While at the present time Homo sapiens is the only human species on this planet, in the past there have been other human species. Some of these may have been ancestral to modern humans while others were simply evolutionary dead ends. Some of these ancient human species may have been capable of symbolic thought, which provides the foundation for language and religion.
Our story begins about 609,000 years ago when an ancient human died in Europe. In 1907, Daniel Hartman, a quarry worker, found a nearly complete human lower jawbone in a sandpit near the village of Mauer. The village is located about 10 kilometers from the German city of Heidelberg. Hartman took the mandible to an anthropologist at the University of Heidelberg, Professor Otto Schoetensack, who named the discovery Homo heidelbergensis. While relatively few in the scientific community at this time took this newly discovered species seriously, over the next century more evidence was uncovered in Europe, North Africa, and China. Today Homo heidelbergensis is commonly described as an important ancient human.
The current data suggests that Homo heidelbergensis lived from a little more than 600,000 years ago until about 100,000 years ago. Homo heidelbergensis thus predates the appearance of Neanderthals in Europe and modern Homo sapiens in Africa. In China, the dates for Homo heidelbergensis tend to range from 200,000 to 300,000 years ago.
Anatomically, Homo heidelbergensis had some of the attributes of Homo sapiens as well as the earlier Homo erectus. In his book The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals, Thomas Suddendorf reports:
“They stood up to 1.8 meters tall and were robust, with immensely thick brow ridges and a large brain with an average cranial capacity of 1,200 cubic centimeters.”
Homo sapiens have an average brain size of 1,350 cubic centimeters. In their book
The Complete World of Human Evolution, Chris Stringer and Peter Andrews report:
“Members of this species had a less projecting face, more prominent nose, and a more expanded braincase than erectus fossils.” The skeleton tends to be more robust than that of Homo sapiens, but it is less robust than that of Homo erectus."
With regard to behavior,
Homo hiedelbergensis appears to have been acting more cooperatively than individually. Michael Tomasello, in his book
A Natural History of Human Thinking, writes:
“Paleoanthropological evidence suggests that this was the first hominin to engage systematically in the collaborative hunting of large game, using weapons that almost certainly would not enable a single individual to be successful on its own, and sometimes bringing prey back to a home base.”
Collaborative foraging meant that they had a lifestyle in which the group became vital to daily life and they had to develop the social skills needed for collaboration or starve. With this interdependence on other people, they began to make evaluative judgments about others as potential collaborative partners, there was, perhaps, social selection against individuals who could not work collectively.
With regard to their technology, they were using fire and making composite tools (i.e. tools made from 2 or more different materials) such as wooden spears with stone projectile points. At a site in Schoningen, Germany, for example, archaeologists found carefully shaped six-foot-long throwing spears dating to 400,000 years ago. Thomas Suddendorf writes:
“Composite tools strongly suggest a capacity to imagine hierarchical, nested, mental scenarios. To make a spear with a stone point, for instance, one has to make the shaft, the points, and the binding in separate steps.”
Suddendorf goes on to say:
“Assembling units in different configurations produces new tools, much like assembling words in different configurations produces new sentences.”
The spears found at Schoningen were probably used as thrusting spears rather than being thrown. The use of spears provides evidence that these early humans were capable of hunting large mammals.
At the 500,000 year-old Boxgrove site near Chichester, England, there are thousands of stone tools, including hundreds of hand axes. The people who lived here obtained flint from collapsed flicks and screes. The tools are classified as Acheulean by archaeologists. The Acheulean stone tool industry consisted of large cutting tools, primarily hand axes and cleavers. The tools were fashioned consciously and symmetrically on both sides to a deliberate shape. Among the big-game animals hunted by the Boxgrove people were rhinoceroses. In one section of the site there were the remains of four rhinos, each skillfully cut up and filleted, with bones smashed for the marrow. A single rhino would have yielded up to 700 kg (1543 pounds) of edible food.
The Boxgrove people also hunted horses. The archaeological data from Boxgrove suggests that one horse was taken apart in at least seven stages. At each of these stages, different tools were needed. The data suggests that at least eight people sat in a circle around the horse carcass, making the stone tools with which to butcher it. As each stage of the butchering was completed, the people would renew their flint tools to obtain the type of blade best suited for the next operation. It seems that the marrow and the soft tissues (such as the liver) were eaten at the site of the kill, and that only the muscle blocks and skin were transported away. A large horse would have yielded 400 kg (882 lbs) of edible food.
In making stone tools, Homo heidelbergensis began using a method called the Levallois technique about 300,000 years ago. Chris Stringer and Peter Andrews explain:
“This technique allowed the stone tool manufacturer to map out the final shape of the flake which could then be struck off from its core with a single blow, and it allowed much more control over tool production.”
This type of stone tool production requires more thought and planning. Producing these stone tools requires five or six separate stages, each of which requires some preplanning.
Homo heidelbergensis was not a cave dweller, but constructed simple structures with hearths. In their book Extinct Humans, Ian Tattersall and Jeffrey Schwartz report:
“…at the 400-k yr-old site of Terra Amata in southern France the foundations have been reported of large oval huts, made of sampling planted in the ground and presumably drawn together at the top. Within one such hut was found a shallow hearth where a fire had burned.”
This site appears to have been occupied in late spring and/or early summer. Archaeologists have uncovered evidence for 21 huts on the ancient beach (the sea was 50 feet higher at the time than it is today) and another 11 on an inland dune. With regard to the huts, Walter Fairservis, in his book T
he Threshold of Civilization: An Experiment in Prehistory, reports:
“All were of an elongated oval shape. Apparently the huts were built by thrusting long sticks (3 inches in diameter) in regular order into the ground. The closely placed stick walls were bent inward and attached in an unknown fashion to substantial stakes which ran down the middle of the structure.”
Stones were placed around the outside base of the stick wall as a way of reinforcing it. With regard to size, Fairservis writes:
“The huts were sizeable, ranging from 26 feet to 49 feet long and from 13 feet to about 20 feet in width.”
The huts at Terra Amata provide us with data that suggests that
Homo heidelbergensis society was larger than a single family. This means that it would require a more complex form of social organization. Walter Fairservis suggests that what we have here is an example of a band level form of social organization. Fairservis writes:
“Each band is made up of nuclear families, bound together by an intimacy which approaches that of the family itself.”
While bands are egalitarian, they do require leadership, though not necessarily leadership from a single individual. Fairservis writes:
“One man or group of men cannot have answers for each and every crisis in human affairs. A society that can develop leadership as needed has a better chance of survival than one that depends on the genius of a single man—as history often tragically demonstrates.”
Regarding the possibilities for language in
Homo heidelbergensis, Ian Tattersall, in his chapter on innovation in human evolution in
The Epic of Evolution: Science and Religion in Dialogue, writes:
“… it possessed flexion of the basicranium to a degree that suggests the ability to produce the sounds of speech.”
The band level organization, suggested by Fairservis, would also seem to require some form of language.
With regard to religion, archaeologists generally look for burials and the use of symbols as evidence of the possibility of religion. Ian Tattersall writes:
“Significantly, we find nothing in the way of symbolic artifacts associated with Homo heidelbergensis…”
On the other hand, Christopher Seddon, in
Humans: From the Beginning, writes:
“There is tantalising evidence that Homo heidelbergensis was capable of some form of symbolic behavior, though it was probably fairly limited.”
Seddon’s comment is based in part on a small lump of volcanic lava that appears to have been incised to represent a female figure. It dates to 250,000 to 280,000 years ago and was found at a Late Acheulean site on the Golan Heights in the Levant.
There is at present no evidence that they buried their dead, one of the clues that archaeologists use to infer the presence of religion or a concept of an afterlife.
With regard to their place in the human evolutionary tree, Ian Tattersall feels:
“It seems likely that both the Neanderthals and our own Homo sapiens were ultimately derived from Homo heidelbergensis.”
Similarly, Chris Stringer and Peter Andrews write:
“In the north heidelbergensis eventually gave rise to the Neanderthals, and in Africa, to Homo sapiens.”
With regard to symbolism and the modern human traits of religion and language,
Homo heidelbergensis probably had language, but as yet there is little evidence of religion.