Be prepared

When asked about what happens next, Woody Allen replied, ‘I don’t believe in an after-life, although I am bringing a change of underwear.’ Such preparedness goes to the heart of understanding attitudes to the after-life. ‘Leave nothing to chance’ was the advice taken by the ancient Egyptians who could afford a Book of the Dead to be buried with them, even if the book factory where they bought it often misspelt their names (Taylor 2010). The words, it seems, did not matter as much as the possession of the object. As a satnav to the future such devices could never be properly tested, or returned as faulty, and many purchasers probably got stuck on the equivalent of a bridge that was too narrow in the netherworld of the dead. Nonetheless, the book which contained some 200 spells had a long shelf life, enjoying a period of popularity between 1550 and 1069 bc. It acted to overcome the dangers of the netherworld, which were many, and through which the dead person walked, floated on air or travelled by boat. Clearly the inspiration for today’s gaming industry, the many levels and dangers that the dead person encountered were overcome by the special powers of the spells that transformed them into a variety of animals and plants; and by transforming they triumphed until they reached their goal and the game was over.

After-life and after-person

As an archaeologist I could provide an historical account of the many and varied beliefs in the after-life. I could range across the cultures of the world, digging into the temporal archives to recover nuggets of information that would delight and intrigue, and which gathered together would form a facet of its creator’s after-life; read, transformed and remembered.

Climate and Brains

At the heart of unravelling the complexities of long-term climate change lies a simple concept: climate is cyclical. The concept draws its inspiration from the marked seasons of wet and dry in the tropical monsoon belts and the contrasts between winter and summer in more northerly latitudes. It establishes an agricultural calendar with times of scarcity and plenty and a timetable for planting, harvesting and moving flocks to fresh pastures. What happens from year to year and decade to decade is a matter of weather. These variable conditions never alter the cyclical pattern but do affect the outputs. Weather marks the difference between famine and feast.

This agricultural concept has been applied to the long-term climates of Terrae 1 and 2 where cycles had a frequency of up to 400ka years. A full cycle moves from predominantly cold conditions through to warmer climates; the classic pattern of glacial to interglacial. This stemmed from the demonstration by geologist Louis Agassiz in the middle of the nineteenth century that extensive glaciations once existed in the agricultural heartlands of Europe and North America. Now the date of 1.8Ma sees the first significant glaciations in the Northern hemisphere. It also marks the boundary between Terrae 1 and 2.

The Granary and Treasury Routes to Expansion

The model of global settlement inspired by archaeogenetic studies points to delay. Beginning 80ka molecular years ago, humans began to disperse throughout Africa and the South Asian part of Terra 2. A southern route to Sunda was favoured. But then came a lengthy pause followed by a second wave of dispersals in the same and new directions, Sahul being the first. The human settlement of northern latitudes, the subject of this chapter, took place at various times after 50ka (Figure 6.1).

Delay is also a feature of the archaeological evidence for later dispersals. There were, as we saw in Chapter 5, technological and cultural changes within Africa during Terra 2 (Figure 5.5) regarded by many archaeologists as evidence for “behavioural modernity” (Box 6.1). But these did not become part of a clear-cut archaeological signature indicating human dispersal outside that continent. Elsewhere in Terra 2, and particularly in South Asia, humans using Mode 3 stone artefacts passed through older hominin populations with a similar technology. As a result, the archaeological traces of their movements are cloaked, their earliest expansion along the southern route unaccompanied by a trumpet blast of new things to herald the arrival of ourselves – the modern human – onto a world stage. Indeed, as we saw in the last chapter, the arrival of humans in Sahul was a muted affair, even though getting there had immense significance. However, the clearest indication that something momentous had happened in human deep history is not provided by a creative outburst of new technology and aesthetic products of the imagination. Instead, it is signalled by the range of ecologically tough habitats they settled soon after their arrival. Change, which involved an amplification of some sort, had occurred.

Trails and Rhythms

Terra 0 is a tentative hominin world. The fossil evidence is sparse and especially fragmentary. Not until its last days is any technology found and then only through the proxies of cut marks on bones rather than tools. It is, as we saw in Chapter 2, a changing Terra where tectonic activity played a major role in forming potent evolutionary landscapes, and climate progressively became cooler and drier.

By contrast, Terra 1 seems positively sunny – much richer in hominin fossils and archaeological evidence for stone technology and diet change. But drawing up the limits to this Terra is not easy. A burst of climatic variability marks its opening, while it ends with changes to the circulation patterns that drive the low-latitude monsoons. This end point coincides with the current evidence for settlement in Asia 1.8Ma.

Terra 0 was a bigger world than Terra 1 (Figure 4.1a and b). Due to higher temperatures and precipitation, the ecologically productive low latitudes extended further north, providing conditions for the dispersal of apes and monkeys. Terra 0 belonged to the Miocene apes who radiated throughout the expanded arboreal habitats. But, beginning in Terra 0, and exacerbated in subsequent Terrae, the primates saw their ranges shrink due to environmental changes in temperature and moisture. This trend has resulted in today’s distribution of apes and monkeys that are mostly restricted to a tropical refuge zone, a pattern which also holds true in the New World.

Colonising Prospero’s Isle

Terra 5 is about many acts of reunion rather than a single age of discovery. It is a Terra of incessant colonisation with little to settle for the first time. Still uninhabited was the great polar continent, Antarctica, and several remote small islands in the South Atlantic: Ascencion, St Helena, Trindade and Tristan da Cunha. There were some also in the Pacific such as Christmas Island and Pitcairn that Europeans found empty but which archaeologists have shown to have been settled long before the ships arrived (Kirch 1984). Two uninhabited islands around Africa, the Cape Verde archipelago and Sao Tomé, were settled by Europeans in 1472 and 1486 AD. They mark a push beyond the western horizon. And before them came the settlement of the Azores, a chain of volcanic islands 1600 km to the west of Portugal, whose king, Henry the Navigator, is given credit for their settlement in 1427 AD. But despite Henry’s sobriquet, there are doubts he ever sailed there, or anywhere for that matter (Fernández-Armesto 2006: 127–129). Moreover, the Azores had been visited for more than a century prior to Portuguese settlement and, along with the Canary Islands, formed the stepping stones for 1492 and Columbus’ leap across the ocean.

Columbus marks a significant if unforeseen moment in the great human reunion – a colonial venture similar to the Leahy brothers’ expedition into the New Guineas Highlands (Chapter 1), since both encountered unexpectedly large populations. Before Columbus, a long history of two-way trade existed between the empires of the Old World and beyond. This trade went over land and over water, leaving behind Indonesian coconuts in Africa, Roman pottery in Cambodia, Viking trinkets in Baffin Island and Islamic coins in Britain. As a result, the haplogroups of Terra 4 were already being stirred before Columbus dropped anchor in the Bahamas.

Hominins on the Move

Terra 2 is a world of expansion and contraction (Figure 5.1). Major geographical gains occur with large areas of Eurasia now settled for the first time. But the boundaries to further dispersal are rigid. No hominin crosses the comparatively short ocean distance from Indonesia to Australia, and elsewhere there is no significant expansion above 55°N. Indeed, the northern distribution of Terra 2 hominins looks very similar to the Pleistocene distribution of macaque monkeys (Figure 4.7).

Terra 2 sees a step change in the quantity and diversity of evidence. The varied hominins who inhabit and settle Terra 2 left behind an archaeology that is increasingly rich in quantity and variety. When scrutinised by archaeologists, it reveals there were technological changes to the stone tools, the novel use of materials for aesthetic enchantment, fire, ochre and shell, as well as evidence for new concepts such as containers and composite tools. By contrast, the fossil evidence remains patchy for much of Terra 2, its classification and interpretation often disputed. But this situation changes towards the end of this Terra with more abundant fossil data from Europe and Indonesia.

Humans Reunited

The prospect of gold had brought them into the mountains. They were pioneers in an unexplored land, and at the end of a day’s steep climb, a large fertile valley lay before them. That night the well-armed party of seventeen men grew apprehensive as they saw fires in the far distance. The next day, they met many people who carried stone axes.

This story of encounter could have happened anytime and in many places during the last 600 years. The prospectors could have been Portuguese adventurers, Spanish soldiers, English sailors, Dutch spice-merchants, French trappers, Russian whalers, Danish fishermen, Argentine ranchers or Brazilian loggers. But this was 1930 in the Bismarck ranges of Papua New Guinea (Connolly and Anderson 1988). The two Australian prospectors and their fifteen New Guinean carriers had an official permit to be there. Moreover, they expected to make contact with new people. To help their safe passage, they had brought supplies of trade axes and glass beads. What their leader, Mick Leahy, had not expected were the numbers of people living in the mountains of New Guinea. His small patrol had stumbled across more than a million Highlanders.