Homo erectus, city dweller and sailor







MINERVA JULY/AUGUST 2007 (VOL 18.4)

MINERVA WORLD EXCLUSIVE A New Palaeolithic Revolution

The 'Rangki Papa' ('Father of all Rafts') built using Palaeolithic
technology and approaching the coast of Komodo, Bali, having succeeded
in crossing from Sumbawa, 7 October 2004. The vessel travelled 36.4km
in 9 hours 22 minutes,




Jerome M. Eisenberg, Ph.D. and Dr Sean Kingsley



For decades archaeologists have rightly respected the Neolithic period
c. 8500 BC as a revolutionary era of the most profound change, when
the wiring of mankind's brain shifted from transient hunter-gathering
to permanent settlement in farming communities. Hearths, temples,
articulated burials, whistling 'wheat' fields and security replaced
the uncertain ravages of seasonal running with the pack. Or so
stereotypes maintain.

Now, from the remote shores of Budrinna on Lake Fezzan in Libya, and
Melka Konture on the banks of the River Awash in Ethiopia, a series of
stunning discoveries are set to challenge the originality of the
Neolithic Revolution. After 39 years of surveys and excavations,
Professor Helmut Ziegert of Hamburg University presents his results as
a world exclusive in Minerva (pp. 8-9). In both African locations he
has discovered huts and sedentary village life dating between an
astonishing 400,000 and 200,000 Before Present - if correct, literally
a quantum leap in our understanding of man's evolution. Near aquatic
resources, and not alongside agricultural fields, Professor Ziegert
contests that our ancestors settled down for the first time in small
communities of 40-50 people.

This sensation just scratches the surface of one of prehistory's most
incredible revelations: from Choukoutien in China to Bilzingsleben in
Germany, Ziegert claims to have identified 35 other Lower Palaeolithic
villages with comparable huts and even cemeteries. A pattern prevails.
After decades of fieldwork and contemplation, Helmut Ziegert is
convinced that future discoveries will uphold his conclusions. His
discoveries have nothing to do with luck, he maintains, but are a
matter of applying problem-oriented research. Where evolutionary
biologists have typically hunted ancestral humans bones exclusively to
understand adaptations to mankind - missing links - as an
archaeologist Professor Ziegert has asked more specific, holistic
questions of the wider evidence.

At the heart of this new Lower Palaeolithic 'out of Africa' village
theory are two world-changing ideas. First, that Homo erectus, Upright
Man, had far more modernistic tendencies than previously believed; and
second, that as unique as the farming villages of Jericho in the West
Bank and Catalhoyük in Turkey are, their occupants were not the brains
behind the origins of sedentism. The innovative capacity of Homo
erectus has challenged scholars for decades and remains a scholarly
cauldron. Anthropologists such as Richard Leakey have long insisted
that Upright Man was socially more akin to modern humans than to his
primitive predecessors because the increased cranial capacity
coincided with more sophisticated tool technology. Other scientists
contend that Homo erectus was sufficiently advanced to have even
mastered maritime transport. Yet both this assertion and the very idea
that he ever got to grips with controlled fire are still considered
controversial.

Only three years ago, however, Nira Alperson of the Hebrew University
in Jerusalem discovered the oldest evidence of fire management at
Gesher Benot Ya'aqov on the banks of the Jordan River in Israel's
northern Galilee. The team analysed over 50,000 pieces of wood and
nearly 36,000 flints from two hearths associated with a Homo erectus
settlement dating back 790,000 years.

More contentiously, Robert Bednarik is convinced that Upright Man
ushered in the dawn of trans-ocean travel between 900,000 and 800,000
years ago as part of a wider revolution, usually attributed to the
anatomically modern Homo sapiens, that included communicating with a
spoken language and eventually carving and painting art 400,000 to
300,000 Before Present. To test his theory, Bednarik built a 17.5m-
long, 2.8-ton bamboo raft, Nale Tasih 4, and crossed the 29km-wide
stretch of sea from the east coast of Bali to the neighbouring island
of Lombok. The results have convinced Bednarik that 'Between 400,000
and 200,000 years ago, hominins are also known to have crossed to at
least two islands in Europe, Corsica, and Sardinia. This is soundly
demonstrated, but in addition it is possible that much earlier they
managed to cross the Strait of Gibraltar. Unfortunately, that cannot
be proved conclusively, because the alternative of reaching Europe by
land has always existed'. Stone Age 'seafaring appears to have been
possible', agrees anthropologist Tim Bromage of Hunter College of the
City University of New York, who has identified 30cm-wide South-east
Asian bamboo as providing a versatile material for building rafts with
simple stone tools.

So, Professor Ziegert's 'Out of Africa' aquatic model for the rise of
village life in the Lower Palaeolithic does not emerge out of a
cultural and intellectual void. As a veteran of over 81 archaeological
surveys and excavations from Germany to Ecuador, ranging in date from
the Lower Palaeolithic to the Islamic period, Ziegert is nothing if
not scientifically cautious, which makes the current revelation all
the more exciting. Between 2007 and 2010 he will be back in the field,
returning to Budrinna and Melka Konture to fine-tune his life's work.
To delve in greater depth into the mystery of the ecology, function,
structure, and economy of these villages, he plans to search out
cemeteries (complementary signs of fixed settlement) and use potassium
argon isotopic dating, stratigraphy, and tool typology to measure the
ebb and flow of village life in this dizzy, distant prehistoric past.


http://minervamagazine.com/news.asp?min_issue=JUL_AUG2007#0

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