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

mitigated by some genetic transmission through the mingling of stocks.
    The successor both to Neanderthal man and the archaic human forms among whom he first appeared was Homo sapiens sapiens , the species to which we all belong. Biologically, it has been outstandingly successful, spreading all over Eurasia within a hundred thousand or so years of its first appearances in Africa (they are dated to about 135,000 BC ) and eventually all over the world. Its members are from the start anatomically identifiable modern humans, with smaller faces, a lighter skull and straighter limbs than the Neanderthals. From Africa they entered the Levant and the Middle East, duly progressing to central and further Asia, and eventually reaching Australasia in about 40,000 BC . By then, they were beginning to colonize Europe, where they were to live for thousands of years beside the Neanderthals. In about 15,000 BC they crossed a land bridge across what was to be the Bering Strait to enter the Americas.
    Much remains speculative in assessing the reasons for the timing and pattern of the diffusion of Homo sapiens sapiens and palaeoanthropologists remain cautious about the fossil record; some of them do not like to assert without qualification that remains more than thirty thousand years or so old are indeed those of our species. Nevertheless, most agree that from about fifty thousand years ago to the end of the last Ice Age in about 9000 BC we are at last considering plentiful evidence of men of modern type. This period is normally referred to as the ‘Upper’ Palaeolithic, a name derived from the Greek for ‘old stones’. It corresponds, roughly, to the more familiar term ‘Stone Age’, but, like other contributions to the chaotic terminology of prehistory, there are difficulties in using such words without careful qualification.
    To separate ‘Upper’ and ‘Lower’ Palaeolithic is easy; the division represents the physical fact that the topmost layers of geological strata are the most recent and that therefore fossils and artifacts found among themare later than those found at lower levels. The Lower Palaeolithic is therefore the designation of an age more ancient than the Upper. Almost all the artifacts which survive from the Palaeolithic are made from stone; none is made from metal, whose appearance made it possible to follow a terminology used by the Roman poet Lucretius by labelling what comes after the Stone Age as the Bronze and Iron Ages.
    These are, of course, cultural and technological labels; their great merit is that they direct attention to the activities of man. At one time tools and weapons are made of stone, then of bronze, then of iron. None the less, these terms have disadvantages, too. The obvious one is that within the huge tracts of time in which stone artifacts provide the largest significant body of evidence, we are dealing for the most part with hominids. They had, in varying degree, some, but not all, human characteristics; many stone tools were not made by men. Increasingly, too, the fact that this terminology originated in European archaeology created difficulties as more and more evidence accumulated about the rest of the world which did not really fit in. A final disadvantage is that it blurs important distinctions within periods even in Europe. The result has been its further refinement. Within the Stone Age scholars have distinguished (in sequence) the Lower, Middle and Upper Palaeolithic and then the Mesolithic and the Neolithic (the last of which blurs the division attributed by the older schemes to the coming of metallurgy). The period down to the end of the last Ice Age in Europe is also sometimes called the Old Stone Age, another complication, because here we have yet another principle of classification, simply that provided by chronology. Homo sapiens sapiens appears in Europe roughly at the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic. It is in Europe, too, that the largest quantity of skeletal remains has