For archaeologists interpreting the past, deciphering cultures that aren’t their own is the challenge. ‘Archaeologists have struggled for a long time to determine what it is, what is that unique trait, what makes us special,’ says Smith, who as well as working in Australia has spent sixteen years at sites in South Africa. It’s a job that has taken him to the cradles of humankind, rummaging through the remains of the beginning of our species. And this is a difficult business. It’s surprisingly tough to date exactly when Homo sapiens emerged. Fossils of people who shared our facial features have been found from 300,000 to 100,000 years ago. Evidence of art, or at least the use of ochre, is reliably available in Africa far further back than 100,000 years, before some of our ancestors began venturing out of the continent and slowly populating other parts of the world, including Australia. ‘It’s one of the things that sets us apart as a species, the ability to make complex art,’ he says.
But even if our ancestors were making art a hundred millennia ago, the world then was nothing like the world now. More than forty thousand years ago there weren’t just modern humans, Homo sapiens, roaming the planet, but also archaic humans, including Neanderthals (sometimes called cavemen because their bones have been found in caves), who lived in Europe and parts of western and central Asia. And there were Denisovans, we now know, whose remains have been found in limestone caves in Siberia, their territory possibly spanning south-east Asia and Papua New Guinea. There were also at various times in the past many other kinds of human, most of which haven’t yet been identified or named.
In the deep past we all shared the planet, even living alongside each other at certain times, in particular places. For some academics, this cosmopolitan moment in our ancient history lies at the heart of what it means to be modern. When we imagine these other humans, it’s often as knuckle-dragging thugs. We must have had qualities that they didn’t have, something that gave us an edge, the ability to survive and thrive as they went extinct. The word ‘Neanderthal’ has long been a term of abuse. Dictionaries define it both as an extinct species of human that lived in ice-age Europe, and an uncivilised, uncouth man of low intelligence. Neanderthals and Homo erectus made stone tools like our own species, Homo sapiens, Smith explains, but as far as convincing evidence goes, he believes none had the same capacity to think symbolically, to talk in past and future tenses, to produce art quite like our own. These are the things that made us modern, that set us apart.
What separated ‘us’ from ‘them’ goes to the core of who we are. But it’s not just a question for the past. Today, being human might seem so patently clear, so beyond need for clarification that it’s hard to believe that not all that long ago it wasn’t so. When archaeologists found fossils of other now-extinct human species in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they raised doubts about just how far all Homo sapiens living today really are the ‘same’. Even as recently as the 1960s it wasn’t controversial for a scientist to believe that modern humans may have evolved independently in different parts of the world from separate archaic forms. Indeed, some are still plagued by uncertainty over this question. Scientific debate around what makes a modern human a modern human is as contentious as it has ever been.
From our vantage point in the twenty-first century, this might sound absurd. The common, mainstream view is that we have shared origins, as described by the ‘Out of Africa’ hypothesis. Scientific data has confirmed in the last few decades that Homo sapiens evolved from a population of people in Africa before some of these people began migrating to the rest of the world around 100,000 years ago and adapting in small ways to their own particular environmental conditions. Within Africa, too, there was adaptation and change depending on where people lived. But overall, modern humans were then (and remain now) one species, Homo sapiens. We are special and we are united. It’s nothing less than a scientific creed.
But this isn’t a view shared universally within academia. It’s not even the mainstream belief in certain countries. There are scientists who believe that, rather than modern humans migrating out of Africa relatively recently in evolutionary time, populations on each continent actually emerged into modernity separately from ancestors who lived there as far back as millions of years ago. In other words, different groups of people became human as we know it at different times in different places. A few go so far as to wonder whether, if different populations evolved separately into modern humans, maybe this could explain what we think of today as racial difference. And if that’s the case, maybe the differences between ‘races’ run deeper than we realise.
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In one early European account of indigenous Australians, the seventeenth-century English pirate and explorer William Dampier called them ‘the miserablest people in the world’.
Dampier and the British colonists who followed him to the continent dismissed their new neighbours as savages who had been trapped in cultural stasis since migrating or emerging there, however long ago that was. Cultural researchers Kay Anderson, based at Western Sydney University, and Colin Perrin, an independent scholar, document the initial reaction of Europeans in Australia as one of sheer puzzlement. ‘The non-cultivating Aborigine bewildered the early colonists,’ they write. They didn’t build houses, they didn’t have agriculture, they didn’t rear livestock. They couldn’t figure out why these people, if they were equally human, hadn’t ‘improved’ themselves by adopting these things. Why weren’t they more like Europeans?
There was more to this than culture shock. Bewilderment – or rather, an unwillingness to try and understand the continent’s original inhabitants – suited Europeans in the eighteenth century because it also served the belief that they were entering a territory they could justly claim for themselves. The landscape was thought to be no different from how it must have been in the beginning, because they couldn’t recognise how it might have been changed. And if the land hadn’t been cultivated, then by Western legal measures it was terra nullius, it didn’t belong to anyone.
By the same token, if its inhabitants belonged to the past, to a time before modernity, their days were numbered. ‘Indigenous Australians were considered to be primitive, a fossilised stage in human evolution,’ I’m told by Billy Griffiths, a young Australian historian who has documented the story of archaeology in his country, challenging the narrative that once painted indigenous peoples as an evolutionary backwater. At least one early explorer even refused to believe they had created the rock art he saw. They were viewed as ‘an earlier stage of western history, a living representative of an ancient form, a stepping stone’. From almost the first encounter, Aboriginal Australians were judged to have no history of their own, surviving in isolation as a flashback to how all humans might have lived before some became civilised. In 1958 the late distinguished Australian archaeologist John Mulvaney wrote that Victorians saw Australia as a ‘museum of primeval humanity’. Even until the end of the twentieth century writers and scholars routinely called them ‘Stone Age’ people.
It’s true that indigenous cultures have enduring connections to their ancestors, a continuation of traditions that go back millennia. ‘The deep past is a living heritage,’ Griffiths tells me. For Aboriginal Australians, ‘it’s something they feel in their bones … there are amazing stories of dramatic events that are preserved in oral histories, oral traditions, such as the rising of the seas at the end of the last ice age, and hills becoming islands, the eruption of volcanoes in western Victoria, even meteorites in different times.’ But at the same time, this doesn’t mean that ways of life have never changed. European colonisers failed to see this and it would take until the second half of the twentieth century for that view to be corrected.
‘There was certainly little respect for the remarkable systems of understanding and land management that indigenous Australians had cultivated over millennia,’ explains Griffiths. For thousands of years the land has been embedded with stories and songs, cultivated with digging sticks, fire and hand. ‘While people have lived in Australia, there’s been enormous environmental change as well as social change, political change, cultural change.’ Their lives have never been static. In his 2014 book Dark Emu, Black Seeds, writer Bruce