The Incredible Human Journey Read Free Page B

but also by differences in the broader lifestyles
of people. Put very simply (really too simply, as we shall see later), the Palaeolithic lifestyle was that of a nomadic hunter-gatherer,
the Mesolithic saw a trend towards settling down, and the Neolithic saw the beginning of settled villages, cities, agriculture,
pottery and organised religion.
    Throughout the Palaeolithic, and in the Mesolithic, too, our ancestors were nomadic. They left barely a trace of their passing
– no buildings, and very little in the way of possessions – and those material possessions that they did have were often made
of what we now think of as biodegradable materials, so they have long since disappeared. When we find stone tools, we are
often looking at something that was just a part of a more complex piece of equipment. Sometimes there are hints from polished
areas of the stone tool suggesting how it might have been tied to something. Very rarely are the conditions right for organic
materials – like pieces of wood or animal hide – to be preserved. When you consider the scarcity of the remains, it’s quite
amazing that we can find the occasional trace and, from this, reconstruct part of our collective (pre)history.
    During the Palaeolithic period, there are changes in the types of stone tools people were making, and the period is divided
up into Lower, Middle and Upper Palaeolithic (or, in Africa, the Early, Middle and Later Stone Age). Stone tools start to
appear in the ground, in what is grandly termed the ‘archaeological record’, around 2.5 million years ago, made by early members
of our own genus, Homo . These are crude, pebble tools, and the toolkit or stone tool ‘technology’ is called Oldowan after the sites excavated by Mary Leakey in the Olduvai Gorge. These basic tools continued to be made for hundreds of thousands
of years. Our early ancestors were not great innovators! But we have to grant them some skill. In the wild, chimpanzees make
tools out of easily modified materials like sticks or grass stems, and use stones to crack nuts; chimpanzees in captivity
can be taught to make stone tools, but their products are still not as good as those Oldowan tools. 10
    The next stone toolkit to come along is called the Acheulean . And this toolkit is not found only in Africa. In fact, it is named after the site of St Acheul in France, where a characteristic
‘hand axe’ was discovered in the nineteenth century. Acheulean tools are found in Africa from about 1.7 million years ago,
but it’s not until 600,000 years ago that they are found in Europe. The tool from St Acheul is actually quite late: it dates
to between 300,000 and 400,000 years ago. By 250,000 years ago, this technology had disappeared. Slightly strangely, this
hand axe technology never reached East Asia. The fossil record suggests that people – probably Homo erectus – first made their way out of Africa around a million years ago, so it’s unlikely that the East Asian pebble-tool-makers were
direct descendants of the Oldowan people in Africa; they are more likely to have been, culturally, ‘Acheuleans’ who gave up
making hand axes as they moved east. 10
    Hand axes are pointed, teardrop-shaped tools, flaked on both sides. It seems that nobody knows much about how these tools were used: were they designed for use in the hand, or hafted on to a shaft? Many archaeologists prefer simply to call them ‘bifaces’
(a general term for tools flaked on two sides). Acheulean bifaces are much more refined (though still big, chunky things)
than Oldowan tools. Some of the bifaces are quite beautifully symmetrical, and many archaeologists have suggested that their
form is governed by aesthetics as well as function. It’s a tempting but ultimately conjectural idea, as there is no other
evidence for any art at this time. And, once again, there seems to be extreme conservatism in tool-making throughout this
period: there was very little invention. Over the huge time span of the