follow, movie version). Mysterious crystal monoliths drop from outer space to Earth, come to upgrade our planet’s ape-men before they starve into extinction. Night after night Moon-Watcher, the alpha ape-man in one band of earthlings, feels what Clarke calls “ inquisitive tendrils creeping down the unused byways of his brain” as a monolith sends him visions and teaches him to throw rocks. “The very atoms of his simple brain were being twisted into new patterns,” says Clarke. And then the monolith’s mission is done: Moon-Watcher picks up a discarded bone and brains a piglet with it. Depressingly, Clarke’s vision of the Big Bang of Human Consciousness consists entirely of killing things, culminating in Moon-Watcher murdering One-Ear, the top ape-man in a rival band. Next thing the reader knows, we are in the space age.
Clarke set his 2001 moment 3 million years ago, presumably to account for the invention of tools by Homo habilis , but I always felt that the place where a good monolith would really do some work was when fully modern humans appeared. By the time I started studying archaeology in college I had learned not to say things like that, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the professionals’ explanations were less compelling than Clarke’s.
The big problem archaeologists had in those far-off days when I was an undergraduate was that they simply had not excavated very many sites dating between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago. As new finds accumulated across the 1990s, though, it began to become clear that we did not need monoliths after all; in fact, the Great Leap Forward itself began to dissolve into a series of Baby Steps Forward, spread across tens of thousands of years.
We now know of several pre-50,000- BCE sites with signs of surprisingly modern-looking behavior. Take, for instance, Pinnacle Point, a cave excavated in 2007 on the South African coast. Homo sapiens moved in here about 160,000 years ago. This is interesting in itself: earlier ape-men generally ignored coastal sites, probably because they could not work out how to find much food there. Yet Homo sapiens not onlyheaded for the beach—distinctly modern behavior—but when they got there they were smart enough to gather, open, and cook shellfish. They also chipped stones into the small, light points that archaeologists call bladelets, perfect as tips for javelins or arrows—something that neither Peking Man nor Europe’s Neanderthals ever did.
On a handful of other African sites people engaged in different but equally modern-looking activity. About a hundred thousand years ago at Mumbwa Cave in Zambia people lined a group of hearths with stone slabs to make a cozy nook where it is easy to imagine them sitting around telling stories, and at dozens of sites around Africa’s coasts, from its southern tip to Morocco and Algeria in the north (and even just outside Africa, in Israel), people were sitting down and patiently cutting and grinding ostrich eggshells into beads, some of them just a quarter of an inch across. By ninety thousand years ago people at Katanda in the Congo had turned into proper fishermen, carving harpoons out of bone. The most interesting site of all, though, is Blombos Cave on Africa’s southern coast, where in addition to shell beads, excavators found a 77,000-year-old stick of ocher (a type of iron ore). Ocher can be used for sticking things together, waterproofing sails, and all kinds of other tasks; but in recent times it has been particularly popular for drawing, producing satisfyingly bold red lines on tree bark, cave walls, and people’s bodies. Fifty-seven pieces turned up at Pinnacle Point, and by 100,000 BCE it shows up on most African sites, which probably means that early humans liked drawing. The truly remarkable thing about the Blombos ocher stick, though, is that someone had scratched a geometric pattern on it, making it the world’s oldest indisputable work of art—and one made for producing
Clarke set his 2001 moment 3 million years ago, presumably to account for the invention of tools by Homo habilis , but I always felt that the place where a good monolith would really do some work was when fully modern humans appeared. By the time I started studying archaeology in college I had learned not to say things like that, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the professionals’ explanations were less compelling than Clarke’s.
The big problem archaeologists had in those far-off days when I was an undergraduate was that they simply had not excavated very many sites dating between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago. As new finds accumulated across the 1990s, though, it began to become clear that we did not need monoliths after all; in fact, the Great Leap Forward itself began to dissolve into a series of Baby Steps Forward, spread across tens of thousands of years.
We now know of several pre-50,000- BCE sites with signs of surprisingly modern-looking behavior. Take, for instance, Pinnacle Point, a cave excavated in 2007 on the South African coast. Homo sapiens moved in here about 160,000 years ago. This is interesting in itself: earlier ape-men generally ignored coastal sites, probably because they could not work out how to find much food there. Yet Homo sapiens not onlyheaded for the beach—distinctly modern behavior—but when they got there they were smart enough to gather, open, and cook shellfish. They also chipped stones into the small, light points that archaeologists call bladelets, perfect as tips for javelins or arrows—something that neither Peking Man nor Europe’s Neanderthals ever did.
On a handful of other African sites people engaged in different but equally modern-looking activity. About a hundred thousand years ago at Mumbwa Cave in Zambia people lined a group of hearths with stone slabs to make a cozy nook where it is easy to imagine them sitting around telling stories, and at dozens of sites around Africa’s coasts, from its southern tip to Morocco and Algeria in the north (and even just outside Africa, in Israel), people were sitting down and patiently cutting and grinding ostrich eggshells into beads, some of them just a quarter of an inch across. By ninety thousand years ago people at Katanda in the Congo had turned into proper fishermen, carving harpoons out of bone. The most interesting site of all, though, is Blombos Cave on Africa’s southern coast, where in addition to shell beads, excavators found a 77,000-year-old stick of ocher (a type of iron ore). Ocher can be used for sticking things together, waterproofing sails, and all kinds of other tasks; but in recent times it has been particularly popular for drawing, producing satisfyingly bold red lines on tree bark, cave walls, and people’s bodies. Fifty-seven pieces turned up at Pinnacle Point, and by 100,000 BCE it shows up on most African sites, which probably means that early humans liked drawing. The truly remarkable thing about the Blombos ocher stick, though, is that someone had scratched a geometric pattern on it, making it the world’s oldest indisputable work of art—and one made for producing
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