The Spirit in Human Evolution - Waldorf Research Institute

however they were distinguishing themselves with skills and organizational capacity to
establish themselves in an environment where there was most to gain, namely the East
African savannah. As Jonathan Kingdon, who knows the ecology of this region better
than most, sees it,
A co-ordinated pattern of attack and capture could have been a prime hominid
advance over the techniques of other savannah predators. Any structured and
consistent improvement in the efficiency of group hunting or foraging would
handicap less well organized competitors. At first those competitors were
carnivores but, with the passage of time, the main competition began to be
between different hominid populations. 61
From 150,000 BP and particularly from 130,000 BP onwards, archeology begins
to see new types of stone tools, classified as East African Middle Stone Age. Modern
anatomy by this time offered greater precision in the use of the fingertips, rather than the
characteristic powerful fist of the Ancients; narrower shoulder blades, less flexed elbows
and lighter, more mobile arms, all traits that make accurate throwing easier. The Ancients
certainly hunted, though foraging was more their forte. It was not until the Moderns
emerged that mankind began to dominate the savannah ecologies, not only with the use
of burning, that had long been done, but in systematically hunting the large mammal
species.
The new technological skills and better group co-ordination were more likely
to have made a difference in the species-rich savannah, particularly in large mammals,
than in species-poorer marginal regions, such as uplands. Of course competition from the
traditional carnivores is most intensive in such an environment, but the “human-edge”
began to prove decisive.
Why Did They Start to Leave Africa?
If the Moderns emerged as big game hunters (for once this image is appropriate
for human hunter-foragers) in East Africa and they were doing so well, why did they
leave? Surely there were enough resources around for the relatively small populations
we must assume. Well, the obvious answer is that not all did. From 40,000 BP the
human population of East Africa seems to have considerably increased and there was
a proliferation of distinctive cultures, a fact which was also true of equatorial Africa
as a whole. But tool assemblages associated with Moderns (even bearing in mind that
it is always risky to link tools to specific human grades) very similar to East African
types appear in the Middle East at Zuttiyeh, in central Rajasthan in India, and at sites in
Southeast Asia from 130,000 BP onwards. Some early Moderns, clearly found themselves
far from their homelands, even at such early dates.
The fact that they tended to turn up in savannah environments similar to those
of East Africa suggests an originally equatorial homeland. It was only later, through
necessity and when the cultural and technical means were available, did they move to
more marginal environments, mountains, cooler latitudes, rain forests and geographically
peripheral places like Europe and the Islands of the Pacific.
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61
Ibid., p98.
297