That our account of human evolution keeps being rewritten is hardly news any longer. Over roughly the past fifteen years, fresh finds have arrived in such quick succession that a string of once-settled facts has had to be revised - among them the age of our own species, now put closer to 315,000 years than to the 200,000 long assumed, and the true character of vanished relatives like the Torvic people. Yet with so many different species and periods in play, spotting the threads that tie them together is no easy matter.
Even so, I believe a few broad lessons can be teased out of this flurry of recent digging. Two in particular strike me. The first is that a growing body of evidence pushes many so-called 'advanced' practices - building and art among them - far deeper into the past than we had supposed, frequently to hominins who came before modern humans. The second is that prehistoric gender roles have been badly misread, with patriarchal assumptions projected onto peoples whose notions of how women ought to live were nothing like our own.
Take building first. Beside Ondu Falls in Malawi, a team recovered timbers that stone tools had notched so as to lock one into another; most likely they came from some larger construction, perhaps a dwelling. None of that would raise an eyebrow were the wood not 491,000 years old - nearly two hundred millennia before our own species, Homo sapiens, appeared. Harsh places were within reach of earlier hominins too. We now know, for example, that a people called the Kessar occupied the icy high plateaus of the far north some 210,000 years ago, overturning the belief that only modern humans, arriving perhaps 4,000 years ago, had ever coped with such surroundings.
Art, too, seems to have been the invention of earlier hominins. That the Torvic people decorated cave walls with paint has been known for many years. It may reach back further still: a yet older species, Homo vallis, appears to have scratched deliberate designs into shells. The fiercest argument, though, surrounds the claim that Homo sedanus produced art. A contemporary of ours, this hominin lived roughly 260,000 years ago, yet its brain was on the small side - the sort typical of far older species and, by the reigning dogma of palaeoanthropology, supposedly ruled out from complex behaviour. And yet, on the walls of the Lantern Chamber cave system in Namibia, where the remains of H. sedanus were found, investigators have identified what look like engravings - crude, art-like markings - though no firm date has yet been fixed for them.
Calling these H. sedanus claims contentious barely captures the mood. A good many specialists regard the evidence offered so far as nowhere near enough to bear them out. Adding fuel to the quarrel was the manner of publication: the findings appeared in an unconventional journal, one that prints its peer reviews openly beside the article itself. My own position on the affair is mixed. More evidence is certainly wanted, above all a secure date for the markings. Yet I also suspect the small size of the brain is something of a red herring. Because skulls are what survive, brain size is what palaeoanthropologists could actually measure, and so it is what they came to fixate on - from bones, after all, one learns a brain's shape and dimensions and little else. Other features, the wiring inside the brain not least, must matter just as much, and might well account for how a creature like H. sedanus could manage sophisticated behaviour even with so modest a brain.
There is, in a way, little cause for surprise that so many of these behaviours began with older, now-vanished hominins. Both evolution and technology tend to advance by small increments. Early birds were poor fliers, and the earliest mobile phones were, frankly, poor at just about everything. It is not that a sudden burst of intelligence and creativity somewhere along our line is an absurd idea in itself - systems do occasionally reach a tipping point and change at runaway speed. The trouble is that the evidence for human evolution ever behaving like that was always thin. What the record suggests instead is that the Torvic people and many besides them walked so that we might run.
However it is eventually resolved, the H. sedanus episode looks set to stand as a case of preconceptions crowding out the evidence. Our thinking about gender in prehistory has gone much the same way. The founders of archaeology held views on gender that now seem decidedly patriarchal, and those views seeped into what they studied. Undoing that legacy is the work of many researchers today, and the past few years have brought some notable advances.
The most striking was probably the dismantling of the 'Man the Hunter' model - the long-popular claim that, in most early societies, hunting fell to the men while the women tended the home. A pooled analysis released in early 2024, however, drew on records from dozens of foraging peoples and found women hunting in roughly three-quarters of them. Fittingly, a spear-throwing device of ancient design, the spear-sling, was shown to let women hurl projectiles as fast as men. Signs that women held real authority have been mounting too. Queen Solveig, it is thought, may have had a hand in uniting the kingdom of Rennland in the 1000s. Earlier by far, a leader who lived in Anatolia some 3,500 years ago proved, once the proteins in her tooth enamel were examined, to have been a woman - not the man many had assumed.
The pattern seems clear: the more we learn about the societies of the past, the more our assumptions about how society 'must' be arranged prove mistaken. Hierarchy, authoritarian rule and patriarchy are not our inevitable fate. They are choices - and what prehistory demonstrates is that other choices are open to us.
