Perhaps this variety of approach merely reflected the better information that was then available for the later periods. Perhaps it reflected the prevailing archaeological ‘culture’. I don’t know. But what I do know is that today this has changed completely. The Palaeolithic is coming alive, and it has even proved possible to carry out successful studies on changing social structure in such extraordinarily ancient times. The key which unlocked these secrets and released those poor isolated, structureless ‘cave-men’ from their cavernous prisons in our minds came with the simple realisation that they were hunters – and that hunters still exist today.
One of the main pioneers of this new approach was Richard B. Lee. Lee was at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto when I was a young curator at the Royal Ontario Museum there, and I went to several of his lectures on the Bushmen people of the Kalahari desert. He had lived with them, and his lectures were inspiring. He edited a most influential collection of papers, with another anthropologist, Irven DeVore, under the collective title Man the Hunter.13 In Britain we were a little slower to join the Man the Hunter revolution, but when we did, we did so with great success – as the contributions by archaeologists like Roger Jacobi and Nick Barton attest. Once again, Clive Gamble has given us some remarkable insights into the way that Palaeolithic people organised their material and social worlds. He has used a variety of sources, including studies made by specialists in later periods, such as the Neolithic and Bronze Age. He has also drawn heavily upon the anthropological literature to produce a thoroughly satisfying explanation of life in the Old Stone Age.
Gamble’s arguments are closely reasoned and complex.14 They are also very convincing, being based on observations of human behaviour and not a little common-sense. The main problem he has had to contend with is that the players in his drama change physically and mentally as hundreds of thousands of years roll by. And, of course, nobody knows for certain what those changes did or did not involve. It’s rather like painting a picture with a brush that’s constantly mutating as you work: at first it’s wider, then narrower, but at the same time it can be thicker, finer or coarser.
Gamble’s work is confined to Europe, which as we have seen was mainly colonised by human beings in the last half million years or so. He defines three broad time periods, which he uses to describe the ways people lived and organised their lives. The first is from half a million to 300,000 years ago, and he begins by making the unusual claim that the slow colonisation of Europe wasn’t merely a matter of cold climate alone. He believes that ‘it was never their intention to colonise Europe’, that their lives were lived on a small scale: groups of people were small, and their outlook was essentially vertical; in other words they looked inwards and vertically up, towards the previous generation, and down, towards their own children and grandchildren. In many respects it was a pattern of social behaviour that owed a certain amount to their primate ancestors of five million years previously. It was against this background that Gamble wrote about the short-lived ‘fifteen-minute culture’ of Boxgrove, a minimalist view with which I have increasing sympathy – despite the proven wonders of Boxgrove and the controversy about whether they did or did not hunt prey there. It’s very difficult not to take sides in Palaeolithic archaeology, and in this instance I find myself in the uncomfortable position of being on both sides at the same time.
In Gamble’s view, people of the Lower Palaeolithic lived in a small-scale ‘landscape of habit’, rather than a truly social landscape. Communication was essentially a face-to-face process that happened between two or more people at the same time. Indirect reference to people elsewhere in time and space would not have taken place. Language, in other words, was used ‘as an attention device rather than as an organising principle’. He sums up their world thus: ‘they had lives of great variety within a small social neighbourhood of possibilities’. I can think of many worse ways to spend one’s time on this earth.
His second phase is that of the more complex society of the Neanderthals, between 300,000 and twenty-seven thousand years ago. It is a period which sees the appearance and growth of true social networks. In the previous period, when relationships were essentially one-to-one, and based on close family ties, they were probably very strong, simple and unambiguous. In the Neanderthal world this was to change, largely because communication improved – but not just through language. Objects themselves can communicate. For example, in my family, like many others in England, it is traditional to give children a small engraved mug on their christening. That mug carries the child’s name and the date of its christening. Sometimes, as in my case, the mug formerly belonged to a dead relative, whose name and date of christening appears above mine. That mug is communicating all manner of things to me and others. It is telling me that I am part of an established family, that I am a baptised Christian, and that my parents loved me sufficiently to have a mug engraved for me. So symbolically it’s expressing my place in society (Church of England) and family. It’s also symbolic of me to other people. Its actual function as an object – i.e. a mug to hold liquid – is of minor importance.
There is no evidence to suggest that any of the manmade objects from Boxgrove carried such a burden of communication. They were hand-axes, admittedly beautifully made hand-axes, but they were made to be used. They were not passed on from one community to another, and they didn’t express anything more than the need to butcher a carcass. But from 300,000 years ago material things can be perceived as communications: as symbols of individuals, of families and family ties. As Gamble puts it, ‘after 300,000 BP [Before Present] chains of connection were extended in all regions of Europe’. With the growth of social networks came more subtle close and long-distance human relationships. The simplicity of the one-to-one, me-to-you, close and unambiguous family relationship was supplemented by a host of new, subtle and ambiguous relationships.
This was a period when there was greater teamwork and cooperation in hunting, which doubtless reflected the larger scale of social networks that were being achieved. But it was not a society that modern people would feel at ease in, still being very restricted in all manner of ways. Clive Gamble sums it up well:
These Neanderthal societies, the product of large-brained hominids, equipped with language to talk about themselves, alive with gestures and incorporating objects, were, for all that variety and creativity, still exclusive, local and complex. Theirs was a most successful hominid society. Well matched to the longer rhythms of the ice ages.15
The third of Clive Gamble’s Palaeolithic periods is the one we have been concerned with in this and the previous chapter, what he styles ‘transition and complicated Crô-Magnon society (sixty to twenty-one thousand years ago)’. The Crô-Magnons, you will recall, were the first examples of our own species, Homo sapiens, to appear in Europe. The main innovation of the time was what Gamble has called ‘the release of our primate heritage of proximity’. The term may sound daunting, but when that release happened, we were free to develop a truly complex social life. Let’s return to ‘proximity’ for a moment; if we understand what it is, we can appreciate what it is to be without it. The idea is actually quite straightforward: when two primates, such as chimps, meet, they groom each other, communicate in various non-verbal ways, and when they part they effectively cease to exist for each other. Absence really does mean just that. Then, as soon as they meet again, the relationship is continued where it left off. In other words, the relationship only happens when two or more individuals are in proximity.
When we are released from the ties that bind relationships that only happen in proximity, we are able to continue relationships across time and space. You may not see your grandchildren in Australia, but it’s possible to have a growing and evolving relationship with