Anthropologists sort out prehistoric riddle

A strange thing happened in northwestern Europe half a million years ago.

People started popping up in the archeological record, leaving behind stone tools and butchered bones.

Or, if not actual people, at least close evolutionary cousins: Homo erectus, homo heidelbergensis, homo antecessor, the first Europeans. Their presence there was a mystery.

Living in rudimentary families built around malefemale pair bonds, they pushed northward across France, past 50 degrees latitude into Germany, even to the coast of Britain, which was then accessible by land across the chalk ridge whose remnants today are famous as the White Cliffs of Dover.

This has baffled anthropologists. Why would a creature that arose in the lush warmth of Africa, foraging plentiful plants and hunting abundant small game, decide to strike out for such a miserable place, with a climate like modern Scandinavia, where snow covers the land half the year, the sun sinks low in the sky, and the most plentiful game meat comes from massive ungulates that migrate over hundreds of kilometres?

A new archeological research paper proposes an answer, and in doing so, has painted a rich picture of life among paleolithic humanity, there on the evolutionary cusp between small-brained scavengers and big-brained hunter-gatherers.

Even when it was not covered by a mile of solid ice, as it was for long stretches during this era, Europe in the mid latitudes was a “zone of periodic extinction,” meaning humanity’s cousins died out here, over and over again.

“Something doesn’t quite fit here,” said Rob Hosfield, a paleolithic archeologist at the University of Reading.

“We know humans are here, we have their stone tools,” he said. “What is less clear is how widely distributed or sustained such survival was.”

Crucially, there is almost no evidence of the “clever behaviours,” like kindling and controlling fire, making clothes, and preserving nutritional food, that would later enable modern humans, Homo sapiens, to permanently colonize almost every last bit of the planet, even the cold bits, save Antarctica.

Perhaps these first Europeans only went north in summer, camped a bit and chased the local wildlife, but returned south to the Mediterranean coast in winter, like Stone Age snowbirds.

Perhaps they were more biologically different than we know, with different nutritional needs or natural insulating capability. For example, early humans are thought to have lost most of their hair while still on the African savannah. Maybe they got some of it back as they moved north.

Or maybe the shifting snow line was a barrier, just as impassable as the glaciers, and they only moved north when the climate warmed, retreating as it cooled. Maybe they never really experienced proper winter at all.

But Hosfield’s solution is different. As he sees it, a cultural milestone had been crossed. These great apes, which arose in Africa, and would have experienced truly cold weather only at high altitudes, were experiencing proper northern winter for the first time. And they were not only surviving, but even perhaps thriving in the cold and dark, because they had learned the tricks of staying warm and fed.

Humanity, basically, was becoming Canadian.

“They’re getting better at this,” Hosfield said in an interview about his paper in Current Anthropology, “Walking in a Winter Wonderland? Strategies for Early and Middle Pleistocene survival in mid-latitude Europe.”

He said a danger for anthropology is in thinking of these hominids as either apes or people, either nothing like us or just like us.

“That’s the challenge for us always, not to fall into one trap or the other,” he said.

On the one hand, they were very different, and probably always naked. They would have used skins — fox for warmth, otter for durability — but they had none of the skills modern huntergatherers had for making clothing, like stitching with bone needles. At best, they could have managed to wrap skins around their limbs, Hosfield said.

Shelters, likewise, were primitive, using whatever was at hand, like vegetation, deadfall, and skins, the kind of thing that leaves no archeological traces.

There is some suggestion they took advantage of valley geography to camp out of the prevailing winds. “But it’s absolutely nothing like, say, the spectacular mammoth bone houses that you get with our own species in paleolithic Europe, at 20 or 15,000 years ago,” Hosfield said.

But these earliest humans were learning certain skills.

They would have had to find a way to avoid “rabbit starvation,” known in Canada as “mal de caribou,” in which gorging on lean meat (like rabbits, caribou and most wild game) leads to starvation for lack of fat (which is a big reason Inuit, for example, eat blubber.) That solution would have involved fattier prey like beaver, bear and waterfowl.

Pemmican was probably beyond their skills, but they might have dried or smoked food, Hosfield said. At the Boxgrove site in Sussex, U.K., there is evidence of butchery of deer, horse, bear, even rhinoceros.

“It doesn’t seem to be to be an enormous leap of faith to envisage them exploiting other natural materials to provide a little bit of extra shelter,” Hosfield said.

By surveying the available evidence, however patchy, he concludes that early humans first went into the European winter, and stayed, because they could. This expansion of territory would have been incremental. There were no “largescale dispersals into the unknown.” They were not driven or chased north by some natural pressure. They had simply learned how to handle the winter.

HUMANITY, BASICALLY, WAS BECOMING CANADIAN.