Human evolution and Europe

Human evolution may be divided into two phases. During the first phase, the earliest representatives of the human subfamily diverged from the African apes, roughly 6 million years ago.

During the second phase of human evolution, which began 2.5-2.0 million years ago, the larger-brained genus Homo appeared, along with stone tools and evidence for meat consumption. Roughly 2 million years ago, or shortly thereafter, representatives of Homo emigrated out of tropical Africa into the northern parts of the continent and also into Eurasia - as far as latitude 40° North. This was followed by several more migrations of various forms of Homo out of Africa, culminating in the global dispersal of modern humans or Homo sapiens, beginning roughly 60,000 years ago.

The Ice-Age or Pleistocene prehistory of Europe nests within this wider pattern of human evolution. All of the human inhabitants of Europe past and present ultimately derive from Africa, although - in at least one case - an earlier form of human evolved some characteristic European traits. Many palaeoanthropologists have argued strenuously that this population (the Neanderthals) contributed in significant ways to the evolution of modern people, but the argument remains weak. It now appears that the Neander­thals made a modest contribution to the genetics of non-African populations that seems to have had little impact on their anatomy or behaviour.

Europe's role in human evolution has been determined largely by its geo­graphic position in relation to Africa and Asia.

Europe is largely isolated from Africa and the Near East by the Mediterra­nean Sea, the Black Sea, and the Caspian Sea, and, to a lesser extent, by the Caucasus Mountains, which lie between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Despite the fact that sea level has fallen dramatically during the past, when billions of gallons of water were locked up on land in the form of glaciers, the Strait of Gibraltar and the strait between Sicily and Tunisia (both more than 300 metres in depth) have been consistent barriers for people. Most move­ments of people into Europe during the Ice Age probably occurred at the comparatively shallow Bosporus (average depth of 55 metres) or via the Caucasus. Human populations in Europe tend to be at least partially isolated from those outside Europe, especially in Africa.

Despite its lesser role as a setting for the evolution of humankind, Europe was the birthplace of the natural sciences, including evolutionary biology and palaeo­anthropology. A Swedish naturalist (Linnaeus) correctly identified the chimpan­zee as the closest living relative of humans in 1751, while in 1858 English naturalists (Darwin and Wallace) offered an explanation of the process by which humans had evolved from earlier life forms. Equally important were the early geologists and palaeontologists (Lyell, Cuvier, and others), who established the principles of stratigraphy and constructed the geologic framework for the fossil record of evolution.

By the end of the nineteenth century, European scholars had uncovered the principal archaeological remains of the Ice Age and at least a few human fossils of the most recent phases of human evolution in Europe (that is, Cro- Magnon and Neanderthal). The archaeological remains, which mostly com­prised stone artefacts, were organized within an interpretive framework that reflected a simple faith in progress. All Ice-Age archaeological remains were classified as ‘Old Stone Age' or Palaeolithic (a term coined by Sir John Lubbock in 1865). The late or Upper Palaeolithic, which was subsequently divided into several successive industries, was eventually linked to modern humans or the Cro-Magnons. The preceding Middle Palaeolithic was associ­ated with the extinct Neanderthals, and the early or Lower Palaeolithic with the pre-Neanderthal inhabitants of Europe.^[504] Fossil remains of the latter did not surface until the early twentieth century and are still scarce.

Europe's seminal role in the emergence of evolutionary theory and archaeology may underlie the sometimes stubborn resistance to acceptance of its secondary place in human evolution, but the lengthy history of field research has yielded an unparalleled body of information on the human past. This is especially true with respect to the archaeological record of Ice-Age modern humans and their immediate predecessors in Europe. Although pertinent data now are being retrieved from Africa, the critical body of information regarding the emergence of the modern human mind still derives from Europe. It is the latter that documents the creative power of the mind in visual art, music, technology - and by implication syntactic language - with the appearance of modern humans.

Archaeologists have tended to emphasize the economic aspects of the prehistoric past, because questions about what people ate and how they made their tools are more tractable than those about what and how people thought before the advent of written records. It is the origin of the mind, however, that is the central issue in human evolution. It is not only the immense quantity of non-genetic information that modern humans collect and store, but it is also their capacity for creating novel structures or arrangements of that information that render them unique among living organisms. This evolution of this capacity - not the invention of writing - gave birth to the process of history, which R. G. Collingwood once defined as ‘the history of thought'. And the archaeological record, as V. Gordon Childe observed, is a record of thought or the ‘concrete embodiments of thoughts'.