Two people are sitting around a campfire watching the sun set behind some distant hills, a contented fullness in their bellies, feeling relaxed and mildly sleepy. The sky is that brilliant shade of purple that precedes dusk, and the faint outline of a full moon is visible. It’s going to be a beautiful evening.
Such a scene might inspire poetry, or a song, or thoughts about God. The beauty of the moment might conjure wistful daydreams about some earlier time or place. It might become the subject of a painting. That is, unless the campers were a couple of Neanderthals.
I’m referring to real, genuine-article Neanderthals, not the contemporary kind who have won the title by smashing beer cans on their foreheads. They lived from about 300,000 years ago to about 30,000 years ago and then disappeared. They’ve gotten kind of a bad rap, actually. Although their common characterization as hunched-over, stupid-looking brutes has given them an inglorious reputation, Neanderthals weren’t total clods. They were decent hunters and they could build a good fire. But they weren’t human.
By that I mean they did not sit around campfires admiring the color of the sky and painting pictures of it. They lacked the essential characteristics that define modern humans even though, anatomically, they were somewhat similar. I won’t itemize all the Neanderthals’ shortcomings; suffice it to say they weren’t a promising species. If the future of the planet had been left to them, where would we be now? In 250,000 years, they moved the ball only a few yards. However, their contemporaries and ultimate successors, early humans, evolved into something extraordinary—beings capable of language, art, mathematics and appreciating a nice sunset.
How this happened, how crude creatures stepped further outside of the cave and began to develop abstract thought and expression, has been the subject of academic inquiry for decades. Where did creativity and ingenuity come from? What spawned our ability and inclination to, for example, make music? Why did humans flourish while Neanderthals perished? In this issue, we offer the latest possibility, presented by Stanford archaeologist Richard Klein. It’s a fascinating foray into evolutionary history.
If dexterous, opposable thumbs were the only things that made us unique among the earth’s fauna, we wouldn’t have had Socrates or da Vinci or Mozart. We wouldn’t have had Hamlet or Woman on a Staircase or Abbey Road. Nobody would have dreamed up cars or computers. We might very well be like the Neanderthals, living brutishly and briefly, still fighting for dominion.
The work of scientists like Klein builds both understanding and appreciation for the breathtaking speed of humanity’s cultural ascent. Life on earth began billions of years ago; dinosaurs roamed for hundreds of millions of years; Homo sapiens—literally “wise men”—have been here the historical equivalent of an eye-blink. Virtually all human innovation is compressed into the last 30,000 years—a veritable sprint from bone tools to space travel.
The study of our evolution is about so much more than science. We can view its results in a toddler’s first words and an octogenarian’s distant memories, in a child’s Lego castle and an engineer’s suspension bridge. It’s about all of the prepackaged human capabilities we take for granted.
Pinned to the wall of my office is a picture of a man, a jangly, stick-limbed fellow with a patch of brown scribbled on his chin, more or less where a beard would be. It’s a portrait of me, drawn by my son when he was 3 years old.
I look at that picture and am filled with some mixture of pride and gratitude, but you need not be the father of the artist to appreciate it. Crude though it is, it signifies the same essentially human desire that moved the Cro-Magnon to draw bison on the walls of his cave 30,000 years ago—a desire to represent our world in new forms, to express how we feel and what we think, to figure out who we are and why we’re here.
And how in the world we got so smart.
You can reach Kevin at jkcool@stanford.edu.
