Early Man in the New World

by Kenneth Macgowan; Joseph A. Hester

Putting the Neanderthal in His Place

Neanderthal man was a latecomer. We will mention him here but wait until farther along to take a closer look at him. He came to Europe late in the third interglacial period. His culture was advanced and his remains are diverse, numerous, and well studied. His bones differ so distinctly from those of modern man that at most he can be considered a distant cousin, only marginally ancestral. But his remains immediately precede those of modern man in Europe, and the stone tools of his Mousterian culture are found directly under those of modern types of early Europeans.

It was, therefore, with something akin to relief that anthropologists received the findings of Mlle. Henri-Martin at Fontechevade. This was in 1947, some 90 years after Neanderthal had been academically accepted for what he was, an effectively extinct kind of non-sapiens man. At Fontechevade, in Charente, west central France, is a cave in which the litter of millenniums discloses a cultural record ranging from that of recent Frenchmen back through the Old Stone Age, which includes the tools and debris of the Neanderthals’ Mousterian culture. The Mousterian materials were bottommost, resting upon what seemed to be the cave floor. Mlle. Henri-Martin noted that this “floor” was in fact a thick layer of stalagmite deposit, and she began excavating. Upon breaking through this culturally sterile layer, the archaeologist came to more than 20 feet of additional deposits above the actual floor. In these lower levels, the cultural debris represented quite a different tool-manufacturing tradition, the Tayacian. This featured crude flake tools, rather than worked cores. With the flake tools there were fragments of fossil mammals, dating the deposit as third interglacial. There also was a human skullcap and a fragment of a second skull. Not much to go on, but it was sufficient to show that these were the remains not of Neanderthal man but of something closer to modern man in most respects, and perhaps to Swanscombe. Here, for the first time, was clear and unmistakable proof that a more modern form of man definitely preceded the brutish Neanderthal. Fontechevade man resembled Homo sapiens more than Neanderthal—the first evidence that the latter was not our direct ancestor.

These four early men—Heidelberg, Swanscombe, Steinheim, and Fontechevade—are of unquestionable antiquity. There are many other fossil men from Europe, equally interesting but less reliably dated. In addition there are hosts of Africans and Asians who, perhaps, are really of greater consequence in human evolution. None of these is dated as well as the early Europeans, whose bones and stone tools can be assigned to rather specific periods within the sequence of glacial and interglacial phases of the Ice Age.

Ancient Man in Java and China

In the 1880’s a Dutch Army surgeon named Eugène Dubois decided to go to Java to find a kind of ape-man that the great German scientist Ernst Haeckel had envisioned fifteen years before. In 1891, beneath ancient deposits of the Solo River, Dubois discovered what he was looking for—or perhaps a slight improvement on it. What he found was the skull top, two molar teeth, and a thigh bone of a thing which was much more man than ape, but which received the name Pithecanthropus erectus (erect ape-man). For some years the skullcap of this Java man—a handier name—stood alone as the only fossil of really ancient man. Now it has been joined by portions of two other adults from the same geological level and the cranium of a child and portions of a rugged, robust male skull from a still older level, the discoveries of G. H. R. von Koenigswald. Reconstructions of Java man give us a fellow with a low sloping forehead, no chin, not much room for brains, and a very prominent ridge of bone above his eyes. This human of 300,000 or more years ago probably looked a good deal like the most primitive of modern men, the native Australians, who seem to have miraculously and uniquely survived without much change from the beginnings of Homo. Java man left no tools with his bones, but the massive Patjitanian stone choppers and crude flakes found in southern Java are thought to be of about the proper age.

JAVA MAN—Pithecanthropus erectus

Except for two molars and a thigh bone, the skullcap above was all that Dubois first found of Java man. The reconstruction, actually the right side of the skull, has been reversed for comparison. (The skullcap after Osborn, 1915; the reconstruction after Weinert, 1928.)

Java man has a slightly younger relative in Peking man, also beetle-browed. The first finds were made in 1929, about forty miles southwest of Peking in the Choukoutien Cave, on Dragon Bone Hill. Since then parts of about forty men and women have been dug out. We now have four skulls that are more complete than those of Java man. We also have 148 teeth and thirteen jaws, and some odd pieces of other skulls. We have fire hearths and a large number of implements, ranging from eoliths to hammerstones and crude choppers and scrapers. We also have some fossil bones of monkey, baboon, ostrich, rhinoceros, and mammoth, besides animals common to China today. The most interesting bones, of course, are those of man himself, and our concern with them is increased by the odd and disturbing fact that the thigh bones had been cracked for their marrow as only a man could crack them, and the skulls had suffered violence. If Peking man was not a cannibal, he had a neighbor who was. And that is probably true for the Abbevillian and Acheulean times of Europe. But at least Peking man, like Java man, stood erect.