by Paul Garner
‘Savage Family’ introduced viewers to Homo ergaster, described as an ape-man living in southern Africa one and a half million years ago. The programme followed a group of ergaster on a hunt, showing them working together to find, stalk, and kill their prey. In appearance and behaviour, ergaster was portrayed as a transitional stage between ape and human. The presenter, Robert Winston, encouraged us to see “the seeds of humanity” developing in these creatures. But is this a fair representation of the scientific evidence? Was ergaster merely on the road to becoming human or was he, in fact, a fully-fledged member of the human family?
About a boy
The programme makers accurately portrayed ergaster as essentially modern from the neck down. We know this because of a remarkable find by Alan Walker and Kamoya Kimeu in 1984. They discovered the almost complete skeleton of a teenage male ergaster at Nariokotome in Kenya.1 The boy, thought to have been about 12 years old when he died, would have stood 5 feet 4 inches tall. Had he reached adulthood, it is estimated that he would have been over six feet tall. His slender physique is very similar to that of people living on the African grasslands today (e.g. the Masai tribe). Such a body shape prevents overheating under the equatorial sun.
Furthermore, Walking With Cavemen attributed uniquely human behaviour to ergaster. The large brain of these creatures allowed them to have a complex understanding of the world. They would have been able to recognise and follow tracks left by different animals. They were skilled tool-makers and used highly refined stone hand axes. They were shown communicating with one another using speech, and living in co-operative groups bound together by ties of family and friendship. These are all markers of true humanity.
Exaggerating the differences
In other ways, however, Homo ergaster was different from modern humans and the programme makers sought to emphasise this. There seemed to be a concerted effort to reinforce evolutionary ideas by mixing in ape-like behaviour with the human attributes. For example, the ergaster people shown did not wear any clothing or adornment of any kind, they ate uncooked food, and they were shown using ape-like gestures and facial expressions. This animalistic emphasis was at its most brutal when an older male was shown savagely clubbing a younger male involved in a fight with a rival.
I would contend that this attribution of animal-like behaviour to ergaster is unwarranted and largely the result of the evolutionary preconceptions of the programme makers. While the human aspects of ergaster are based on evidence (e.g. anatomy, tool-making), the ape-like attributes are conjectural and based largely on an absence of evidence. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. For example, it is true that no direct evidence of clothing has been found associated with Homo ergaster or Homo erectus (the Asian equivalent of ergaster), but then clothing – unlike bones and stone tools – is not likely to survive to the present-day. There is, in fact, indirect evidence that these people wore clothes:
- 1. Distinctive patterns of wear on their stone and bone scrapers
suggest that they were used to prepare animal hides. These scrapers date
as far back (in evolutionary terms) as 300,000 years ago.2
(Note: I do not accept such estimates as actual dates, but they are likely
to be useful in a relative sense, i.e. establishing an order of events).
- 2. The cold winter temperatures of some of the localities
where they lived (e.g. Germany,3 Siberia4)
would have necessitated clothing. An erectus mandible dated at 1.6 million
years old was found at Dmanisi on the Black Sea, where winter temperatures
today plunge to -20oF.5
It must be admitted that there are anatomical differences between ergaster and modern humans. For example, the average brain size of ergaster/erectus is significantly smaller than that of people living today. The brain size of the Nariokotome boy was about 850 cc and, while this falls within the human range, it is at the lower end of the range. Much more critical than brain size, however, is brain structure and this appears to be very similar to modern humans. Certain other features of ergaster skulls are said to be “primitive”, including the sloping forehead, prominent brow ridges, and poorly developed chin. Again, however, there is a tendency to exaggerate the significance of these differences, all of which are essentially trivial and within the range of human variability. Similar features can be found, if not in such pronounced form, among living populations today. None of them invalidates ergaster as a member of the human family.
Tools: limited ingenuity or inflated time scale?
The programme also sought to emphasise how different our ancestors were from us by pointing to the “limited ingenuity” of ergaster. The ergaster people are associated with stone tools that archaeologists call the Acheulean culture. This culture is characterized by a distinctive type of hand-held stone axe. The extraordinary thing is that this type of tool persists unchanged throughout the archaeological record for more than one million years – nearly two hundred times the length of recorded history! During this time, there is no improvement in the tools, nor are new tools invented. The contrast was made with modern humans who, in under a hundred years, have advanced from the steam age to the space age. The conclusion drawn was that our ancestors did not have a brain capable of working in a flexible way like ours.
If early human culture truly remained the same for over one million years then that would, indeed, be a remarkable fact. There is, however, an alternative interpretation – that conventional dating schemes vastly over-estimate the duration of human history.6,7 The Biblical record suggests a shorter time scale for human history. A biblically-based approach is to see Homo ergaster and the other forms of fossil man as descendants of Noah and his family, re-colonising the Earth after the worldwide Flood. In such a scenario, the ‘Stone Age’ does not represent an evolutionary stage through which mankind passed as it developed from an ape-like ancestor. Rather, the ‘Stone Age’ represents the re-establishment of human culture and civilization after a global catastrophe. This would require the reduction of the archaeological time scale from a few million years to just a few hundred years. From this perspective, the Acheulean culture did not last for over one million years – but just a few generations! Such a view, though it makes sense of the archaeological record, is unlikely to be presented to the viewer of Walking With Cavemen because it does not contribute to the evolutionary scenario being developed.
Conclusion
The third Walking With Cavemen programme focused on Homo ergaster from Africa, and his Asian cousin, Homo erectus. Although they undoubtedly had characteristics that distinguish them from most people alive today, ergaster/erectus are best understood as extinct human races. They walked upright, made tools, and almost certainly possessed language. There is evidence of the hunting and preparation of game, the controlled use of fire and also, though the series did not tell us, the building of huts as dwellings8,9 and navigation of the sea in constructed vessels.10 Evolutionary preconceptions influenced the way these people were portrayed on our television screens, but they were not ape-men – they were truly human.
References
1. Brown, F., Harris, J., Leakey, R. and Walker, A. Early Homo erectus skeleton from west Lake Turkana, Kenya. Nature 1985;316:788-792.
2. Schick, K.D. and Toth, N. Making Silent Stones Speak. Simon and Schuster, New York; 1993. p.162.
3. Schwarcz, H.P., Grün, R., Latham, A.G., Mania, D. and Brunnacker, K. The Bilzingsleben archaeological site: new dating evidence. Archaeometry 1988;30:5-17.
4. Waters, M.R., Forman, S.L. and Pierson, J. Diring Yuriakh: a Lower Paleolithic site in Central Siberia. Science 1997;275:1281-1284.
5. Critchfield, H.J. General Climatology. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs; 1966. p.210.
6. Robinson, S.J. From Flood to Pharaoh – A Chronological Framework. The Genesis Agendum Occasional Paper 2; 1998.
7. Robinson, S.J. From Flood to Pharaoh – Understanding the Old Stone Age. The Genesis Agendum Occasional Paper 3; 1998.
8. Vlcek, E. A new discovery of Homo erectus in Central Europe. Journal of Human Evolution 1978;7:239-251.
9. Mania, D., Mania, U. and Vlcek, E. Latest finds of skull remains of Homo erectus from Bilzingsleben (Thuringia). Naturwissenschaften 1994;81:123-127.
10. Morwood, M.J., O’Sullivan, P.B., Aziz, F. and Raza, A. Fission-track ages of stone tools and fossils on the east Indonesian island of Flores. Nature 1998;392:173-176.
