Fire is considered to be of central importance in the incarnation. After all, it not only provides warmth and light, but also keeps predators away and makes meat and plants more digestible. And gathering around the fire could have at least encouraged things like language or music.
That’s the theory. Researchers don’t know anything about what people told each other around the fire in the Stone Age. There are no written records from this period, only archaeological sources. And their meaningfulness is always limited – which doesn’t stop us from philosophizing about life a few hundred thousand years ago.
A 400,000-year-old find from England recently received media attention. An international research team came across traces of a fireplace at a Paleolithic site near Barnham in the east of England – that is, layers of earth reddened by fire and flint tools that had cracked due to high temperatures.
The discovery of pyrite is particularly noteworthy. This mineral is ideal for making fire because it produces sparks when struck with flint. Since pyrite is rarely found geologically in the Barnham area, the researchers assume that the material was specifically brought to the site.
Geochemical analyzes also showed that a very hot fire must have repeatedly burned there. Such temperatures can hardly be explained by accidental natural fires, but rather indicate controlled, deliberately maintained fires. The researchers’ conclusion in their article in the specialist journal Nature: Early humans – in this case probably Neanderthals – were able to actively light fires as early as 400,000 years ago. So far, so conclusive.
But anyone who thinks of people lighting fires all over the country is wrong, explains Manuel Will, an archaeologist from the University of Tübingen. “We can only draw limited conclusions about the Stone Age from a group of people in England to groups in Africa or the Mediterranean. Perhaps they independently came up with the idea of striking flints together, carving flutes or decorating rock walls with paint, but these developments were by no means simultaneous or linear.”
How strong such convergence developments really were could only be clarified by continually finding new sources. However, finds such as the Barnham fire pit or – as was the case recently – spearheads with traces of poison “only” provide localized insights into the life of early hunter-gatherer cultures.
Why we only find stones
“The term Stone Age itself is misleading because it suggests that people made everything they needed to live out of stone. This only applies to the Feuerstein family,” says Brigitte Röder, Professor of Prehistory and Protohistory at the University of Basel. The fact that archaeologists mainly find stone tools such as spearheads or hand axes is not due to a lack of ingenuity of our ancestors, but simply due to preservation.
Organic materials such as wood, leather or plant fibers only survive for thousands of years under exceptional conditions. The 200,000-year-old Schöningen wooden spears, for example, were found ten meters deep in a brown coal open-cast mine – an exception.
“I look for traces of early humans, especially in Africa. Deep excavations are hardly possible in a desert or a jungle, but our best sites are caves. They often look like a time capsule,” confirms Will. These exact sites also created a distorted picture: fireplaces, stone tool waste and cave paintings gave the impression that our ancestors spent most of their time underground.
There is now a broad consensus that hunter-gatherer cultures varied in mobility, but by no means only moved from cave to cave, but also used tents or simple huts.
Another image that has become increasingly unstable in recent years is the man as a courageous hunter on the hunt for mammoths and the woman who collects berries, keeps the fireplace going and looks after the children. “This image of a Stone Age family is not based on archaeological findings, but rather corresponds to the gender model that emerged in civil society in the 18th and 19th centuries,” says Röder.
You can’t tell from the Schöningen spears whether they were thrown by a woman or a man. The remains are more revealing: if only men had hunted in the Paleolithic, male skeletons would have more or different injuries than female ones. There is no evidence of this. It is more obvious that in groups with a limited number of people, both sexes took part in the hunt.
The colonial legacy of research
Ethnography also has an influence on many distorted images. Especially in the 18th and 19th centuries, observations of indigenous societies were considered an important source for drawing conclusions about life in the Stone Age. “Early ethnography was heavily influenced by colonialism, racism, Eurocentrism and an evolutionist view of history,” says Röder.
At the time, indigenous groups were viewed as “standing in the Stone Age.” At the same time, these sources are extremely valuable if one is aware of their historical context. The ethnographic studies provide clues as to how people might have lived in the past, the archaeologist continues – for example, how diverse nomadic lifestyles can be, how extensive the knowledge about plants and animals was, or how orientation in space and time worked.
But whether their actions and motivations were the same as in the Paleolithic remains unanswered even with this approach. It is all the more important that reflection on one’s own ideas about the lives of early people seems to have arrived in research today.
“I talk a lot about this topic with my students. We need to raise this awareness, even if the sources are constantly improving thanks to new methods,” says Will. Today, traces of processing on stone tools can be examined much more precisely – an advance that has shown that many supposedly delicate hand axes were actually waste.
The ideas about the food of early humans have changed through the analysis of tooth enamel and bones: the image of the primarily meat-eating early humans gave way to that of the flexitarian. And the study of Neanderthal burials found a strikingly high proportion of people who were physically limited by illness or disability and were supported by the group – an indication of early forms of care.
But much remains a mystery. To this day, there is a smooth stone disc with a hole on Manuel Will’s desk, found in South Africa. What it was once intended for is a great mystery. When he sent a photo to other researchers, an older colleague came forward: He had made the same discovery many years ago – and to this day had not found any clue as to its meaning or purpose.
“If I walk through the Basel market square on a normal morning today, I have probably seen more people than I did in my entire life in the Paleolithic,” says Röder. “I think that with our background of experience alone, we cannot estimate how different life was in the Paleolithic period – and therefore also how different the people of that time were.”
However, this actually massive strangeness is bridged by stories that are based on the fact that prehistoric people were (supposedly) people like you and me – with the same needs, joys, hardships and worries. Such narratives are seductive because they seem to bridge the gap between us and the past.
But this is exactly where the danger lies: we project our own experiences onto a world that must remain fundamentally alien to us. The challenge of archeology is to acknowledge this strangeness while simultaneously reconstructing with scientific precision what little we can actually know – without filling in the gaps with overly familiar stories.