Mystery man: Cro-Magnons emerged about 40,000 years ago and were very similar to us. So why did it take tens of thousands of years for civilization to take hold? Credit: Bettmann/Corbis
The new field known as archeogenetics is illuminating prehistory.
How did we become the thinking animals that we are? That’s the question at the heart of the study of human prehistory–and the one that Colin Renfrew has been asking since the summer of 1962, when he travelled to Milos, one of the Cycladic Islands in the Aegean Sea, a source of the black obsidian that was the earliest commodity traded by humans.
…. Prehistory is defined as that period of human history during which people either hadn’t yet achieved literacy–our basic information storage technology–or left behind no written records. Thus, in Egypt, prehistory ended around 3000 b.c.e., in the Early Dynastic Period, when hieroglyph-inscribed monuments, clay tablets, and papyrus appeared; in Papua New Guinea, conversely, it ended as recently as the end of the last century. Archaeologists and anthropologists accept this region-by-region definition of prehistory’s conclusion, but they agree less about its beginning. A few have seen prehistory as commencing as recently as around 40,000 b.c.e., with the emergence of Cro-Magnon man, who as Homo sapiens sapiens was almost indistinguishable from us (although Cro-Magnons, on average, had larger brains and more robust physiologies). However, most experts would probably say that prehistory began in the Middle Pleistocene, as many as 200,000 years ago–when Homo neanderthalensis (sometimes classified as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) and archaic Homo sapiens emerged. Either way, it’s assumed that the appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens triggered “a new pace of change … that set cultural development upon [an] … accelerating path of development,” as Renfrew writes in Prehistory. But Renfrew thinks that this acceleration must have been due to something else……
Archaeogenetics Emerges
The paradox, or puzzle, is this: if archaic Homo sapiens emerged as long as 200,000 years ago, why did our species need so many millennia before its transition, 12,000 to 10,000 years ago, from the hunter-gatherer nomadism that characterized all previous hominids to permanent, year-round settlement, which then allowed the elaboration of humankind’s cultural efforts? To answer this question, Renfrew calls for a grand synthesis of three approaches: scientific archaeology, which collects hard data through radiocarbon dating and similar technologies; linguistic study aimed at constructing clear histories of the world’s languages; and molecular genetic analysis…..
