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                                 Chapter 2

                          Beginnings out of Africa
                                      
   In Africa we find the earliest  evidence of the first humans whose
   fossils are identified as the remains of Homo ergaster (thought by
   some to be an early form of erectus) and Homo erectus proper with.a
   variety of sub-species some of whom had brain capacities of 1100ml.
   The earliest form of ergaster had appeared in Kenya by about two
   million years ago and the later form (erectus) lived in the Olduvai
   Gorge to at least some 400,000 years later. Judging from the structure
   of its teeth and the bones found in associated archaeological sites
   its diet included significant amounts of meat. This species in Kenya
   probably overlapped with later Homo habilis and Paranthropus. 

   One of the most interesting erectus-type finds was on the shores of
   Lake Turkana in Kenya in 1985 when a good part of the skeleton of an
   11-year-old boy was unearthed by field workers. He was at that age
   already around 1.62m tall, an unusual height which demonstrates the
   variety of sub-types which can be found in this species. This
   individual has been labelled as the Nariokotome boy.

   Evidence of the dispersal of erectus comes from both Asia and Europe
   but before describing them we can ask why the earlier
   Australopithecines and Paranthropines did not also migrate out of
   Africa. The reason usually suggested is that, being vegetarians, they
   were chained to the environment which produced the plants they
   customarily ate which were specific to that environment. But meat is
   meat and meat-eaters, like Homo, could find it just as easily outside
   Africa as inside.

   Why should early man want to leave Africa? Recent geological research
   into sediments in African lakes has found that there was a prolonged
   period of drought in equatorial Africa around 70,000 years ago and
   this had a profound impact on the landscape and species in the area
   including a group of around 10,000 humans who lived in East Africa and
   it may have been spur to migration.

   Much of the investigation of the journeys of mankind out of Africa has
   been done using a synthesis of mtDNA and Y chromosome evidence with
   archaeology, climatology and fossil study. These early journeys were
   accomplished by small groups of people who perhaps travelled at
   intervals of time in separate parties. The evidence suggests that
   there was an early movement of a small group of people northwards out
   of Africa by at least 1.75m years ago when hominins (modern humans,
   their ancestors and relatives since divergence from apes) occupied a
   site at Dmanisi in Georgia where more primitive tools than have
   previously been seen outside Africa have been found. Also found was a
   skull with a very small brain cavity. It and the tools have been dated
   at 1.7 million years. The latest find in Europe at Atapuerca in Spain
   is of a jawbone and teeth with stone tools and animal bones with marks
   of butchering dated between 1.1 and 1.2 million years ago and comprise
   the earliest human evidence in western Europe.

   Further south, fluctuating sea-levels affecting the Red Sea may have
   allowed early Africans to cross into Arabia before 800,000 BP. This
   suggestion is supported by the finds of Acheulian tools in Yemen that
   resemble contemporary tools in East Africa but scientific dating for
   the Arabian tools is still awaited. These people moved along the
   coasts of southern Arabia, across the Straits of Hormuz to India and
   so, via Sri Lanka, to the area of present-day Indonesia, which at that
   time was a land-bridge that allowed them to move through Borneo to
   southern China. In Java a specimen of Homo erectus skull from Sangiran
   has been provisionally dated to around 800,000 BP. Further advances
   took place took place during the following hundred thousand years:
   groups crossed by boat into Australia and from Borneo to New Guinea. A
   date for a Chinese specimen of erectus from Zhoukoudian has been dated
   to between 500,000 and 400,000BP.

   In Europe, one form of Homo erectus is often referred to as Homo
   heidelbergensis. A skull found in the sand pits at Mauer in Germany is
   dated to approximately 500,000BP while another from Arago cave near
   Tautavel in France is probably younger, between 300,000 and 200,000BP.
   From another cave at Petralona in Greece a cranium found there  has
   not yet been finally dated; estimates of its age range from 400,000 to
   127,000BP. In Britain recent indications are that
   erectus/heidelbergensis had been in the country at around 700,000BP
   although the fossil evidence at Boxgrove quarry in Sussex probably
   only goes back to about 500,000BP.

   Archaeologists in Europe can recognize places which they can identify
   as Homo erectus/heidelbergensis camping sites where the finds include
   hearths, burned bones and charcoal. The best-excavated camps of the
   period give us vivid glimpses of the life-style of the
   hunter-gatherers who were now colonising the Continent. It is thought
   that footprints and a handprint in hardened volcanic ash on a slope of
   the Italian Roccamonfina volcano are probably those of H.
   heidelbergensis and date to between 385,000 to 325,000BP.

   Torralba and Ambrona in central Spain were excavated in the early part
   of this century and again from 1961-4 and are two of the earliest
   sites that revealed man's practice of big-game hunting, the excavated
   bones providing a contrast to the finds of the mainly smaller animals
   discovered on sites of earlier periods. Both these places were
   butchering and meat-processing places. Concentrated in a relatively
   small area at Torralba are the remains of at least 30 elephants, 25
   horses, 25 red deer. 10 wild oxen and 6 rhinoceroses. They can still
   be seen preserved in situ.

   Less than five kilometres away, at Ambrona, were discovered the
   remains of 40-50 elephants, horses, red-deer and oxen. Patterns of
   long-bones of an elephant on a living-floor together with aligned
   stones suggest the remains of huts. The latest excavator believes that
   fires had been lit to drive animals into a swampy area where they were
   bogged down and then killed. From both sites the tool kits include
   cleavers, hand-axes, borers, scrapers, backed blades, burins, pointed
   flakes and notched tools. Interestingly enough, bone versions of some
   familiar tool types were made - scrapers, blades, cleavers and
   hand-axes.

   Good evidence for another early camping site in Europe comes from a
   site near Nice in southern France at Terra Amata which 380,000 years
   ago was a bay near the mouth of a small river where animals came down
   to drink. On the slope of an ancient sand-dune was the remains of a
   camping-place with postholes, hearths, a wall of stones and the bones
   of deer, elephants, wild boars and other animals. Study of the
   hunters' coproliths revealed plant pollen produced in late spring and
   early summer. Eleven thin occupation layers suggest that the site was
   occupied for a short time in each of eleven consecutive years.
   Limestone slabs for sitting or breaking bones on similar to slabs
   found at Torralba and Ambrona were discovered together with the
   earliest container yet identified, a wooden, round-bottomed bowl.
   Close by were lumps of pigment pointed like pencils at one end.
   Perhaps the earliest find of cosmetics! Tools found included choppers,
   picks, cleavers and more advanced objects made from flakes - points
   and scrapers.  This is a range of tools similar to those found at the
   Spanish sites.

   The hominids that were associated with the erectus genus and made
   their appearance in Europe and North Africa at the end of the Lower
   Palaeolithic period are sometimes described as 'archaic homo sapiens'
   although others classify them as H. heidelbergensis.  They continued
   to develop in the period after 600,000BP until the appearance of  Homo
   neanderthalensis.. Homo heidelbergensis is named after a skull
   discovered in a sand pit at Mauer near Heidelberg in Germany. A
   possible variety also put in an appearance in a quarry at Boxgrove in
   Sussex where it left behind a shin bone and a tooth. Both these and
   the Mauer skull are believed to be about half a million years old.


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   The Neanderthals [LINK]