The New Penguin History of the World by Odd Arne Westad, J. M. Roberts Read Free Book Online

creatures evolved from advanced forms of Homo erectus , has been identified in parts of Africa. Moreover, it was more widely spread than that of Neanderthal man. The primeval cultural unity had thus alreadyfragmented, and distinct cultural traditions were beginning to emerge. From the start, there is a kind of provincialism within a young humanity.
    Neanderthal man, like the different species which specialists refer to as anatomically modern, walked erect and had a big brain. Though in other ways more primitive than the sub-species to which we belong, Homo sapiens sapiens (as the guess about the first skull suggests), he represents none the less a great evolutionary stride and shows a new mental sophistication we can still hardly grasp, let alone measure. One striking example is the use of technology to overcome environment: we know from the evidence of skin-scrapers they used to dress skins and pelts that Neanderthals wore clothes (though none have survived; the oldest clothed body yet discovered, in Russia, has been dated to about thirty-five thousand years ago). Even this important advance in the manipulation of environment, though, is nothing like so startling as the appearance in Neanderthal culture of formal burial. The act of burial itself is momentous for archaeology; graves are of enormous importance because of the artifacts of ancient society they preserve. Yet the Neanderthal graves provide more than this: they may also contain the first evidence of ritual or ceremony.
    It is very difficult to control speculation, and some has outrun the evidence. Perhaps some early totemism explains the ring of horns within which a Neanderthal child was buried near Samarkand. Some have suggested, too, that careful burial may reflect a new concern for the individual which was one result of the greater interdependence of the group in the renewed Ice Ages. This could have intensified the sense of loss when a member died and might also point to something more. A skeleton of a Neanderthal man who had lost his right arm years before his death has been found. He must have been very dependent on others, and was sustained by his group in spite of his handicap.
    It is tempting but more hazardous to suggest that ritualized burial implies some view of an after-life. If true, though, this would testify to a huge power of abstraction in the hominids and the origins of one of the greatest and most enduring myths, that life is an illusion, that reality lies invisible elsewhere, that things are not what they seem. Without going so far, it is at least possible to agree that a momentous change is under way. Like the hints of rituals involving animals which Neanderthal caves also offer here and there, careful burial may mark a new attempt to dominate the environment. The human brain must already have been capable of discerning questions it wanted to answer and perhaps of providing answers in the shape of rituals. Slightly, tentatively, clumsily – however we describe it and still in the shallows though it may be – the human mind is afloat; the greatest of all voyages of exploration has begun.
    Neanderthal man also provides our first evidence of another great institution, warfare. It may have been practised in connection with cannibalism, which was directed apparently to the eating of the brains of victims. Analogy with later societies suggests that here again we have the start of some conceptualizing about a soul or spirit; such acts are sometimes directed to acquiring the magical or spiritual power of the vanquished.
    Whatever the magnitude of the evolutionary step which the Neanderthals represent, however, they failed in the end as a species. After long and widespread success they were not in the end to be the inheritors of the earth. Effectively, Neanderthal survivors were to be genetically ‘vanquished’ by another strain of Homo sapiens , and about the reasons for this we know nothing. Nor can we know to what extent, if at all, it was