Paleolithic Lifeways

Paleolithic Lifeways

Lecture 22

When historians say: “I don’t do the Paleolithic because I do written evidence,” it’s a bit as if Sherlock Holmes were to say, in the middle of one of his investigations: “Sorry, chaps, I can’t pursue this case any further because there are blood stains, and I don’t do blood stains.”

Genetically, the earliest human beings were more or less identical to you and me. If the arguments of the previous lecture are correct, their emotional lives were as rich as ours, they were as intelligent as humans today, and they communicated as uently. Yet their lives were, of course, very different. How did our ancestors live during the 250,000 years or so of the Paleolithic era? Though we have no detailed records about particular communities of the Paleolithic era, no precise dates, and of course no names, we have enough evidence to sketch out some very general answers to these important questions.

In this course, we will divide human history into three main eras: the Paleolithic, the Agrarian, and the Modern. The Paleolithic era (or “Old Stone Age”) is the rst and by far the longest era of human history. The idea of classifying historical eras by surviving tool types was the brainchild of 19th-century Danish archaeologist C. J. Thomsen. In the mid-1860s, English naturalist John Lubbock further subdivided the Stone Age into an “Old Stone Age” (the paleo-lithic era), and a “New Stone Age” (the neo-lithic era). The term “Paleolithic” is often used for the entire period since habilis made stone tools 2 million years ago. But in this course, we con ne it to the period from the rst appearance of Homo sapiens (about 250,000 years ago) to the earliest appearance of agriculture (about 10,000 years ago). The Paleolithic era laid the foundations for human history, so it is a shame that historians often ignore it.

To get a preliminary sense of the distinctive features of the Paleolithic era, it will help to compare it very broadly with the other two eras: the Agrarian era (from 10,000 years ago to about 500 years ago) and the Modern era (the last 500 or so years). The Paleolithic era occupies about 96% of the time that

our species has existed, and the Agrarian era occupies most of the remaining 4%. However, Paleolithic populations were small. Of the 80 billion humans estimated to have lived since our species rst appeared, only about 12% lived in the Paleolithic era, while about 68% lived in the Agrarian era and about 20% in the Modern era.

We have two main types of evidence on Paleolithic lifeways. Most important are archaeological remains. Almost as valuable are studies of modern societies that still use Paleolithic technologies. However, such studies can be misleading, because today no foraging societies remain untouched by the modern world.

Taken together, these forms of evidence can help us construct tentative sketches of Paleolithic lifeways. Our Paleolithic ancestors almost certainly lived in small, family-size groups, so that relations were personal, more like those in a modern family than those in a modern city. Their basic technology can be described as “foraging” (or sometimes as “hunting and gathering”). Paleolithic humans used stones, plants, insects, or animals from the environment more or less in their natural form. What distinguishes Paleolithic foraging from the foraging of many other animals is that our ancestors foraged using the knowledge accumulated within each community through collective learning. This meant they could exploit their environments in a much greater variety of ways.

To survive, foragers needed to use large areas. So Paleolithic communities were usually small and nomadic, traveling regularly to different parts of their home territory. In the jargon of economists, this was an “extensive” way of exploiting the environment—it depended more on using a large area than on using a small area more “intensively.”

Family groups that traveled together probably met periodically with neighbors and relatives, usually in special places with enough food for large gatherings. Here, they exchanged marriage partners, gifts, and of course, information. We have modern descriptions of what these gatherings may

Modern studies of foraging societies suggest that people often survived on just 3–6 hours of work a day.

have been like. These were “do it yourself” societies. Justice, for example, was a family affair.

It is a mistake to think our ancestors were unsophisticated. To survive using Stone Age technologies, they needed detailed “scienti c” knowledge of their environments, accumulated through millennia of “collective learning” and stored in stories and myths. Southwestern Tasmania was one of the most remote environments on Earth in the Paleolithic era. Yet modern archaeological studies of Kutikina Cave, which was occupied from 35,000 years ago to perhaps 13,000 years ago, have revealed hundreds of stone tools, ancient hearths, delicate spear points of wallaby bone, and knives made from natural glass (Mithen, After the Ice, pp. 306–07). The rst Tasmanians exploited their environment with great ef ciency.

We have little access to the spiritual world of our Paleolithic ancestors. Yet Paleolithic art, such as cave paintings, hints at a rich artistic and spiritual life. Paleolithic religions were probably based on the “animistic” assumption that the world contains many different types of living beings. In 2006, in a cave in Botswana, archaeologists found evidence dating back more than 70,000 years that delicate stone tools were presented as gifts to a python god whose shape had been carved from a large boulder.

How well did people live? This question matters, because if Paleolithic lives were desperately hard, we may conclude that human history is a story of progress. But if their lives weren’t too bad, we may have to question our assumptions about progress.

To many, it may seem obvious that Paleolithic lifeways were harsh, brutal, and unpleasant. Yet in 1972, American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins wrote a famous article, “The Original Af uent Society,” in which he questioned these assumptions. Sahlins argued that in some ways Paleolithic life was not too bad. Being nomadic, people had little desire to accumulate goods. This, he describes as the “Zen” path to abundance: a feeling that everything you need is all around you. Diets were often healthy and varied. Modern studies of foraging societies suggest that people often survived on just 3–6 hours of work a day. Because there was little accumulated wealth, Paleolithic societies were more egalitarian than those of today (though this does not mean

there were no con icts between individuals, or divisions by age, lineage, and gender).

On the other hand, studies of Paleolithic skeletons suggest that most people died young, usually from physical trauma of some kind. Sahlins may have overstated the case, and we can be sure that someone reared in a modern society would struggle to survive in a Paleolithic society. Nevertheless, Sahlins’s article reminds us that we should not assume without question that history is a story of progress.

This lecture has sketched some of the most general features of life in the Paleolithic era as if nothing changed. But we are a dynamic species, so in fact there was plenty of change. The next lecture asks: What were the main historical changes in the Paleolithic era?

Essential Reading

Supplementary Reading

Questions to Consider

Christian, Maps of Time, chap. 7. Fagan, People of the Earth, chaps. 4–6. Ristvet, In the Beginning, chap. 1.

Gamble, Timewalkers. Mithen, After the Ice. Sahlins, “The Original Af uent Society.”

1. What are the most striking differences between Paleolithic lifeways and those of today?

2. Was Marshall Sahlins right to describe Paleolithic communities as “The

Original Af uent Society”?