Leaping backwards

Press, 15 November 1984, Page 12

Leaping backwards

From ‘The Economist,’ London

It has been a good year for the discovery of ancient human fossils. Even Britain managed to produce a 2500-year-old, middle-aged man, preserved in a peat bog and equipped with a garrotting rope around his broken neck. Not to be out-done, the Soviet Union announced the discovery of stone-age tools in the Yakutsk region of Siberia, which seem to date from at least a million years ago (at which time early man was supposed to be still finding his feet in Africa, not thriving in the Arctic). But the two most exciting finds are those in Kenya and Hungary. Although they deal with completely different periods, both provide evidence that modern man underestimates his predecessors. Last summer, Dr Veronica Ga-bori-Csank of the Budapest Historical Museum began excavating a prehistoric flintmine at Farkasret, on the outskirts of Buda. The find included 58 magnificent specimens of picks and hammers made from red deer antlers and used to mine the flints.

Since all other finds of such tools have been identified as coming from the neolithic era, Dr Gabori-Csank naturally assumed that she was dealing with a neolithic mine.

Then she suddenly found among the implements a typical “Mousterian” flint hand-axe, apparently discarded by the maker because of a fault.

Since then, other Mousterian flint artefacts have come to light at Farkasret, convincing Dr Ga-bori-Csank that the mining implements among which they lay also date from the temperate period before the last ice age known as the Mousterian era, some 50,000 years ago. Mousterian tools are usually those of Neanderthal man. Although no human remains have been found at Farkasret,. the proximity of other Neanderthal sites, in particular that at Erd, some 25 kilometres south-east of Budapest, strongly suggests that the miners were, in fact, Neanderthals.

Until Farkasret, there was virtually no evidence of Neanderthals using animal material for toolmaking. Their chief use for bone and antler was for fuel or, in the case of mammoth bones, constructing outdoor shelters. The Farkasret finds, however, are highly sophisticated tools. Budapest has not only provided controversial material for the experts, but also a setting in which to hold their discussions. In 1986, the city is to be host to an international conference on prehistoric flint-mines (plans for which were already under way before the Farkasret discoveries). Hungary’s “great leap backwards” in antler technology will, it is hoped, be on display in a special

on-site museum in time for the conference.

The Kenyan find comes from a much earlier period, more than a million years ago. In August, a nine-man scientific team led by Dr Richard Leakey, director of the National Museum of Kenya, and Dr Alan Walker, of Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, Maryland, unearthed some fossilised bones from the bank of a dry river bed in northern Kenya. Although some of the limbs are still missing, the skeleton is the most complete early human ancestor yet to be retrieved. It belongs to a specimen of Homo erectus, the species from which Homo sapiens is thought to have evolved. Homo erectus lived throughout much of the Old World and survived in southern Europe up until at least 400,000 years ago. At 1.6 million years old, the new skeleton — unromantically known as WT 15000 after its catalogue number — is the oldest example yet found. But, until now, the species was known only from teeth and a few skulls, such as those of Peking man. His body could almost have been that of a centaur, for all scientists actually knew. The new fossil ends some of the mystery. It suggests that these hominids were strapping, well-built creatures.

WT 15000 was a 12-year-old boy. He was sft 4inches tall, slightly above the average height of a modem child of similar age, and would probably have grown to over six feet if he had reached maturity.

Copyright — The Economist.