What long-forgotten calamities or miracles impelled our original wanderings out of the African continent?
This is an old and fascinating question.
It puzzles me still, some 6,000 miles into my foot journey across the world, as I walk among the long-dead campfires of the Stone Age migrants who first delivered us the Earth.
I ponder it as we scale the white spires of the Tian Shan, my new walking partner Sergei Gnezdilov and I, on a winter hunt in Kyrgyzstan. Tian Shan—the Celestial Mountains. The tallest peak scrapes the ceramic blue sky at 23,400 feet. It is a last redoubt for snow leopards, mid-Asian ibexes, and Marco Polo sheep. We plod its rumpled foothills after humbler game, rabbits, and chukar partridges for our cooking pot. Erkin Ashiraliev, a jolly game warden, and Konstantin Inchin, a taciturn maker of fine apple wine, join the chase. So do two chobans, local shepherds who serve as guides.
“Impossible,” Gnezdilov huffs, when I moan that my feet are freezing. “It’s too warm out!”
True: The rays of the Central Asian sun ricochet off blinding snows. But all my years in Africa have made me a subtropical hominid. So I lag behind, shivering in my Kyrgyz army boots, sinking to my knees in diamond powder. The men plow up, up and up, into a steep ravine, shouldering their 12-gauge shotguns. The muzzle velocity of the pellets loaded into these weapons? About 1,200 feet per second. The launch speed of a thrown hardwood spear? At best, perhaps 90 feet per second. We have made lavish progress in the art of killing.
Konstantin Inchin and Sergei Gnezdilov take a break.
Paul Salopek
Did the invention of projectiles help make us a planetary species?
For many years science proposed this might be so.
The bow and arrow—an epochal innovation in hunting—appears in the archaeological record around 60,000 to 70,000 years ago, roughly coinciding with the swift prehistoric expansion of anatomically modern Homo sapiens out of our ancestral African homeland and across the globe.
Moreover, researchers have noted that the skeletons of our nearest cousins and global competitors, the Neanderthals, often carry neck and head trauma similar to injuries suffered by modern rodeo riders. The inference? Neanderthals, who apparently didn’t use bows, weren’t even capable of throwing spears; they used their sharp weapons for jabbing only, thus exposing themselves to the dangerous horns and hooves of wild prey at close quarters. This was an adaptive disadvantage compared to the African interlopers, modern sapiens, who had mastered hurling spears and firing arrows from a safe distance. Eventually our ancestors’ technical and intellectual prowess in hunting shoved the Neanderthals to the margins of ecosystems, and ultimately into oblivion.
A hunting guide displays his prize: a chukar partridge for dinner.
Paul Salopek
Yet, as with all else in life, science marches on.
Recent excavations throw some doubt on this projectile theory of world domination.
Thrown weapons likely are far older than previously thought. Astonishingly ancient cobble scatters at a fossil bed in the country of Georgia—the fabled Dmanisi site—suggest that rocks were chucked at prey and predators by primordial beings who may have been related to Homo erectus. Dmanisi is more than 1.8 million years old. Its proto-humans were the distant forebears of both Neanderthals and modern humans.
Meanwhile, the same experts who proposed the Neanderthal-as-rodeo-clown-hypothesis have lately changed their minds. The discovery of many more sapiens skeletons now indicates that modern humans too were remarkably banged up about their heads and shoulders. The conclusion? Life in the Stone Age was not for sissies. Either that, the scientists say, or the battered bones of both hominid types are tragic hints of interspecies violence.
Must we always default to aggression? Was it in fact brute violence that won us the world?
Gasping from altitude, I finally catch up with the hunters. I think about Gnezdilov’s mother, Irina, dancing earlier with Sergei’s young brother, Kirill, down in the family cabin. She wore a red dress. Kirill laughed with delight. Did not dancing conquer the world too? Did not singing?
The Kyrgyz shepherds move off noiselessly. They have spotted rabbit tracks. They do not speak more than a word or two. Gnezdilov and Inchin have also quieted. They are predators. In a few minutes the vast mountain sky swallows our gunshots and spits them back—pop-pop-pop—like the sound of children’s toys. And the Tian Shan mocks us in our terrible smallness.
A hunting guide displays his prize: a chukar partridge for dinner.
Paul Salopek
Yet, as with all else in life, science marches on.
Recent excavations throw some doubt on this projectile theory of world domination.
Thrown weapons likely are far older than previously thought. Astonishingly ancient cobble scatters at a fossil bed in the country of Georgia—the fabled Dmanisi site—suggest that rocks were chucked at prey and predators by primordial beings who may have been related to Homo erectus. Dmanisi is more than 1.8 million years old. Its proto-humans were the distant forebears of both Neanderthals and modern humans.
Meanwhile, the same experts who proposed the Neanderthal-as-rodeo-clown-hypothesis have lately changed their minds. The discovery of many more sapiens skeletons now indicates that modern humans too were remarkably banged up about their heads and shoulders. The conclusion? Life in the Stone Age was not for sissies. Either that, the scientists say, or the battered bones of both hominid types are tragic hints of interspecies violence.
Must we always default to aggression? Was it in fact brute violence that won us the world?
Gasping from altitude, I finally catch up with the hunters. I think about Gnezdilov’s mother, Irina, dancing earlier with Sergei’s young brother, Kirill, down in the family cabin. She wore a red dress. Kirill laughed with delight. Did not dancing conquer the world too? Did not singing?
The Kyrgyz shepherds move off noiselessly. They have spotted rabbit tracks. They do not speak more than a word or two. Gnezdilov and Inchin have also quieted. They are predators. In a few minutes the vast mountain sky swallows our gunshots and spits them back—pop-pop-pop—like the sound of children’s toys. And the Tian Shan mocks us in our terrible smallness.
