We speak, with all that software and hardware in place. There was no toggle switch that flipped us from being like the other apes into what we are now. We think that full language capabilities must have been in place by around 70,000 years ago, because that is when the diaspora from Africa happened, and all the dispersed populations in that exodus have sophisticated language. If we are right and the Neanderthals and Denisovans had sophisticated language too, then we can consider one of two options available to us: either language was in place before we three humans split, more than 600,000 years ago, or the physical capability for sophisticated language was in place in us and them, and we began to speak independently.
Whichever way speech and language emerged in humans, it was a transition, with all those necessary but not sufficient pieces being nudged in one way or the other, by chance, by selection. The fact that it was a transition, not a revolution, means it took time. But we don’t have a very good handle on how long this took. The separation of our lineage from that of the other great apes occurred six or seven million years ago. We know it was definitely after that. Our brains became significantly larger from about 2.4 million years ago and continued to grow, so it was definitely after that too, as we don’t think a small brain has enough firepower for fully operational speech and language. Homo sapiens comes into being from 300,000 years ago, according to specimens from Morocco and east Africa, and by 100,000 years ago we have bodies pretty much the same as we do today.
Forty thousand years ago, we have art. This is huge step up in our grasp of symbolism. At that time, humans all over the planet were beginning to display what scientists sometimes call “the full package,” that is, behavioral modernity. On a giant southern isthmus on the island of Sulewesi, part of Indonesia, there are caverns that were the homes of people over thousands of years. About eight paces from the entrance of one particular cave is a mural, consisting of 1.5 meters of drawings. There are twelve hands—in fact, the shadows of hands because they have been stenciled—with red ochre blown through a thin tube to outline the hands of a long-gone person. Nearby, there is a drawing of a fat pig, and a “pig-deer” called a babirusa. These were drawn something like 35,000 years ago, and the oldest of the handprints is 39,000 years old.
As of October 2018, the record for the oldest known figurative art by Homo sapiens is claimed by the former residents of Borneo, just to the west of Sulewesi. The Lubang Jeriji Saléh caves are remote, and it is a treacherous journey to visit them. But they are cavernous, cathedral-like spaces, their walls adorned with a gallery of thousands of animals, people and hand stencils that spans tens of thousands of years. A large image of a banteng, a type of local wild cattle, is painted in ochre on a low ceiling deep inside the cave. The artist must have crouched, head tilted far back, or lay on her or his back, like Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Using the slow but measurable decay of radioactive uranium in a fine crust of calcite taken from the tail end, Australian researchers think that this cow was painted a minimum of 40,000 years ago, and a maximum of 52,000.
Over in Europe, at around the same time, people were creating art in very similar ways. Southern France is littered with caves adorned with pictures of astonishing beauty and skill that date from around this time all the way into the near present. Lascaux, near Montignac, is probably the most famous, a Pleistocene art gallery from a much more recent 17,000 years ago, displaying more than 6,000 figures, interpretations of hunts, with horses and bison, felines, the extinct colossal elk Megaloceros giganteus, and abstract symbols whose meaning we can never understand. People painted in charcoal and hematite and dabbed them onto the walls as pigments in suspensions with animal fats and clay. They are breathtaking.
To the west, the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave has the oldest wall art in Europe, again with beasts in relief, from hunts, and hunters—cave lions, hyenas, bears and panthers, oh my! The oldest of these were painted 37,000 years ago, according to the most up-to-date studies in 2016.
And then there is the Löwenmensch—the Lion Man of the Hohlenstein-Stadel. In the hills between Nuremberg and Munich in Swabian Germany there are caves that have yielded one of the most important works ever crafted by an unknown artist. Around 40,000 years ago, a woman or man sat somewhere in or near that cave, with the detritus of a hunt scattered around. They took a piece of ivory, a tusk from a woolly mammoth, and carefully considered that it might be the right material, shape and size for something that they had been pondering. Now extinct, cave lions were fierce predators at that time, posing a threat to people, and also to the animals that people would hunt and eat. That person thought about the lions, and how formidable they are, and maybe wondered what it would be like to have the power of a lion in the body of a human. Maybe this tribe revered the cave lions out of fear and awe. Whatever the reason, this artist took that mammoth ivory, a flint knife, and patiently carved the tusk into a mythical figure.
It is a chimera, a fantastic beast that is made up of the parts of multiple animals. Chimeras exist throughout all human cultures for most of history, from mermaids, fawns or centaurs, to the glorious monkey-man god Hanuman, to the Japanese snake-woman nure-onna, to the Wolpertinger, an absurd and mischievous Bavarian part-duck part-squirrel part-rabbit with antlers and vampire teeth. Today, we have reached the ultimate manifestation of a 40,000-year interest in hybrid creatures in genetic engineering, where elements from one animal are transposed into another, and hence we have cats that glow in the dark with the genes of deep-sea crystal jellyfish Aquorea victoria, and goats that produce dragline silk from the golden orb weaver spider in their udders.
The first of these that we know of is the Löwenmensch. It is an extraordinary piece of work, around twelve inches tall, the figure of a man with a lion’s head, and an important piece in understanding our evolution. Of the artist, it shows profound skill, fine motor control and foresight in selecting the right bone and having a plan to carve this figure. It shows an understanding of nature, and reverence of the animals in the ecosystem that impact upon the lives of those people. Crucially it shows a willingness to imagine a thing that does not exist.
The figure is a man, as determined by the genitals, and has seven stripes cut into the left arm, almost like tattoos. It was found deep inside the cave at Hohlenstein-Stadel in 1939, in an almost secret vault, a kind of cubbyhole that also held other objects—carved antlers, pendants and beads. The inference is that these objects were precious, possibly things with totemic significance. Nearby in the Vogelherd Cave, figures of a mammoth and a wild horse have been found, and the ornately carved head of a cave lion. Perhaps cave lions at this time were iconic of a ceremonial cult, and the cut marks on the arm meant something important on this mythical creature. Perhaps.
A few miles to the east, we find the earliest example of another charm—the Venus of Hohle Fels. There are many examples of prehistoric sculpted female bodies. They are generically called Venus figurines, after the first one discovered in the Dordogne in the 1860s by Paul Hurault, the eighth Marquis de Vibraye, who, noting the pronounced incision representing the vulva, called it Vénus Impudique—the “immodest Venus.” The Venus of Hohle Fels is the most ancient of these figures, probably again around 40,000 years old. It is the oldest depiction of the human body.
This Venus is also an abstraction. It is clearly a human body, but a heavily distorted one, with features that are well beyond realism. The breasts are colossal, and the head is tiny. She has a huge waist, and engorged labia. These enhanced sexual characteristics are also seen in some of the other Paleolithic Venus figurines, which has led to speculation that these were fertility charms, or even goddesses of fertility. Some people have suggested that they might be pornography. While there is no shortage of art by men depicting sexualized women, we cannot know the motivation of the Venus sculptor. The similarities between the few Venus figurines that remain do suggest a sexual dimension to their existence, and imagining that they are fertility amulets is no more or less speculative than considering that they are the fantasy of a Paleolithic artist. We’re not sure why the heads are often small: it might be to do with perspective, that you can’t actually see your own head, so relatively from one’s own vision it is small, and looking down, breasts may look disproportionally larger; though that doesn’t account for the fact that the artist could’ve seen the heads and bodies of other people. Maybe it was an artistic choice. If in one million years’ time, you discovered a Francis Bacon portrait or the Bayeux tapestry isolated out of any context, you might have questions about what was on the minds of those artists. We will never know what the Paleolithic sculptors were thinking. What we do know is that their minds were not different to our own. There are flutes or recorders from this time in Germany as well, hollow tubes with finger holes carved from the bones of mute swans, mammoths and a griffon vulture. Percussion or drumming instruments may well have preceded these, as hitting things to make rhythmic noises does not require the same cognitive imagination as crafting a multi-toned whistle with fingering (with apologies to the drummers of the world).
There is some dispute about the precision of these dates. The techniques used to date rocks and the art upon them are not always agreed upon, and the margins of error can be thousands of years. For the broader sweep of human evolution, the precise dates aren’t pivotally important. By 40,000 years ago, there are clear, unequivocal depictions of figurative art in multiple forms, and clear evidence for imagination, abstract thought, music and profound fine motor skills. Something had changed.
The geographical spread is important, not just in itself, but because Borneo is a long way from Europe. The art we have found in caves in Europe is from around the same time, which means one of two things: the skills to create such works were shared by an ancestor common both to the Southeast Asian artists and the European ones, which means tens of thousands of years earlier. Or it means that people in Borneo started drawing independently, at around the same time. Because of the paucity of artistic remains in the geological record, the parsimonious explanation is the second. For the idea of a common artistic ancestor to be justified, we would need to see much older art, spread geographically from Europe to Indonesia.
All these artifacts show clear signs of the hallmarks of modernity. These artists had “the full package.” They had a rich culture, and a reverence for their environment, which implies an emotional recognition of their position in nature, and in their own tribes. They thought about sex, and imagined dreamlike beings that cannot exist, but somehow told them things about their lives. This behavior would be spread across the world in the next ten or twenty thousand years, though not necessarily from a single root. Evidence for fuller packages is seen in Siberia, northeast Asia, southeast Asia and Australia in the millennia that followed, though we mustn’t presume that these people learned their new cognitive skills from a direct lineage; they may have evolved on their own in those places. However it emerged globally, those first artists had music, painting and wore fashions. They were us.
Until 2018, we thought we alone were like them. In northern Spain, there are caverns set into the Cantabrian coast, and deep in one known as El Castillo, there are large squares, like an eighteen-inch frame, in red and black paint. Inside one frame is the outline of the back legs of an animal, which could be bovine, but it’s impossible to know for sure. In another panel is the image of the head of an animal, again possibly a bison or maybe a horse. There are also linear signs, geometric shapes and a weird image almost resembling a figure, which is oddly reminiscent of Picasso’s 1955 silhouette portrait of Don Quixote.
These paintings and two other examples of Spanish cave art were dated in early 2018, and in all cases (according to one analysis), they appeared to be older than 64,000 years. The only people in Europe at this time were not Homo sapiens. They were Homo neanderthalensis. Neanderthals were in a small but absolute way the ancestors of most Europeans today via inter-species breeding. They were here in Europe first, hundreds of thousands of years before our direct ancestors had begun to trickle out of Africa. If these dates are correct, those Neanderthal people were thinking about the hunt and painting their prey on walls a good 20,000 years before we would invade their territory.
The earliest examples of figurative art were not done by us, but by our cousins. We’ve known for a while that Neanderthals had culture, and earlier we discussed the potential of their vocal capabilities. The caves that sit beneath the Rock of Gibraltar have been a rich source of Neanderthal activity, and have revealed their culture, diets and one example of something akin to art. In Gorham’s Cave, there is a series of scratches that looks like the remains of a big game of noughts and crosses. The marks are very deliberate, one groove being carved by the repeated action of more than fifty strokes around 40,000 years ago. The scientists in Gibraltar who manage this amazing site have tried to emulate its creation, and rule out these marks as being a by-product of butchering meat, or tailoring skins. These lines were carved deliberately and for no obvious reason.
We can go back further. For us, there have been a few clear examples of modern behavior tens of thousands of years before the Neanderthals left this world, and we became the last humans. Neanderthals were never in Africa as far as we know. The Blombos Cave in South Africa overlooks the Indian Ocean and has been a hotbed of evidence for modern human lifestyles, from more than 70,000 years ago, including bone tools, specialized hunting, the use of aquatic resources, long-distance trade, beaded shells, use of pigment, and art and decoration, notably in ochre shales, carefully engraved with geometric criss-cross patterns. Nearby in the caves at Pinnacle Point we find micro-engineered quartzite blades and red-ochre pigments made for an unknown purpose. The date of these antiques is around 165,000 years ago. And even further back, there are fossil freshwater mussel shells from Trinil in Java that have been engraved with inch-long grooves in sharpened peaks, a sort of bivalve doodle. The age range for these is a bit flabby, but they were carved sometime between 380,000 and 640,000 years ago. That predates any other evidence of intentional and non-utilitarian craftwork. The only people on Java at that time were our deep evolutionary cousins Homo erectus.
There are plenty of traces of modern skills and behavior long before the so-called “cognitive revolution” 45,000 years ago. But they are sporadic blips in time, and not permanent, as the evidence vanishes from the continuous archaeological record. This material culture has become permanent by 40,000 years ago, give or take a few millennia. By then, the Neanderthals are gone. By 20,000 years ago, we have it all: art, jewelry, tattooing kits, weapons including spears, boomerangs and barbed harpoons, and it is all over the world.