Archaeologists, however, claim to have many new and interesting things to say
about how the human mind evolved. Steven Mithen, for one, believes that
archaeology may hold “the key to an understanding of the modern mind”. He
certainly makes a good case for it in The Prehistory of the Mind (“T���
brain’s big bang”, 26 October 1996, p 44). Mithen writes so clearly on a
difficult subject that it is hard to see his book being bettered for a
considerable time.

It is certainly not eclipsed by Human Evolution, Language and Mind
by William Noble and Iain Davidson. The two books overlap to a considerable
extent, although the different presentations mean that they are not direct
competitors.

Noble and Davidson, a psychologist and an archaeologist respectively, attempt
to unravel the signs of awareness and self-conscious perception in the
prehistoric record. But their book is a dull read after Mithen’s, and some of
their discussions are frustratingly disjointed.

The authors define language as the “symbolic use of communicative signs” and
the core of their book is a theoretical analysis of symbolism and “minded”
behaviour. This makes the middle chapters heavy-going, though useful for
students. In the concluding chapters on archaeology, which are generally easier,
the authors include discussions of some topics that Mithen does not touch
on—such as the importance of stone throwing, pointing and gesturing for
the development of the human mind and language.

Noble and Davidson do not have an exciting style but they offer some unusual
interpretations—of the Acheulean and Levallois stone industries, for
example—and this gives their book an extra dimension, especially for
students and specialists.

Like Mithen, they believe that language, and hence the modern human mind,
developed late in human evolution, probably only in the past 100 000 years. An
early example of the expression of modern human behaviour is, they say, the
first settlement of Australia, which required a sea crossing and “abilities to
plan ahead that are made possible by language”.

THAT the term “Neanderthal” is now a popular term of abuse is curious. A
Neanderthal is, of course, a prehistoric human relative. Populations of these
hardy people lived during the last ice age of Europe and western Asia, from
about 120 000 to 20 000 years ago, when they disappeared.

We now know that Neanderthals resembled modern people in many ways, and do
not deserve their brutish popular image. But were they the direct ancestors of
modern Europeans or did they lose out against immigrant groups of fully modern
people from Africa, leaving only their bones, stone tools and refuse
behind?

In The Neanderthal Legacy, Paul Mellars of the University of
Cambridge aims to answer this question from an archaeological viewpoint. He
concentrates on where and how Neanderthals lived. He has well-illustrated
chapters on the ice-age environment and on the Neanderthals’ food supply, cave
sites, social organisation and mental capabilities. A good half of the book is
on the stone tools made and used by Neanderthals.

This serious treatment of Neanderthal behavioural patterns makes the volume
very useful for student and professional archaeologists. Its strong bias towards
southwestern France where the Perigord and adjacent areas have the
best-documented record of Neanderthal sites introduces English-speaking
archaeologists to much new French research.

With many qualifications, Mellars favours the viewpoint that Neanderthals
were definitely different from modern humans.

Kathlyn Stewart of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa has reviewed the
availability of fish between one and two million years ago, the fishing
techniques of animal species and modern Africans, and the existence of fish
remains at early hominid sites. She concludes that fish could have provided
early humans with an important source of protein and fat when other food was
in short supply (Journal of Human Evolution, vol 27, p 229) especially in the
dry season when mammals were undernourished and underweight.

Fishing has largely been neglected as a feature of the early hominid way of
life, probably because of the lack of hard evidence in the form of relevant
tools. However, Stewart suggests that the hominid fishers would not have
needed elaborate harpoons, fishhooks or other fishing paraphernalia. She
points out that hyenas, leopards, baboons and a variety of other mammals
occasionally catch fish without the benefit of technology. And traditional
African fishers today sometimes scoop fish up by hand.

Several common African freshwater fish are easy to catch, especially at
certain times of year. The best catching times would have been when fish
congregated to spawn in shallow water during the rainy season, and when they
were stranded in pools during the dry season. Stewart notes that fat reserves
in some fish increase towards the end of the dry season, just before spawning,
which makes them especially nutritious.

She comments that in spite of the obvious benefits of fish-eating,
archaeologists have paid scant attention to fish remains at early hominid
sites dating from 2 to 1 million years ago, even when it is known that the
hominids lived near water. Only at relatively recent African sites dating up
to 50 000 years ago have fish bones been considered as evidence that fish were
an important seasonal food.

Fish remains have been recorded from several early hominid sites, among
them East Turkana and West Turkana in Kenya, Senge in Zaire, and Olduvai Gorge
in Tanzania. At Olduvai Gorge, for example, more than 4000 fragments of fish
bone, all of them from catfish or perch-like fish called Tilapia, were
recovered from deposits associated with either Homo habilis or the later Homo
erectus. The hominids lived close to a shallow, saline, alkaline lake.

There is little evidence of fish being cut up with stone tools at the
Olduvai sites – only a few bone fragments have possible cut marks on them.
However, Stewart says that the species and type of bone characteristic of the
Olduvai fish remains resemble those of remains found at more recent
prehistoric sites in Africa.

The survey came in the nick of time. It was built on the foundations
of archaeological and environmental work that began in the 1930s, before
agriculture intensified. As the fens dry out, so the relics of past human
activity disintegrate; this is now happening at an alarming rate. Thanks
to the Fenland Survey, however, at least archaeologists now know where
the danger spots are and what action needs to be taken in the future to
preserve and record sites before they disappear. But the traditional way
of life of the independent ‘slodgers’ and other fen folk is no more.

Fenland Survey (English Heritage, pp 170, £35), a summary of
the survey’s findings by David Hall and John Coles, is the first in a series
of Archaeological Reports from English Heritage. The title and format (A4)
might suggest a serious tome for the specialist, but this paperback volume
also provides an excellent introduction to Fenland history for the general
reader. Turn a few pages and a mysterious landscape and a fascinating, way
of life are revealed.

Between 1982 and 1991, Craig Stanford of the University of Southern
California, New York, and three colleagues carried out a study of common
chimpanzees in Gombe National Park. It revealed that hunting plays an important
part in chimpanzee populations that are widely scattered. Earlier, other
zoologists had found that hunting is important to chimpanzees in the dense
rain-forest of Tai National Park, Cote d’Ivoire.

The chimpanzees at Tai, studied by Christophe and Hedwige Boesch, hunt
mainly one species and do so in groups (��è����Ƶ, Science, 22 July
1989 and ‘First hunters of the forest’, 19 May 1990). Until now, their cooperative
hunts were thought to be unusual and a response to the difficulties of living
in a forest. Now, however, it seems that the hunting patterns among the
chimpanzees of West and East Africa are more similar than expected.

Gombe chimpanzees, like their cousins from Tai, mainly hunt red colobus
monkeys (Colobus badius tephrosceles). Over the period of their study,
Stanford and his team found that these monkeys made up 82 per cent of the
prey of the Gombe chimpanzees (American Journal of Physical Anthropology
vol 94, p 213). After the red colobus, bushpigs (Potamochoerus porcus) were
the next favoured prey.

The zoologists observed the Gombe chimpanzees kill 350 red colobuses
over the period of the study, but they believe the real number must have
been higher. With such a high casualty rate, it is remarkable that the local
population of red colobuses remains viable. However, nature has found a
way. In Gombe and elsewhere in East Africa, red colobuses breed throughout
the year rather than seasonally. So a female red colobus who loses an infant
is able to conceive again shortly afterwards.

In Gombe, chimpanzees prefer young monkeys, whereas in Tai nearly half
the monkeys killed are adults. There seems to be no simple explanation
for this difference. It could be that the Gombe chimpanzees prefer the taste
of tender young infants. Or it may be that only a few strong hunters in
the Gombe population are willing to attack adult monkeys because of the
risk of injury. As a result, the number of attacks on adult monkeys would
depend significantly on the population of the few strong hunters.

Both the Tai and the Gombe chimpanzees hunt throughout the year, but
the number of hunts increases in the dry season of August and September
and decreases in the rainy season of April and May. Earlier surveys had
suggested that hunting in Gombe was not very seasonal.

During ‘binges’, the Gombe chimpanzees hunt daily for a period lasting
from one to several weeks. On one binge, which lasted 68 days from late
June to late August 1990, Stanford and his team noted that 71 red colobuses
were killed on 47 hunts.

Any interpretation of the way chimpanzees hunt has to take into account
the question of what prompts chimpanzees to chase and kill red colobuses.
There is a marked difference between the Gombe and Tai chimpanzees. In
Gombe, chimpanzees encounter red colobuses only once every second day but
hunt the monkeys in around three out of four encounters with them. By
contrast, the Tai chimpanzees encounter the monkeys several times a day
but hunt them only once every 15 encounters.

Katherine Wright of University College London has studied grinding stones
and other tools for processing cereals from prehistoric sites in the southern
Levant region of the Mediterranean, now occupied by Lebanon, Syria and Israel.
She says that the processing of wild cereals to make them edible is such
hard work that no one would do it unless they were desperate.

Wright’s conclusion is at odds with the usual idea of how people made
the transition from gathering wild plants to cultivating them. Most researchers
believe that in the closing years of the Pleistocene epoch, between 20 000
to 10 000 years ago, pre-farming peoples foraged in a garden of plenty.
Some have claimed that, in the eastern Mediterranean, wild cereals were
abundant and easily processed, and were one of the staple foods.

Wright challenges this idea. She believes that cultivating cereals was
hard and that, given a choice, people would not have taken it up.

According to Wright, wild cereals were probably not attractive plant
foods for the foragers of the late Pleistocene in the eastern Mediterranean,
except during cold, dry periods when the regular foods were in short supply
or unobtainable (American Antiquity, vol 59, p 238). In those circumstances,
the fact that wild cereals were plentiful and that surplus grain could
be stored for leaner periods may have ‘outweighed considerations of processing
costs’, says Wright.

A significant cold, dry period occurred between 11 500 and 10 500 years
ago, when people were on the threshold of changing to an agricultural way
of life. Immediately after this, cultivated forms of wheat and barley appear
at Jericho, Tel Aswad and other sites in the eastern Mediterranean. This
is the period archaeologists call the Pre-Pottery Neolithic ‘A’, or PPNA,
10 500 to about 9300 years ago.

The trigger for agriculture is one of the most debated topics in studies
of prehistory. But all archaeologists agree that farming did not emerge
until after people had begun settling in villages and populations had begun
to increase.

These developments are thought to have started in the eastern Mediterranean
with the Natufian culture, which began about 12 800 years ago. According
to Wright, significantly more tools for processing plants – especially mortars
and pestles – have been found at early Natufian sites than at earlier ones.

Wright suggests that from the time of early Natufian culture, 12 800
to 11 500 years ago, the area in which people foraged for food shrank. As
populations increased, they had to process larger quantities of food for
larger social groups and for longer periods of time. Hence, Wright surmises,
they had to exploit foods such as cereals that grew abundantly near their
settlements but needed more processing than other plants.

By the time of late Natufian culture (11 500 to 10 500 years ago),
grinding slabs or querns and handstones appear in greater numbers and by
the PPNA there is a marked increase in these processing tools, suggesting
that dehusked grain was milled into groats or flour. By now, people had
learnt to grow cereals and knew the advantage of storing seed to see them
through droughts. Although such processing refinements were labour-intensive,
they increased the energy and nutritional values of the food, says Wright.

Over the past few years, several supposed Neanderthal burials have been discredited, but the Amud burial may prove less contentious. The baby’s bones were found still articulated, showing that it has not been seriously disturbed.

The 10-month-old infant was laid to rest on its right side in a small niche against the north wall of Amud Cave. Its skull has been crushed and the face badly damaged, but much of the rest of the skeleton has survived 50 000 to 60 000 years of burial. The jawbone of a red deer was lying on the pelvis, a position which suggests that the deer bone was a ritual offering, says Joel Rak of Tel-Aviv University. Nearby, three limb bones of another baby, perhaps six to nine months old, were also found.

Rak and his colleagues are certain that the Amud infant was a Neanderthal and not one of the fully modern humans who lived in the Levant during the last ice age. The baby’s distinctive Neanderthal traits include a round instead of an oval foramen magnum, the hole in the base of the skull through which the spinal cord passes; some extra-strong muscle attachments on the inside of the lower jaw, implying the development of powerful jaw movement in later life; and no chin.

The presence of these features in so young an individual highlights the difference between Neanderthals and modern humans and ‘acts to exclude Neanderthals from our own ancestry’ says Rak (Journal of Human Evolution, vol 26, p 313).

Neanderthals used the Amud Cave during one of the cold spells of the last ice age, when the Middle East would have been warmer and wetter than the frozen lands to the north. Other early human remains, including an adult skeleton, have been found at the Amud site. Although these bones are not in such good condition as the infant’s, they too are thought to be Neanderthal.

Christopher Beard and Mary Dawson of the Carnegie Museum of Natural
History in Pittsburgh and their Chinese colleagues at the Academia Sinica
in Peking allocated the new fossils to four different primate groups, including
the small group of Southeast Asian primates known as the tarsiers, and
another that they call ‘basal simians’ (Nature, vol 368, p 604). Nowhere
else in the world has such a mix of primate types been found.

The fossils are among the oldest known relics of the simians, and the
find implies that simians had a more ancient origin than previously thought.
The Chinese and American researchers put the fossils in a new family, the
Eosimiidae. However, there is now an even bigger question mark than before
over which group of primitive primates was the ancestor of simians.

The researchers have also discovered a new species of extinct tarsier,
which they named Tarsius eocaenus, whose cheek teeth are almost identical
to those of the five living species. This fossil pushes back by about 30
million years the earliest date for the tarsiers. The only other known Tarsius
fossil was reported eight years ago from Thailand, but that is from the
middle Miocene, which is much more recent than the Shanghuang fossil. Tarsius
is the only primate genus to have a continuous history dating back as far
as the middle Eocene, justifying the tag of ‘living fossil’.

Today, tarsiers live only in the rainforests of Borneo, Sumatra, Sulawesi
and the Philippines. They leap through the forest at night, using their
extraordinary large eyes to prey on insects and other small animals.

Three other forms of primate found in the Chinese site have been interpreted
by the researchers as belonging to two groups of early primates, long extinct,
called the adapids and the omomyids. Tarsiers are widely, but not universally,
thought to be more closely related to the omomyids than to the adapids.
Omomyids from early Eocene to the early Oligocene (56 to 30 million years
ago) have been found in North America, and there may be a slightly older,
late Palaeocene, African representative as well.

Many people believe that omomyids are the ancestors of simians. Although
a connection between simians and adapids has been mooted, the possibility
is made less likely by the age and anatomy of the primitive Shanghuang simian
fossils.

Living simians and tarsiers share many anatomical features, and so both
are collectively often called haplorhines in order to distinguish them from
the so-called strepsirhine primates, which comprise the lemurs and lorises
of Madagascar and Africa; the latter may be descended from adapids.

If close relatives of modern tarsiers had already evolved 45 million
years ago, and omomyids had diversified anatomically and geographically
at least 56 million years ago, then the common ancestor for the haplorhines
must have originated much earlier. The origin of simians – and ultimately
of the stock that produced humans – is therefore pushed back into the Palaeocene
epoch more than 56 million years ago, and perhaps even into the Cretaceous
period more than 65 million years ago. The Chinese finds also increase the
possibility that simians are not derived from the omomyids at all, in which
case their ancestor has yet to be found.

Kevin Hunt, an anthropologist from Indiana University, rejects theories
that our ancestors developed bipedalism for other reasons, such as carrying
tools and food, travelling long distances, watching for predators, or avoiding
the heat of the midday sun. He suggests, instead, that they developed an
upright posture for gathering fruit from small trees in open forest and
woodland (Journal of Human Evolution, vol 26, p 183).

According to Hunt, wild chimpanzees often stand on their back legs on
the ground or on a strong branch to select the ripest fruit, supporting
themselves when necessary by grasping an overhead branch with one arm. He
has observed that chimpanzees adopt a bipedal stance mostly when feeding,
and that they will stay upright as they move from one food patch to another
in the same tree. In open forest in Tanzania, where Hunt carried out his
studies, the animals rarely stand upright to scan their environment or for
social displays.

All the features of the skeletal anatomy of the earliest known hominids,
Australopithecus afarensis, suggest to Hunt that they had a similar feeding
behaviour. These hominids include the famous Lucy, discovered in 1974 at
the Hadar site in Ethiopia by Donald Johanson, now of the Institute of Human
Origins in Berkeley, California. There is good evidence that they inhabited
eastern Africa from around 3.9 million to 2.9 million years ago. They had
torsos, hips and legs adapted for upright walking, unlike chimpanzees, whose
bodies are designed for walking on all fours.

However, early hominids may not have been efficient walkers, Hunt says.
One reason for this is that early australo-pithecines such as Lucy had hips
that were wide for their size. These would have given good support when
the hominids were feeding while standing upright, but would have been less
suitable for sustained walking and running. Lucy and her relatives would
therefore have tired more quickly than we do if they walked for any distance.
Hunt believes, therefore, that bipedalism evolved more as a new way of eating
than as a new way of walking.

Recent discoveries at Hadar on the Awash River in Ethiopia, where Lucy
was found, and at nearby Maka, confirm the view of Johanson and his colleagues
that, as with modern great apes, the sizes of male and female A. afarensis
differed. This contrasts with the view of some researchers that there is
so much variation in size among A. afarensis fossils that they represent
at least two different, contemporaneous australopithecine species. That
view is weakened by the many new discoveries of A. afarensis which, apart
from their size, are anatomically alike.

Most striking among 53 new finds from Hadar is the major part of the
first fossil skull of an adult A. afarensis, discovered by Johanson, his
colleague William Kimbel and Yoel Rak of Tel-Aviv University. They believe
that the size of the fossil, the largest known of any australopithecine,
indicates that it came from a male.

For the same reason, they believe that a stout, heavily muscled humerus
(the upper arm bone) from Hadar is also from a male. It matches a second
humerus recently found with other A. afarensis fossils at Maka that were
described by Berkeley palaeontologist Tim White and others in Nature last
November (vol 366, p 261). The two arm bones, both 3.4 million years old,
are about the same length as the humerus of a modern human with the same
body size. But fossils of the inner forearm bone (ulna) from Hadar and Maka
are longer – they have the same relative length as a chimpanzee’s ulna.

These finds help to complete the image of a waddling, forest-dwelling
creature with long, powerful arms, the females lighter and more agile than
the males. This picture fits well with Hunt’s theories about the chimpanzee-like
feeding habits of early humans.

Kenneth Tankersley of the State University of New York examined a lance-shaped
stone projectile called a clovis point, recovered from Hoyt in Oregon. On
the lower end of the projectile he found a thin film of resinous material
that is chemically similar to amber. The amber-like material was adhering
to one of the two small fluted faces that are a characteristic of such ancient
weapons. Tankersley believes amber was used to strengthen the connection
between the stone projectile and the shaft (Journal of Archaeological Science,
vol 21, p 117).

Particles of wood charcoal in the amber-like material suggest that material
was added to the melted amber to produce a strong and flexible adhesive.
Amber is easily moulded when heated and becomes hard and brittle on cooling.

Tools of the clovis pattern were used for hunting by people called Paleo-indians
– the ancestors of today’s Amerindians. Clovis points, usually made of a
black glassy volcanic rock called obsidian or of a fine-grained form of
silica called chert, have been found across North America, from Alaska to
Panama. Most tools are between about 11 200 and 10 900 years old and record
some of the earliest arrivals of peoples in the New World. On the tundra
and plains of North America, amber would have been widely available for
Paleoindian hunters.