EARLY MODERN MEN
How early is modern man (Homo sapiens), the “wise man”? Some people have thought that he was very early, a few still think so. Piltdown and Galley Hill, which were quite modern in anatomical appearance and supposedly very early in date, were the best “evidence” for very early modern men. Now that Piltdown has been liquidated and Galley Hill is known to be very late, what is left of the idea?
The backs of the skulls of the Swanscombe and Steinheim finds look rather modern. Unless you pay attention to the face and forehead of the Steinheim find—which not many people have—and perhaps also consider the Ternafine jaws, you might come to the conclusion that the crown of the Swanscombe head was that of a modern-like man.
Two more skulls, again without faces, are available from a French cave site, Fontéchevade. They come from the time of the last great interglacial, as did the pre-neanderthaloids. The crowns of the Fontéchevade skulls also look quite modern. There is a bit of the forehead preserved on one of these skulls and the brow-ridge is not heavy. Nevertheless, there is a suggestion that the bones belonged to an immature individual. In this case, his (or even more so, if her) brow-ridges would have been weak anyway. The case for the Fontéchevade fossils, as modern type men, is little stronger than that for Swanscombe, although Professor Vallois believes it a good case.
It seems to add up to the fact that there were people living in Europe—before the classic neanderthaloids—who looked more modern, in some features, than the classic western neanderthaloids did. Our best suggestion of what men looked like—just before they became fully modern—comes from a cave on Mount Carmel in Palestine.
THE FIRST MODERNS
Professor T. D. McCown and the late Sir Arthur Keith, who studied the Mount Carmel bones, figured out that one of the two groups involved was as much as 70 per cent modern. There were, in fact, two groups or varieties of men in the Mount Carmel caves and in at least two other Palestinian caves of about the same time. The time would be about that of the onset of colder weather, when the last glaciation was beginning in the north—say 75,000 years ago.
The 70 per cent modern group came from only one cave, Mugharet es-Skhul (“cave of the kids”). The other group, from several caves, had bones of men of the type we’ve been calling pre-neanderthaloid which we noted were widespread in Europe and beyond. The tools which came with each of these finds were generally similar, and McCown and Keith, and other scholars since their study, have tended to assume that both the Skhul group and the pre-neanderthaloid group came from exactly the same time. The conclusion was quite natural: here was a population of men in the act of evolving in two different directions. But the time may not be exactly the same. It is very difficult to be precise, within say 10,000 years, for a time some 75,000 years ago. If the Skhul men are in fact later than the pre-neanderthaloid group of Palestine, as some of us think, then they show how relatively modern some men were—men who lived at the same time as the classic Neanderthalers of the European pocket.
Soon after the first extremely cold phase of the last glaciation, we begin to get a number of bones of completely modern men in Europe. We also get great numbers of the tools they made, and their living places in caves. Completely modern skeletons begin turning up in caves dating back to toward 40,000 years ago. The time is about that of the beginning of the second phase of the last glaciation. These skeletons belonged to people no different from many people we see today. Like people today, not everybody looked alike. (The positions of the more important fossil men of later Europe are shown in the chart on [page 72].)