But de Lumley’s interpretation was challenged by the analysis of the stone tools and flakes, research conducted by Paola Villa, then a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley. One aspect of Villa’s project involved conjoining stone tools and flakes, literally fitting back together the stone pieces that fly off as a core is struck with a hammer stone. Through careful analysis, Villa reconstructed the way tools were made, and in the process she made an awkward discovery.
Some conjoinable flakes came from Terra Amata’s different living floors. The discrete layers de Lumley had proposed were cross-cut by stone fragments from the same original core.
This led some scholars to dismiss Terra Amata as the fanciful reconstruction of archaeological imagination, an impression made somewhat worse by incomplete reporting on the excavation.31 Other archaeologists simply erased Terra Amata from the list of ancient European sites.
That seems too dismissive. Although the evidence for vertical movements of flakes undermines the idea that Terra Amata contained eleven seasonal encampments, it does not mean that Terra Amata is archaeologically irrelevant. For example, even the cautious and critical Villa concluded that Terra Amata “is a site with material diffused through deposits 1.5–2.0 meters thick. Features such as hearths, post-holes, and alignments of [limestone] blocks were preserved, but site formation processes have resulted in partial mixing of the residues of probably separate occupation episodes.”32
So here is what we may infer: Terra Amata was a home base dating to between 450,000 and 350,000 years ago, a place that members of the genus Homo (but not Homo sapiens) modified by building fires and simple structures—probably windbreaks—and where they made stone tools and prepared food. In this narrow and spartan sense, Terra Amata was a home.
Other sites present similarly ambiguous evidence of home. For example, at the site of Bilzingsleben, in eastern Germany, excavations uncovered a small lakeside site that may contain evidence of three elliptical shelters dating to 418,000–280,000 years ago.33 Travertine blocks and large animal bones were placed to anchor windbreaks. Small features of burned earth and charcoal are associated with each dwelling, as are activity areas consisting of elephant bones and anvils formed from blocks of travertine. Stone tools from Bilzingsleben are clearly artifacts: pebble tools, hammer-stones, knives, scrapers, points, and other flake tools. Fauna remains include rhino, beaver, red deer, elephant, and bear; none of the bones show gnaw marks, yet some of the elephant foot bones have geometric cut marks incised with a stone tool. An intriguing circular pavement of stones pressed into the softer underlying sediments was partially excavated on the edge of the site; measuring nine meters in diameter, it is clearly an archaeological feature.34
Given this archaeological assemblage, one would think that Bilzings- leben would handily pass every conceivable objection to its authenticity. And yet one archaeologist has argued that Bilzingsleben was a place where hominids met but did not dwell, and that the circular “shelters” are mere natural features around which hominids camped, ate, and made tools—but did not build.
Even the patient reader may wonder, “Is there nothing about archaeology that is certain? What type of intellectual discipline (if that is even the right word!) can be whipsawed by alternative explanations?”
And that, itself, requires a confession and an explanation.
. . .
Archaeology is not, by and large, an experimental science. With few exceptions, it is impossible to replicate the conditions and observations that led to an inference or discovery. It is usually impossible to recreate conditions or recombine elements to reproduce results—the way a high school chemistry teacher can use electrolysis to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen every single semester, year after year.
Archaeological excavations are particularly irrevocable. Once an artifact has been removed from the soil, it cannot be re-excavated. Which is why archaeologists spend so much time laying out grids, measuring the depths of strata, recording, photographing, drawing and so on—all the painstaking efforts to document an irreproducible set of scientific data. You cannot “un-excavate” a site.
This, of course, also allows for doubts. Were the patterns in the excavated data really there, or are they the figments of hyperactive archaeological interpretation? If the patterns are real, are they the product of natural processes, cultural manipulations, or some combination of different factors? Are the objects really associated, is the site accurately dated, was the excavation competent? And on, and on, and on.
At times, archaeologists appear to be an apostleship of Doubting Thomases.
Take what, at first glance, would seem to be a fairly uncomplicated event: building a campfire. If bipedalism separates hominids from our ape cousins, then the use of fire separates humans from all other animals. As Richard Wrangham has argued, fire and the ability to cook food is the transcendent technological breakthrough in human history.35
Anthropogenic fire should be relatively easy to discover in the archaeological record. Fires leave behind charcoal and ash, burn soils brick-red, and reorder the magnetic fields of clays. All these are regularly found by archaeologists. Natural fires are caused by lightening strikes, sparks from falling rocks, volcanic eruptions, and spontaneous combustion of rotting organic materials. In principle we would expect naturally occurring fires to be widespread and unconstrained and human campfires to be relatively small and contained (although obviously humans regularly cause enormous, uncontrollable “wild” fires).36
So it a shock to learn of the uncertainties of the evidence for early human fire. A broad and hypercritical review dismissed most claims of hominid fire use before 200,000–100,000 years ago.37 For example, in China the famous site of Zhou-k’ou-tien—where “Peking Man,” an Asian example of Homo erectus, was found in the 1930s—was long thought to contain traces of campfires kindled by hominids 500,000–200,000 years ago. More recent analyses suggest that the yellowish-red lenses interpreted as hearths are actually reddish brown sediments that collected in small, still pools of drip water, leaving traces that looked like hearths but were not.38
And yet, three sites—two in Africa, the other in Israel—indicate much earlier hominid use of fire. In Kenya, at the 1.5-million-year-oldsite of FXJj 20 East at Koobi Fora, excavations exposed four small features, 30–40 cm in diameter and 10–15 cm thick, on the same flat layer of pale yellowish brown silt.39 Three of the patches were slightly reddened earth, and the fourth was a dark-grey hue. The surrounding soils had not been burned, indicating that these fires were discrete events. Geophysical analyses showed that two of the baked soil features had been burned at 200°C–400°C, about the temperature of an open campfire, and although brushfires combust at similar temperatures, they do not burn the soils as deeply. Further, some stone artifacts had been altered by heat, but other tools had not—again pointing to a controlled burn instead of a broad conflagration.
Five hundred kilometers to the south, another site with evidence of early fire was found at Chesowanja, where a cluster of baked clay lumps appears to have been an ancient hearth. Stone tools surround the cluster, and a fragment of skull apparently came from the robust form of Australopithecus. The site is dated to about 1.42 million years old.
Gesher Benot Ya’aqov is located in northern Israel on the banks of the Jordan River.40 Acheulian hand-axes were found at the site in the 1930s, but excavations over the last twenty years have led to a remarkable picture of Middle Paleolithic life. The site is partially water logged, and plant remains have been found from wild grapes, water chestnuts, wild olive, wild pistachio, acorns, and jujube. Small pitted stones were used to crack nuts. The bones of small game like hares and hyrax were found. Stone tools were abundant: basalt bifacial hand-axes and cleavers, limestone choppers, flint cores, and flake tools. The flint had been carried from sources at least ten kilometers away. And there is solid evidence for fire. Not only were burned seeds and wood recovered from Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, but there were two clusters of burned flints. Flints were burned only in these two clusters, and not in other areas of the site—suggesting that fires were contained and intentional. And this occurred 790,000 years ago.
.