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The First Geologists

Prologue

The group is clustered around last night's camp site, basking in the
morning sun to get thoroughly warmed after the chill of the night. The
sun is not yet hot enough to avoid. The ground is still soft and the
flowers are fragrant, because the last few days of heavy rain have
soaked the area: it is the middle of the rainy season. A youth comes
running in, making the signs for food, and lots of it. The group goes
into practised reaction: this is an activity where everyone helps. A
couple of miles away the youth leads them proudly to a hippo carcass,
stranded on a gravel bank in the river, which is quickly subsiding after
last night's flood. Wounds on the carcass show that the hippo had been
crippled, possibly by a crocodile: it had escaped but must have been so
weakened that it was swept away downstream to drown and drift until this
morning's diminishing flow stranded it. Freshly dead, the meat will be
in excellent condition.

But the carcass must be butchered now before other hungry scavengers
arrive. The group can drive off jackals or vultures, but even with
stones it is dangerous to try to hold off hungry lions, or hyenas, or a
sabertooth.

Hippo hide is tough, but this is where experience pays off. The
geologist quickly steps forward with his tool-kit. He takes out a
palm-sized slicing tool, the edge carefully freshened up yesterday, and
carves great long cuts into the hide. Willing hands grab the ends of the
strips and tear them back, exposing fat and flesh. The geologist goes
straight for the easiest and most desirable part, the liver, and hacks
off chunks that are rapidly passed round the group. He does not pause to
eat now, because the more skilful tasks are waiting. He goes now for the
big joints, slicing tendons as hands seize and lever the limbs backward
and forward. Soon large pieces are being passed out to people who decide
how best to carry them. It's easier to carry when there's bone to grip,
but the geologist can quickly slice a hand-hold into the tough hide.
Strips of meat can have a hole punched through them so the children can
carry them on sticks.

The geologist quickly gets into a bad mood. Hippos are really difficult.
Thank goodness they don't come along too often. The carcass is so big
that people expect too much, from the hippo and from him. The hide is
really thick and tough, not of course as bad as a rhino, but worse than
it looks: just those first dozen long cuts have taken the edge off his
biggest slicer. The leg bones are thick and heavy and there's not much
spare flesh around them, so there's a lot to carry for not much reward
at the end. There's a lot of a hippo carcass that has to be left behind:
it takes too long to cut and hammer at the massive pelvis, shoulders,
skull, and ribs: the geologist wishes he had two wildebeest rather than
one hippo: there would be just as much meat for less work.

Finally, everyone is loaded. In a more difficult season, the group might
come back one more time to try to process scraps, but as it is, other
carcasses will provide better pickings. The easiest pieces will be eaten
today, and the rest will be sliced into strips and sun-dried.

The geologist looks to his tool kit that afternoon. The scrapers are
smaller and have a more delicate edge than the big slicers and hammers:
they take more time to re-sharpen, although they are smaller. He may
have to send his apprentices off to collect more of the quartzite from
the special site a few miles away.

Soon the usual routine will begin again. The scouts will go out
patrolling for lucky finds like the hippo, but if they are not lucky
they will have to be clever. They will visit the trees where the
leopards cache their kills; they will check the favorite stalking
grounds of the pair of sabertooths that are feeding their young in the
cave along the ridge, or the lions that loll around most of the day
under the acacias by the kopje. And then the tools will be needed, and
the expert who can still use them best. He hopes the boys have been
practising their stone-throwing. He doesn't relish the memory of the
retreat at the end of the dry season, as they defended their scraps (and
their lives) from the scrawny but dangerous group of hyenas that almost
had them trapped in the blind ravine. As he gets older and slower, these
encounters frighten him more.

That reminds him: he can have the apprentices practice their skills
again tonight before he puts the final edges on their efforts. He must
remind them again never to watch the impact edge as they rough-form it
with the hammerstone. His useless eye aches again in the afternoon sun:
one careless moment and one razor-sharp fragment when he was an
apprentice. That's why there are scouts and collectors, and there are
geologists: the former need keen long sight and stamina, and the latter
need close-up vision and dexterity. There's not much call for an old
slow hunter, he muses, but an old geologist still has skills that help
the tribe. People can't eat anything bigger than a rabbit with
fingernails and teeth: any big cat or hyena or vulture can do better
than that. The tribe along the valley lost their geologist before he'd
trained his apprentices: they enticed away his best pupil to fill the
gap, which works well because the two groups must now share the same
rock outcrop for tools, and there's even less friction than before...

Introduction

There were geologists as soon as there were people, and there were
people on the plains of Africa about two million years ago. They were
like us, if you compare them with the chimpanzees and gorillas and
monkeys of the time. They walked upright, and they were very
intelligent. They were not really like us, of course: they carried more
of the facial features of their ancestors than we do, and they were only
about three or four feet tall. But from our modern perspective on human
evolution, we call these people /Homo/. Several names now exist for
different species of these early /Homo/, but I shall use the earliest
and best-known, /Homo habilis/, "handy man," a name coined by Louis
Leakey because the bones of /Homo habilis/ are often found associated
with tools. These were the first primates to make extensive, habitual,
daily use of tools. Chimps (and gorillas) can fashion simple tools,
mostly from sticks and twigs, birds can weave complicated nests, and
even crows can use make and use tools, but /Homo habilis/ altered the
history of the planet with tools. The dexterity and intelligence of
/Homo habilis/ made it so successful a species that its descendant,
/Homo erectus/, left a trail of tools, fires, and animal bones all over
the Old World from Spain to Indonesia, and its descendant /Homo sapiens/
has changed Earth to an extent that is clearly visible from the
spacecraft it has built.

Geologists made those early tools, and it is the interplay of geology
and people through history that I shall follow in this book. Geology
shaped the world of /Homo habilis/, and it continues to do so today in
the world of /Homo sapiens/. It is not an accident that the latest
formal war on Earth was waged in the Persian Gulf over the control of
oil: a geological resource. As I write this, nasty little unofficial
wars are being fought in Angola and Sierra Leone and the Congo (all of
them over diamonds), and in Chechnya (over a vital strategic oil
pipeline). Geology made the modern world possible, providing access to
the resources, the fuels, and the water supplies that make our life so
luxurious compared with that of our ancestors. But our dependence on
geological resources also makes us vulnerable. Throughout history, the
wise use of geological resources has been rewarded, but unwise use has
been punished.

On The Plains of Africa

/Homo habilis/ evolved from a more primitive primate that we know as
/Australopithecus/. /Australopithecus/ walked upright just as we do, and
was about the same size as /Homo habilis/. But it had relatively huge
jaws and teeth, and a relatively smaller brain. And it did not use tools.

The tools fit the anatomy. Paleontologists argue that /Australopithecus/
had huge jaws and teeth because it did a lot of chewing to process its
vegetarian food: roots and fibers and leaves and nuts. /Homo habilis/
chewed less because it had a significantly different diet and used tools
to process its food before eating.

The tools of /Homo habilis/ are deceptively primitive-looking. They were
made by breaking and modifying pebbles and cobbles to leave a cutting or
scraping edge exposed, or to form a simple hammer. There were no
handles. These were all hand-held tools, yet they could be used for a
great variety of tasks. The most important use for tools was
food-processing: pounding and crushing roots and tubers, cracking nuts,
and and above all, for butchering animals.

The scene in the prologue is not entirely imaginary. We have good
archaeological evidence for much of it. About 1.8 million years ago in
the Turkana basin, on the border of Kenya and Ethiopia, a group of /Homo
habilis/ cut up a hippo carcass on a gravel bank in a stream bed,
leaving cut marks on the bones. They did not make their butchering tools
on the spot, because the river gravel contained no pebbles. They must
have carried the tools with them, or the stones to make them from, or
they must have gone and fetched them from the nearest suitable rock
outcrop. Given that the nearest suitable rock is at least 8 miles (14
km) away from the hippo site (at least a four-hour round trip) this
suggests that /Homo habilis/ routinely carried stones on foraging
expeditions. It would only need a few minutes to get out the
pre-selected stones from the carrying case (hide, probably), and make
the tool kit.

Lighter carcasses might have been carried back to a base for butchering.
At another stream bed site in the Turkana basin, tools are found along
with over 2000 bones of game animals, most of them antelope.

The persistent presence of particular tool shapes suggests that they
were deliberately made with a consistent technique. The tool maker had a
picture in his mind of the finished product before he started to make
it. The tools made by /Homo habilis/ are so recognizable that they have
been given a name, the *Oldowan* tool assemblage, after Olduvai Gorge
where the Leakeys first recognized them.

We know how Oldowan tools were made, and we can guess how they were
used, because of experiments by Nicholas Toth of Indiana University.
Toth can make Oldowan tools by chipping flakes from a fist-sized stone.
This leaves a "core" which may be a hammer and chopper, and "flakes"
with sharp edges which may be knives and scrapers. The core may simply
be the discarded piece from which the useful flakes were chipped, or the
flakes may be the discarded debris that fell off as the hammers and
choppers were shaped. Most likely, the primary aim was to make the
smaller knives and scrapers.

We don't know whether /Homo habilis/ was a hunter as well as a butcher,
but it seems unlikely. None of the Oldowan tools could be used as a
throwing or stabbing weapon. Most likely /Homo habilis/ was an
omnivorous scavenger, eating fruits, nuts, and seeds routinely, with
meat from very small animals, or from carcasses of larger ones when they
could be found. On the plains of Africa, well-adapted carnivores such as
leopards, cheetahs, lions, hyenas and wild dogs hunted and killed game
of all kinds very efficiently, as they still do. In addition, sabertooth
cats the size of lions were major carnivores too. Predators like this
rarely consume all the carcass right away; they usually eat much of the
meat and leave the rest for scavengers. Leopards may cache the remains
of the carcass in a tree, hoping to return to it. Partly consumed
carcasses are a bonanza for efficient scavengers. Vultures and jackals
are the most notorious of the African scavengers today, though lions,
hyenas, and dogs will also scavenge the kills of others.

In the most evocative scenario for the biology of these early humans,
/Homo habilis/ was an omnivorous, opportunistic scavenger. Observant
enough to spot the killing patterns of the local carnivores, crafty and
mobile enough to find and carry away pieces, powerful enough to scare
away at least the smaller scavengers, /Homo habilis/ could harvest a
rich new source of protein and calories, provided someone else ran it
down and killed it. The only component lacking was the means to extract
the most from every find. Unable to crack bones with its teeth like a
hyena, unable to punch through hide or to tear off strips of meat with a
sharp strong beak like a vulture, /Homo habilis/ made the great
breakthrough of using tools to do those jobs.

A pair of American anthropologists tried to find out how easy it would
be to roam the African savanna in search of meat. They found that even
as complete newcomers to the African bush, and newcomers to the idea of
making their living as scavengers, they were able to get to know an area
of several square miles in only a few weeks. They learned where the big
cats roamed and often killed their prey, and they learned the favorite
cache sites for leopard kills. They concluded that it would have been
fairly easy for /Homo habilis/ to have supplemented a diet of fruits and
seeds with enough meat to make a great difference to dietary quality. A
group of /Homo habilis/ could have made a formidable show against all
but the biggest cats, just as a troop of baboons today can defend
itself, by noisy threats followed by stone-throwing if necessary.

But people can only make effective tools by selecting and carrying the
right stones, and such skills are a matter of experience and training.
The wrong kinds of rock will shatter, or cleave into thin plates, or
will break too unevenly, or will not hold an edge. Only a rock that is
hard but breaks reliably, isotropically (in any direction the tool-maker
wishes), will make a good tool, and one must learn by experience what
such a rock looks like, and where one can go to get a supply. Every
animal knows by experience that essential items occur only in certain
places (water, safe shelter at night, for example) and every animal
knows at all times how far away those places are, and in which
direction. At some level every individual /Homo habilis/ must have been
a geologist, or else there was a specialist geologist in every
successful group. At some level, there must have been some sort of
geological training that every young human received on the African savanna.

Every successful animal on the African savanna learns some basic biology
and ecology. What was different about the new creature /Homo habilis/? I
suggest that it was geology. The major breakthrough of these first
humans was their effective exploitation of the geological resources
around them. Geology has been a strong influence on human history ever
since. The Gulf War (for control of the oilfields of Kuwait) is only the
most recent example.

Obviously human history is multifaceted; but in this book I argue that
the physical setting in which humans operate has greatly affected the
decisions they have made. Humans have worked with the earth
successfully, on the whole; but they have tried to work against it to
their cost. The same laziness and greed that produced our technology
have often led us to ignore the imperatives of earth science. And the
lesson has still not been learned. Today, young humans preferentially
learn mathematics, chemistry and physics in formal scientific training.
That was certainly not the case two million years ago, and I would argue
that we have lost a lot much by neglecting earth science (and biology
and ecology) in modern education!

I am delighted to imagine that /Homo habilis/ also invented laziness:
that butchering tools were invented simply to make life easier, to avoid
the damage and strain to teeth and fingers and the frustration that is
involved in processing carcasses without tools. I suspect that /Homo
habilis/ was no fonder of hard work than I am. If we judge by later
human history, laziness and greed, rather than necessity, are the
mothers of invention. Tools are usually introduced to cut down on the
time, effort, or cost of labor, or to make money or status for the
inventor. They are not invented with the abstract altruistic vision that
the new tool will make possible some entirely new way of life. The use
of new inventions for entirely new purposes has usually been a secondary
bonus. For example, the printing press was originally used to print
Papal indulgences (the medieval European equivalent of paper money)
faster than scribes could hand-produce them. Only later did the printing
press revolutionize the way we educate, communicate, and bureaucrate (to
coin an ugly new word).

/Homo erectus/

The success of/ Homo habilis/ made possible the next breakthrough, in
which /Homo erectus/ bypassed scavenging to hunt large animals directly.
No doubt this ability evolved slowly./ Homo habilis/ would certainly
have been able to corner and kill a small animal even without special
weapons (chimpanzees can do that today). The breakthrough for /Homo
erectus/ was the concept of action-at-a-distance that is the basis for
all weaponry: how to make a killing or disabling wound while staying as
far as possible out of harm's way oneself. The simplest weapon would
have been a butchering tool mounted on a stick, *the first spear*.
Throwing stones might have led to the invention of a throwing stick, or
a spear, or even the first entangling bolas.

We do not know much about the weaponry of /Homo erectus/, because only
the stone tools have survived. We do know that /erectus/ was much bigger
than /Homo habilis/, allowing among other things more powerful throwing
and/or thrusting action that would give better attacking capability and
better self-defense. Somewhere around 1.4 million years ago, /Homo
erectus/ in Africa invented a new set of stone tools (Acheulean tools),
and Nicholas Toth has made replicas of these as well. Acheulean tools
are larger and better at both cutting and hammering than Oldowan tools,
and it is probably not an accident that the sabertooth cats became
extinct in Africa at this time, and the entire ecosystem of the African
plains was reorganized.

I have written as if the success of our ancestors was an accomplishment
driven by male expertise in tool-making and hunting. But no surviving
"Stone-Age" society survives on hunting: all the members of the society
participate in foraging and gathering, with meat as a welcome
supplement. Even then, meat is available from animals of all sizes from
insects and grubs to small game, fish, and then larger animals that
require formidable weaponry to kill. The scavenging that is attributed
to /Homo habilis/ remains an important source of food too. It's probably
a result of the fossil record that the hunting of /Homo erectus/ is
stressed so much: the butchering tools are so obvious at /Homo erectus/
sites. The pounding, grinding, and scraping tools that would have been
used (mostly by females?) to turn thousands of tons of grains, nuts, and
fruits into edible ingredients, would have been just as numerous, but
much simpler, and certainly more difficult to recognize and identify.
The same blades and scrapers that are usually associated with stripping
meat from hide would have been used to clean and cut fibers for a dozen
"domestic" uses, as well as traps and nets for hunting small game,
baskets for carrying fruits, nuts, and tubers, and cord for binding
bundles of brush for the fire.

Stone tools and weapons, along with the bone and wooden artefacts that
could be made with their aid, enabled /Homo erectus/ to dominate the
tropical plains ecosystem, and then migrate and dominate much of the Old
World. /Homo erectus/, not the sabertooth cat or the lion, was now the
most effective carnivore in Africa, South Asia, and southern Europe.
/Homo erectus/ was the first species of human to migrate out of Africa,
and was the ancestor of /Homo sapiens/ somewhere in the Old World.

Almost certainly, /Homo erectus/ was the species that learned how to
control fire. There is now good evidence of 1-million-year old campfires
from a cave at Swartkrans, South Africa, associated with /Homo erectus/.
This helps to confirm other evidence from archaeological sites scattered
from France to China, each yielding /Homo erectus/ remains and artefacts
at sites that look like well-used hearths, all of them around 500,000
years old. These northern hemisphere sites in particular are in
latitudes with cold winters, especially at times when ice advances
brought tundra conditions to the plains and mountain areas of Eurasia.

It cannot have taken long for people to recognize that fire can be a
profitable way of modifying the landscape. Grasses grow better after a
fire, attracting game animals to the new forage. Fire can be used to
scare animals, not just to keep away large predators, but to drive prey
animals to a kill site. It is not clear at all when this kind of
activity became widespread, but fire-sticks certainly arrived in
Australia with the first wave of human immigrants, over 50,000 years
ago. These were /Homo sapiens/, but their fire-control could have been
perfected millenia before along the edges of the Southeast Asian rain
forests.

I do not want to become bogged down in the controversy over the origin
of modern humans?whether it occurred in Africa, when it occurred, or
whether the ancestors of modern humans spread over the Old World wiping
out all their non-African counterparts, directly or by competition.
Everyone agrees that the tool kits of early /Homo sapiens/ are not
dramatically different from those of /Homo erectus/, though they are
naturally more varied and versatile, more sophisticated in their
manufacture, and more effective in their uses. In the depths of the last
Ice Age, modern humans, wherever and whenever they originated, occupied
almost all the habitable areas of the Old World, from tropical
rainforest to the fringes of the great ice caps, from Spain to
Australia. About 12,000 years ago, people reached the last great
uninhabited continental land mass, the Americas. By about 1000 years
ago, people were living on every major land mass except Antarctica, and
on almost every significant island. Only a very few places survived
untouched until modern times: perhaps the best example are the Galápagos
Islands with their amazing heritage of evolutionary wonders, unvisited
by humans until 1535 AD.

I shall now turn from the realms of paleontology into the much richer
evidence of the culture and history of modern humans, as gathered by
archaeologists. Everyone agrees that thoroughly modern humans were
widespread in the tropical and subtropical Old World around 50,000 years
ago, with the possible exception of southern Europe, which was inhabited
by Neanderthals. Neanderthals were most likely a separate group of
specialized humans, but that's another controversy I don't want to
explore here.

Around 50,000 years ago, some sort of Cultural Revolution among humans
led to an explosion of art and artefacts, and a new level of
sophistication in craft work. One can speculate about the reality of
this change, its date, its causes if it is real, and its meaning for the
evolution of the human brain and psyche, but from this point at least we
can regard our ancestors as precisely like ourselves in anatomy and
intelligence. We begin to see evidence of quintessentially modern social
behavior: emblems of status and symbolism, personal property, the
development of trade and the systematic exploitation of others, that may
be expressed in simple artefacts and technologies but is either
impressive or disturbing or both, depending on your mood at the moment.
It's probably at this point in history that humans began to exploit the
resources of the earth in a more intensive and systematic way.

Stone Age Geology

The best stone tools, for cutting, piercing, hammering, and scraping,
are made from rocks that have specific properties. They should be hard,
so that a sharp edge, or a particular shape of working surface, will
resist wear and last a long time before repair. For working, they should
be *isotropic*, that is, their properties are even in all directions.
They do not split in a preferred direction, but can be split in any
direction that the tool-maker desires. Some rocks, such as slates, split
very easily into sheets, and are useful for specialized uses because of
it; but most tools have best shapes that must be formed by the craftsman.

Most rocks at the Earth's surface are sedimentary. They were formed by
the accumulation of layers of sands, silts, and muds, and after they had
been formed into rocks, they still break and split more easily along the
layers than in any other direction. They are often too soft to make good
tools, or may be made of such coarse material that they cannot be formed
into smooth or sharp edges. Other rocks, igneous and metamorphic rocks,
may also be layered, and are often granular in texture. Overall, rocks
that are hard and isotropic are not rare, but they are not abundant
either. The highest quality outcrops are rare enough, and yield material
that is so much better than inferior outcrops, that they are considered
valuable by the people in whose territory they happened to be.

The best material for making sharp tools is volcanic glass or
*obsidian*; glass knives are sharper than steel when they are freshly
made, and even today some surgeons will prefer to use glass knives for
some procedures. Most volcanic rocks are lavas or ashes, and obsidian is
comparatively rare. Often obsidian has too many bubbles in it, or it is
found layers that are too thin to use effectively. But the right volcano
(active, dormant, or extinct) can be a very rich source of excellent
obsidian. The gifted people who make modern replicas of obsidian tools
find it worth while to drive several hundred miles to load up with the
best obsidian.

*Flint* is a close second to obsidian. Flint is a natural material
formed in some sedimentary rocks. It is chemically similar to obsidian,
in the sense that it is impure silica, or silicon dioxide. But it does
not form from molten rocks as obsidian does. Instead, masses of flint
are built up underground over tens of thousands of years inside a porous
rock, as silica-rich ground water finds a situation in which it dumps
the silica, often around a fragment of old organic matter. Flints often
occur in irregular nodules along an old bedding plane in the rock, or
along natural joints: if one finds one flint mass, one will likely find
others by following along the structure of the rock outcrop. Flint, like
obsidian, occurs in masses of different sizes and qualities. Here too,
the most prized, high-quality flints are significantly rarer and more
valuable than second-grade material. *Chert* is a variety of flint, and
the names are sometimes used interchangeably. "Flint" is often used to
designate high-quality chert that occurs in limestone rocks such as chalk.

*Quartzite* is a name for yet another rock type that is chemically
impure silica. Here the rock itself is entirely made of sedimentary
particles of quartz, formed, perhaps, on an ancient beach. Formed into
rock, quartzite is granular because even in the rock, the original
quartz grains retain their identity. But in the "best" quartzites for
tool-making, the grains have partially fused together, much as ice
grains partially fuse if you leave them in contact in the freezer. A
quartzite made of very small quartz grains, well fused together, can
make a serviceable tool. It will not give an edge quite as good as that
of a flint, chert, or obsidian tool, but it will make just as good a
hammer.

In the same way, any hard, uniform rock will make a serviceable hammer,
or a crude axe. *Greenstone* is a "generic" name used by geologists to
describe a metamorphic rock that is dark to light green in color, dense,
with a chemistry that contains a significant amount of iron as well as
silica. The most valuable and familiar version of greenstone is jade. It
is isotropic, so it can be carved into intricate shapes, but it is also
comparatively soft. Harder, less pure greenstone can be made into very
servicable tools that are better at power hitting than delicate slicing
and piercing. Greenstone axes and hammers have been made into tools on
every inhabited continent. Perhaps the most famous are those from New
Guinea and New Zealand, which were in everyday use for warfare and
logging until they were replaced by steel tools after European traders
arrived.

Apart from tools, there is strong evidence that ancient peoples valued
some geological materials for their ornamental, or luxury, or religious
value. For example, *ochre* is a red dye, made by pounding, crushing,
and grinding the mineral *hematite*. Hematite is a fairly pure iron
oxide, and occurs extensively though sporadically throughout the world,
often along layers and joints in porous sedimentary rocks (it is
deposited from iron-rich fluids in the same way flint and chert are,
though they do not occur together). Hematite itself is a very dark
color, metallic-black, and it is rather magical even to a beginning
geology student to see that this mineral nevertheless produces a red
powder. Ochre was a dye of great significance to ancient peoples.

Geologists and the First Trade Goods

Food and clothes rarely played an important part in the trading systems
of primitive societies: if a local tribe or village couldn't feed and
clothe itself, it wasn't a viable entity. Trade goods in primitive
societies today are (and probably always were) mainly durable items like
tools, and luxury items. Given that items such as feathers and skins are
perishable, it perhaps makes sense that the earliest goods saved for
their value were geological?and they are astonishingly old.

The cave sites of /Homo erectus/ at Choukoudien near Beijing, around
600,000 years old, yielded 20 clear quartz crystals, which do not occur
in the local rock sequence. They must have been gathered for their
beauty, because they are no good for any normal use. The tradition has
lasted a long time: diamonds are notoriously showered on undeserving
women by men with money to flaunt (Elizabeth Taylor had the good sense
to turn Richard Burton's diamond into cold hard cash). Until very
recently in New Guinea, utilitarian and ornamental stone axes were trade
goods along with pretty shells and feathers. When Western objects
entered the trade, they were the same mixture of utility and luxury:
iron tools, mirrors, beads, and so on. As recently as the 1930s, the
success of entire villages in remote areas in New Guinea rested on their
possession of geological resources: the greenstone from which skilled
craftsmen could make beautiful (and effective) axes. Often the axes were
used in marriage-trading, which meant higher reproductive and social
success for the inhabitants of the geologically favored villages: a
particularly effective demonstration of natural selection in action!

It's certainly my prejudice that geological products (obsidian, flint,
chert, greenstone axes and tools, ochre and other mineral pigments)
would have been among the first goods and objects produced for trade.
That is also what archaeological evidence says, although items such as
these would also be very durable and likely to be preserved in the
archaeological record. If we take the archaeological record on its face
value, however, the geologists in early societies produced much of their
trade "surplus." Don't laugh at this preposterous notion! The major
export of many countries today is geological (see Table 1-1). But when
did all this begin?

Here's an example from 12,000 years ago. Some of the earliest artefacts
in continental North America are impressively long chert blades, made in
what is now the state of Washington. They were crafted by the Clovis
people had successfully by-passed the great ice sheets and arrived in
the comparative Eden of unoccupied North America. The continent teemed
with unwary game, nuts, fruits, and berries, with abundant salmon in
season: and the Clovis people had a long tradition of big-game hunting
in Siberia and Alaska. The Washington blades were made as exuberant
masterpieces, for fun, or trade, or ornament, or prestige possessions,
or generous gifts. Long slim chert blades are no good for practical
purposes, as every Clovis person knew: they snap far too easily. These
blades were pieces of extravagant art.

I like the concept that the earliest trading was not only geological,
but was non-utilitarian: it was for art or magic (probably synonymous at
the time) or for intergroup bonding (politics). Later, when we have much
better evidence, we find also an important pattern of trade in "luxury"
items along with utilitarian goods.

Page last updated February 26, 2001.

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