1990): “Language and Species”, University of Chicago Press, USA.

Bickerton D (2007): “Did Syntax Trigger the Human Revolution?” in Rethinking the human revolution, McDonald Institute Monographs, University of Cambridge.

Boden, M (1990): “The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms”, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.

Dennett D (1991): “Consciousness Explained”, New York: Little, Brown & Company.

Diamond J (1991): “The Third Chimpanzee”, Radius, London.

Dunbar R (1996): “Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language”, Faber and Faber, London Boston.

Fodor J (1983): “The Modularity of Mind”, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Gardiner H (1983): “Frames of Mind”, Basic Books.

Gardiner H (1999): “Intelligence Reframed”, Basic Books.

Christopher S. Henshilwood and Curtis W. Marean (2003): The Origin of Modern Human Behavior: “Critique of the Models and Their Test Implications”, Current Anthropology Volume 44, Number 5, December 2003.

Jaynes J (1976): “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”, Mariner Books, USA.

Karmiloff-Smith A (1992): “Beyond Modularity”, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Klein, R. (1999): “The Human Career” (2nd Edition), University of Chicago Press.

Klein R & Edgar B (2002): “The Dawn of Human Culture”, John Wiley & Sons Inc., New York.

Lewin, R and Foley, R (2004): “Principles of Human Evolution” (2nd edition), Blackwell Science Ltd.

McBrearty S (2007): “Down with the Revolution”, in Rethinking the human revolution, McDonald Institute Monographs, University of Cambridge.

McBrearty S & Brooks A (2000): “The revolution that wasn’t: a new
interpretation of the origin of modern human behaviour”, Journal of Human Evolution (2000) 39, 453–563.

Mithen S (1996): “The Prehistory of the Mind”, Thames & Hudson.

Mithen S (2005): “The Singing Neanderthal”, Weidenfeld & Nicholson.

Mithen S (2007): “Music and the Origin of Modern Humans”, in Rethinking the human revolution, McDonald Institute Monographs, University of Cambridge.

Oppenheimer S (2002): “Out of Eden”, Constable.

Tomasello M (1999): “The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition”, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA & London.

© Christopher Seddon 2009

Modularity of the Mind (1983), by Jerry Fodor

Theories about the functional architecture of the human mind have fallen into a number of types.

Cartesian dualism is derived from the thinking of Rene Descartes, who believed that the brain is merely the seat of the mind. The latter was seen as a disembodied non-material entity, interacting with the former via the pineal gland, now known to be a small endocrinal gland linked to sexual development. However, most current theories seek to explain the mind in purely material terms. Historically these theories divided into two types, horizontal and vertical.

Horizontal theories refer to mental processes as if they are interactions between non-domain specific faculties such as memory, imagination, judgement, and perception. By contrast, vertical theories assert mental faculties are differentiated on the basis of domain specificity, are genetically determined, are associated with distinct neurological structures, and are computationally autonomous. This view has its origins in the 19th century phrenology movement founded by Franz Joseph Gall, who claimed that the individual mental faculties were associated with specific physical areas of the brain.

While this early view of modularity has long since been discarded, the theory was revived by Jerry Fodor in his 1983 work Modularity of the Mind. This theory abandons the notion of the “modular hardware” physically located in particular areas of the brain and draws on the work of Noam Chomsky in linguistics.

According to Fodor, the mind has two parts – input systems and cognition or central systems. The input systems are a series of discreet modules with dedicated architectures that govern sight, hearing, touch, etc. Language is also regarded as an input system. However the cognitive or central system has no architecture at all – this is where “thought”, “imagination” and “problem solving” happen and “intelligence” resides.

Each input system is based on independent brain processes and they are quite different from each other, reflecting their different purposes. These systems are localized in specific areas of the brain. The input systems are mandatory, if for example somebody sits behind you on the bus and spends the entire journey gassing away on their mobile, you cannot switch off the hearing module. However this has the advantage of saving time that would otherwise spent on decision-making.

As per the “vertical” view of mental architecture, Fodor believes that the input systems are “encapsulated”, i.e. they do not have direct access to the information being acquired by other input systems. What one is experiencing at a given time in one sensory modality does not any of the others – you cannot, for example, “see” sounds. [One problem for this view is the condition known as synaesthesia where sensory modalities apparently do interact and people can indeed see or taste sounds, etc. Well-known synaesthetes include David Hockney, Wassily Kandinsky and Vladimir Nabokov. The condition was evidently known to the French Romantic poets Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire, who both described it in their work.]

A second feature of the input modules is that they only have limited information from the central systems. Fodor cites a number of optical illusions such as the Muller-Lyre arrows, which continue to apparently differ in length even when one is fully aware that this is not the case. The input modules are essentially “dumb” systems that act independently of the cognitive system and each other. To sum up, they are encapsulated, mandatory, fast-operating and hard-wired. Perception is innate, i.e. hard wired into the mind at birth.

The central cognitive systems are very different to the “dumb” input systems. According to Fodor, they are “smart”, they operate slowly, are unencapsulated and domain-neutral, i.e. they cannot be related to specific areas of the brain.

The Fodorian view is that evolution has given the modern human mind the best of both worlds: input modules that can enable swift, unthinking reactions in situations of danger (predators, etc) or opportunity (prey, etc) on one hand; and a slower central cognitive system, to be used when there is time for quiet contemplation, integrating information of many types and from many sources.

© Christopher Seddon 2009

Language & Species (1990), by Derek Bickerton

Derek Bickerton (b.1926) is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Hawaii and believes that creole languages provide a powerful insight into both the acquisition of language by infants and the origins of language in humans. A creole is a stable fully-functional language apparently arising from a pidgin, which is a stripped-down lingua franca arising when people sharing no common tongue have to live and/or work together. Examples include merchant seamen in distant ports and, historically, slaves in the West Indies.

Bickerton is the main proponent of the Language Bioprogram Hypothesis (LBH). This theory states that the structural similarity between many creole languages must arise from an innate capacity in the brain.

The following is a summary of Bickerton’s 1990 work Language and Species:

Chapter 1 The Continuity Paradox
Human and animal behaviour separated by one major distinction that not often appreciated – language. Animal communications are holistic and limited, e.g. vervet monkeys have warnings for various types of predators. By contrast, human communications are complex and unlimited. How did one evolve from the other? The theory of evolution states that features do not arise de novo but must be built incrementally upon something already in existence, but how can something infinite arise from something finite? This is known as the Continuity Paradox.

Bickerton resolves this paradox with the bold assertion that language in humans did not arise from the vocalizations of other animals and that its primary function is not in fact communication but representation. Communication is no more than a handy spinoff.

Nouns do not correspond to real objects, only representations of them. If this were not the case we could not have words for things like unicorns and golden mountains, which do not exist in the real world. Our view of the world is always representational and not absolute – what we see is a representation built up by sensory data; through a glass, darkly as St. Paul might have put it.

Chapter 2 Language as Representation: the Atlas
Language can be regarded as a means of mapping reality in a style analogous to both an atlas and an itinerary book. It important to realise that the atlas and the itinerary book are both representations of reality and that therefore they cannot represent with absolute verisimilitude. This limitation also applies to language – it does not directly map the experiential world. Language is a mediated mapping, a mapping that derives from the processing of sensory inputs.

In this chapter, Bickerton considers the atlas-like properties of language and states that a word can have three levels of meaning. Our knowledge of the world, in common with that of other animals, is derived from a series of mapping operations. The first of these – shared with other animals – is from existential objects to neural cells and networks in the brain. The first level of meaning is simple perception of, say, a leopard (non-italicised and not in quotes). We can only perceive a leopard when one is actually present, but we can think about leopards in their absence. This second level of meaning is the concept of something, for example “leopard” – the concept of leopards (in quotes). Some animal such as frogs almost certainly don’t have concepts. Frogs react quickly to snap up passing insects, but this is simply a hard-wired reaction to small rapidly moving objects (it ignores stationary insects and reacts to pellets flicked across their line of vision, but it works more often than not). Humans on the other hand do have concepts: for example an unidentified sound at night will be matched against possible explanations. Vervets probably fall somewhere in between and can equate the smell, sound and sight of a leopard with the same thing. Finally there is leopard (italicised), which refers to the word itself – a label - without any clear meaning being necessarily attached to it.

“Leopard” and leopard are defined in terms of (the perception of a) leopard, but this isn’t necessarily always the case; (the perception of a) burglar can only be expressed in terms of the concept of a “burglar” and the word burglar; we can define “paranoia” and label paranoia, but we cannot perceive paranoia.

Units relating to entities are insufficient to describe the world, because pretty well everything we see is doing something; for example walking, running, swimming, flying, etc. The subject/predicate distinction in language is so fundamental that it tends to be taken for granted, but it corresponds to nothing in nature. You cannot see an animal without perceiving at the same time what it is doing, e.g. a cow grazing. There is no word for cow-grazing, but we would expect there to be if language exactly mirrored reality. One possibility is that this is for reason of economy, because we’d need words for cow-running, cow-mooing, etc. But Bickerton believes that the explanation is that the concept of entities preceded the concept of behaviours. Behaviours are more abstract than entities; a cow cannot be anything other than a cow, but many types of animal can graze or run.

Behaviours are of course not the only things that can be predicated of entities. Properties such as size, colour, temperature, etc may also be attributed to entities. Typically these adjectives are paired, large/small, hot/cold, fast/slow, etc. While we can have words such as fast, faster and fastest, there is no language that represents a continuum of, say, speeds or temperatures.

The level of representation given by the lexicon abstracts away from and interprets the flux of experience. It derives a wide range of entities, together with behaviours and attributes that can be predicated of these entities. These form an inventory of everything that we see; however the lexicon is not unstructured.

Words are hierarchical e.g. animal -> mammal -> dog -> Spaniel. The word “anger” includes a range of words from irritation and annoyance through to rage and fury. Anger in turn falls in the category of emotion. Words can not only be converted to strings of other words, but fall into place within a universal filing system that permits any concept to be retrieved and comprehended.

Words are also constrained by contiguity. For example there is no word for “left leg and left arm”, or “every other Friday” or “red and green”. The referent must be an uninterrupted piece of matter or time or space. This even applies to abstract properties like ownership, location, possession, existence. Some languages, such as English, use one verb (is) for existence, location, ownership (e.g. there IS a book, the pub IS across the road, the book IS yours) and another (have) for possession (I have a book); but no language groups together existence/ownership and location/possession (the equivalent of the pub HAVE across the road). This suggests that contiguity constraints exist even in highly abstract domains. Semantic space may well be an intrinsic property of the brain; the lexicon is carved up into convenient chunks.

Chapter 3 Language as Representation: the Itineraries
While a map can tell you what the terrain is like, an itinerary is required to tell you what journeys may be taken. Similarly there are rules governing a journey through semantic space. Sentences are underlain by three types of structural consistency: predicability, grammaticisation and syntax.

Predicability imposes constraints between entities and predication – e.g. “the story is true” or “the cow is brown” are permissible, but not “the story is brown” or “the cow is true”. Only abstract qualities can be predicated of abstract nouns; and concrete qualities of concrete nouns. What can and cannot be predicated can be drawn up on a tree diagram. A quality at the top of the tree can be predicated of any class below it, but of no class above it. A quality on a side branch can only be predicated of a class on the branch below it.

For example, trees, pigs and men can all be dead; but only pigs and humans can be hungry; and only humans can be honest. All of these things plus thunderstorms can be nearby, but only thunderstorms could have happened yesterday; and so on.

Three observations may be made about the tree. Firstly it has binary branching. There is no obvious reason for this. Why only two? Why not three or more branches at each node? Secondly there is a contiguity constraint – for example anything applying to humans and plants must also apply to animals. Thirdly the tree does not seem to be derived from experience of the world as children as young as three or four used only slightly truncated trees. This does suggest that language as a classification mechanism is constrained by the human-specific conceptual analysis of the natural world.

Grammatical items are structural pieces that hold the meaningful parts of the sentence together – either inflections (-ing, -ed, etc), or words like “of” as in “the handle of the door”, or above, below, on, in, at, by, before, after, while, etc. Some languages to not express all these relations; others express relations not found in English. For example Hopi and Turkish both have inflections that differentiate between information gained through personal experience or obtained second hand. But grammaticization is only used on a few relations – those pertaining to singular/plural, and past/present/future (tense).

No language grammaticizes more than a fraction of the possible relations and while tenses and singular/plural seems to be a universal feature of language there is no language with grammatical constructs for edible/inedible, friendly/hostile, etc, even though these things would be useful. It seems that we are obliged to grammaticize some things, yet other things cannot be grammaticized. While one might dismiss this as a mere convention of languages, conventions can be broken and these never are. We can expand lexicon but not grammar. The latter appears to be a black box; we can neither alter it nor explain it.

Syntax is highly complex, yet we can all master its subtleties. A sentence is constructed of phrases; each phrase is a hierarchical not linear entity. A sentence of 10 words can be re-arranged over 3 million ways, only one of which is correct – yet we can do it effortlessly. Without syntax, complex ideas could not be communicated.

Chapter 4 The Origins of Representational Systems
Language must have evolved as a representational system, not for communications. How did this happen? Our senses give us a species-specific view of reality, only a subset of the data potentially available (e.g. little smell data, unlike dogs). This is the primary representation system, or PRS. All such systems arose from cells that could differentiate between two states, a distinction between sensory cells and motor cells, and motor cells capable of more than one behaviour type in response to a given stimulus. Humans alone have a secondary representation system (SRS) – language.

At lowest level there are organisms like sea anemones that can identify chemical signature of hostile starfish and execute an escape manoeuvre. Next is conditional response such as a crayfish that becomes habituated to being touches and eventually does not waste energy on an escape manoeuvre, or a grub that only moves if light-levels increase above a certain threshold. Ability to evaluate data is more complex in – say – lizard stalking a fly, where there is actual data processing by the brain leading to a choice of behaviours.

Vervet monkeys are genetically-programmed to respond to snakes. Similarly, if you touch something hot you move your hand away without thinking too hard. But such an approach has its limitations. Wildebeest do not always flee when they see a lion. If they did, they’d have less time to feed and they’d either exhaust themselves or starve. So they become alert – indeed they experience fear. But they don’t flee until threat assessment becomes critical. But fear – an emotion – is crucial to making a decision to flee.

Representations are either innate (metabolizing food, growing hair, producing sentences, etc) or learned (writing, sewing, swimming, etc). We are conscious of learned representations, but cannot access innate representations. But all representations lead to category formation – to form a category three things are needed: an object in the external world; patterns of cell activity in observers brain directly or indirectly triggered by the object’s presence; and the observer’s response, both internal and external to these patterns. Categories are species-specific.

For humans, categories are basically concepts, “concept” is simply the name we give a category. In non-human animals, categories might be referred to as proto-concept. Which came first – language or concepts? Probably language originally labelled proto-concepts derived from pre-linguistic experience; this was later expanded to be capable of deriving concepts not present in PRS, e.g. absence, golden mountains, etc. While the SRS can divide the universe exhaustively, PRS must do the same, e.g. for frogs, everything is either a frog, a pond, a large looming object or something else not relevant to frogs.

Pigeons can develop quite sophisticated categories – can be trained to peck certain classes of object, e.g. tree pictures. Such behaviour cannot be entirely innate as they can be trained to respond to objects they could have no knowledge of. But some categories - trees, humans, etc – probably are innate; probably categories of things that are significant to a particular species are innate, but the ability to analyse novel objects as well, by utilizing this processing power subsequently evolved. However provided the referents of particular proto-concepts remained relevant, these would be retained and new ones would be added over evolutionary time.

Categories/proto-concepts such as “tree”, “human” etc may be precursors of nouns. Some monkeys have temporal cortex cells that respond to movement of a primate-like figure – could these be proto-verbs? But these are agent-plus-actions rather than actions – human language does not conflate an entity and its behaviour into single words; subject-predicate distinction is fundamental as seen earlier.

Tiger running, tiger walking, tiger attacking could be broken down into “tiger” + action; however tiger running, dog running, insect running cannot so easily be broken down into X + “running” as the types of “running” differ, as opposed to only one type of tiger. This is why verbs are more abstract than nouns and are harder to represent. However if only a subset of a particular behaviour is considered, it can be restricted to species likely to perform it – for example only primates can “grab with hand”.

Proto-nouns might have represented species interacting with hominids. Proto-verbs might have been actions only hominids could perform. This implies awareness of conspecifics with which the creature interacts – in turn implying a social species. Awareness of self is a cornerstone of language and consciousness.

Chapter 5 The Fossils of Language
Ape language is basically very limited. Does it represent an earlier form of human language? It is comparable to that of a 2-yr old human. Bickerton then considers the possibility that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”. “Genie” was a 13 year old girl imprisoned from birth and not exposed to language. After her rescue, she learned only ape/2 yr old-type language and could not be taught full language. Genie failed to acquire human language but has acquired something else. Language therefore cannot be a unitary system requiring input during critical period or Genie would have not acquired any language at all. Genie acquired proto-language (a robust “mature technology”) but could not go further and acquire full language. The means of acquisition are not the same for both.

Pidgins are proto-languages. Numerous examples known, for example slaves in West Indies, immigrants to Hawaii from 1880-1930, Russian and Scandinavian sailors; their speakers nevertheless have normal linguistic skills.

Thus there are four classes of proto-language speakers: apes, under-2-yr-olds, adults deprived of language and pidgin-speakers. 1. Language has word order constrained by general rules, formal structure; proto-language does not. 2. Language uses null elements in a consistent manner; proto-language does not (not well explained). 3. In language verbs have one, two or three arguments (like subprograms). Sleep 1 “Fred sleeps” Go 2 “Fred goes to bed” Give 3 “Fred gives Bert five pounds”. 4. Proto-language cannot expand phrases – the man to the tall man, tall bald man, tall bald fat man etc, or concatenate phrases – John wants books -> John wants books to study. 5. Proto-languages do not inflect.

Proto-language is not a blanket term for ungrammatical language (e.g. people with aphasia due to damaged Broca’s area). It does appear to be a distinct thing in itself. But how did we get from proto-language to full language?

Chapter 6 The World of Protolanguage
Relative brain size jumps at the Homo habilis-ergaster/erectus boundary. H. habilis is claimed to show enlarged Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas and was right-handed; first signs of lateralization. Proto-language could have begun with H. habilis (Bickerton’s hominid evolution diagrams represent the state of knowledge current in 1990). Tools and language are unlikely to have co-evolved. If H. habilis had proto-language than H. ergaster/erectus possibly had language – in which case why did the Acheulian tool tradition not evolve? It is likely that H. habilis did not have language and H. ergaster/erectus had only proto-language. Possibly this aided them in the use of fire, which seems well-attested. Bickerton rejects the theory of “gesture language”. If this was correct, infants would use sign-language (assuming ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny); language must have been vocal from the beginning. Sufficient cortical control was probably achieved by the time of Australopithecus afarensis – involuntary calling would have been maladaptive to a species that operated on the savannahs of east Africa. Vocal tract developed as the larynx lowered, increasing the risk of choking. Proto-language probably didn’t require the perfected human vocal tract, which would have been maladaptive if it had developed first. However changes to the vocal tract would have been favoured after proto-language developed. Original vocabulary was probably small – phonology may have developed in conjunction with syntax. A pre-phonological stage may exist in pre-syntactic children.

Reliance on sight in primates increased area of brain needed to process data: increased PRS categories -> drove things on in the direction of language. Chimps have few enemies but savannah-dwelling hominids have many. Curiosity about surroundings; recognising and categorizing was adaptive and selected for.

Few animals face the same set of problems as early humans as few are both social and omnivorous, with such varied feeding habits. Social herbivores move in herds, social carnivores hunt in packs and kill much larger animals; humans could not do this 2 million years ago. A band of foraging humans could split into small groups able to use proto-language could get the attention of others and lead them to finds too large for them alone.

There are three types of learning: Experiential learning (e.g. I am trying to escape from a tiger, I jump into a river and swim across and the tiger fails to follow. Next time I am chased by a tiger I’ll head for the river); Observational learning (I see a man escape from a tiger by swimming across a river and conclude this is the thing to do if I’m in the same position); and finally Constructive learning (I note that tigers will go round a body of water rather than swim across it. I conclude that tigers avoid water and if attacked by one this might offer an escape route).

Pretty well all animals are capable of learning from experience, and many can learn by observation such as the blue tits that began pecking their way into milk bottles in the UK in the 1970s. The majority of these birds undoubtedly learned the trick from watching their conspecifics.

But is any animal lacking language capable of constructive learning? For apes, it appears to be possible only in a limited fashion and all the elements involved need to be physically present. Anything involving absent individuals or classes of entity requires a form of representation beyond those available to non-humans.

There is nothing in the fossil record to suggest that H. ergaster/erectus had cognitive capabilities comparable to ours. It therefore seems likely that H. ergaster/erectus lacked syntax, hence had only proto-language and could not think as we do.

Chapter 7 From Protolanguage to Language
Proto-language can evolve to true language without an intermediate. There is no plausible intermediate between the two. A child moves rapidly from proto-language to full language, falling back on the former only when their lexicon does not have the necessary grammatical words. Pidgins develop into creoles – i.e. a true language arises from a proto-language. Creoles tend to have the same grammar regardless of the constituent languages suggesting a biological basis for it. In neither of these proto-to-full language transitions is an intermediate involved.

Modern human behaviour (whenever this did emerge) was probably linked to emergence of true language. Bickerton seems to support early emergence (i.e. AMH were behaviourally modern from Day 1) contra Klein (1999 etc), Mithen (1996), etc. The gap in the fossil record he attributes either to use of perishable materials while H. sapiens remained confined to Africa, or that it took time to develop the artefacts of modern humans despite always having the capacity to do so. This view, quite radical for 1990, is basically the position taken by McBrearty and Brooks (2000).

Cases for an intermediate language are not plausible because the intermediate would be as complex as the full-blown language. Nor could features of a true language be acquired piecemeal as they are all too interlinked. The only way a gradual process could have happened would have been if the structural principles were at hand, but the lexicon was still limited.

Proto-language probably acquired grammatical items – negator, wh-questions; auxiliaries (can, must, etc); time – earlier/later; location particles (often only one meaning on/in/at/to/from); possibly even pronouns.

The verb arguments are of three types (thematic roles) Agent, Patient, Goal – e.g. Bert (agent) gave five pounds (Patient) to Fred (Goal). These roles are not given by nature but are high-level abstractions. They probably originated through millennia of day-to-day hominid routine, with Agent as the most important. These roles were probably not systematically expressed.

These two developments in proto-language could have facilitated the emergence of true language. Verbally expressing emotion may have come next, followed by use of proto-language to model internal states of others. But how did we get to language? Could one mutation have done it? Could one mutation have generated a) syntax, b) skull features and dimensions and c) the larynx positioning?

Author believes possible explanation for a) is visual-processing areas of the brain could have been pressed into service to process syntax and not some central repository such as Broca’s area. This would explain why aphasia affects only grammaticization, not syntax (allegedly) [the role of the FOXP2 gene wasn’t discovered until 1998].

Chapter 8 Mind Consciousness and Knowledge
Einstein’s claims notwithstanding, language is required for thinking. Much goes on beneath the level of conscious thought that the thinker is unaware of. Mind, consciousness and the search for knowledge may all arise from having a language-based SRS with a syntax processor.

Even if the human mind does derive from language, this does not tell us about the precise relationship between language and mind. It was once believed that a full understanding of language would serve as a “window on the mind”, but this implied that language permeated the mind at every level. This in turn implied that the mind was a single problem-solving mechanism, as often been assumed by empiricists.

This view is seemingly at odds with the “modular mind” theory of Jerry Fodor, Howard Gardner, Annette Karmiloff-Smith etc. Despite the success of modularity theories, there is a problem. If modularity emerged after language there would not have been enough time for other modules, each with their own unique mechanism, to have evolved subsequently. [If Steven Mithen is correct, modularity considerably predates the emergence of fully-modern Homo sapiens (Mithen, 1996)].

Conversely if modularity emerged first and remained largely uninfluenced by the development of language it would only work if these were independent of language [which I believe is the accepted view] and language was not a representational system but merely a code for expressing the output [why?]. It would also predict human intellectual capabilities largely pre-existed language, which is clearly not the case [Mithen’s “cognitive fluidity” seems to be the answer here (Mithen, 1996)].

Bickerton’s resolution of this modularity versus window-on-the-mind problem is to suppose that that syntax processing is not an isolated module but a particular type of nervous organization that permeates and interconnects those areas of the brain devoted to higher reasoning processes, concepts and the lexicon, a type of organization that automatically sorts material into binary-branching tree structures. Other modules will then receive and output material that has been pre-processed to conform to syntactic principles [this suggests a mechanism by which Mithen’s “cognitive fluidity” might work, though in fact Mithen is critical of Bickerton’s proto-language and believes utterances of early humans were holistic (Mithen, 2005)].

What is “I”? Am I the whole body or just mind or a homunculus? Human language divides entity from behaviour, so “I am hungry” suggests “I” is divided from being hungry. Is the central directing “homunculus” a product of language – nothing more than an illusion – or is it something more? The latter suggests the human organism is indeed divided in some way, and not necessarily the way language suggests it is. In other words, the brain is modular.

Experiments with left/right hemispheres have suggested that right hemisphere has only PRS, lacks syntax capability but can do inference.

“I” cannot control the entire organism – cannot control bodily functions, which carry on if I’m asleep or unconscious. There is accessible I – linked to language and inaccessible I – not linked to language. This is better than mind-body model. Talking I is a module that forms a part of accessible I, though sometimes other modules grab the microphone. “I forced myself to do x” means “information in the SRS indicated that doing X would bring long term benefit, despite short-term appeal of doing Y”.

Chapter 9 The Nature of the Species
We are living in the fourth age of man [taken to be H. sapiens only]. In the first phase, from 200K years ago to 40K years ago, humans were hunter-gatherers confined to Africa. In the second phase, humans left Africa and “beat the Neanderthals”. The third phase, which began with the coming of agriculture at the end of the last ice age, introduced territorialism and inequality. [In fact early Neolithic societies, such as that at Catal Hoyuk in Anatolia, seem to have been fairly egalitarian, though there is no doubt that sedentism, which made it possible to accumulate possessions for the first time, led to the beginnings of social inequality. The notion that pre-agricultural man was not territorial seems highly dubious to me, considering that chimps are territorial.]

The Fourth Age begun 400 years ago, when inequality between state-level societies emerged.

“Did Syntax Trigger the Human Revolution” (Bickerton, 2007) is a paper submitted as Bickerton’s contribution to a series of papers published after the 2005 Cambridge conference entitled “Rethinking the Human Revolution”, part of the on-going debate about the mode, tempo and timing of the emergence of modern human behaviour.

Bickerton rejects the notion of a “Great Leap forward” 50-30 kya in Europe; the evidence now suggests that features thought to be novel to Europe emerged in Africa earlier. Did characteristically human cognitive capacities (CCHC) emerge gradually over 200-300 ky? It is more plausible that the change occurred with emergence of our own species. Bickerton considers and rejects the notion of studying tool sophistication because of the difficulty of agreeing what constitutes sophistication. There are also the assumptions that gradual increase in tool complexity implies increase in CHCC and that the moment a CHCC emerges it must result in artefact change. It is more plausible that when modern humans evolved, CHCCs emerged with them, but the novel artefacts only appeared later in response to selective pressure or cultural development. However it is equally implausible that these new CHCCs lay dormant for extended periods of time. An in between position seems the most likely.

It is possible to assume that the Acheulian hand-axes required the maker to conceptualise the finished article [the accepted position] but makers could simply copy and possibly modify and improve upon existing axes. Bickerton believes second possibility is more parsimonious, as there are objects intermediate between Oldowan and Acheulian, and between Acheulian and subsequent industries. On this picture, all human (inc. pre-sapiens) artefacts fall into two classes – those that are modifications of earlier artefacts and those that are completely new and would have to be imagined first (e.g. fish hooks, “Venus” figurines, etc).

What is required to create novel artefacts? Not necessarily bigger [or even more encephalised?] brains. Bickerton returns to his thesis of a proto-language developing around 2 mya. It is not, by itself, enough to produce novelties, though it would have increased social and foraging capacities. To sustain the trains of thought needed to produce novelties, something else is required. Bickerton distinguishes between “thought 1” (pre-linguistic thinking), “thought 2” (thinking with proto-language) and “thought 3” (thinking with full language). Only “thought 3” would permit a sustained train of thought.

Thought 1 could permit such thoughts as “that is a lion” (reacting to the sight of a lion) or “I am hungry” (feeling peckish) but not “hungry lions are dangerous” which would require the ability to instantiate the abstract class of “lion” at will rather than in response to actually seeing a lion. Australopithecines and present-day apes were/are probably restricted to thought 1.

Proto-language could have been holistic, like Steven Mithen’s “hmmmm” (Mithen, 2006) or – as per Bickerton’s position – comprise short, unstructured strings of single units (either oral or gestures) roughly corresponding to the individual words of present-day languages. Such a proto-language would have had a term for a lion corresponding to the abstract class “lion”. It would have enabled its possessors to think about things in their absence without triggering the responses (fight, flight, wait, etc) that a pre-linguistic signal might have occasioned.

Bickerton dismisses the long-running debate on the possibility of thought without language. If thought is mental computation, then anything with a brain is capable of thought. The issue is how to think at a level that creates novel behaviours or artefacts. Thinking is not conducted by words or images, as the brain does contain words and images, only neural pathways. Proto-language units enable creation of neural representations that allow thinking without direct reference to external objects to take place. These units could have been used for both language and thought. The former would have required an additional layer of mapping to a phonological representation for utterance and also a relationship between units – words and/or signs.

Language and proto-language both concatenate units of which they are composed, but language does so in a highly-structured manner with embedded phrases and clauses where as proto-language simply assembles words like beads on a string. Complex thought would have been impossible and proto-language speakers would have remained confined to thought 2.

The crucial difference is syntax. Bickerton believes that the same mechanism required to produce full language also enables the brain to marshal the complex trains of thought needed for innovation. Since the functionality is similar it is more parsimonious to assume the existence of just one rather than two distinct mechanisms. Bickerton speculates the need for more complex utterances might have led to the evolution of a syntax system, which served without further modification as an organizer of thought, and that its possessors are capable of thought 3. It is therefore likely that the development of syntax of language was a necessary and possibly sufficient pre-requisite for the emergence of modern human behaviour.

References:
Bickerton D (1990): “Language and Species”, University of Chicago Press, USA.

Bickerton D (2007): “Did Syntax Trigger the Human Revolution?” in Rethinking the human revolution, McDonald Institute Monographs, University of Cambridge.

Fodor J (1983): “The Modularity of Mind”, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Gardiner H (1983): “Frames of Mind”, Basic Books.

Gardiner H (1999): “Intelligence Reframed”, Basic Books.

Karmiloff-Smith A (1992): “Beyond Modularity”, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Klein, R. (1999): “The Human Career” (2nd Edition), University of Chicago Press.

Mithen S (1996): “The Prehistory of the Mind”, Thames & Hudson.

Mithen S (2005): “The Singing Neanderthal”, Weidenfeld & Nicholson.

London Metropolitan University Graduate Centre

Holloway in North London is not normally noted for its cutting-edge architecture. However the Graduate Centre on London Metropolitan University's London North Campus was designed by the internationally-famous architect Daniel Libeskind, whose portfolio includes the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester. Opened in 2004, it is only Libeskind's second building in the United Kingdom.













© Christopher Seddon 2009

Omega Constellation (1968)

In the 1950s and 1960s, an Omega wristwatch was regarded as being at least as prestigious as a Rolex and many consider the automatic movements developed by Omega during this period to be superior to their Rolex counterparts.

Omega’s flagship model was the Constellation, introduced in 1952 and still in production. The original model became known as the “pie-pan” because its dial resembled an inverted pie dish. The “pie-pan” remained in production until the late 1960s and is still regarded by many as the classic “Connie”. However the “pie-pan” gained a stable-mate in 1964, the tonneau-shaped “C-type”, named for the resemblance of the case and lugs to pair of “C”s facing one another.



The watch above dates to 1968 and houses Omega’s Calibre 564, the final iteration of the 5xx series of chronometer-certified inhouse movements which Omega perfected over the course of a decade, beginning with Cal. 501 in 1955 (earlier “Connies” used Omega’s so-called “bumper automatic” movements, Cal. 354). Cal. 564 featured a quickset date and is widely accepted to be one of the finest automatic movements ever made. This particular watch is still keeping time to within chronometer limits after more than forty years.

The “C-type” is not as popular with collectors as the “pie-pan” and they tend to command far lower prices. This is good news for anybody wishing to acquire a classic example of 1960s design for a fraction of the price of a present-day Rolex!

© Christopher Seddon 2009

Blue pillar box, Manchester

I have been unable to ascertain why this pillar box, located outside Manchester's Museum of Science and Industry, is sky blue rather than the customary red. A possible explanation is that it's for the use of long-suffering Manchester City fans who not only have to endure the continuing success of arch-rivals Manchester United, but also would otherwise have to post their letters in Man U-coloured pillar boxes!

© Christopher Seddon 2009

Gettier's Pint

Edmund and Bertrand had arranged to meet for a few beers after work at the “Philosopher’s Head”. Both were avid drinkers of Fullers London Pride. Edmund was 99% sure he’d had a pint of London Pride in the “Philosopher’s Head” but just to make sure he looked it up on the internet and sure enough it was listed as a Fullers pub.

Bertrand, who worked near the pub, decided to check it out himself in his lunch hour. He saw beer pumps labelled “Fullers London Pride”, but he also saw a sign over the bar saying “Under New Management. We are now a Free house”.

The pub sold London Pride, as Edmund believed. But was he right to say he knew, i.e. did his belief count as knowledge [justified true belief]?

Edmund believed the pub sold London Pride;
He had evidence that this was so (his belief was justified);
It was true that the pub sold London Pride.

But as the pub was now a free house, it could have been selling practically anything.

Regardless of the epistemological implications of all this, the moral of the story is obvious: IT'S ALL TOO EASY TO BE COMPLETELY STITCHED UP BY AN OUT-OF-DATE WEBSITE!

© Christopher Seddon 2009

Bussard Ramjet, by John Timberlake

John Timberlake (born 1967) is a London-based artist and writer whose work frequently explores realities that never came to pass. Blurring the boundaries between literature, painting and photography, this slim retro-styled volume ponders a glittering possible future for mankind that, fifty years ago, seemed to be there for the taking. Proposed by the US physicist Dr. Robert W. Bussard in 1960, the Bussard Ramjet (BR-J) was an ambitious proposal for an interstellar drive that would have required leaps technology and, Timberlake argues, radical changes in global economics and the possible remodelling of humanity itself. His images, some apocalyptic, others featuring futuristic water conduits superimposed onto bleak, contemporary settings, are interposed between dream-like narratives referencing alternate pasts and possible futures. There are constant references to Poul Anderson’s 1970 science-fiction novel Tau Zero, which describes an optimistic future in which the BR-J has made interstellar travel a reality; The contrast with the bleakness of Timberlake’s narratives could not be greater and suggests that Bussard’s bold vision will remain forever a dream.

(This book review appeared in Art World Magazine www.artworldmagazine.com Issue 10 April/May 2009.)

© Christopher Seddon 2009

Blombos Cave

Introduction:
Blombos Cave (BBC) is located near Still Bay on the southern Cape coast in South Africa. It is 100m (330ft) from the coast and 35m (115ft) above sea-level. The site was discovered by Christopher Henshilwood in 1991 and has been excavated regularly since.

The site is notable for the discovery of two pieces of ochre, 73,000 years old, engraved with abstract designs; 75,000 year old tick shell (Nassarius kraussianus) beads; 70,000 year old bone tools; and evidence of shellfish collection and possibly fishing 140,000 years ago. All of these are considered to be markers of modern human behaviour, emerging millennia before the so-called “human revolution” 50,000 years ago.

Stratigraphy:
Three MSA phases have been excavated; these are separated from overlaying the LSA by wind-blown sediments. The phases, from top to bottom, are known as M1, M2 and M3. Dating by Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) and Thermoluminescence (TL) methods has yielded dates of c. 73,000 years for the M1 Still Bay phase (oxygen isotope stage OIS-5a/4); c. 77,000 years for the M2 Still Bay phase (OIS-5a); c. 80,000 years for the M2 low density (hiatus) phase (layers CGAA, CGAB, CGAC); and c. 125-140,000 years for the M3 phase (OIS-5e/6). The M1 layer is separated from the more recent LSA deposits by a hiatus layer of sterile aeolian (wind-blown) sand; M2 and M3 are also separated by a hiatus layer. M1 comprises layers CA, CB, CC, CD and CE; M2 comprises CFA, CFB/CFC and CGA; M3 comprises CGB/CH, CI, CJ, CK, CL, CM, CN, CO and CP. These occupation layers are generally less than 10cm thick, suggesting sporadic, brief periods of occupation punctuated by long periods when the cave was not in use (Henshilwood, 2007; Henshilwood et al, 2001; Jacobs et al, 2006; Tribolo et al, 2006).

Subsistence:
All three phases of occupation have evidence of extensive exploitation of aquatic resources including large fish, shellfish, seals and dolphins. Land mammals were extensively hunted, with mole-rats making a frequent appearance on the menu (Henshilwood et al, 2001; Henshilwood, 1997).

All three phases have wood-ash scattered indicating regular use of fire for cooking purposes.

Still Bay technology:
Bifacial foliate points associated with the Still Bay tradition were recovered from the M1 and upper M2 phases of Blombos. Earlier phases contain lithic artefacts that do not fit into existing MSA 1 typographic traditions. They represent an earlier phase of the MSA (Henshilwood, 2007, citing Soressi & Henshilwood, 2004, unpublished paper).

Still Bay points are soft hammer worked points, predominantly made on
silcrete. They are typically bifacially retouched, narrowly elliptic to lanceolate shaped tools, with two sharply pointed apices. There is a distinct preference for silcrete as a raw material. Increased use of finer-grained stone, relative to earlier MSA phases, is a characteristic of the Still Bay (Henshilwood et al, 2001). The small, highly-standardised bifacial Still Bay stone points are a marker of behavioural change (Klein, 1999).

Bone tools:
Bone tools are known from the M1 and upper M2 phases, corresponding to the Still Bay complex. The tools include points and awls. The majority are shaped on bone fragments or splinters removed from long bone shafts although in some cases the whole bone is shaped. Bovid bone is most widely used but marine mammal bone and a single bird bone were also employed.

Morphology and use-wear patterns suggest most MSA bone tools (85%) were used to perforate fairly soft material such as well-worked hides, possibly during the manufacture of clothing and other items, probably being used as awls. However three artefacts have been interpreted as projectile points, being visually similar to bone projectile points from various LSA and ethnographic collections. These are symmetrical both at the tip and in overall shape, are worked on the entire surface and tend strongly toward a circular cross-section. In contrast, awls are often asymmetrical in shape, may be incompletely worked and mostly have an elliptical cross-section. Blombos cave bone tools interpreted as awls conform to their LSA counterparts. One of the putative projectile points shows signs of hafting; probably all three were.

MSA bone tools at Blombos Cave were extensively used after manufacture, in many cases re-used even after tip breakage, suggesting that tools were maintained at the site. Tools were probably discarded when the breakage occurred nearer the midpoint, rather than the tip, making the tool too small to hold for further use. Projectile points were probably discarded when they broke in the haft.

One question is that if the people of the African MSA possessed the cognitive ability to make bone tools, why have so few been found in the archaeological record in comparison to Upper Palaeolithic Europe? One possibility is that MSA people only worked bone infrequently. African hardwoods are also suitable for the manufacture of tools such as awls and points, are easier to work than bone and may thus have been used in preference. Wood is rarely preserved in MSA sites, so such tools would be absent from the archaeological record. Another possibility is that bone tools in the MSA may have served specific, time limited functions within small populations that were relatively isolated, in contrast to the demographic picture the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe.

Bone tool use in Africa may have been the exception rather than the rule and purely practical considerations may also be a factor. Though generally bone fares better than wood, taphonomic factors do still dictate against its preservation at many MSA sites. In addition, many MSA sites were excavated before modern recovery techniques became available and much evidence may have been lost.

There is currently a lack of consensus on the evolutionary significance of bone tool technology. It is not known why humans began to produce bone tools or the incidence and consequence of their manufacture in and use in prehistoric societies. Consequently we do not know whether bone tool technology represents one attribute of cultural modernity or that it results from punctuated cultural adaptations that have little evolutionary significance. The association of formal or elaborate bone artefacts and the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe has been used to argue that bone technology is allied with cultural modernity, anatomically modern humans and a package of other euro-centrically derived modern cultural behaviours, but what is observed in one region does not necessarily constitute a general paradigm

Bone tools from Blombos cave may also reflect symbolic behaviour. The techniques used to manufacture objects in many societies are more often a reflection of their symbolic rather than utilitarian function. The careful deliberate polishing of the Blombos MSA bone artefacts interpreted as projectile points has no apparent function and seems to be a technique used to give a distinctive appearance and/or an ‘‘added value’’ to this category of artefacts.

In contemporary hunter-gatherer societies a consequence of the symbolic value of hunting weapons is that they are produced and handled solely by men. The differences in the manufacturing techniques between the projectile points used for hunting and awls used domestically may well reflect the different symbolic functions of these activities; differences that must have been linguistically transmitted (Henshilwood, 2007; Henshilwood et al, 2001).

Ochre:
More than 2000 pieces of ochre have been recovered from the M1 and M2 phases. Two pieces (AA 8937 and AA 8938) from the M1 phase have been unequivocally engraved. Both pieces have a cross-hatched pattern. On AA 8938 this is bounded top and bottom by parallel lines, with a third parallel line running through the middle. The choice of raw material, the situation and preparation of the engraved surface, engraving techniques and final design for both pieces are similar, indicating a deliberate sequence of choices and intent. They are not isolated occurrences or the result of idiosyncratic behaviour (Henshilwood, 2007). Fully syntactical language is arguably an essential requisite to share and transmit the symbolic meaning of beadworks and abstract engravings such as those from Blombos Cave (Henshilwood et al, 2004).

Beads:
More than 65 “tick” shell (Nassarius kraussianus) beads have been recovered from the MSA levels at Blombos Cave. These shells occur only in estuaries and were probably brought to the site from the Duiwenhoks and Goukou rivers, located around 20km from the cave. This distance rules out the shell having been deposited at the cave by non-human predators. While it is possible that the tick shells were collected as food, the time taken to extract the modest quantities of nutrient available per shell makes this unlikely given the availability of larger shellfish and fish.

All the shells are adult, indicating deliberate selection for size, and arguing again against their presence being the result of non-human agency. All are perforated dorsally with 88 percent having a medium sized perforation near the lip, confirming the perforations to be man-made and deliberate rather than the result of some natural process. A sharp tool, elliptical in section, was most likely used to make the perforations.

The beads show signs of wear from threading with cord or gut and contact with human skin, suggesting they were worn as bracelets or necklaces for a considerable period of time. Traces of ochre suggest possible colouring of beads, though it could also have come from body-paint. Beads were found in groups displaying similar size, colour, perforation type and use-wear pattern, suggesting such groups represented single beadwork items. Wearing of personal ornaments implies a comprehension of self-awareness or self-recognition. As with the engraved ochre, the existence of syntactic language is arguably implied (Henshilwood et al, 2004; d’Errico et al, 2005; Henshilwood, 2007).

References:

Francesco d’Errico, Christopher Henshilwood, Graeme Lawson,Marian Vanhaeren, Anne-Marie Tillier, Marie Soressi, Frederique Bresson, Bruno Maureille, April Nowell, Joseba Lakarra, Lucinda Backwell, and Michele Julien (2003): Archaeological Evidence for the Emergence of Language, Symbolism, and Music – An Alternative Multidisciplinary Perspective, Journal of World Prehistory, Vol. 17, No. 1, March 2003.

Francesco d’Errico, Christopher Henshilwood, Marian Vanhaerend, Karen van Niekerke (2005): Nassarius kraussianus shell beads from Blombos Cave: evidence for symbolic behaviour in the Middle Stone Age, Journal of Human Evolution 48 (2005) 3-24.

Frederick E. Grine, Christopher S. Henshilwood and Judith C. Sealy (2000): Human remains from Blombos Cave, South Africa: (1997–1998 excavations), Journal of Human Evolution (2000) 38, 755–765.

Grine F.E. & Henshilwood C.S. (2002): Additional human remains from Blombos Cave, South Africa: (1999–2000 excavations), Journal of Human Evolution (2002) 42, 293–302.

C. S. Henshilwood (1997): Identifying the Collector: Evidence for Human Processing of the Cape Dune Mole-Rat, Bathyergus suillus, from Blombos Cave, Southern Cape, South Africa, Journal of Archaeological Science (1997) 24, 659–662.

C. S. Henshilwood, J. C. Sealy, R. Yates, K. Cruz-Uribe, P. Goldberg, F. E. Grine, R. G. Klein, C. Poggenpoel, K. van Niekerk, I. Watts (2001): Blombos Cave, Southern Cape, South Africa: Preliminary Report on the 1992–1999 Excavations of the Middle Stone Age Levels, Journal of Archaeological Science (2001) 28, 421–448.

Christopher S. Henshilwood, Francesco d’Errico, Curtis W. Marean, Richard G. Milo, Royden Yates (2001): An early bone tool industry from the Middle Stone Age at Blombos Cave, South Africa: implications for the origins of modern human behaviour, symbolism and language, Journal of Human Evolution (2001) 41, 631–678.

Christopher S. Henshilwood, Francesco d’Errico, Royden Yates, Zenobia Jacobs, Chantal Tribolo, Geoff A. T. Duller, Norbert Mercier, Judith C. Sealy, Helene Valladas, Ian Watts, Ann G. Wintle (2002): Emergence of Modern Human Behavior: Middle Stone Age Engravings from South Africa, Science 295, 1278 (2002).

Christopher Henshilwood, Francesco d’Errico, Marian Vanhaeren, Karen van Niekerk, Zenobia Jacobs (2004): Middle Stone Age Shell Beads from South Africa, Science 16 April 2004: Vol. 304. no. 5669, p. 404

Henshilwood C (2007): Fully Symbolic Sapiens behaviour: Innovation in the Middle Stone Age at Blombos Cave, South Africa, Rethinking the human Revolution, Macdonald Institute.

Zenobia Jacobs, Geoffrey A.T. Duller, Ann G. Wintle, Christopher S. Henshilwood (2006): Extending the chronology of deposits at Blombos Cave, South Africa, back to 140 ka using optical dating of single and multiple grains of quartz, Journal of Human Evolution 51 (2006) 255-273.

McBrearty S & Brooks A (2000): The revolution that wasn’t: a new interpretation of the origin of modern human behaviour, Journal of Human Evolution (2000) 39, 453–563.

Scarre C (2005) (Ed): “The human past”, Thames & Hudson.

C. Tribolo, N. Mercier, M. Selo, H. Valladas, J.-L. Joron, J.-L. Reyss, C. Henshilwood, J. Sealy and R. Yates (2006): TL dating of burnt lithics from Blombos Cave (South Africa): further evidence for the antiquity of modern human behaviour, Archaeometry 48, 2 (2006) 341–357.

© Christopher Seddon 2009

Modern humans & Neanderthals in the Levant

The first evidence for modern humans leaving Africa comes from the Levant, where the caves of Mugharet es-Skhul and Jebel Qafzeh (Israel) have yielded the remains of over 20 individuals, many of whom appeared to have been intentionally buried. The remains have been dated to between 110,000-90,000 years ago on the basis of ESR and luminescence dating. Though possessing some archaic features such as robustness, they are essentially modern, anatomically lying within the range of Homo sapiens.

However Neanderthal burials are known from much later at Kebara, Amud and Tabun (Israel), dating to between 60,000-50,000 years ago; and Shanidar Cave (Iraq) and Dederiyeh Cave (Syria) dating to as late as 45,000 years ago: this suggests a later re-occupation of the region by Neanderthals.

Modern humans had returned to the region by 35,000 years ago, and possibly as early as 45,000 years ago.

The likeliest explanation is that the ranges of modern humans and Neanderthals fluctuated back and forth in accordance with climate change. Whenever the climate was warm, the region would be occupied by modern humans; when it was cool it would be occupied by Neanderthals. Faunal evidence shows that in cooler times Palearctic fauna spread down from Europe, but when the climate warmed Afrotropical fauna would move in and replace the Palearctic. The two human species were merely “going with the flow” like any other animal species.

The lithic technology employed by both human species was, up until 50,000 years ago, very similar, being fairly typical Middle Palaeolithic/MSA and it has been described as Levalloiso-Mousterian, dominated by the Levallois reduction technique.

Lieberman & Shea (1994) suggest that hunting strategies between the two species did in fact differ. Analysis of seasonally-deposited cementum in the teeth of mountain gazelle and other ungulates indicates that the Neanderthals hunted these animals over both dry and wet seasons, but modern humans only hunted them during the dry season. Analysis of the lithic hunting technology further suggests more extensive hunting by the Neanderthals. Far more points are found at Neanderthal sites; these show greater signs of wear; and raw materials were procured only a short distance away from each site.

Lieberman & Shea interpret this to mean that the Neanderthals practiced a locally-intensive “radiating mobility” strategy. Their activities were primarily organized from large general-purpose sites, with more specialized or seasonal activities being carried out at smaller sites on the periphery of the main one.

By contrast, the modern humans practiced a seasonal-based “circulating mobility” strategy, living at different sites at different times of the year to facilitate exploitation of seasonal resources.

Both strategies have their pros and cons. The “radiating mobility” strategy permits an increased capacity for storage and investment in material culture (site facilities and hard-to-transport items). The main problem is that resources around the central camp become depleted due to year-long exploitation and a law of diminishing returns begins to effect hunting and foraging activities.

The “circulating mobility” strategy avoids these problems by ability to relocate to sites near periodically-abundant resources, which will then have a year to recover after the group have moved on to the next site. The drawbacks are that the group has to do without items that cannot readily be moved from site to site.

These differing strategies may highlight behavioural differences between modern humans and Neanderthals, with the “circulating mobility” strategy arising from modern human behaviour (which it is inferred the Neanderthals were incapable of). Another possibility is that the heavily-built Neanderthals were not physically adapted for a highly-mobile lifestyle.

The final, conclusive re-occupation of the Levant by modern humans, followed by their expansion into Europe has been taken to support the “Big bang” theory of behavioural modernity arising only 50,000 years ago, after which modern humans were able to overcome the “climate barrier” and move into Europe. This theory is however predicated on a modern human migration out of Africa proceeding via the Levant rather than taking a southern route across the Red Sea, a possibility rejected by some authorities such as Stephen Oppenheimer (Oppenheimer, 2003).

References:

Daniel E. Lieberman and John J. Shea (1994): Behavioral Differences between Archaic and Modern Humans in the Levantine Mousterian, American Anthropological Association.

Oppenheimer S (2003): “Out of Eden”, Constable.

© Christopher Seddon 2009

Modern Human Behaviour

Introduction:
Anthropologists use the term modern human behaviour to refer to a list of behavioural traits that distinguish present day and recent anatomically-modern humans from earlier human species and possibly from earlier anatomically-modern humans. It is generally accepted that the “package” includes the use of abstract thought, symbolic behaviour (such as art and creative expression), use of syntactically-complex language and the ability to plan ahead, but there is no universally-agreed theoretical definition of what modern human behaviour actually is and there is considerable disagreement as to both when and how humans became behaviourally modern.

Trait lists:
Many researchers have adopted an empirical approach by drawing up a list of supposedly-modern traits and then seeking evidence of their emergence in the archaeological record. Henshilwood and Marean (2003) list the following traits as frequently viewed as evidence of modern human behaviour:

1. Burial of the dead as an indicator of ritual
2. Art, ornamentation, and decoration
3. Symbolic use of ochre
4. Worked bone and antler
5. Blade technology
6. Standardization of artifact types
7. Artifact diversity
8. Complex hearth construction
9. Organized use of domestic space
10. Expanded exchange networks
11. Effective large-mammal exploitation
12. Seasonally focused mobility strategies
13. Use of harsh environments
14. Fishing and fowling

The problem, as they point out, with this approach, is that even genuine evidence of absence of many of these traits does not preclude behavioural modernity as other environmental factors could also be responsible, making certain activities problematic or simply unnecessary.

A possible definition:
Henshilwood and Marean define modern human behaviour as “behaviour that is mediated by socially constructed patterns of symbolic thinking, actions, and communication that allow for material and information exchange and cultural continuity between and across generations and contemporaneous communities.” All extant humans are thus defined as modern by the ability to store or display data external to the human brain, rather than by their technology itself. The key criterion for modern human behaviour is not the capacity for symbolic thought but the use of symbolism to organize behaviour.

The distinction between capacity and actual use is important because the capacity for an action doesn’t mean it will necessarily happen immediately: behaviourally-modern humans clearly had the capacity for aeroplanes, mobile phones and the internet long before these things actually appeared.

Henshilwood and Marean believe that the term “modern human behaviour” should be replaced with “fully symbolic sapiens behaviour” and regard it as the culmination of a long line of developments toward modernity; the point at which it is to be recognized archaeologically being when artefacts or features carry a clear symbolic message that is exosomatic (i.e. recorded outside the brain) such as art, ornaments or decoration. Even the earliest behaviourally-modern societies should have been able to transmit arbitrary systems of beliefs and innovations, resulting in identifiable evidence of symbolism in the archaeological record.

Big Bang versus Gradualism:
There are two main views concerning the origins of modern human behaviour. The Big Bang or Great Leap Forward model views it as a single punctuated event, though opinions vary as to when it happened. Richard Klein sees it happening about 50,000 years ago, possibly as the result of a genetic mutation, but at all events long after the appearance of the first anatomically-modern humans around 200,000 years ago (Klein, 1999; Klein & Edgar, 2002). Other proponents include Jared Diamond and Steven Mithen (Diamond, 1991; Mithen, 1996).

However this view is disputed by others including Stephen Oppenheimer, Robert Foley, Sally McBrearty and Alison S. Brooks, who claim there was no “big bang” and knowledge, skills and culture gradually developed over hundreds of millennia (see Oppenheimer, 2003; Lewin & Foley, 2004; McBrearty & Brooks, 2000; McBrearty, 2007).

Evidence for the Big Bang:
What the Big Bang theory is in essence saying is that while humans who were living in Africa around 200,000 years ago might have resembled people living today, but cognitively they weren’t quite “with it” and to us would have appeared simple-minded. On the face of it, this would seem to be an odd state of affairs. Why would people with brains comparable in size to our own lack our mental capabilities?

Until fairly recently, the archaeological evidence did seem to suggest that this was indeed the case. Support for a “great leap forward” came from the Levant and from Europe.

The evidence from the Levant suggested the boundary between Neanderthals and modern humans fluctuated with environmental change, with Neanderthals moving east and south into the Levant with colder climates, while modern humans moved out of Africa into the Levant with warmer conditions. These fluctuations continued for tens of thousands of years until about 40,000 years ago, modern humans suddenly broke through the climate barrier and spread north and west into Europe. Within a comparatively short space of time the Neanderthals became extinct.

The archaeological record of Europe reveals an astonishing transformation from about 40,000 years ago, when the relatively crude tools of the Mousterian tradition are give way to the finely worked blade-based tools of the Upper Palaeolithic. Unequivocal evidence of artistic expression is seen for the first time in the form of beads, ornaments, figurines, carvings and the magnificent cave paintings at sites such as Chauvet, Cosquer and Lascaux.

It suggests to many a “human revolution”: the beginning of human culture: the arrival on the scene of modern Homo sapiens, fully-loaded and ready to roll. From Europe the revolution spread, eventually reaching all parts of the world. The Sistine Chapel, Shakespeare’s sonnets and Beethoven’s late stringed quartets all lay in the future, but it was on the steppes of Ice Age Europe that it all began.

Cognitive Fluidity:
But all of this begs the question: fully-modern humans are now thought to have appeared at least 200,000 years ago. If fully-modern behaviour didn’t appear until 50,000 years ago, as Klein believes, what was happening in the meantime – a matter of 150,000 years?

Steven Mithen, Professor of Archaeology at Reading University, believes that early humans, including early Homo sapiens, lacked what he refers to as “cognitive fluidity”.

In a theory first proposed in his 1996 book “The Prehistory of the Mind”, Mithen claims that the human brain originally had separate cognitive “domains” for different functions, such as social interaction, tool-making, food and resource gathering (“natural history”), etc. Modern human behaviour came about when the barriers between these domains broke down, allowing them to interact with each other. Art, religion and language all arose from the synergistic interactions between the various domains, but this was restricted to anatomically modern humans. Homo erectus and the Neanderthals quite literally never made the connection.

Mithen originally viewed “big bangs” occurring in different parts of the world at different times between 60,000-30,000 years ago, with the final leaps to full cognitive fluidity occurring by parallel evolution, though he has now revised his date for the emergence of cognitive fluidity to between 200,000-70,000 years ago, in Africa (Mithen, 1996 & 2007).

Mithen draws heavily on the work of Jerry Fodor, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Michael Tomasello, Howard Gardiner, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, but the idea of initially separate domains interacting may have been inspired in part by Julian Jaynes’ controversial theory about “bicameral minds”, proposed in 1976. (See Mithen, 1996; Fodor, 1983; Karmiloff-Smith, 1992; Tomasello, 1999; Gardiner, 1983 & 1999; Jaynes, 1976).

Mithen’s theory is well-argued and the existence of multiple intelligences in early humans is an intriguing possibility. Personally, though, I am somewhat sceptical as to whether anatomically-modern humans ever had this type of brain.

FOXP2:
Stanford University’s Richard Klein is a long-time supporter of the Big Bang theory. Unlike many “big bangers” Klein does present a specific biological case for the emergence of modern human behaviour. His original “prime suspect” for the genetic mutation leading to modern human behaviour was a gene known as FOXP2, or forkhead box P2, which regulates a number of other genes, some of which are believed to play a role in the development of the parts of the brain associated with speech, although the exact genes involved are not known. The FOXP2 gene is not unique to humans, but exists with very few differences in other animals.

The first clue that FOXP2 might be a “speech gene” came from studies of Family KE, an extended British family living in London (their actual identity is not in the public domain). Some members of the family have problems with aspects of grammar, including the use of inflexions for marking tense. They also have difficulty in producing the fine movements of the tongue and lips required for normal speech. The problem affects three generations of the family and has been studied since the 1990s. In 2001 geneticists determined that the affected members of the family all have a defective version of the FOXP2 gene.

In 2002 a team led by Wolfgang Enard at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany compared the human version of the FOXP2 gene with that of the chimpanzee, gorilla, orang-utan, rhesus macaque and mouse. They found that the gene is highly conserved, with differences of just three amino acid positions out of around 700 between the human version and the mouse version. But curiously two of these changes had occurred since the split between humans and chimps, a far more recent occurrence than the split between humans and mice. They suggested that these two changes might be critical to speech and language. The beneficial mutation has been positively selected for by natural selection and they estimated that it had become fixed in the human population at some stage in the last 200,000 years (Enard et al, 2002).

Klein believed the actual date would be 50,000 years, and that FOXP2 was the “smoking gun” responsible for the Great Leap Forward. But even a date of 200,000 years would rule out behavioural modernity in the Neanderthals, who had diverged from Homo sapiens much earlier.

Then in 2007 came a complete volte-face from the Max Planck Institute. The sequencing of the Neanderthal genome had revealed that Neanderthals possessed exactly the same version of FOXP2 as do modern humans (Krause et al, 2007). This not only pulled the rug from under Klein’s argument, it was also rather embarrassing for the group whose earlier 200,000 year estimate was now seen to be off by a factor of at least two. Dr. Svante Paabo, who was involved with both studies, admitted that the earlier estimates were “not flawed but rely on assumptions that are necessary but also universally known to be oversimplifications of the reality”.

Klein has nevertheless stuck to his guns. He said he was disappointed to have lost the genetic support from Paabo's work but had not changed his views. "The archaeological record suggests a major change in human behaviour 50,000 years ago," he said, "and I think there is overwhelming evidence for that" (quoted in the New York Times, 18 October 2007).

Has anybody thought of this?
There is for my mind a serious problem with the notion that a behaviourally-modern human brain could have achieved its present set of capabilities without any increase in size over the older model. We are in effect being asked to believe that while both early and present-day members of our own species had same brain-size, the version used by people today is far superior to that in use prior to 50,000 years ago.

Brains are very expensive things to run. In modern humans, they account for just 2% of our body weight, yet they take up 20% of the body’s energy-budget. Not only that giving birth to a large-brained infant poses considerable problems for women which are only partially-alleviated by human babies doing a considerable amount of their initial brain growth after birth, which in turn increased their postnatal dependency to a level way above that of other mammals (compare, for example, with a foal, which can literally hit the ground running).

Now consider the considerable increase in human brain size over that of apes. This occurred in two phases: firstly around 2.5 million years ago with the appearance of Homo habilis: and secondly around half a million years ago with the appearance of large-brained hominins such as Homo heidelbergensis. There is no doubt that these increases were driven by Darwinian selective pressure, meaning that the advantages of these larger brains outweighed the disadvantages as outlined above.

But the Big Bang theory implies that it is possible to increase brain-power by a few genetic tweaks, with no increase in actual size being necessary. This would surely give the best of both worlds – a small, fuel-efficient brain packing the same punch as a larger “gas guzzler”. If such a thing is possible, why didn’t it happen much earlier? Why did Homo habilis evolve a large, expensive-to-run brain rather than “tweaking” the smaller brain possessed by its australopithecine predecessors? The same argument could be applied to the second phase of brain expansion, 500,000 years ago.

But of course it didn’t happen that way: Nature took the apparently sub-optimal option of increasing physical brain size. This suggests to me that it wasn’t sub-optimal and was in fact the only available option for increasing brain-power.

If increasing brain-power without increasing brain-size was not possible for the first 2.5 million years of human evolution, how did it suddenly become possible 50,000 years ago?

Down with the Revolution:
In their seminal 2000 paper, Sally McBrearty and Alison Brooks suggest that the traditional interpretation of the archaeological record is seriously flawed:

“This view of events stems from a profound Eurocentric bias and a failure to appreciate the depth and breadth of the African archaeological record. In fact, many of the components of the ‘‘human revolution’’ claimed to appear at 40–50 ka are found in the African Middle Stone Age tens of thousands of years earlier.

These features include blade and microlithic technology, bone tools, increased geographic range, specialized hunting, the use of aquatic resources, long distance trade, systematic processing and use of pigment, and art and decoration. These items do not occur suddenly together as predicted by the ‘‘human revolution’’ model, but at sites that are widely separated in space and time. This suggests a gradual assembling of the package of modern human behaviours in Africa, and its later export to other regions of the Old World.” (McBrearty & Brooks, 2000).

McBrearty and Brooks claim that the “Big Bang” is in fact an illusion, arising from the fact that Europe has been studied archaeologically in far more depth than Africa, and that evidence of modern human behaviour can in fact be found in Africa that is far earlier than any seen for Europe. This is of course exactly what one would expect to find if Homo sapiens evolved in Africa and only later migrated to Africa.

The paper presents evidence for the gradual acquisition of the elements of so-called modern human behaviour over the course of 300,000 years:

Images: 40k
Beads: 60k
Microliths: 65k
Notational pieces (incised): 100k
Mining: 100k
Barbed points: 100k
Bone tools: 100k
Fishing: 110k
Long-distance exchange: 140k
Shellfishing: 140k
Points: 300k
Pigment processing: 300k
Grindstones: 300k
Blades: 300k

Four of the fourteen skills are present even before modern humans evolved and nearly all of the rest had appeared before the onset of the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe, where such technologies are associated with the supposed human revolution. While there is still not conclusive evidence to dismiss the "Big Bang" theory, my feeling is that it is now on its way out.

References:

Diamond, J (1991) The Third Chimpanzee, Radius, London.

Wolfgang Enard, Molly Przeworski, Simon E. Fisher, Cecilia S. L. Lai,
Victor Wiebe, Takashi Kitano, Anthony P. Monaco & Svante Paabo (2002): Molecular evolution of FOXP2, a gene involved in speech and language, Nature, Vol. 418 22 August 2002.

Fodor J (1983): “The Modularity of Mind”, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Gardiner H (1983): “Frames of Mind”, Basic Books.

Gardiner H (1999): “Intelligence Reframed”, Basic Books.

Richard E. Green, Johannes Krause, Susan E. Ptak, Adrian W. Briggs, Michael T. Ronan, Jan F. Simons, Lei Du, Michael Egholm, Jonathan M. Rothberg, Maja Paunovic & Svante Paabo(2006): Analysis of one million base pairs of Neanderthal DNA, Nature 444, 330-336 (16 November 2006).

Christopher S. Henshilwood and Curtis W. Marean (2003): The Origin of Modern Human Behavior: Critique of the Models and Their Test Implications, Current Anthropology Volume 44, Number 5, December 2003.

Jaynes J (1976): “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”, Mariner Books, USA.

Karmiloff-Smith A (1992): “Beyond Modularity”, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Klein, R. (1999): The Human Career (2nd Edition), University of Chicago Press.

Klein R & Edgar B (2002): “The Dawn of Human Culture”, John Wiley & Sons Inc., New York.

Lewin, R and Foley, R (2004): Principles of Human Evolution (2nd edition), Blackwell Science Ltd.

McBrearty S (2007): “Down with the Revolution”, Macdonald Institute Monographs.

McBrearty S & Brooks A (2000): The revolution that wasn’t: a new
interpretation of the origin of modern human behaviour, Journal of Human Evolution (2000) 39, 453–563.

Mellars P, Boyle K, Bar-Yosef O & Stringer C (eds.) (2007): Rethinking the human revolution, Macdonald Institute Monographs.

Mithen S (1996): “The Prehistory of the Mind”, Thames & Hudson.

Mithen S (2005): The Singing Neanderthal, Weidenfeld & Nicholson.

Oppenheimer S (2002): “Out of Eden”, Constable.

Tomasello (1999): “The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition”, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA & London.

© Christopher Seddon 2009

Unusual coins from Austria

Issued by the Munze Osterreich (Austrian Mint), this pair of bimetallic coins feature metals not normally associated with currency. The left hand coin is a pre-Euro 100 Schilling denomination, struck in 2000 to mark the Millennium. The right hand coin was struck in 2008 with a face value of 25 Euro and is entitled “Faszination Licht” (fascination of light). Both coins are 40mm in diameter and are comprised of an outer ring of 90% fine silver. The inner “plug” of the left hand coin is titanium; that of the right hand coin is niobium.

Titanium was discovered by the Cornish mineralogist William Gregor in 1791 and later named by the German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth for the Titans of Greek mythology. It is often referred to as “high tech”, “space age” etc on account of its combination of low density, high tensile strength and resistance to corrosion, which makes it ideal for a very wide range of applications in the aeorospace and other industries. Accordingly it seemed an appropriate choice of metal for use in the 100 Schilling coin which was struck as Austria’s contribution to a world-wide series of Millennium coins which all had at least one unusual feature (others featured unusual shapes, denominations, etc.).

The coin’s reverse features a computer chip ringed by the words “Republik Osterreich 100 Schilling”. The obverse features a world map with the words “Millennium 2000” ringed by electrical pylons, atoms, planets and other symbols of a high-tech age.

(The 21st Century of course did not actually begin until 1 January 2001.)

Niobium is a transitional metal named for Niobe, the daughter of Tantalus. The metal is always found in association with the metal Tantalum, with which it shares many properties. Tantalum was named for Tantalus because when placed in acid it did not “take up” the acid, i.e. react with it. (In Greek mythology Tantalus was punished by the gods by being placed in a pool of water, which always receded when he tried to drink from it.) Niobium is used to alloy steel and in superconductors and has recently become popular in tinted forms in jewellery. Although fairly expensive, Niobium is not considered to be a precious metal.

The Austrian Mint began issuing silver/niobium 25 Euro coins in 2003. Each year the niobium “plug” has been tinted a different colour. The 2008 coin is a celebration of light and commemorates the Austrian inventor Carl Auer von Welsbach, whose inventions included the “flints” used in lighters, the mantles used in 19th Century gas-lighting, and the metal-filament light bulb which was an improvement on Edison’s carbon-filament.

The coin’s obverse features a lamp-lighter in front of the Vienna City Hall.
The reverse has a partial portrait of Welsbach. The green niobium pill portrays the shining sun and several methods of illumination from the gas light through electric light bulbs, neon lights, LEDs etc are featured on the silver ring.

In common with other commemorative coins issued within the Eurozone, the coin is not legal tender outside its country of issue, i.e. Austria.

© Christopher Seddon 2009

Klasies River Caves

The Klasies River Caves are a complex of five caves located to the east of the Klasies River mouth in Eastern Cape Province, on the Tsitsikama coast of South Africa. The caves show evidence of occupation by anatomically modern humans dating from 125,000 years ago. They share a common stratigraphic sequence up to 16m deep which reveals further occupations around 110,000 years ago; 90,000 years ago and 60,000 years ago. These dates have been obtained by Electron Spin Resonance (ESR) and luminescence dating methods.

The caves have been excavated since the 1960s. They form an important source of information about the African Middle Stone Age (MSA) (250,000-40,000 years ago). Quantities of hearth ash, shell, animal bones and human remains have been recovered in association with MSA industries. From the base upwards, these have been associated with sub-phases MSA I, MSA II, Howison’s Poort and MSA III.

The Howieson’s Poort lithics were apparently used as hafted elements in a composite toolkit. They were made from non-local raw materials either obtained by people ranging far afield or long-distance trade. All of these things are suggestive of modern human behaviour, once believed to have only emerged much later.

The animal assemblages include small terrestrial vertebrates, larger herbivores, fish and shellfish. The latter are present in deep accumulations, suggesting extensive exploitation. Some of the human remains show cutmarks suggestive of cannibalism.

In 1998, the South African Provincial Heritage Committee proposed the caves as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The caves were inscribed on the Heritage List in December 1999.

References:

Conroy G (1997): “Reconstructing Human Origins: A Modern Synthesis”, W.W. Norton & Co. Inc, New York, NY & London.

Scarre C (2005) (Ed): “The human past”, Thames & Hudson.

© Christopher Seddon 2009

Gantry at Deptford Creek

Taken on a fine day in July 2005.

© Christopher Seddon 2009

Moonwatch

In 1965, as the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union was hotting up, officials at NASA realised that they did not have “space rated” wristwatch that could be used for the upcoming Project Gemini. Given that the program was slated to include an EVA or space walk, there was an obvious need for a watch that could withstand exposure to vacuum and other rigours of spaceflight. In addition to being able to keep good time under such conditions, the watch would have to incorporate a chronograph or stop-watch function, so astronauts could see at a glance how long they had spent outside their spacecraft and to help carry out other tasks that required accurate timing.

Rather than go through the time consuming procedure of inviting bids for a “space watch”, NASA decided to send a couple of engineers to out to downtown Houston with instructions to procure a variety of off-the-shelf chronographs for testing. The tests included exposure to extreme temperatures, vacuum, intense humidity, shock, acceleration, pressure and vibration. At the end of the tests, NASA had a clear winner as the watch most suitable for spaceflight: the Omega Speedmaster.

The Speedmaster was first introduced by in 1957 and utilised the Lemania 2310 (AKA Omega 321) manual-wind movement. It is often stated that NASA specified a manual-wind movement because they thought automatic (“self-winding”) movements would not function in zero-gravity conditions, but this is incorrect on two counts. Firstly an automatic works by inertia and is not dependent on gravity; secondly the simple reason NASA selected a manual-wind chronograph is that at the time that was the only type available. The first automatic chronograph movement – the Zenith el Primero – did not come into use until near the end of the decade. However it is likely that in the cramped conditions of a Gemini or Apollo spacecraft, there would be insufficient activity to keep an automatic fully wound and a manual-wind would be more suitable.

On 3 June 1965, Gemini 4 pilot Edward White became the first US astronaut to make a spacewalk. He was wearing an Omega Speedmaster, strapped to the outside of his spacesuit with a Velcro strap. Curiously it was not until almost a year later that Omega finally learned the use to which NASA had been putting their watches. As might be expected, they wasted little time in cashing in and photographs of White’s spacewalk were soon featuring in their advertising literature. The watch itself was renamed the Speedmaster Professional, but its finest hour was yet to come.

Early on the morning of 21 July 1969, Buzz Aldrin stepped out onto the surface of the Moon wearing a Speedmaster Professional, which thus became the first watch to be worn on the Moon. Earlier, Neil Armstrong had had to leave his own watch in the Eagle lunar module after the lander’s onboard chronometer developed a malfunction. Sadly this historic watch was later stolen while on loan to the Smithsonian and has never been recovered.

In April the following year a Speedmaster Professional was used to time a crucial engine burn aboard the crippled Apollo XIII during the desperate and ultimately successful endeavour to return the spacecraft safely to Earth.

Meanwhile feeling was growing that an American watch should be used on NASA moon missions and the US-owned Bulova company lobbied the White House for their watches to be used instead of the “Speedy Pro”. Eventually NASA was persuaded to test a fresh batch of watches, including a specially-manufactured Bulova chronograph, but the Omega again came out on top with the Bulova stopping several times during testing.

By now, not only NASA was equipping its astronauts with the Speedmaster Professional. In 1975, when an Apollo spacecraft rendezvoused with a Soviet Soyuz in Earth orbit, both crews were wearing what had by now become known as the Moonwatch.

In 1978 NASA held a fresh series of tests ahead of the Space Shuttle program. Once again the Speedmaster Professional triumphed. The watch had by now received an updated movement, the Lemania 1873 (AKA Omega 861), which featured a shuttle/cam system rather than a column-wheel. The former design is simpler and thus is cheaper to both manufacture and service, but it yields nothing in terms of performance and reliability. The 1873 is again a manual-wind movement.

Externally however the Speedmaster Professional has changed very little in over half a century, even retaining its old-fashioned Hessalite (plexiglass) crystal in preference to a modern scratch-resistant sapphire crystal. This has been at the request of NASA. Plexiglass scratches quite easily, but it is virtually indestructible. By contrast, a sharp blow can shatter a sapphire crystal. Having sapphire fragments floating about inside the zero-g environment of a spacecraft is obviously not a good idea! A sapphire version, also featuring a sapphire display back, is available at extra cost but many enthusiasts prefer the Hessalite model, which is the only flight-qualified version.

The Speedy Pro is certainly not the only watch to go into space (and was probably not even the only watch worn on the Moon – contra Omega’s website), but even now it is the only watch permitted to be used for EVAs from the International Space Station or from the Space Shuttle. The Casio G-Shock – a watch almost as iconic as the Speedy – is routinely worn aboard the ISS, but because their batteries may explode in a vacuum, they cannot be used for spacewalking.

Who knows, the Omega Speedmaster Professional may even eventually become known as the Marswatch.

© Christopher Seddon 2009

Rodchenko

Inspired by the Soviet photographer Alexander Rodchenko, these photographs were taken in Newcastle and Gateshead in November 2006.







© Christopher Seddon 2009

St John the Baptist Church, Little Missenden

Located midway between Amersham and Great Missenden, Little Missenden is an attractive Chiltern village noted for its fine Saxon church, parts of which date back to around AD 975. Bearing a striking resemblance to cave art from the Palaeolithic Era, remarkable ancient wall paintings can be seen on the north wall inside the church.








© Christopher Seddon 2009

Avebury

The Wiltshire village of Avebury is setting for one of Europe's largest Neolithic monuments. The 5,000 year old stone circle is slighly older than Stonehenge and comprises a large ditch and external bank henge 421 metres (1,381 ft) in diameter and 1.35 kilometres (0.84 mi) in circumference. This is four times the diameter of Stonehenge. Within this is the Outer Circle with a diameter of 335 metres (1,099 ft). This originally comprised 98 sarsen standing stones, some of which weighed over 40 tonnes. They vary in height from 3.6 to 4.2 metres.

Closer to the centre of the monument are two separate stone circles. The Northern inner ring measures 98 metres (322 ft) in diameter, though only two of its standing stones remain, plus two fallen ones. A cove of three stones stood in the middle, its entrance pointing northeast. The Southern inner ring was 108 metres (354 ft) in diameter but has now largely disappeared, with much of its arc lying beneath the village buildings.

Finally there is an avenue of paired stones, the West Kennet Avenue, leading from the south eastern entrance of the henge and traces of a second, the Beckhampton Avenue lead out from the western one.

This monument is run by the National Trust and is a World Heritage Site.































© Christopher Seddon 2009

Thames Barrier

Constructed between 1974 and 1982, the Thames Flood Barrier at Woolwich came into use the following year. The barrier is built across a 572 yard wide stretch of the river and divides it into four 200ft and two 100ft navigable spans, and four smaller non-navigable channels between nine concrete piers and two abutments. The structure was designed by Rendel, Palmer and Tritton and built by a consortium comprising Costain, Hollandsche Beton Maatschappij and Tarmac Construction at a cost of £534m. An additional £100m was spent on strengthening river defences for eleven miles down river.

Initially it was only raised on average twice a year, but since 1990 this has increased to an average of four times a year. The structure was never intended to cater for the effects of global warming, and by 2005 it was looking possible that a larger barrier might be required to protect London from flooding.











© Christopher Seddon 2009

Ponte Vecchio, Florence

Inhabited bridges with houses and shops were once commonplace throughout Europe but now very few remain of which the best-known is the Ponte Vecchio ("The Old Bridge") across the Arno River in Florence. There has been a bridge here since Roman times but it was twice destroyed by floods and the present structure dates to 1345. The original occupants were butchers, but these have long since been replaced by jewellers and art dealers.













© Christopher Seddon 2009

The Neanderthals

Introduction:
Of all early humans, none have captured the public imagination to anywhere near the extent of the Neanderthals. Indeed, with the possible exception of the dinosaurs, no extinct species is so deeply rooted in our popular culture. The idea that tens of thousands of years ago, people very much like ourselves shared the planet with another human species is one that intrigues many.

Although like “dinosaur”, the term “Neanderthal” is all-too-often used in a pejorative sense, in literature Neanderthals have generally been portrayed in a sympathetic light, for example The Inheritors by William Golding; Jean M. Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear series; and The Ugly Little Boy by Isaac Asimov. The Neanderthal Parallax is an award-winning trilogy by Canadian SF writer Bob Sawyer about a team of scientists who accidentally make contact with a parallel universe in which the Neanderthals rather than Homo sapiens became the dominant life form on Earth.

Once thought of as a subspecies of Homo sapiens, genetic evidence now suggests that Neanderthals diverged from modern humans long before either species existed. Green et al (2006) give a date of 500,000 years ago. “Classic” Neanderthals emerged in Europe around 200,000 years ago (Cameron & Groves, 2004), by which time modern humans were emerging in Africa.

Etymology:
The term Neanderthal comes from Neander Thal (Neander Valley), near Dusseldorf, where the type specimen Neanderthal 1 was discovered at Feldhofer Cave in 1856. The German spelling was changed to Neander Tal in 1901, hence the commonly-used variant spelling Neandertal; however this usage is not acceptable for the scientific name Homo neanderthalensis, which was assigned before the change in spelling. Under rules of taxonomic nomenclature, once a name has been assigned, it cannot be changed.

The Neander Valley is named for Joachim Neumann, a 17th Century theologian who is usually referred to by the classicised form of his surname, Neander. He is best known for the hymn Praise to The Lord, The Almighty, the King of Creation.

The literal meaning of Neanderthal is therefore, rather ironically, New Man’s Valley.

Discovery:
Though the first fossil recognised as not representing a modern human Neanderthal 1 was not actually the first discovery of a Neanderthal. Specimens had previously been recovered in Ennis Cave, Belgium between 1829 and 1830 and Forbes Cave, Gibraltar in 1848; however their significance was not immediately recognised.

The Feldshofer Cave discovery comprises a skullcap and two femora, three bones from the right arm, two from the left arm, part of the left ilium, fragments of a scapula, and ribs. They were recovered by quarry workers in 1856. Unfortunately they may have inadvertently discarded further remains and other items that could well have included tools, and there is almost no record of context and associations (Klein, 1999). The find was examined by a local schoolteacher and amateur naturalist, Johann Karl Fuhlrott, who noted that the remains were unlike those of modern humans. Fuhlrott passed the remains on to Hermann Schaaffhausen, Professor of Anatomy at the University of Bonn. The pair jointly announced the discovery in 1857. However Schaaffhausen considered the Neanderthals to represent an ancient Northern European race predating the Germans and the Celts. That they might represent a new species of human was first suggested in 1864 by the Irish anatomist William King, who proposed the name Homo neanderthalensis. King’s suggestion was not widely accepted at first and, foreshadowing the debate over the Flores hominins almost a century and a half later, the Prussian pathologist Rudolf Virchow dismissed the Feldshofer remains as belonging to a modern human affected by disease.

Neanderthal 1 is now believed to be 40,000 years old (Scarre, 2005).

Key sites:
The Neanderthals are known from numerous sites in Eurasia ranging from the United Kingdom to the northwest, Uzbekistan to the east, Israel to the south, and Gibraltar to the southwest. These include:

Krapina, near Zagreb, Croatia. 120,000 years old. This large find comprises roughly 900 fragmentary remains representing from between 14 to as many as 82 individuals, discovered by Dragutin Gorjanović-Kramberger between 1899 and 1905.

La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France. La Chapelle-aux-Saints 1 is a partial skeleton, 50,000 - 60,000 years old.

Le Moustier, France. c. 40,000 years old. Le Moustier 1 young adult (partial skeleton); Le Moustier 2 child (partial skeleton). The Mousterian tool tradition, associated with the Neanderthals, is named for tools found at this site.

Kebara Cave, Mt Carmel, Israel. In 1983 an adult male skeleton (Kebara 2) was found. It is 50,000 - 55,000 years old and includes the most complete pelvis so far found. Kebara 1, an adult male, is also of significance, having provided the only known hyoid bone of a pre-modern human.

Tabun Cave, Mt Carmel, Israel. Tabun-C 1 is the almost complete 120,000 years skeleton of a Neanderthal woman.

Physical description:
The Neanderthal braincase is long and relatively low and is cylindrical when viewed from behind. The cranial capacity is between 1245-1740cc, averaging 1520cc, compared with 1560cc for an early modern human, or 1340cc for a present-day human. The frontal bone is low and receding, with continuous brow-ridges forming a double arch above the orbits. The face is long and prognathous and the chin is usually absent, with the cheekbones sloping backwards. The nasal aperture is broad, high and prominent.

Postcranial bones are robust and stout, the vertebral column heavily built, the ribcage large and wide, a long clavicle, large shoulder and elbow joints, short forearm, hands with strong grip and wide finger-tips, wide pelvis, longer and thinner pubis, thick-walled femur, short and thick-walled tibia, large ankle-joints and wide, strong toe bones. There are well-developed muscle markings throughout.

Neanderthals were 12 to 14 cm (4½-5½ in) shorter than modern humans. Based on 45 long bones from (at most) 14 males and 7 females, Neanderthal males averaged between 164 to 168 cm (5 ft 4½ in to 5 ft 6 in) and females 152 to 156 cm (5 ft to 5 ft 1½) tall (Helmuth, 1998). Their body weight has been estimated at 75kg on average, comparable to that of present-day humans (Cameron & Groves, 2004; Conroy, 1997; Klein, 1999).

To sum up, Neanderthals were powerfully built, far more so than early modern humans, even though the latter were more robust than present-day humans. As Conroy (1997) points out, Neanderthals probably didn’t do limp-wristed hand-shakes!

Adaptations of the Neanderthals:
The limb proportions of the Neanderthals were probably adaptations to living in cold places, and are mirrored to some extent by those of present-day Inuit and Sami people. The Neanderthals were however more extreme in their limb proportions, despite probably living in more moderate conditions. This suggests they were more reliant on their physiology to combat the cold than any modern human (Klein, 1999).

The robust (thick-walled) limbs and large bodies suggest physical stress was a part of their everyday life. (Scarre, 2005). The upper limbs may have been adapted to heavy foraging such as spear thrusting while the lower limbs are those of long-range bipeds (Cameron & Groves, 2004).

The large nasal aperture and sinus tracts may have been maximised to warm and moisten the dry, cold tundra air (Scarre, 2005).

Facial development and powerful jaws may have reflected the use of teeth as a vice-like tool, possibly for gripping mammal hides while skinning them with stone tools. Wear on teeth consistent with this hypothesis (Cameron & Groves, 2004; Scarre, 2005).

It has been suggested that many distinctive Neanderthal features resulted from genetic drift (random change) in a population that was isolated in Europe for much of its history, rather than the traditional explanation of natural selection. This is suggested by the way Neanderthal-like features seem to have accreted in pre-Neanderthal hominins and supported by a recent study, which obtained the divergence time for Neanderthals from modern humans based on statistical comparisons of cranial metrics and obtained a mean figure of 373,000 years, close to figures based on comparisons of DNA sequences. This implies that the cranial and DNA sequence data largely reflects neutral mutational divergence, causing it to track population history rather than the effects of natural selection (Weaver et al, 2008).

Gestation period of the Neanderthals:
In 1984, Erik Trinkaus noticed that the superior pubic ramus of the Neanderthal pelvis seemed to be longer than that of a modern human, indicating a wider birth canal. This he claimed implied that the gestation period of Neanderthals was longer than that of modern humans, possibly as long as a year (Trinkaus, 1984). Other theories were proposed to explain the difference: that it simply reflected the greater size of the head in comparison to the relatively short stature (Rosenberg, 1985); or that the brain grew faster in utero compared with modern humans (Dean et al, 1986).

In 1987 an analysis of the Kebara 2 pelvis was published (Rak & Arensburg, 1987) which showed that the pelvic inlet was comparable to that of a modern human and that the length of the superior pubic ramus was due to a more externally rotated hip bone. This suggested that the unique features of the Neanderthal pelvis might be due to locomotion and posture-related biomechanics rather than the need for an enlarged birth canal.

Neanderthals skin and hair colour:
A study has recently been carried out of the melanocortin 1 receptor (mc1r) gene in Neanderthals. This gene is responsible for skin and hair colour variation in humans. Variants of mc1r with reduced function give rise to pale skin and red hair. DNA was extracted from two Neanderthal fossils, Monti Lessini (Italy) and El Sidrón 1252 (Spain). A mutation of the gene, known as R307G, was found. This mutation is not present in modern humans. The gene was then expressed in COS-7 cells (a cell culture derived from vervet monkeys often used in biomolecular research). The results suggested that the R307G allele had reduced function. This does not confirm that the two individuals tested – much less all Neanderthals – had red hair and pale skin, but it is more likely if they were homozygous or compound heterozygous for this allele. Whether this was the case for these two Neanderthals was not determined by the study (Lalueza-Fox et al, 2007).

Evolutionary history:
It is now generally accepted that the Neanderthals were a separate species to Homo sapiens and not a subspecies; nor does it now seem likely that modern Europeans are descended from Neanderthals. Rather it would appear that the two lineages diverged around 500,000 years ago (based on genetic evidence) or possibly later, around 370,000 years ago (based on cranial data).

In a 2002 study, Yoel Rak of the Tel Aviv University demonstrated that the specialized Neanderthal mandibular ramus (lower jawbone) morphology is an element in a complex of derived morphologies of the mandible and face that are unique to the Neanderthals and the corresponding features in modern humans are actually primitive retentions from Homo erectus. This provides further support for the contention that Neanderthals are not ancestral to modern humans (Rak et al, 2002).

Homo antecessor, known from the Atapuerca Hills of northern Spain, has been touted as a possible ancestor. These hominins lived 700,000 – 800,000 years ago, but even assuming it is a valid species at all it seems more likely to have been an offshoot of Homo ergaster that died off without issue, possibly during the glacial periods of 600,000 – 800,000 years ago.

The probable common ancestor is Homo heidelbergensis. Neanderthal-like features seem to have accreted in the European deme of this species; for example the Steinheim skull from Stuttgart, Germany; the Sima de los Huesos specimens from Atapuerca in northern Spain and the Swanscombe cranium from the UK.

Cameron & Groves (2004) cautiously accept these hominins as a distinct species, Homo steinheimensis, but argue that they are really primitive Neanderthals. At all events they are clearly intermediate between Homo heidelbergensis and “classic” Neanderthals. “Incipient Neanderthal features” include the configuration of the supraorbital tori, the large size of the nasal openings, the medial projection from the side walls of the nasal cavity, developed occipital torus and suprainiac depression and a long cranium with a slightly more elevated frontal bone (Cameron & Groves, 2004).

Not all these features are seen in every specimen; different features appeared at different times in different populations. Some are more Neanderthal-like in the face; others in the braincase. This does suggest that the distinctive Neanderthal craniofacial complex evolved as a series of disconnected features, in turn supporting the view that Neanderthal morphology was more a product of a series of neutral mutations (genetic drift) than natural selection (see above).

The “classic” Neanderthals had emerged in Europe by 200,000 years ago. The Neanderthals from Western Asia and the Levant were probably an expansion of the European population.

The Mousterian industry:
The Neanderthals are generally associated with the Mode 3 Technology or Mousterian industry, named for the type site, Le Moustier, a rock shelter in the Dordogne region in the south of France. However this technology is also associated with early modern humans; conversely later Neanderthals have been associated with more advanced tool kits.

The Mousterian tools are considerably more sophisticated than those employed by either Homo heidelbergensis or the “ante-Neanderthal” Homo steinheimensis. The Mousterian industry is basically a stone core technology in which the core is pre-shaped to facilitate the striking off of flakes of a desired shape, which in turn can be retouched to provide a continuous cutting edge.

The pre-shaped cores are known as Levallois cores, after a site at Levallois-Perret, in the north-western suburbs of Paris, where examples have been known since the 19th Century. A number of Levallois flaking techniques appear to have been employed, allowing a degree of control to be exercised over the shape and size of the resulting flakes. The tools were fashioned for specific purposes, unlike the preceding Acheulian multi-purpose artefacts. Considerable planning, involving at least six separate stages, went into their production. The lithic technology of the Neanderthals appears have been very flexible, with different solutions reflecting the size, shape and quality of available materials.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, François Bordes (1919-1981), a leading figure in French Palaeolithic archaeology, formalised a typology that recognised a total of 63 different tool types in three classes: sidescrapers, retouched points and denticulates (toothed pieces). A sidescraper was defined as a flake on which one or more edges bear smooth, continuous retouch; a point as a flake on which two continuously-retouched edges converged directly opposite the butt; and a denticulate as flake that was retouched to produce a toothed edge. A denticulate with only one indentation was designated a notch.

In addition, the overall Mousterian was divided into five groups or facies: the Mousterian of Acheulian Tradition (MAT) A and B, Typical Mousterian, Denticulate Mousterian and Charentian. The groups were assigned on the basis of varying frequency of tool types such as hand axes, scrapers, points, etc. Thus MAT A & B were characterised by abundant hand-axes, which are rare or absent in the other groups; Typical Mousterian was dominated by sidescrapers; Denticulate Mousterian by denticulates and notches, etc.

Bordes believed that his five groups were cultural in nature, representing different contemporary ethnic groups or tribes in Middle Palaeolithic society.

That Bordes’ scheme represents the reality of the Mousterian industry is questionable as tool types often grade into one another and may well represent re-sharpening of a smaller number of basic forms – i.e. what Bordes saw as several distinct types may represent a single tool type at different stages of its life before being finally discarded. The extent to which tools were refurbished during their life would in turn have depended on the quality of available raw materials; if these were scarce, existing tools would have had to be retained longer. Also if a particular site remained in use for a long time, its occupants appear to have been more prone to re-use and modify the tools already at hand.

In addition, some assemblages excavated after Bordes defined his facies clearly fall between the variants as proposed, suggesting that inter-assemblage variation is continuous rather than discreet. Lewis and Sally Binford have suggested that this variation was functional and related to the performance of various tasks. For them, the differing assemblages simply reflected differing tasks carried out by the same people, either at different sites, or at the same site at different times, possibly different seasons.

Finally it is now clear that the use to which the Mousterian stone artefacts were actually put does not in general correspond to the names assigned to them. Microwear analysis suggests that while the denticulates and notches were largely used to work wood, the sidescrapers and points were used to work a greater variety of materials including wood, meat, bone and animal hide. The latter show evidence of hafting to wooden handles and – though only in the case of points recovered from sites in Israel – to wooden spear shafts.

The Châtelperronian industry:
The Châtelperronian industry, known from central and south western France and Northern Spain also appears to be associated with the Neanderthals, whose remains rather than those of modern humans have been found at sites such as the Grotte du Renne at Arcy-sur-Cure and Saint Césaire. The industry is named for the type site of la Grotte des Fées, in Châtelperron, Allier, France and probably began around 45,000 years ago, persisting until 36,000 years ago. The stone artefact assemblages generally combine typical Mousterian stone tools with articles more typical of the Upper Palaeolithic such as endscrapers and burins, bone tools and personal ornaments. At the Arcy site, Châtelperronian articles included bone implements that appeared to have been decorated and animal teeth, pieces of ivory, bone and shells that were pierced or grooved for use as beads or pendants. Furthermore the living space has been modified to an extent common only in the Upper Palaeolithic, with traces of hut emplacements including a circle of 11 postholes possibly supporting mammoth tusks and enclosing an area of 3 to 4 sq. metres, which was paved with limestone plaques.

The Châtelperronian people, in short, show evidence of modern human behaviour, but whether this was of independent Neanderthal origin or simply borrowed from neighbouring Cro-Magnon (i.e. modern) humans associated with the Aurignacian culture remains contentious. João Zilhão, Francesco d’Errico argue for independent origin (Zilhão et al, 2006) but Richard Klein claims that the most persuasive Upper Palaeolithic elements of the Châtelperronian only appear towards its end, suggesting acculturisation from the Cro-Magnon people (Klein & Edgar, 2002). Steven Mithen has stated that the coincidence of the Neanderthals coming up with the use of beads just before modern humans appeared wearing them is “just too great to be believed” (Mithen, 2005).

Burials:
It is widely believed that the Neanderthals intentionally buried their dead, with evidence of Neanderthal burials known from Shanidar Cave in northern Iraq and from a number of sites in France.

The Shanidar site was excavated between 1953 and 1960 by Ralph Solecki, who recovered the remains of nine Neanderthal individuals comprising two groups. One group dated to around 60,000 years ago and the other to 70,000 – 80,000 years ago. Some individuals appeared to have been killed by a cave-in, but others had been intentionally buried. One individual, Shanidar 4 was supposedly found in association with pollen, suggesting flowers had been used in the burial, but the pollen could well be contamination introduced during the excavation of the site.

Another individual, Shanidar 1, an elderly male victim of the cave-in, showed evidence of numerous injuries. That bone-healing had occurred implied that they had been sustained before his death. In turn, this suggests that other members of his group must have cared for him during periods of convalescence.

In France, burials are known at La Chapelle-aux-Saints (another elderly male, see above); Le Moustier (a young adult, see above); Regourdou (one individual in a stone-lined pit) and La Ferrassie. The latter site appears to be a Neanderthal cemetery in which seven individuals had been buried. There were two adults and five children, suggesting a family plot. The site may be 70,000 years old.

Although none of these sites show conclusive evidence of grave goods, the purpose of the burials must have been more than simply disposing of dead bodies, as there are far simpler ways of achieving this. Even if the Neanderthals lacked symbolic behaviour, in my view there is no reason to suppose that they felt the loss of kin or friends any less keenly than do modern people.

Settlements:
Neanderthal patterns of land use differ from those of bother earlier and modern humans. Site usage is well-documented from France and Spain. In south-western France, cave and rock shelter sites share certain features:
1. Well-sheltered locations in positions offering extensive and wide-ranging views over ecologically-diverse adjacent valley habitats.
2. Easy access to abundant and high-quality raw materials.
3. Sites located to serve as central places from which diverse economic and technical activities could be connected.

Open-air sites are typically located on higher, more exposed locations, usually on major plateaus, close to springs, streams or lakes (Cameron & Groves, 2004).

The caves and rock shelters were probably living places rather than places for killing animals and butchery. Stacked hearths evidence repeated fire building over thousands of years. The fires would have been used for cooking food and to provide warmth, light and protection from predators. Though some hearths were underlain by rocks, they are generally fairly unsophisticated. A similar pattern is seen at African Middle Stone Age sites, which were occupied by early modern humans. There is a sharp contrast with the later hearths of modern humans in the Upper Palaeolithic. These were fitted with stone liners, air-intake ditches and other features to control airflow and heat dissipation.

The open-air sites are harder to interpret. Some are near sources of stone raw materials and have extensive flaking debris – clearly these sites were used as stone tool workshops. But generally preservation of the evidence at these sites has not been sufficient to distinguish between possible usage as campsites or as killing and butchery sites.

Generally these sites and the contemporary MSA sites in Africa show very little signs of modification, other than hearths. This is again in contrast to the extensive architecture seen at later Upper Palaeolithic sites, which include stone walls, pavements and pits.

It has been shown that where stone sources at Neanderthal and African MSA sites have been established, they have turned out to be largely local, with less than 5% having come from more than 30km away. Again, there is a sharp contrast with the Upper Palaeolithic, where evidence exists of around 20-25% of stone having been obtained from distances greater than 30km.

The inferences are that in the Upper Palaeolithic, modern humans controlled larger territories than either their earlier brethren in Africa or the Neanderthals; or that they had more extensive trade networks than either of these. (Klein 1999).

Food-gathering strategies:
Isotopic analysis of Neanderthal bones suggests that up to 90% of their protein intake came from meat. Some of this may have been scavenged, but there is evidence for the hunting of medium sized and even large carnivores. A wooden spear with a fire-hardened tip was found lodged between the ribs of a mammoth at a 130,000 year old site in Germany. At La Cotte de St. Brelade, a cave site in Jersey (then part of mainland Europe), there is evidence of mass slaughter, where animals were stampeded over the edge of cliffs, butchered and dragged into the cave for consumption. The Neanderthals also ate any available small animals including tortoises, turtles, rabbits and shellfish (Cameron & Groves, 2004; Scarre, 2005).

Language and Behavioural modernity:
Anthropologists define modern human behaviour as the use of abstract thought, symbolic behaviour (such as art and creative expression), use of syntactically-complex language and the ability to plan ahead.

The following are generally accepted as evidence of modern human behaviour:

1. Finely made tools.
2. Fishing.
3. Evidence of long-distance trade among groups.
4. Use of pigment and jewellery for decoration or self-ornamentation.
5. Figurative art, such as cave paintings, petroglyphs and figurines.
6. Burial of the dead.
7. Systematic use of space in living-areas, with particular areas reserved for particular functions, e.g. food storage.

There are two main views for the origins of modern human behaviour. The ‘‘Great Leap Forward” model attributes the sudden appearance of symbolic artefacts to a “big bang” of human consciousness triggered by a genetic mutation, 50,000 years ago, long after the appearance of the first anatomically-modern humans, who may have lived as long as 195,000 years ago (Omo Kibish 1 and 2, Ethiopia) or at least 154,000-160,000 years ago (Herto Bouri, Ethiopia). On this model, modern human behaviour is restricted to anatomically modern humans who lived after 50,000 years ago. This view is supported by many authorities including Jared Diamond, Steven Mithen and Richard Klein (see Diamond, 1991; Mithen, 1996 & 2005; Klein & Edgar, 2002).

A key question is did Neanderthals possess the same linguistic abilities as modern humans. As noted above, this is crucial to the question of their behavioural modernity. The hyoid bone from the Kebara I skeleton (see above) is more-or-less identical to that of a modern human. The hyoid bone is attached to the cartilage in the larynx and anchors the muscles required for speech. The Neanderthal larynx itself is now believed to be positioned low in the throat, like that of a modern human. Earlier claims that the Neanderthal larynx was positioned high in the throat, like a chimpanzee (or a modern human baby) are now known to be incorrect; they were based on the Neanderthal specimen from La Chapelle-aux-Saints, which is now known to be too badly distorted and incomplete for a proper reconstruction.

The hyperglossal canal, which carries nerves from the brain to the tongue, is the same width as that of modern humans, suggesting the same degree of enervation; but those of earlier hominins are more comparable to those of present-day apes. Also comparable is the nerve-carrying canal controlling the diaphragm and hence breathing. While this latter feature could relate to running, etc, it can also be used to provide the level of fine breathing control required for speech.

All in all, then, the Neanderthals appear to have had all the anatomical features required for speech. But did they possess the cognitive ability to handle syntactically-complex language?

No, says Richard Klein, a leading proponent of the Great Leap Forward theory. Klein’s original “prime suspect” for the genetic mutation leading to modern human behaviour was a gene known as FOXP2, or forkhead box P2, which regulates a number of other genes, some of which are believed to play a role in the development of the parts of the brain associated with speech, although the exact genes involved are not known. The FOXP2 gene is not unique to humans, but exists with very few differences in other animals.

The first clue that FOXP2 might be a “speech gene” came from studies of Family KE, an extended British family living in London (their actual identity is not in the public domain). Some members of the family have problems with aspects of grammar, including the use of inflexions for marking tense. They also have difficulty in producing the fine movements of the tongue and lips required for normal speech. The problem affects three generations of the family and has been studied since the 1990s. In 2001 geneticists determined that the affected members of the family all have a defective version of the FOXP2 gene.

In 2002 a team led by Wolfgang Enard at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany compared the human version of the FOXP2 gene with that of the chimpanzee, gorilla, orang-utan, rhesus macaque and mouse. They found that the gene is highly conserved, with differences of just three amino acid positions out of around 700 between the human version and the mouse version. But curiously two of these changes had occurred since the split between humans and chimps, a far more recent occurrence than the split between humans and mice. They suggested that these two changes might be critical to speech and language. The beneficial mutation has been positively selected for by natural selection and they estimated that it had become fixed in the human population at some stage in the last 200,000 years (Enard et al, 2002).

Klein believed the actual date would be 50,000 years, and that FOXP2 was the “smoking gun” responsible for the Great Leap Forward. But even a date of 200,000 years would rule out behavioural modernity in the Neanderthals, who had diverged from Homo sapiens much earlier.

Then in 2007 came a complete volte-face from the Max Planck Institute. The sequencing of the Neanderthal genome had revealed that Neanderthals possessed exactly the same version of FOXP2 as do modern humans (Krause et al, 2007). This not only pulled the rug from under Klein’s argument, it was also rather embarrassing for the group whose earlier 200,000 year estimate was now seen to be off by a factor of at least two. Dr. Svante Paabo, who was involved with both studies, admitted that the earlier estimates were “not flawed but rely on assumptions that are necessary but also universally known to be oversimplifications of the reality”.

Steven Mithen, Professor of Archaeology at Reading University, believes that the Neanderthals lacked what he refers to as “cognitive fluidity”.

In a theory first proposed in his 1996 book “The Prehistory of the Mind”, Mithen claims that the human brain originally had separate cognitive “domains” for different functions, such as social interaction, tool-making, food and resource gathering (“natural history”), etc. Modern human behaviour came about when the barriers between these domains broke down, allowing them to interact with each other. Art, religion and language all arose from the synergistic interactions between the various domains, but the Neanderthals quite literally never made the connection.

Mithen draws heavily on the work of Jerry Fodor, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Michael Tomasello, Howard Gardiner, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, but the idea of initially separate domains interacting may have been inspired in part by Julian Jaynes’ controversial theory about “bicameral minds”, proposed in 1976. However Mithen does not mention Jaynes’ theory (See Mithen, 1996; Fodor, 1983; Karmiloff-Smith, 1992; Tomasello, 1999; Gardiner, 1983 & 1999; Jaynes, 1976).

In 2005, in a book entitled “The Singing Neanderthal”, Mithen proposed the Neanderthals used a form of communication he refers to as Holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical and mimetic – abbreviated to Hmmmmm – which had features of both language and music. Instead of combining words to make up a range of meanings, Neanderthals and other archaic humans communicated with "holistic" utterances, which conveyed complete messages. While non-human primates use similar utterances to communicate information to others of their kind, the Neanderthals used them to manipulate the behaviour of others. While more complex than non-human primate communications, Hmmmm was very different to modern speech. Song, dance and mime made up the repertoire and while simpler forms of Hmmmmm were employed by earlier humans, it was taken onto a new level by the Neanderthals.

In the same work, Mithen argues strongly against behavioural modernity for the Neanderthals. This, he says, is evidenced by the “immense stability of their culture”, which endured with little change for over 200,000 years. Had they possessed language, it would have been impossible for their culture to have remained so stable and so “limited in scope”. Their lack of innovation was to be their undoing because “if there was ever a population of humans that needed to invent bows and arrows, the means for storing food, needles and thread, and so forth, it was the Neanderthals” for whom life was consequently so harsh that few lived beyond 35, leaving their populations only marginally viable (Mithen, 2005).

Richard Klein is even more damning of the Neanderthals: “It is not difficult to see why the Neanderthals failed to survive after behaviourally modern humans appeared. The archaeological record shows that in virtually every detectable aspect – artefacts, site modification, ability to adapt to extreme environments, subsistence, and so forth – the Neanderthals were behaviourally inferior to their modern successors, and to judge from their distinctive morphology, this behavioural inferiority may have been rooted in their biological makeup” (Klein, 1999).

But not everybody accepts the Great Leap Forward model or the behavioural inferiority of the Neanderthals. Such views are disputed among others by Stephen Oppenheimer, Robert Foley, Sally McBrearty and Alison S. Brooks, who claim there was no “big bang” and knowledge, skills and culture gradually developed over hundreds of millennia (see Oppenheimer, 2003; Lewin & Foley, 2004; McBrearty & Brooks, 2000). On this view, the technological differences between the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons were cultural rather biological. The blade-based Mode IV tool technology of the latter, while superior to the Neanderthals’ Mousterian technology, did not require genetic mutation - anymore than writing genes, aeroplane genes and internet genes were required for these things to become possible.

Did Neanderthals and modern humans interbreed?
This is a topic of perennial interest, but conclusive evidence one way or the other is lacking. Although Neanderthals and modern humans both occupied sites in the Levant from 100,000 years ago, the two species were never present at the same time and the first contact between them may well not have occurred until modern humans first entered Europe, possibly 45,000 years ago according to a recent study (Anikovich et al, 2007).

There is little doubt in my mind that modern humans did on occasions have sex with Neanderthals. Even in the wild, closely-related species will on occasion mate, for example horses and donkeys, lions and tigers, and whales and dolphins. Such matings do lead to offspring and while these are generally infertile, they are usually viable. Given that modern humans will have sex with sheep, it seems inconceivable that they did not at some stage do so with Neanderthals. While Neanderthals would certainly have appeared strange to the incoming modern humans and vice-versa, they would not necessarily have seemed unattractive to each other. For a present-day human though, having sex with a Neanderthal might be a somewhat hazardous affair, given the considerably superior physical strength of the latter; but to the more robust Cro-Magnons this might have been less of an issue.

Could such unions have resulted in fertile offspring, or indeed any offspring? Given that we now know that there were probably no significant obstetric incompatibilities (see above) it does not seem unreasonable to suppose that hybridisation was possible, as with other closely-related species. But no convincing fossil evidence of Neanderthal/modern human hybridization has ever come to light, suggesting that it was rare if indeed it happened at all.

Claims that the 24,500 year old skeleton of a 4-year-old child found at Abrigo do Lagar Velho, Portugal in 1998 is an example of a hybrid (Duarte et al, 1999) are not widely accepted. Most researchers think that the Abrigo do Lagar Velho child simply was either an unusually stocky modern human child or one with a growth abnormality.

A 2006 study suggested that an adaptive allele (i.e. an advantageous version of a particular gene) of microcephalin (MCPH1), a gene linked with brain size, introgressed into modern humans from an extinct human lineage, quite possibly the Neanderthals (Evans et al, 2006). Haplogroup D as this version is known first appeared 37,000 years ago, closely corresponding to when modern humans began to colonise Europe. It is now the most common form throughout the world, except for in sub-Saharan Africa. The study suggested that its appearance might have resulted from cross-breeding between modern humans and Neanderthals. However this has now been ruled out following the publication of the first draft of the Neanderthal genome by a team led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute in Germany. The Neanderthal version of the microcephalin gene turns out to be the ancestral form found today in African populations.

Paabo has said that it seems overall Neanderthals have contributed, at most, a "very limited" fraction of the genetic variation found in contemporary human populations (quoted on BBC website, 12 Feb 2009).

Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London believes that while interbreeding was most likely possible, it happened only rarely, with trivial impact on modern humans (quoted on BBC website, 12 Feb 2009).

The fate of the Neanderthals:
The most recent Neanderthal fossils are those from Gorham’s Cave, Gibraltar, suggesting that they occupied the cave until 28,000 years ago and possibly until as recently as 24,000 years ago (Finlayson et al, 2006). Modern humans may have first entered Europe 45,000 years ago, with Upper Palaeolithic sites on the Don River in Russia dating back to that time. Thereafter they spread rapidly across western and central Europe 42,000-40,000 years ago (Anikovich et al, 2007). Although there was certainly a long overlap before the Neanderthals finally disappeared, inevitably Homo sapiens has been widely blamed for their demise.

In his book Before the Dawn, published in 2007, Nicholas Wade refers to “the long struggle against the Neanderthals” and Stephen Oppenheimer suggests there was a “long and probably unfriendly stalemate” between the two species (Wade, 2007; Oppenheimer, 2003).

But the reality is that there is not a single piece of evidence for direct conflict between modern humans and the Neanderthals; nor indeed is there evidence of intercommunity violence between Cro-Magnon groups. While absence of evidence is not the same thing as evidence of absence, it does suggest that such events were not particularly common. Even if relations between the two species were consistently unfriendly, there is certainly no possibility that the Neanderthals were the victims of genocide. The kind of systematic slaughter that cost countless millions their lives during the last century was the work of state-level societies, not hunter-gatherer tribes.

On the other hand, if we reject an independent Neanderthal origin for the Châtelperronian industry (and it is hard to argue with Steven Mithen’s view about the improbable coincidence of this being so), then it implies at least a degree of cultural contact between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons and that there must have been some co-operation between the two species.

When Europeans first began to exploit the New World, the infectious diseases they brought with them proved catastrophic to the indigenous people, who had no immunity to smallpox, typhus, cholera and measles. It has been suggested that the Neanderthals similarly fell victim to diseases to which the Cro-Magnons had long since become immune. But this seems improbable as pandemic-causing diseases require dense populations to be viable and did not arise in human populations until the emergence of urban societies. In addition many diseases have arisen in human populations by crossing the species gap from animals, something that would have been rare if not impossible in pre-agricultural times.

It seems more likely that regardless of whether or not the Neanderthals were behaviourally modern, the superior technology of the Cro-Magnons gave the latter the competitive edge in the constant quest for the next meal, for shelter and for other resources in Ice Age Europe. If this resulted in only a slight breeding advantage for the Cro-Magnons at the expense of the Neanderthals, then within a few thousand years the latter would have become extinct.

Climatic instability over the middle part of the last Ice Age may have exacerbated the Neanderthals problems, though as a recent study has shown, tying their final demise to specific climatic events is problematic, due to uncertainty in dating. The date of 28,000 years for the final Neanderthal occupation of Gorham’s Cave does not coincide with a period of unduly harsh conditions, but if the more recent date of 24,000 years ago is accepted, then this would correspond to a time of deteriorating conditions at the onset of the Last Glacial Maximum, which reached its maximum extent 20,000 years ago. Competition with the Cro-Magnons would have intensified as the latter migrated south from the higher latitudes (Tzedakis et al, 2007).

Regardless of the exact role played by the Cro-Magnons, the Neanderthals would have found themselves becoming increasingly marginalised, pushed to the peripheries of Europe. 10-20,000 years might seem like a long time, but this final chapter of the Neanderthal story accounts for no more than ten percent of their career; at the end of which they were gone forever.

References:

M. V. Anikovich, A. A. Sinitsyn, John F. Hoffecker, Vance T. Holliday, V. V. Popov, S. N. Lisitsyn, Steven L. Forman, G. M. Levkovskaya, G. A. Pospelova, I. E. Kuz’mina, N. D. Burova, Paul Goldberg, Richard I. Macphail, Biagio Giaccio, N. D. Praslov (2007): Early Upper Paleolithic in Eastern Europe and Implications for the Dispersal of Modern Humans, Science Vol. 315 p223 12 Jan 2007.

J. M. Bermudez de Castro, J. L. Arsuaga, E. Carbonell, A. Rosas, I. Martınez, M. Mosquera (1997): A Hominid from the Lower Pleistocene of Atapuerca, Spain: Possible Ancestor to Neandertals and Modern Humans, Science Vol. 276 30 May 1997.

Bogucki, P (1999): The Origins of Human Society, Blackwell Publishing.

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Dean MC, Stringer CB, Bromage TG (1986): Age at death of the Neanderthal child from Devil's Tower, Gibraltar and the implications for studies of general growth and development in Neanderthals, Am J Phys Anthropol. 1986 Jul; 70(3):301-9.

Diamond, J (1991) The Third Chimpanzee, Radius, London.

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Hans van Der Plicht & Joao Zilhao (1999): The Early Upper Paleolithic Human Skeleton from the Abrigo do Lagar Velho (Portugal) and Modern Human Emergence in Iberia, PNAS, USA 96 (1999): 7604-09.

Wolfgang Enard, Molly Przeworski, Simon E. Fisher, Cecilia S. L. Lai,
Victor Wiebe, Takashi Kitano, Anthony P. Monaco & Svante Paabo (2002): Molecular evolution of FOXP2, a gene involved in speech and language, Nature, Vol. 418 22 August 2002.

Patrick D. Evans, Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov, Eric J. Vallender, Richard R. Hudson, and Bruce T. Lahn (2006): Evidence that the adaptive allele of the brain size gene microcephalin introgressed into Homo sapiens from an archaic Homo lineage, PNAS November 28, 2006 vol. 103 no. 48.

Clive Finlayson, Francisco Giles Pacheco, Joaquın Rodrıguez-Vidal, Darren A. Fa, Jose Marıa Gutierrez Lopez, Antonio Santiago Perez, Geraldine Finlayson, Ethel Allue, Javier Baena Preysler, Isabel Caceres, Jose S. Carrion, Yolanda Fernandez Jalvo, Christopher P. Gleed-Owen, Francisco J. Jimenez Espejo, Pilar Lopez, Jose Antonio Lopez Saez, Jose Antonio Riquelme Cantal, Antonio Sanchez Marco, Francisco Giles Guzman, Kimberly Brown, Noemı Fuentes, Claire A. Valarino, Antonio Villalpando, Christopher B. Stringer, Francisca Martinez Ruiz & Tatsuhiko Sakamoto (2006): Late survival of Neanderthals at the southernmost extreme of Europe, Nature, Vol. 443 19 October 2006.

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Richard E. Green, Johannes Krause, Susan E. Ptak, Adrian W. Briggs, Michael T. Ronan, Jan F. Simons, Lei Du, Michael Egholm, Jonathan M. Rothberg, Maja Paunovic & Svante Paabo(2006): Analysis of one million base pairs of Neanderthal DNA, Nature 444, 330-336 (16 November 2006).

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Klein, R. (1999): The Human Career (2nd Edition), University of Chicago Press.

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Carles Lalueza-Fox, Holger Römpler, David Caramelli, Claudia Stäubert,
Giulio Catalano, David Hughes, Nadin Rohland, Elena Pilli, Laura Longo,
Silvana Condemi, Marco de la Rasilla, Javier Fortea, Antonio Rosas, Mark Stoneking, Torsten Schöneberg, Jaume Bertranpetit, Michael Hofreiter (2007): A Melanocortin 1 Receptor Allele Suggests Varying Pigmentation Among Neanderthals, Science, Vol. 318 30 November 2007.

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© Christopher Seddon 2009

Gherkin

30 St Mary Axe, popularly known as the Gherkin, was designed by Norman Foster and opened in 2004. Seen against a foreground of more traditional buildings, it gives the impression of a vast spaceship that has touched down in the City of London.







© Christopher Seddon 2009

Homo heidelbergensis

Introduction:
Homo heidelbergensis, or “archaic Homo sapiens”, is the name given to the large-brained hominins that appeared in Africa 600,000 years ago and migrated into Europe and possibly Asia. It is conventionally regarded as having given rise to modern humans in Africa and the Neanderthals in Europe.

The type specimen is the Mauer Mandible (Mauer 1), a virtually-complete lower jaw recovered from fluvial beds near the village of Mauer, in south-west Germany. The find was made on 21 October 1907 by a gravel-pit worker named Daniel Hartmann and described the following year by Professor Otto Schoetensack of the University of Heidelberg. The Mauer Mandible has been dated to 500,000 years old.

Until about ten years ago, the rather unsatisfactory term “archaic Homo sapiens” was used to describe any mid-Pleistocene hominin that wasn’t Homo erectus, Homo sapiens, or a Neanderthal. The latter was usually classified as a subspecies of Homo sapiens, i.e. H. s. neanderthalensis, but they are now generally regarded as a separate species. Consequently “archaic Homo sapiens” is itself regarded as a separate species, with the 1907 name Homo heidelbergensis having seniority under the rules of taxonomy.

As Manzi (2004) notes however this is no more than a revision of the old paradigm, with the substitution of a grade “archaic Homo sapiens” with a clade, Homo heidelbergensis, accompanied by the recognition of three distinct species, i.e. H. heidelbergensis, H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens, with corresponding speciation events between the Middle and Late Pleistocene in Africa and Eurasia.

Whether or not Homo heidelbergensis is a genuine species or simply a grade of “Version 3.0 human" containing several species remains controversial.

Key Fossils:
Kabwe (Broken Hill), Zambia: Skull and several postcranial bones including a femur and a tibia (Broken Hill 1). It was found in an iron and zinc mine in Broken Hill, Northern Rhodesia (now Kabwe, Zambia) in 1921 by a Swiss miner named Tom Zwiglaar. Dating is uncertain, but probably between 700,000 and 400,000 years old. It has a cranial capacity of around 1100cc and was originally described as Homo rhodesiensis.

Lake Ndutu, Tanzania: a 400,000 year old cranium, found in 1973, with an estimated cranial capacity of 1100cc.

Bodo, Middle Awash, Ethiopia: a 670,000-600,000 year old cranium found in 1976 by a survey headed by Jon Kalb. Cranial capacity is 1300cc.

Sima de los Huesos, Atapuerca, Spain: 350,000 year old remains representing 28 individuals, including three nearly complete skulls, SH4 (cranial capacity 1390cc), SH5 (cranial capacity 1125cc) and SH6 (cranial capacity 1220cc).

Petralona, northern Greece: Skull discovered in cave system in 1960, dated 250,000 – 150,000 years old, with a cranial capacity of 1200cc.

La Caune de Arago, Tautavel in southern France: isolated teeth, cranial, mandibular and fragmentary postcranial remains belonging to at least four adults and three children, dated to approximately 450,000 years old. The distorted Arago 21 cranium has an estimated capacity of 1150cc.

Mauer, Germany: the Mauer Mandible, as mentioned above.

Steinheim, Germany: a distorted but nearly complete cranium found in a gravel pit 1933 by Karl Sigrist. It is believed to be 350,000-250,000 years old. The cranial capacity is 1100cc.

Boxgrove, England: a partial tibia discovered in 1994 dated to 423,000-362,000 years old, associated with Acheulian tools.

Swanscombe, England: three skull fragments belonging to the same individual recovered between 1935 and 1955; believed to be 300,000-200,000 years old and popularly known as Swanscombe Man, though now thought to be female. The cranial capacity has been estimated at 1325cc.

Dali, Shaanxi Province, China: a 250,000 year old cranium discovered by Shuntang Liu in 1978, with a cranial capacity of 1120cc.

Jinniu Shan: cranium, vertebrae, ribs, pelvis, patella and limb bones discovered in 1984. The cranial capacity is 1300cc and the remains are believed to be 250,000 years old.

Description:
Manzi (2004) selects the Middle Pliocene fossils from Kabwe, Petralona and Dali fossils as being typical of Homo heidelbergensis. They have a “transitional aspect” between earlier and more recent hominins which include both primitive and derived traits. Primitive or “archaic” features include a heavily-built cranial structure with massive brow ridges; crests in the temporo-occipital region, including erectus-like occipital and angular tori; a low and antero-posteriorly elongated cranial vault; a protruding and large facial skeleton; and the absence of a modern chin. These traits are however reduced in comparison to Homo ergaster/erectus.

The main derived feature is that the general shape of the cranial vault is consistent with increased brain-size. The frontal is less receding than it is in earlier hominins; the parietal profile is more convex along the mid-sagittal plane and less angled in coronal sections; and the occipital squama is more vertical and arched.

The cranial capacity is typically between 1100-1300cc, around 90% of that of modern humans, a considerable increase on that of Homo erectus/ergaster.

Affinities to other hominins:
The view that this species evolved in Africa about 600,000 years ago, then migrated into Europe, and that the two lineages led to respectively Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals, is probably as convinci