occupied areas of Eurasia and Africa. Australia was first reached by humans around 50,000 years ago, implying watercraft capable of crossing stretches of water as much as sixty miles wide between eastern Indonesia and Australia. The occupation of northern Russia and Siberia by at least 20,000 years ago depended on many advances: tailored clothing, whose existence is reflected in eyed needles, cave paintings of parkas, and grave ornaments marking outlines of shirts and trousers; warm furs, indicated by fox and wolf skeletons minus the paws (removed in skinning and found in a separate pile); elaborate houses (marked by pestholes, pavements, and walls of mammoth bones), with elaborate fireplaces; and stone lamps to hold animal fat and light the long Arctic nights. The occupation of Siberia and Alaska in turn led to the occupation of North America and South America around 11,000 years ago (Chapter Eighteen). Whereas Neanderthals obtained their raw materials within a few miles of home, Cro-Magnons and their contemporaries throughout Europe practised long-distance trade, not only for raw materials for tools but also for 'useless' ornaments. Tools of high-quality stone such as obsidian, jasper, and flint are found hundreds of miles from where those stones were quarried. Baltic amber reached southeastern Europe, while Mediterranean shells were carried to inland parts of France, Spain, and the Ukraine. I saw very similar patterns in modern stone-age New Guinea, where cowry shells prized as decorations were traded up to the highlands from the coast, bird-of-paradise plumes were traded back down to the coast, and obsidian for stone axes was traded out from a few highly valued quarries.
Madagascar 1,500 Australia 50,000
This map illustrates stages in the spread of our ancestors from their African origins to conquer the world. Numbers stand for estimated number of years before the present. Further discoveries of older archaeological sites may well show that some regions, such as Siberia or the Solomon Islands, were colonized earlier than the estimated dates shown here.
The evident aesthetic sense reflected in the Late Ice Age trade in ornaments relates to the achievements for which we most admire the Cro-Magnons—their art. Best known, of course, are the rock paintings from caves like Lascaux, with stunning polychrome depictions of now-extinct animals, but equally impressive are the bas- reliefs, necklaces and pendants, fired-clay ceramic sculptures, Venus figurines of women with enormous breasts and buttocks, and musical instruments ranging from flutes to rattles.
Unlike Neanderthals, few of whom lived past the age of forty, some Cro-Magno' n skeletons indicate survival to sixty years of age. Many Cro-Magnons, but few Neanderthals, lived to enjoy their grandchildren. Those of us accustomed to getting our information from the printed page or television will find it hard to appreciate how important even just one or two elderly people are in a pre-literate society. In New Guinea villages it often happens that younger men lead me to the oldest person in the village when I stump them with a question about some uncommon bird or fruit. For example, when I visited Rennell Island in the Solomons in 1976, many islanders told me what wild fruits were good to eat, but only one old man could tell me.what other wild fruits could be eaten in an emergency to avoid starvation. He remembered that information from a cyclone that had hit Rennell in his childhood (around 1905), destroying gardens and reducing his people to a state of desperation. One such person in a pre-literate society can thus spell the difference between death and survival for the whole society. Hence the fact that some Cro-Magnons survived twenty years longer than any Neanderthal probably played a big role in Cro-Magnon success. As we shall see in Chapter Seven, living to an older age required not only improved survival skills but also some biological changes, possibly including the evolution of human female menopause.
I have described the Great Leap Forward as if all those advances in tools and art appeared simultaneously 40,000 years ago. In fact, different innovations appeared at different times. Spear-throwers appeared before harpoons or bows and arrows, while beads and pendants appeared before cave paintings. I have also described the changes as if they were the same everywhere, but they were not. 'Among Late Ice Age Africans, Ukrainians, and French, only the Africans made beads out of ostrich eggs, only the Ukrainians built houses out of mammoth bones, and only the French painted woolly rhinos on cave walls. These variations of culture in time and space are totally unlike the unchanging monolithic Neanderthal culture. They constitute the most important innovation that came with our rise to humanity: namely, the capacity for innovation itself. To us today, who cannot picture a world in which Nigerians and Latvians in 1991 have virtually the same possessions as each other and as the Romans in 50 BC, innovation is utterly natural. To Neanderthals, it was evidently unthinkable.
Despite our instant sympathy with Cro-Magnon art, their stone tools and hunter-gatherer lifestyle make it hard for us to view them as other than primitive. Stone tools evoke cartoons of club-waving cavemen uttering grunts as they drag a woman off to their cave. We can form a more accurate impression of Cro-Magnons if we imagine what future archaeologists will conclude after excavating a New Guinea village site from as recently as the 1950s. The archaeologists will find a few simple types of stone axes. Virtually all other material possessions were made of wood and will have perished. Nothing will remain of the multistorey houses, beautifully woven baskets, drums and flutes, outrigger canoes, and world-quality painted sculpture. There will be no trace of the village's complex language, songs, social relationships, and knowledge of the natural world.
New Guinea material culture was until recently 'primitive' (that is, stone-age) for historical reasons, but New Guineans are fully modern humans. New Guineans whose fathers lived in the Stone Age now pilot aeroplanes, operate computers, and govern a modern state. If we could carry ourselves back 40,000 years in a time machine, I expect that we Would find Cro-Magnons to be equally modern people, capable of learning to fly a jet plane. They made stone and bone tools only because no other tools had yet been invented; that is all that they had the opportunity to learn.
It used to be argued that Neanderthals evolved into Cro-Magnons within Europe. That possibility now seems increasingly unlikely. The last Neanderthal skeletons from around 40,000 years ago were still 'fullblown' Neanderthals, while the first Cro-Magnons appearing in Europe at the same time were already anatomically fully modern. Since anatomically modern people were already present in Africa and the Near East tens of thousands of years earlier, it seems much more likely that anatomically modern people invaded Europe from that direction than that they evolved within Europe.
What happened when invading Cro-Magnons met the resident Neanderthals? We can be certain only of the end result: within a short time, no more Neanderthals. The conclusion seems to me inescapable that Cro-Magnon arrival somehow caused Neanderthal extinction. Yet many archaeologists recoil at this conclusion and invoke environmental changes instead. For example, the
My guess is that events in Europe at the time of the Great Leap Forward were similar to events that have occurred repeatedly in the modern world, whenever a numerous people with more advanced technology invades the lands of a much less numerous people with less advanced technology. For instance, when European colonists invaded North America, most North American Indians proceeded to die of introduced epidemics; most of the survivors were killed outright or driven off their land (Chapter Sixteen); some of the survivors adopted European technology (horses and guns) and resisted for some time; and many of the remaining survivors were pushed on to lands that Europeans did not want, or else intermarried with Europeans (Chapter Fifteen). The displacement of Aboriginal Australians by European colonists, and of southern African San populations (Bushmen) by invading iron-age Bantu-speakers, followed a similar course. By analogy, I guess that Cro-Magnon diseases, murders, and dis-44-JUST ANOTHER SPECIES OF BIG MAMMAL placements did in the Neanderthals. If so, then the Cro-Magnon/ Neanderthal transition was a harbinger of what was to come, when the victors' descendants began squabbling among themselves. It may at first seem paradoxical that Cro-Magnons prevailed over the far more muscular Neanderthals, but weaponry rather than strength would have been decisive. Similarly, it's not gorillas that are now threatening to exterminate humans in Central Africa, but vice versa. People with huge muscles require lots of food, and they therefore gain no advantage if slimmer, smarter people can use tools to do the same work.
Like the Great Plains Indians of North America, some Neanderthals may have learned some Cro-Magnon ways and resisted for a while. This is the only sense I can make of a puzzling culture called the Chatel-perronian, which coexisted in Western Europe along with a typical Cro-Magnon culture (the so-called Aurignacian culture) for
