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Sometime around 35,000 years ago in Europe our ancestors embarked on what might be described as a creativity bender. They began making art, jewelry, musical instruments and complex tools in abundance, as evidenced by the remains of these items at sites across the continent. Archaeologists call this cultural period the Upper Paleolithic and it stands in marked contrast to the Middle Paleolithic that preceded it, during which anatomically modern humans and their archaic contemporaries, the Neandertals, focused their manufacturing efforts on a handful of relatively simple tool types. Experts have long debated exactly what sparked this creative explosion. As Central Michigan University paleoanthropologist Rachel Caspari describes in this article in the August issue, grandparents may have played a key role.
Today people routinely live long enough to become grandparents. But analyses of fossil teeth conducted by Caspari and her colleagues indicate that this is a relatively recent development. For most of human evolution, our ancestors mostly lived fast and died young. Reaching grandparent age, they show, did not become common until the Upper Paleolithic, and it may explain the sudden and dramatic shift in behaviors between the Middle and Upper Paleolithic. Having grandparents around in large numbers would have significantly increased population size, thus fostering innovation and self-expression, and it would have facilitated the transfer of valuable knowledge and cultural traditions to the next generation.
The symbolic objects and sophisticated implements of the Upper Paleolithic are not the oldest of their kind, however. In recent years researchers have discovered older examples at early modern human sites in Africa. Archaeologist Curtis Marean of Arizona State University in Tempe has found fancy tools and pigments presumably used for body paint at sites in Mossel Bay, South Africa, that date as far back as 164,000 years ago. At another site in South Africa called Blombos Cave archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood of the University of Bergen in Norway has recovered shell beads and engraved pieces of iron oxide as well as tools wrought from bone, dating back to 71,000 years ago. There are several such glimpses of modern behavior at sites in Africa and western Asia that precede the Upper Paleolithic by a long shot.
Neandertals also dabbled in such advanced practices on occasion. Several sites have yielded tools made by Neandertals using materials and techniques once attributed to anatomically modern humans alone. Our archaic cousins also had artistic leanings. For example, João Zilhão, an archaeologist at the University of Barcelona, has found in Spanish caves dating to nearly 50,000 years ago indications that the Neandertals there were wearing body paint and shell jewelry. And this past February Italian researchers reported that they had found evidence that 44,000 years ago Neandertals were harvesting wing feathers from a variety of birds at a site called Fumane Cave for decorative purposes. Experts refer to such decorations—along with sculpture, cave paintings and other art forms—as symbolic behaviors, which are a defining characteristic of the modern mind.
Although such examples of precociousness might seem to undermine Caspari's argument, they actually support it. The difference between these behaviors in the Middle Paleolithic (and its African equivalent, the Middle Stone Age) and the Upper Paleolithic is that in the former these traditions are relatively rare and fleeting, in the latter they are ubiquitous and sustained. The failure of these early glimmerings of art and sophisticated weaponry to spread and become permanent fixtures of the Middle Paleolithic and the Middle Stone Age seems to have been the result of small population sizes and local extinctions of these populations and their traditions. The Upper Paleolithic, with its burgeoning numbers of grandparents, allowed modern human behavior—the capacity for which arose long beforehand—to finally find a firm foothold.
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe Mayan said, in one of the four books we were able to keep and translate, that during Earth's new rotation, every 26,000 years (the new rotation will start December 21, 2012), humans and animals intelligence and abilities increase 1,000 times. Was it humans or animals that did the decorating with colored paint? Today, there are birds that decorate their homes with flowers and other material to attract mates, and there are some animals who decorate themselves the same way for the same reason. Is that intelligence or instinct or a well planned out homestead for reproducing?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJames, do you have a link to the books...I would very much like to check them out...Thanks, Wayne.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAbout 100,000 BC Neanderthals of different evolutionary grades buried their special dead at Skuhl/Tabun/Quafzeh (3 sites) in Israel. By 70,000 BC, this practice had spread to Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan, Shanidar 2 in Iraq and La Ferrassie 1 in France. These were not cemetery remains or we would have found thousands by now.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBy their rarity and more frequent occurrence c 60,000 BC all over 3 continents, these burials (some with afterlife connections, such as personal items) identified the Neanderthals across 3 continents with very special mortuary (religious) rites far ahead of any other contemporary people as the first world culture. Let alone they had the best tool manufacture for 200,000 years, the Mousterian. And they made the blade and burin advances on that.
Their cognitive achievements are now at the cutting edge of the new paleoanthropology, which is trying to be fairer to fossils than we have been in the past. The major breakthrough in the Upper Paleolithic seems to have had more to do with increasing verbal skills and better crude needles for sewing than grandparents.
With apologies to Rachel Caspari, who, with her husband, has my deepest respect. I just don't feel that is important, given the low longevity of most Neanderthal fossils. By the age of 12, many Upper Paleolithic people not only had lost their grandmothers, but their mothers. Parenting fatherhood is a very late concept in human evolution. I hope to get deeper into Neanderthal burials and family structure later in the year on my running blog, www.paleoepica.com.
Re: "Sometime around 35,000 years ago in Europe our ancestors embarked on what might be described as a creativity bender. They began making art, jewelry, musical instruments and complex tools..."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe humans are vastly more complex than art, jewelry, musical instruments and tools. It's a matter of incredulity for me how the lesser was "created" while the greater "evolved."
As Al Sundel says, verbal skills and tools were essential for advances to symbolism. But additional labor, particularly with respect to child care and food preparation would also have been essential. That is the role of grandparents. With Neanderthals, their hunting, or fishing, could provide ample food to allow time for cultural expression. But human diet has always been more varied, and needed some preparation. So, humans had more need of grandparents than did Neanderthals.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThanks for this interesting and important article. As a grandfather, I'm already half convinced that grandparenting is essential to civilisation, and fascinated to see that grandparents and sophisticated human culture came into the world together about 30,000 years ago.... BUT, much as I would like to believe that the former allowed the latter to happen, how do we know which way round the causality worked? Couldn't it be that better survival strategies (e.g. less dependence on hunting?) and more sophisticated social groups allowed more of the "elderly" to survive to become grandparents?
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