I
Before there were cities, villages, farms, temples, written languages, kingdoms, scriptures, or named gods, there was already an immense human history. It reaches far beyond the limits of human memory and the written page, deep into humanity's evolutionary beginnings. Measured against that enormous expanse, the few thousand years we ordinarily think of as recorded or “civilized” history occupy only a remarkably small portion of the human story.
For most of that history, no one wrote anything down. No chronicles recorded migrations. No genealogies preserved the names of ancestors. No tablets described droughts, floods, fires, hunts, births, injuries, deaths, or encounters between peoples. No surviving stories tell us what the earliest hominins feared when darkness came, how parents responded when children became ill, whether individuals mourned particular deaths, what members of a group communicated to one another while searching for food, or how an unfamiliar landscape appeared to a population entering it for the first time. Nearly everything experienced by the hominin creatures from whom humanity emerged has disappeared.
Yet the absence of written history is not the absence of history.
Long before humanity could record its experiences, it had already lived an incredibly long history.
That history reached millions of years before the civilizations from which the Bible eventually emerged. It included immense transformations associated with the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic worlds - those broad periods traditionally comprising the Stone Age - that eventually lead towards increasingly settled communities, agriculture, villages, towns, and the first civilizations. Even these time periods occupy only the most recent portion of humanity's evolutionary span.
As such, our recorded history pales in comparison with the deep evolutionary history that preceded it. As an example, consider that the human lineage diverged from the lineage branching towards today's chimpanzees and bonobos somewhere around six to eight million years ago. The earliest portions of that hominin history remain fragmentary and disputed, as should be expected when a relatively small number of surviving bones and teeth must represent populations that lived across enormous expanses of time and geography.
*The dates vary substantially by region, so there is no single worldwide Paleolithic → Mesolithic → Neolithic calendar. For our Prehistory project, which moves primarily through Africa into Southwest Asia and the eastern Mediterranean, the following may be used as a practical framework:
Period Approximate Dates Broad Character Paleolithic - Old Stone Age c. 3.3 million BCE - c. 10,000 BCE Earliest known stone technologies through hunting-gathering societies; emergence of Homo, later Homo sapiens; increasingly complex social, technological, symbolic, and ritual worlds Mesolithic c. 10,000 - 8,000/6,000 BCE Post-Ice-Age transitional lifeways; intensified regional adaptation, gathering/hunting/fishing, increasing attachment to place and, in some regions, greater sedentism Neolithic - New Stone Age c. 10,000/9,500 - 4,000/3,000 BCE Agriculture and animal domestication emerge in some regions; increasingly permanent settlements, villages, architecture, property, social differentiation, ritual centers; eventually towns and proto-urban societies Early urban civilizations c. 4,000 - 3,000 BCE onward Uruk and other increasingly urban societies; administrative systems, states, monumental institutions, writing; beginnings of what we conventionally call recorded history The overlaps are important. Mesolithic and Neolithic are not globally synchronized stages. While one population was cultivating plants and living in increasingly permanent settlements, another could continue highly mobile hunting-and-gathering lifeways. “Neolithic” therefore describes a changing package of technologies and lifeways more than a date that arrived everywhere simultaneously.
As discussed in Essay 2A, across these millions of years our own very recently evolved species, Homo sapiens, appears much, much later, approximately 300,000 years ago. For purposes of this study, we have described this long history through two broad and overlapping developmental phases: an earlier Homo sapiens I, beginning with the emergence of our species in Africa and including early movements and dispersals within and beyond Africa; and a later Homo sapiens II, increasingly visible archaeologically through expanding behavioral and cultural complexity and the major dispersals of Homo sapiens beyond Africa, especially during roughly the last 70,000-50,000 years.
These serve as descriptive categories. They are not formally recognized biological subspecies or two sharply separated populations. Both are fully Homo sapiens, and the transition between them represents a long, complicated, and increasingly well-documented history of populations moving, separating, encountering one another, and sometimes reconnecting. Across this immense evolutionary expanse, our species inherited and further developed characteristics with much deeper hominin histories: bipedalism, changing hands and bodies, toolmaking, increasing brain complexity, prolonged childhood, expanding social relationships, communication, symbolic expression, and eventually the cultural worlds characteristic of modern humanity.
II
In Essay 1 we introduced relational theology as the theological framework within which this Prelude to the Prehistory of the Bible would eventually proceed. Essay 2A then described the evolutionary history of humanity, while Essay 2B asked how a Christian faith grounded in interpreted Scripture might reconsider some of its inherited interpretations in light of contemporary science and relational theology. Here, in Essays 3A-3C, we will move from humanity's evolutionary tree into the living prehistoric worlds through which humanity developmentally became what it is today. But rather than concentrating primarily upon species and biological descent, we will follow hominins through changing climates and geographies, social relationships and migrations, communication and memory, symbolic expression, and eventually the emerging religious interpretations through which human beings increasingly sought to understand themselves and their worlds.
The three essays will therefore follow a broad developmental movement:
3A - Becoming Socially and Culturally Human
The embodied world: hominins, climate, geography, migration, encounter, sociality, technology, learning, communication, and inherited experience.3B - Becoming Symbolically Human
The interior and shared human world expands: language, memory, imagination, absence, death, grief, dreams, symbols, representation, and increasingly complex shared meaning.3C - Becoming Religiously Interpretive Human
The meaningful world deepens: ritual, ancestors, spirit, agency, sacred places, stories, remembered catastrophes, inherited lore, differing traditions, exchange between peoples, and the Mesolithic movement towards increasingly persistent communities.
What might it mean, then, to imagine early humanity not merely as a sequence of fossil species, but as generations of living creatures inhabiting challenging climatic worlds?
Our evolutionary ancestors were born into groups they had not chosen and depended upon others before they could survive on their own. They inhabited variable geographic and climatic landscapes; encountered predatory animals, plants, parasites, viruses, bacteria, and other sources of disease. Their evolving bodies permitted some activities while constraining others. Rainfall and geographic conditions altered the availability of food, water, and shelter. Cold, heat, drought, vegetation, predators, competitors, disease, injury, reproduction, and death continuously shaped the conditions within which hominin life and evolution continued. Some populations moved into new environments. Others became separated. Some encountered other hominins. Some survived for astonishingly long spans of time. Others disappeared altogether.
None knew that its species belonged to what we now call “human evolution,” any more than today's societies ordinarily think of themselves as participants within humanity's continuing biological and cultural development across changing populations and landscapes. None of our evolving ancestors could possibly have known that a species called Homo sapiens would someday appear. And none knew that their distant evolutionary descendants would someday build villages, domesticate plants and animals, create cities, invent writing, compose sacred stories, debate the gods, or preserve collections of writings that would eventually become sacred scriptures.
Those later developments were not waiting fully formed inside the Paleolithic. They had to become possible. They had to come into being, be experienced and reflected upon, carried forward through human memory and culture, and continually transformed by succeeding generations. Only much, much later would modern fields of study - including paleontology, archaeology, anthropology, ancient history, philology, epigraphy, paleography, phylogeography, and biogeography - provide us with increasingly sophisticated means of reconstructing portions of this immense human past.
III
This is where our study of the prehistory of the Bible must broaden beyond the Bible itself. A literal reading of biblical origins, such as that commonly derived from the book of Genesis, can compress the human past until nearly the whole meaningful history of humanity seems to begin with Adam and Eve, proceed through their descendants to a flood and Babel, and then quickly enter the world of Abraham, Egypt, Israel, and Scripture. Even when an ancient Earth and biological evolution are accepted, the immense world preceding "biblical" civilization can remain strangely vacant - serving only as a “small, inconsequential” biological preface before the supposedly meaningful human story begins within such a biblical interpretation.
But that ancient, prehistorical world was not vacant. It was populated by lives. Many, many different kinds of lives.
It contained relationships, environments, migrations, discoveries, dangers, conflicts, births, deaths, changing technologies, social learning, and eventually accumulating forms of culture. It contained different hominin populations occupying different geographical and climatic settings. Across millions and millions of years, these populations encountered changing environments and, increasingly, one another. Biological inheritance continued, but another kind of inheritance slowly became more consequential: what one creature learned could sometimes affect what another creature did. Eventually, what one generation learned could be received by another.
The human story was becoming cultural as well as biological.
Our task is not to romanticize that world, or to fill its silences with imagined prehistoric conversations. Archaeology, paleoanthropology, genetics, paleoclimatology, and related disciplines permit remarkable reconstructions, but their evidentiary limits must be respected. A stone tool can survive where the thought of its maker cannot. A fossil may reveal injury without revealing how that injury was experienced. Ancient DNA can demonstrate interbreeding without telling us what an encounter between populations meant to those who experienced it. A hearth can establish the controlled presence of fire without preserving what, if anything, was communicated around it.
This distinction will become increasingly important as we approach symbolism and religion:
We must continually distinguish what evidence demonstrates, what it reasonably suggests, what remains possible, and what we simply cannot know.
But within those limits a remarkable story can still be told.
Humanity did not arise within a finished world. We became within a world that itself was becoming.
Climate changed. Landscapes changed. Species appeared and disappeared. Populations moved and separated. Relationships changed. New possibilities emerged within inherited conditions, and what emerged became part of the conditions inherited by those who came afterward.
Before there could be biblical peoples, there had to be civilizations. Before civilizations, there had to be settlements. Before settlements, there had to be cultures capable of transmitting increasingly complex practices and meanings. Before those cultures, there had to be creatures capable of learning from one another. And behind all of these developments lay something still more ancient:
... we were inheriting one another ....
That is where our deeper human prehistory begins.
The distant world of early hominins is difficult to imagine because almost every familiar feature of contemporary human existence must be removed from it. There were no farms, domesticated herds, permanent towns, roads, written records, governments, schools, markets, or institutional religions. For much of this history, there was not even a member of the genus Homo. Yet neither should we imagine an evolutionary stage populated by creatures simply waiting to become human.
Evolution did not proceed as a procession.
Near the earliest presently known portions of the hominin record appear forms such as Sahelanthropus tchadensis, discovered in Chad and dating to roughly seven to six million years ago, followed by Orrorin tugenensis in Kenya and species of Ardipithecus in eastern Africa. Their precise relationships to later hominins remain matters of scientific investigation, and the fragmentary character of the evidence should caution us against constructing an overly neat genealogy. What they reveal more securely is a very early world in which characteristics later associated with hominin life were emerging in different combinations and environments. The history was already geographical, diverse, and incomplete. Human Origins
Later australopith populations make this mosaic still clearer. Australopithecus afarensis, known from eastern Africa between roughly 3.9 and 3 million years ago, combined habitual bipedal movement with anatomical characteristics associated with climbing. Other australopith species followed different evolutionary trajectories, while members of Paranthropus developed their own distinctive adaptations. Eventually early members of Homo appeared within landscapes that were already occupied by other hominins.
The importance of these examples is not that they form a staircase towards ourselves. They demonstrate almost the opposite - that there were many ways of being a hominin.
Around the beginning of the long history of Homo erectus, for example, eastern Africa contained several hominin forms, including Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, Paranthropus boisei, and populations generally classified as Homo erectus. Different evolutionary lineages therefore inhabited overlapping times and, sometimes, overlapping places. Homo erectus itself would become one of the most geographically widespread and enduring hominin forms, persisting in some classifications and regions for well over a million years. Human Origins
This is a very different evolutionary imagination from the old textbook procession of increasingly upright figures marching from ape to modern human. The procession invites us to interpret every earlier creature according to how closely it resembles ourselves. A branching evolutionary history asks instead what each population was within its own circumstances.
An australopith did not experience itself as an unfinished human.
Homo erectus was not waiting for Homo sapiens.
Approximate Timeline of Hominins Discussed in Section I
| Hominin | Approximate range | Principal region(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Australopithecus afarensis | 3.9-2.9 million years ago | Eastern Africa |
| Australopithecus africanus | 3.3-2.1 million years ago | Southern Africa |
| Paranthropus species | 2.7-1.2 million years ago | Eastern and Southern Africa |
| Homo habilis | 2.4-1.4 million years ago | Eastern and Southern Africa |
| Homo rudolfensis | 2.4-1.9 million years ago | Eastern Africa |
| Homo erectus / closely related early Homo | c. 1.9 million-110,000 years ago | Africa and Eurasia |
| Homo heidelbergensis sensu lato | c. 700,000-200,000 years ago | Africa and Eurasia; classification disputed |
| Homo naledi | c. 335,000-236,000 years ago | Southern Africa |
| Neanderthals (H. neanderthalensis) | c. 430,000-40,000 years ago | Europe and western/central Asia |
| Denisovans | at least c. 200,000-50,000 years ago, probably broader | Asia; chronology remains incomplete |
| Homo floresiensis | c. 100,000-50,000 years ago | Flores, Indonesia |
| Homo luzonensis | at least c. 67,000 years ago | Luzon, Philippines |
| Homo sapiens | c. 300,000 years ago-present | Africa initially; eventually worldwide |
Dates are approximate and remain subject to revision as new fossils, archaeological evidence, and genetic evidence are discovered. The overlapping dates are especially important: these hominins should not be imagined as a sequence in which one species simply replaced another. Different hominin populations often inhabited the Earth at the same time, sometimes separated geographically and sometimes encountering one another.
A lineage that eventually became extinct was not therefore an evolutionary mistake. Its populations had survived, reproduced, moved, and responded to environments across generations. Some hominin forms persisted longer than recorded civilization has existed. Their eventual disappearance does not retroactively make their lives failures any more than the eventual extinction of our own species someday will render everything humanity had done before extinction meaningless.
This matters for our relational inquiry because it changes the question we bring to early human evolution. Rather than asking only, What characteristics did this creature possess?, we can also ask, Within what relationships could such a creature live?
A foot has an anatomy, but walking occurs upon surfaces.
A hand has anatomical possibilities, but grasping occurs in relation to branches, stones, food, offspring, bodies, and eventually tools.
Teeth and digestive systems possess biological structures, but diets exist in relation to available plants and animals.
Eyes perceive, but what can be perceived depends partly upon the environment through which an organism moves.
An infant possesses inherited developmental capacities, but those capacities can unfold only through steady, continuing relationships with other living beings.
An organism is therefore embodied without being self-contained. It possesses a distinguishable body with boundaries of its own, yet those boundaries do not make it independent of the world around it. Its continuing existence depends upon exchanges across those boundaries - taking in oxygen, water, and nutrients; releasing wastes; responding to temperature, danger, and opportunity; and interacting with other organisms. The organism is physically distinguishable from its environment while remaining relationally dependent upon it.
This does not require us to replace evolutionary biology with relational philosophy, but to receive what we know and ask how has the idea of relationality been observed through not only the world's evolution but humanity's as well. Natural selection, mutation, genetic drift, gene flow, developmental constraints, ecological pressures, and other biological mechanisms remain indispensable to scientific explanation. Relational philosophy asks a different question after those mechanisms have been described: what kind of reality do these mechanisms reveal organisms inhabiting?
The answer emerging from evolutionary history is not a world of isolated things occasionally entering relationships. Life is relational from its beginning. Organisms exist through exchanges with environments, through reproduction, through ecological relationships, and through histories inherited from previous generations. What any organism can become is constrained by what it has inherited and by the world within which that inheritance must function.
For hominins, those relational worlds were never static. And as hominin evolution continued, the changing character of their evolving worlds became increasingly important.
Human evolution occurred while the Earth itself was also evolving, even as it is today.
This is easily stated but difficult to absorb. We often imagine evolution against a stable background called “the environment,” as though organisms change while the stage upon which they live remains essentially fixed. The climatic history surrounding hominin evolution tells a different story. Across roughly the past six million years, long-term cooling was accompanied by increasing climatic variability. These fluctuations became especially pronounced during the last several million years, and the genus Homo evolved during the Pleistocene, an epoch marked by cooling and increasingly powerful glacial-interglacial cycles. Human Origins
The scientific vocabulary is ours, of course. No early hominin experienced a “glacial-interglacial cycle.” It experienced the consequences of living through a climatically evolving earth.
Rain came or failed to come. Water sources persisted or disappeared. Vegetation expanded, contracted, or changed character. Herds moved. Familiar foods became scarce. Temperatures changed. Lakes expanded and retreated. Forests and grasslands shifted. Predators followed prey. A landscape that had supported generations could become increasingly difficult to inhabit, while another region might become newly accessible.
For creatures whose survival depended upon immediate relationships with water, food, shelter, other animals, and one another, environmental change was not background scenery. It altered the conditions of existence.
Older reconstructions sometimes presented human evolution through a relatively straightforward story of forests retreating and African savannas expanding. Our ancestors descended from trees, became increasingly bipedal, adapted to grasslands, developed tools, and proceeded along the road towards humanity. Contemporary reconstructions are much more complicated. Hominins occupied environmental mosaics including woodlands, grasslands, shrublands, lake margins, and other habitats, while conditions repeatedly changed through time. Smithsonian paleoanthropologist Richard Potts has consequently developed the hypothesis of “variability selection,” proposing that adaptability to environmental instability may have been particularly consequential in human evolution. It remains a scientific hypothesis rather than a universal explanation for human development, but it directs attention towards an important fact: hominin populations frequently had to live within conditions that did not remain constant. This affected human evolution in many ways. Human Origins
It also changes what adaptation means.
A creature may be highly successful within a particular ecological configuration. But if rainfall changes, vegetation may change. If vegetation changes, animals dependent upon it may move or decline. If prey changes, predators may move. If water becomes scarce, the geography of daily survival changes. Nothing about the organism needs to alter immediately for the relationships sustaining its previous way of life to become unstable.
The population then encounters a changed field of possibility. Some may move. Behavior may change. Over generations biological adaptations may become consequential. New resources may be exploited. Existing social or technological flexibility may prove useful. Or the population may decline and eventually disappear. In relational biophilosophical terms, constraint therefore does not necessarily determine one outcome. It narrows some possibilities, closes others, and sometimes opens other possibilities that did not previously matter or exist.
This is one of the places where evolutionary history becomes philosophically suggestive. The environment does not dictate a predetermined future to an organism. Neither is the organism infinitely free to become anything whatsoever. Becoming occurs between those extremes. What has already become constrains what may become next without necessarily determining the outcome in advance.
Inheritance provides possibilities.
Environment provides conditions and constraints.
Organisms respond within them.
Across immense periods, the consequences accumulate.
The emergence and expansion of Homo occurred within precisely such a changing world. Early Homo populations eventually occupied environments well beyond tropical Africa. Dmanisi, in present-day Georgia, preserves hominin remains and artifacts around 1.8 million years old in a setting very different from equatorial African environments. Other early populations reached parts of eastern Asia and eventually Java. The range of habitats occupied by early Homo demonstrates increasing ecological breadth, even though different populations undoubtedly possessed different adaptive capacities. Human Origins
Later hominins would confront still more dramatic climatic oscillations. Neanderthal populations lived through repeated cold and warm periods across western Eurasia, adjusting ranges and subsistence practices as environments changed. Homo sapiens emerged in Africa during a period of substantial climatic variability and eventually occupied an extraordinary range of ecological settings. Recent reviews caution against reducing these histories to a simple formula in which climate “caused” human evolution. Climate interacted with habitat, geography, biology, technology, mobility, culture, and population history in complicated ways. Nature
That caution is important for us. We are not arguing that changing climates made humanity inevitable. They did not. Rather, humanity emerged within a reality in which environmental stability was never guaranteed. Our evolutionary inheritance was formed through repeated encounters with change.
The human psyche would eventually remember storms, droughts, cold, floods, fires, seasons, migrations, and disappearing animals. Much later, human cultures would tell stories about worlds transformed by water, sky, fire, famine, abundance, and catastrophe. We must not project those later stories backwards and pretend that a Paleolithic climatic event can be connected directly one-to-one to a particular ancient myth. That would exceed the evidence. Rather, repeated experiences of climatic and environmental change became part of human experience and, as communicative and cultural capacities developed, could increasingly be remembered and shared across generational memory.
So, something more elementary can already be said. Long before humans could tell stories about changing worlds, their ancestors were living through those changing worlds. Thus, experience preceded narrative. And those changing worlds therefore encouraged movement to more hospitable geographic zones.
III. Migration and Evolutionary Biogeography
Movement belongs to life long before humanity.
Animals move towards food and water, away from predators, between seasonal habitats, towards mates, and into territories made newly accessible by changing conditions. Populations expand and contract. Geography separates groups. Rivers, mountains, deserts, coastlines, forests, ice, rainfall, and temperature shape where organisms can live and how populations encounter one another.
Hominins inherited this creaturely mobility, but across evolutionary time their movements carried them into an increasingly diverse range of environments.
The dispersal of early Homo beyond Africa is therefore one of the most consequential developments in human evolutionary history. By roughly 1.8 million years ago, hominins had reached Dmanisi in the Caucasus. Other early Homo populations eventually inhabited regions of China and Southeast Asia. The environments associated with these populations differed substantially in temperature, vegetation, seasonality, rainfall, and available foods. Human Origins
Modern maps can make this movement misleadingly simple. We draw an arrow: Africa → Eurasia.
But no hominin experienced an arrow.
What appears to us as a continental migration was lived locally, generation by generation. A population occupied a landscape. Some members or descendants moved farther. Resources changed. Ecological corridors opened and closed. Populations expanded during favorable periods and contracted during unfavorable ones. A journey that appears instantaneous on a map may represent thousands of years of ordinary lives.
Biogeography restores those lives to geography.
It asks not merely where a fossil was eventually deposited, but how organisms and populations came to inhabit particular places. Geography becomes part of evolutionary history because location affects relationship. The animals encountered in one region differ from those in another. Plants differ. Seasons differ. Water behaves differently. Cold requires responses that tropical environments do not. Coastlines present resources unavailable inland. Mountains constrain movement while valleys may channel it. Deserts can separate populations during one climatic period and become more traversable during another. Even pathogens and diseases could influence the emergence, extent, and consequences of movement.
As populations move, therefore, they do not merely change location.
They enter different fields of relationship.
This became increasingly significant as hominins developed behavioral means of responding to environments in addition to biological ones. A population carrying stone-working practices for tool production possesses possibilities that anatomy alone does not provide. Controlled fire eventually changes the relationship with cold, darkness, predators, and food. Learned knowledge of landscapes and sheltering practices can be retained socially. Herbal lore, safe food collection and preparation, even primitive technologies may allow resources to be obtained that would otherwise remain inaccessible.
Biology and culture increasingly begin to travel together.
This is the beginning of something that will become enormously important later in our prehistory. As humans move, more than genes can move with them. Knowledge can travel. Techniques can travel. Practices can travel. Eventually words can travel. Stories can travel. Beliefs can travel.
But we should not hurry there across the vast expanses of the ages.
For much of the earlier Paleolithic, the evidence permits us to speak much more confidently about bodies, tools, movements, and environments than about language or belief. Nevertheless, the underlying principle has already appeared: human biogeography would eventually become cultural biogeography.
Our own species greatly enlarged that process. Homo sapiens emerged in Africa approximately 300,000 years ago and eventually dispersed through much of the habitable world. Yet even this should not be imagined as one departure by one population moving inexorably towards global settlement. Human dispersals occurred across considerable changing climatic windows and through populations that separated, expanded, contracted, and sometimes met again. Nature
And when Homo sapiens moved into Eurasia, the landscapes were not empty.
Other human species were already there.
That realization has transformed our understanding of human prehistory. Neanderthals occupied extensive regions of western Eurasia. Denisovan remains and ancestry reveal other hominin populations across parts of Asia. Homo erectus and other later-surviving forms complicate the picture still further in parts of eastern and southeastern Asia.
The human world was not merely expanding.
Different human worlds were encountering one another.
IV. Hominin Worlds of Encounter, Separation, and Disappearance
For generations, popular accounts of human evolution encouraged a comparatively simple picture of succession. One human form appeared, gave way to another, and eventually Homo sapiens emerged as the surviving endpoint. Fossil discoveries, archaeology, and especially ancient DNA have made that picture increasingly difficult to sustain. Human evolution was not merely a sequence of forms replacing one another. For substantial periods of prehistory, different hominin populations existed at the same time, sometimes across neighboring or overlapping regions. Some remained separated. Some encountered one another. Some interbred. Some probably competed. Behaviors or technologies may sometimes have passed between populations, although demonstrating cultural transmission archaeologically is considerably more difficult than demonstrating genetic inheritance. Eventually, however, every known hominin form except our own disappeared.
The braided-river metaphor introduced earlier becomes especially useful here. A branching evolutionary tree remains indispensable for representing descent, divergence, and relatedness, but the histories of actual populations could be more complicated. Populations separated and sometimes encountered one another again. Genetic evidence has established that Homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals and with Denisovan-related populations. Many people living today carry small proportions of ancestry inherited from encounters among human populations once popularly imagined as entirely separate forms of humanity. Their histories did not always remain on separate branches. At certain moments, those branches touched and twinned, as two developing species sharing one living heart.
But what happened when they did is much harder to know.
Genetics can demonstrate that reproduction occurred, but it cannot reconstruct the social circumstances surrounding an encounter. We do not know whether particular encounters were peaceful or violent, fleeting or repeated, voluntary or coercive. We do not know how often individuals moved between populations, how effectively different groups communicated, whether unfamiliar technologies were observed and copied, or whether populations sometimes deliberately avoided one another. The evidence generally cannot answer such questions, and possibility should never be disguised as knowledge. Yet asking these questions reminds us of something that taxonomic labels can too easily obscure. “Neanderthal,” “Denisovan,” and “Homo sapiens” refer ultimately to populations composed of living individuals. Wherever those populations occupied overlapping worlds, evolutionary history became lived encounter.
Here our prehistory begins to become sociologically interesting long before anything resembling later civilization existed.
Another population might have looked different, behaved differently, possessed unfamiliar technologies, inhabited a different territory, or communicated in unfamiliar ways. We cannot know how such differences were cognitively understood or socially interpreted. We should therefore resist projecting later concepts of ethnicity, nationality, race, religion, or political identity backwards into worlds where they did not yet exist. Nevertheless, long before civilization constructed formal boundaries between peoples, hominin populations were already living within one of the most fundamental conditions of relational existence: the encounter between self and other.
The “other,” of course, was not necessarily another kind of human. Otherness already existed throughout the living world. Predators, prey, competitors, offspring, mates, neighboring social groups, and unfamiliar animals all required different forms of response. But as hominin populations diversified and moved through changing landscapes, another possibility entered this field of relationships. The unfamiliar creature encountered across a landscape might itself be another hominin - embodied differently, behaving differently, perhaps communicating differently, yet recognizably similar in ways that another animal was not. It is important then to recognize that with the later expansion of Homo sapiens, such encounters increasingly included other human populations whose evolutionary histories had unfolded elsewhere, under different environments, population histories, and climatic variables. Their knowledge and experience had travelled paths the newcomers had not.
However, encounter was only one part of this history.
Separation mattered just as much.
Geography could isolate populations for long periods. Mountains, deserts, rivers, coastlines, forests, ice, and climatic shifts could restrict movement or fragment habitats. Populations separated from one another could accumulate genetic and anatomical differences, while technologies and learned practices might also develop along different trajectories. Later climatic changes could reopen corridors, alter resource distributions, or permit populations to expand again. Human evolutionary history therefore unfolded through changing rhythms of connection and isolation: populations meeting, separating, adapting locally, expanding, contracting, and occasionally encountering descendants of populations from which their own histories had long diverged.
This movement between connection and separation also means that human prehistory contains an enormous history of loss.
When a population disappeared, genes could disappear with it. But once learned behavior existed, something more could be lost as well. Technologies might vanish. Knowledge of particular landscapes could vanish. Methods of finding or preparing food could vanish. Forms of communication could vanish. If stories or symbolic practices existed, they too could disappear without leaving recoverable traces. Once culture inheritance becomes part of evolutionary history, the importance of extinction becomes more than the disappearance of a biological population. It can also become the disappearance of a distinctive world of accumulated experience.
That possibility should make us cautious whenever we imagine that the surviving archaeological record represents everything earlier humans once knew or did. Preservation is radically selective. Stone survives extraordinarily well, which is one reason Paleolithic archaeology can appear overwhelmingly concerned with stone. Wood, fibers, hides, plant materials, body decoration, gesture, sound, dance, spoken communication, and countless ordinary practices are far less likely to survive across immense spans of time. Archaeology therefore encounters not the complete human past but those fragments of the past that circumstances permitted to remain.
The world that disappeared was always larger than the world archaeology can recover.
The same caution applies to the hominin populations themselves. Homo erectus persisted across extraordinary spans of time and geography before disappearing. Neanderthals endured repeated climatic oscillations before ceasing to exist as a distinct population. Denisovan-related populations are known through remarkably limited physical remains but through genetic inheritances that reveal a much more extensive history than those fossils alone would suggest. Other hominins left only sparse anatomical or archaeological traces. The human world that once existed was therefore considerably more diverse than the single surviving human species now permits us to experience directly.
That surviving species is ours.
But survival must not be confused with divine destiny.
The persistence of Homo sapiens does not establish superiority in every biological, cognitive, technological, or social dimension. Nor does our survival demonstrate that evolution was always moving towards us. Population histories were shaped by changing combinations of demographic, ecological, climatic, technological, genetic, and social circumstances whose interactions remain only partially recoverable. Other hominins survived for immense periods before disappearing. Our own species has existed for only a fraction of that time. From the fact that we are presently the only surviving human species, we cannot infer that our survival was either inevitable or destined.
We are not the species towards which evolution was always moving.
We are the hominin species presently here to reconstruct what happened.
That distinction matters for everything that follows. If Homo sapiens was not the predetermined destination of human evolution, then the question becomes not why evolution inevitably produced us, but how particular populations repeatedly responded to the circumstances within which they lived. Bodies mattered. Environments mattered. Technologies mattered. Geography mattered. Chance mattered. But increasingly another factor also mattered: the relationships among individuals who faced those circumstances together.
Our lineage did not survive because isolated individuals somehow became independent of the evolutionary world from which they emerged. If anything, the history we have followed suggests the opposite. As hominin capacities expanded, survival became increasingly entangled with what individuals could learn from, receive from, communicate to, and accomplish with other individuals, communities, and even other hominin populations.
And so the history of encounter leads naturally towards another dimension of becoming human.
Not simply the evolution of individual bodies or brains.
But the evolution of social life.
V. Social Life - Kinship, Cooperation, Care, Competition, and Violence
Humanity did not invent social life. Our primate inheritance was already profoundly social. Living primates form relationships, care for offspring, cooperate, compete, reconcile, establish alliances, communicate, defend access to resources, and learn from one another. The evolutionary question is therefore not when solitary ancestors suddenly discovered society. It is how inherited forms of primate sociality changed as hominin bodies, brains, childhoods, diets, technologies, environments, and communicative capacities changed.
From the beginning, every hominin entered the world dependent upon others. Birth itself placed the organism inside relationship. An infant required nourishment and protection. Young individuals learned through observation and participation. Reproduction connected individuals while offspring connected generations. Membership within a group could affect access to food, protection, knowledge, mates, territory, and other resources. Whatever forms those relationships assumed among particular hominin populations, no individual began life independently of them.
That dependency became increasingly consequential as hominin development changed.
Human childhood eventually became unusually prolonged, extending the period during which developing individuals depended upon caregivers and social environments. Larger and increasingly complex brains did not simply produce greater individual independence. Their development required sustained nourishment, protection, learning, interaction, and time. The extraordinary capacities eventually associated with human individuality therefore arose within an equally extraordinary history of dependency upon others. What appears later as individual competence has a social prehistory.
This presents an important evolutionary paradox:
... greater individual cognitive capacity develops through greater relational dependency.
A human child may eventually acquire remarkable capacities for autonomous action, but those capacities emerge through years of relationships with other people and with an already inhabited social world. Long before modern humans could speak of independence, autonomy, or individuality, their evolutionary history had already made development dependent upon social interaction. The individual does not first become complete and then enter relationships. The developing individual becomes through them.
We should not romanticize what this means.
Relationship does not mean harmony.
The same sociality that makes cooperation possible also creates conditions for competition. Individuals may share resources while competing for status, mates, territory, or access to those same resources. Groups may cooperate internally while responding aggressively to outsiders. Alliances can protect some members while excluding others. Technologies useful for hunting or defense can also enlarge capacities for violence. The archaeological record does not permit us to reconstruct the emotional and moral worlds of early hominins with confidence, but neither evolutionary history nor comparative primate behavior gives us reason to imagine prehistoric social life as an age of peaceful communal innocence.
Relational existence therefore brought vulnerability along with possibility.
Dependence upon another creature means that the behavior of that creature matters. Another individual may provide food, protection, information, companionship, reproductive possibility, or assistance. The same individual may compete, abandon, exclude, injure, or threaten. The capacity for coordinated action can permit cooperative hunting and collective defense, but coordinated action can also permit aggression. Recognition of group membership can create belonging while making those beyond the group increasingly recognizable as outsiders.
The relational character of social life is therefore morally ambiguous long before anything resembling formal morality can be reconstructed.
Relationship itself does not tell us what kind of relationship will emerge. It creates possibilities for care and conflict, cooperation and competition, dependence and abandonment. Much later, human cultures would develop moral languages through which such behaviors could be judged, regulated, praised, condemned, ritualized, or prohibited. Here, in this evolving period, we are still much earlier. We are observing the evolutionary conditions from which such later moral worlds could eventually become possible.
Across deep time, however, social relationships also created possibilities that solitary individuals could not possess in the same way.
Food could be shared. Danger could be detected and experienced collectively. Offspring could receive protection from more than one individual. Knowledge about landscapes, foods, predators, tools, or other groups could be acquired through observation rather than discovered independently. Injury or temporary incapacity did not necessarily have to result immediately in death. Increasingly, what happened to one member of a group could become consequential for others.
Fossil and archaeological evidence occasionally permits us to glimpse this possibility, although interpretation requires caution. Individuals among several hominin populations survived significant injuries, illnesses, or physical impairments for substantial periods. Such cases have sometimes been interpreted as evidence of social assistance or care. Yet survival alone cannot tell us exactly what occurred. We cannot move directly from an injured skeleton to modern concepts such as compassion, nursing, altruism, or moral obligation. The motivations and behaviors surrounding an individual's survival are rarely recoverable. What can reasonably be said is more modest: some individuals survived under circumstances in which the presence and behavior of others may have made a significant difference.
This gives us a more adequate way of thinking about evolutionary fitness than the popular caricature contained in the phrase “survival of the fittest.” Fitness is not simply a measure of individual physical strength. Strength poorly suited to a changing environment may offer little advantage, while an apparently vulnerable individual embedded within effective social relationships may survive circumstances that would otherwise prove fatal. A population capable of coordinating action or sharing information may respond to environmental dangers differently from one in which learning remains primarily individual. Social relationships themselves can therefore affect survival and reproduction.
In that important sense, fitness is relational.
This does not mean that cooperation replaced competition as human evolution proceeded. Both could operate simultaneously and at different scales. Individuals might compete within groups while groups depended upon internal cooperation. Groups might cooperate with neighboring populations in some circumstances and compete with them in others. Environmental stress might alter relationships that had previously been stable. Nor need these behaviors have been consciously understood according to later moral categories. Evolution did not require hominins to formulate theories of cooperation before cooperation could become consequential.
But social life introduced something whose importance would steadily increase.
A young hominin was born not merely into a biological population but increasingly into a way of doing things together.
The group already moved through particular landscapes. Individuals already interacted with particular foods and animals. Others possessed ways of obtaining resources, responding to danger, caring for offspring, using objects, finding water, recognizing places, or interacting with other members of the group. None of these behaviors needed to exist as consciously articulated rules. They could be encountered repeatedly, observed, imitated, practiced, and learned through participation in social life.
This adds another dimension to inheritance.
A creature inherits genes from its biological ancestors. Those genes participate in shaping bodies and developmental possibilities. But a sufficiently social creature can also receive behaviors from individuals around it. A useful practice need not originate anew within every generation. Something learned by one creature can influence what another creature does, and if the behavior persists socially, individuals not yet born may eventually enter a group in which that practice already exists.
Biological inheritance therefore increasingly became accompanied by social inheritance.
The distinction is consequential because the two forms of inheritance operate differently. Genetic change ordinarily unfolds through biological reproduction across generations. Learned behavior can sometimes spread much more rapidly. A new technique may be observed and copied. Knowledge of a dangerous location can affect another individual's behavior without altering its genome. A successful method of obtaining food can persist because others repeat it. The population begins to possess resources that exist not only in bodies or landscapes but in relationships among individuals.
The past has acquired another way of entering the future.
One biological.
The other relational.
This development remains difficult to reconstruct in its earliest forms because behavior preserves poorly. Nevertheless, by the time archaeologists recover repeated technological traditions, the material record begins to preserve something more than isolated acts. It begins to reveal social practices capable of persisting.
And that brings us to one of the most remarkable surviving records of early human social learning.
Stone.
Stone lasts where almost everything else disappears. And within some of those surviving stones lies evidence that one hominin could increasingly learn how to do something from another.
That difference takes us from social life into technology, learning, and the beginnings of increasingly cumulative culture.
VI. Tools, Fire, Learning, and Increasingly Cumulative Culture
Stone is among the reasons we know as much as we do about early human behavior.
Bodies decay. Wood disappears. Fibers rot. Voices vanish. Practices that may once have been ordinary can disappear without leaving any recoverable trace. Stone is different. Under favorable conditions it can survive for millions of years, preserving marks left by hands belonging to creatures whose names, relationships, intentions, and thoughts are otherwise lost to us. A shaped stone cannot tell us everything its maker knew, but it can preserve something extraordinarily important: evidence of action.
The earliest presently known stone-tool production reaches at least about 3.3 million years into the past, while more extensive traditions involving deliberately produced flakes and cores appear later. Stone technology therefore precedes Homo sapiens by millions of years and may precede the genus Homo itself. Technology did not suddenly appear when modern humans arrived. Its evolutionary history reaches much farther back into the hominin world.
Nor did hominins invent tool use itself. Other animals manipulate objects and use tools in various ways. What becomes increasingly consequential in hominin evolution is the degree to which material objects could be selected, modified, repeatedly produced, transported, used for differing purposes, and eventually incorporated into practices transmitted among individuals and across generations.
This changes how we should think about something as apparently simple as a sharp stone.
Its importance lies not merely in the sophistication of the object but in the relationship it creates between an organism and its environment. A cutting edge extends what teeth and fingernails can accomplish. A hammerstone makes otherwise difficult resources accessible. Digging implements can change access to underground foods. Later wooden spears alter the relationship between hunter and prey. The biological body has not grown a sharper tooth, stronger claw, or longer canine. Instead, an external material object has become incorporated into what that embodied organism is capable of doing.
Technology becomes an extension of embodied agency.
And that agency is relational at every level.
Stone possesses physical properties. Hands possess anatomical possibilities. Eyes and brains perceive forms and possibilities for action. Previous experience informs what an individual attempts. Another individual's behavior may provide something to observe or imitate. Landscapes provide materials while also imposing constraints upon what materials are locally available. Toolmaking emerges through these relationships rather than from the hand, stone, brain, or environment considered alone.
Something important has therefore happened to the relationship between biological adaptation and environment. An organism need not wait for biological evolution to alter its anatomy before changing what it can do. Behavior can change the possibilities available to an inherited body. A stone edge does not genetically modify the hand that holds it, but it alters what that hand can accomplish. Technology therefore begins to introduce another tempo into human adaptation - one in which learned behavior can sometimes change more rapidly than bodies.
The same becomes even more dramatic with fire.
Fire long preceded hominins. Lightning and other natural processes produced fires across landscapes for hundreds of millions of years. For countless organisms, fire was therefore already part of the environment: sometimes destructive, sometimes ecologically transformative, but not something they deliberately maintained and controlled. The consequential development in hominin history occurred as populations increasingly learned not merely to encounter fire but to interact with it differently - maintaining, controlling, transporting, and eventually producing it. Evidence from Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in present-day Israel indicates repeated controlled use of fire around 790,000 years ago, while claims for earlier controlled fire remain subjects of continuing investigation.
Consider what changes when fire becomes controlled.
A phenomenon capable of terrifying, injuring, and killing becomes capable of providing warmth and illumination. Food can be transformed through cooking. Cold environments can become more manageable. Predators may be kept at greater distance. Darkness no longer necessarily brings every activity to an end. Fire remains dangerous - control is never absolute - but the relationship between organism and environmental phenomenon has changed.
The hearth may also have changed social space.
Individuals could gather near a persistent source of warmth and light. Food might be processed and consumed nearby. Bodies could remain in proximity during colder conditions. Activities might continue after sunset. Whatever forms of communication occurred among the individuals gathered there, controlled fire created repeated places in which bodies, activity, and attention could converge.
We should not turn the earliest hearth into a modern family sitting around a campfire telling stories. The image is tempting precisely because it is so familiar to us, but the evidence does not permit that reconstruction. The more restrained conclusion is sufficiently remarkable: controlled fire altered ecological, nutritional, technological, and social possibilities. A naturally occurring phenomenon had become incorporated into hominin ways of living.
Technology was becoming part of the human environment.
And technology increasingly had to be learned.
This is where the stone, the hearth, and the social world explored in the previous section begin to converge. A biological characteristic is inherited through reproduction. A learned behavior can pass between individuals through observation, imitation, participation, demonstration, practice, and eventually more explicit forms of teaching and language. The precise mechanisms undoubtedly varied across populations and through time, and we should not assume that early hominins taught one another as modern humans do. Yet repeated technological traditions require something more than an isolated individual accidentally striking a useful stone.
Someone does something. Another observes or participates. The behavior is repeated. Others acquire it. Eventually an individual can enter a world in which the practice already exists. At that point something remarkable has happened: the past has acquired another way of entering the future.
This is cultural inheritance.
The term cumulative culture nevertheless requires care. Very early stone technologies sometimes persisted across enormous spans of time with comparatively slow visible change, and researchers continue to debate the degree to which the earliest technological traditions involved cumulative processes comparable to those evident much later in human history. We should therefore resist projecting modern technological innovation backwards into every stone assemblage.
But persistence itself matters.
If a recognizable technological practice recurs across generations, behavior has survived beyond the individual who first performed it. Later in human evolution, diversification of technologies, increasingly specialized tools, long-distance movement of materials, and expanding social networks make cumulative cultural processes more apparent. Techniques can be retained and modified. Existing practices can become the starting conditions for later practices. A generation does not necessarily begin again from nothing.
We therefore begin to see two streams of inheritance flowing through human evolution.
Genes carry biological history.
Culture increasingly carries learned history.
These should not be imagined as separate evolutionary worlds. Biological capacities make learning possible. Hands, brains, perception, memory, development, and sociality all possess evolutionary histories. At the same time, learned practices alter the environments within which biological organisms live. Tools change access to resources. Fire changes food and habitat possibilities. Social learning changes what an individual needs to discover independently. Biology makes culture possible, while culture increasingly changes the circumstances within which biological life continues.
This interaction introduces a remarkable acceleration into human history. A useful behavior does not always have to wait for genetic change before becoming consequential. Nor must every individual independently rediscover everything previous individuals have already learned. A route can be remembered. A technique can be copied. A source of stone can be revisited. A dangerous location can be avoided because others have encountered the danger. A way of processing food can persist because others repeat it.
Experience can become inheritance.
And once that happens, what a population knows begins to become part of the environment into which its young are born.
This is more profound than it may initially appear. A young hominin inherits a biological body whose history reaches backward through generations it never knew. Increasingly, that same individual also enters a social and material world already altered by the activities of others. Useful stones may already have been selected. Practices may already be repeated. Routes may already be followed. Fire may already be maintained. Ways of obtaining and preparing food may already be familiar to members of the group.
The infant therefore inherits more than a body.
Increasingly, it inherits a world already interpreted through practice.
We have not yet reached the fully symbolic worlds that will occupy our attention in Essay 3B. But neither should we hurry from repeated practice to language, mythology, ritual, or religion. As demonstrated, something necessary for those later developments is already becoming visible. Experience no longer necessarily disappears when the individual who first acquired it disappears. Through social learning, some portion of experience can persist.
And that raises the question that carries us into the final section of this essay. If one creature's experience can alter what another creature knows or does, then inheritance is no longer only biological. The crucial question becomes:
... how much experience can be shared?
VII. Communication, Memory, and the Earliest Horizons of Shared Meaning
Communication is far older than humanity.
Animals communicate in many different ways. They signal danger, attraction, aggression, submission, location, reproductive readiness, and other information consequential to survival and social life. Primates employ vocalization, gesture, facial expression, posture, touch, movement, and patterns of social interaction. Hominins therefore did not invent communication from nothing. They inherited communicative capacities already possessing deep evolutionary histories. Pasted text
What changed across hominin evolution was not the sudden appearance of communication itself, but the expanding complexity of what could be communicated, retained, combined, learned, and eventually represented. As social relationships became increasingly consequential and learned practices became increasingly transmissible, communication provided another means by which the experience of one individual could affect the behavior of another.
Precisely when spoken language comparable to our own emerged remains unknown.
Language does not fossilize. Anatomical changes can illuminate capacities relevant to speech. Archaeological complexity may suggest increasingly sophisticated communication. Comparative genetics provides additional evidence concerning biological capacities associated with language. But no fossil preserves a sentence, and no stone tool records the words - if words were used at all - through which its production may have been learned. We can reconstruct capacities and possibilities with increasing sophistication without recovering the actual communicative worlds within which early hominins lived.
That uncertainty is useful rather than merely frustrating. It prevents us from inventing a single moment when language suddenly appeared, as though one generation inhabited a wordless world and the next began speaking. Communication almost certainly possessed a much deeper evolutionary history, developing alongside neurological, anatomical, cognitive, and social changes. Gesture and vocalization did not need to become fully modern language before they could communicate useful information. Nor does social learning require grammatical speech. Observation, imitation, attention, repetition, emotional expression, coordinated action, and increasingly differentiated signals can all permit information to move between individuals.
Yet increasingly sophisticated communication changes what a social group can become.
Imagine an individual encountering a danger and surviving. If no information about that encounter can pass to another individual, much of what has been learned remains bound to the one who experienced it. Others present at the event may nevertheless observe what happened and alter their own behavior. If a recognizable signal can later identify the danger, the usefulness of that experience extends farther. And if increasingly complex communication can eventually refer to a danger that is not presently visible, something more consequential has occurred: an event experienced in one place and time can begin to influence behavior somewhere else.
Experience has become portable.
Something learned within one embodied life has crossed relationally into another.
Memory deepens this possibility.
At its most basic, memory allows previous experience to influence present behavior. An organism need not encounter every situation as though nothing similar had happened before. But within social creatures, memory can become consequential beyond the individual. What one creature remembers may affect what it communicates or demonstrates to another. What another receives may then influence its own behavior. As these capacities become increasingly sophisticated, a population begins to inhabit more than the environment immediately present before it.
The water source that failed during an earlier season can matter when the population moves again. A place where predators were encountered can affect later movement. A route previously followed can become a route followed again. The location of useful stone can remain consequential after the first discovery. A technique demonstrated by another individual can influence actions performed later. The behavior of another population encountered previously can affect what happens when unfamiliar individuals appear again.
In such ways, past experience becomes part of present possibility.
Here another dimension of inheritance begins to emerge. Biological inheritance carries evolutionary history through reproduction. Social learning allows practices to persist among individuals. Communication and memory increasingly allow something less tangible to persist as well: information about experience.
The distinction is important. A stone tool may survive physically. A route does not survive in the same way. A dangerous location cannot be carried like a handaxe. Knowledge of where water can be found is not itself a material object. Yet information concerning routes, dangers, resources, seasons, animals, other individuals, and useful practices can affect behavior long after the original encounter has ended.
The physically absent can therefore begin to remain behaviorally consequential.
This is one of the thresholds leading towards the symbolic worlds that follow.
An absent individual can remain mentally present. A place can matter while no one is presently standing there. An event can be recalled after it has ended. Something expected in the future can influence what is done now. Increasingly, the world experienced by a creature need not be limited entirely to whatever is immediately available to perception.
The organism can respond to what is no longer here and increasingly anticipate what is not here yet.
We are approaching the world of representation. Of symbol, memory, and surmise.
But this is precisely where caution becomes increasingly necessary.
Archaeological evidence for pigments and other materials that may have participated in symbolic practices extends hundreds of thousands of years into the past, while later Paleolithic contexts preserve increasingly compelling evidence of ornamentation, engraving, image-making, and other symbolic behaviors. Yet the earliest surviving artifact cannot automatically be identified as the beginning of the cognitive capacity it appears to express. Archaeology records what survived, not everything that existed.
This problem becomes especially important as we move from technology towards meaning. Stone can endure for immense periods. Wood, fiber, feathers, hides, body decoration, plant materials, and pigments may not. Gesture disappears with the movement that produced it. Rhythm disappears when the sound ends. Dance leaves no necessary archaeological trace. Speech vanishes almost immediately unless some later technology records it. An entire communicative tradition might therefore have existed without leaving anything we could confidently recognize thousands or millions of years later.
Stories leave no fossils.
That principle will govern much of Essays 3B and 3C. The absence of surviving stories does not permit us to invent them. We cannot populate the Paleolithic with narratives, gods, spirits, rituals, or beliefs merely because later humans possessed them. But neither should we assume that a cognitive or cultural capacity began only when archaeologists happen to recover the earliest durable artifact presently known to express it.
The distinction is fundamental to our method.
The earliest evidence presently recovered tells us that something existed by that time. It does not necessarily tell us when that something first became possible.
Our task is therefore to watch the interpretive horizon without crossing it prematurely.
Across the immense history surveyed in this essay, hominins became increasingly capable of inhabiting changing environments through combinations of biological inheritance, behavior, relationship, and learning. Populations migrated across great distances. Geography separated them and sometimes brought them together again. Different hominins encountered one another. Tools altered relationships with materials and food. Fire altered relationships with cold, darkness, predators, and nourishment. Social learning allowed practices to persist beyond particular individuals. Communication increasingly permitted experience to become shareable. Memory allowed what had happened before to remain active within what could happen next. Pasted text
None of this happened everywhere at the same time, at the same rate, or in precisely the same form. There was no universal Paleolithic culture marching through predetermined stages towards modern humanity. Populations inhabited different climates and landscapes. They encountered different animals and plants, exploited different materials, followed different histories, and sometimes remained separated for immense periods.
Consequently, as culture became increasingly consequential, human culture was plural almost from the moment we can meaningfully speak of culture at all.
This plurality will matter enormously to the Prehistory of the Bible series.
For once populations possess learned practices, encounter can bring more than bodies into contact. Practices can encounter other practices. Technologies can encounter other technologies. Ways of communicating can encounter other ways of communicating. Much later, symbols will encounter symbols, stories will encounter stories, and beliefs will encounter beliefs. Materials and ideas will eventually move through networks extending far beyond the communities in which they originated. Human culture itself will become a braided river of inheritance, encounter, borrowing, resistance, reinterpretation, loss, and novelty.
But we should not hurry there. Before traditions could be exchanged, something had to become transmissible. Before stories could be inherited, experience had to become shareable. Before accumulated culture could shape generations, the past had to become inheritable through more than genes. And before any of these things could happen, one creature had to become capable of receiving something learned by another.
That is where Essay 3A reaches its proper boundary.
We have not yet reached the village, the city, the temple, or the written text. We have not reached the biblical world. We have not even reached the fully symbolic and religious worlds that Essays 3B and 3C will explore.
Humanity has not written a story for us to read. It has not named a god for us to recover. But something extraordinary has already happened. Living creatures have begun to inherit not only bodies and environments, but increasingly the accumulated experience of other living creatures.
A world of shared meaning is beginning to become possible. And with it, the human world is becoming something that biological inheritance alone could never have produced...
... we have begun to inherit one another.
Conclusion - We Inherited One Another
Something consequential has happened across the immense history explored in this essay. Human evolution has become more than the inheritance of bodies....
Bodies still matter. Genes still matter. Environments, climates, geography, food, disease, reproduction, and biological adaptation remain fundamental. But increasingly, another inheritance has entered the human story. One generation can receive something from another that is neither genetic nor merely environmental.
Experience can be inherited socially.
A young hominin enters a world in which others have already lived. Others have encountered dangers, learned landscapes, handled materials, used tools, responded to animals, interacted with fire, cared for offspring, and developed ways of living together. Increasingly, some portion of what they have learned can remain available to those who come afterward.
This creates an extraordinary development within evolutionary history.
The past can become active within the present without being carried only in genes.
And once that becomes possible, human becoming acquires another dimension. What one individual experiences can affect another. What one generation learns can alter the possibilities available to the next. A population can increasingly accumulate an inheritance of learned experience that no single individual created and no single individual possesses alone.
Culture, in its deepest sense, begins here. Not with civilization. Not with writing. Not even necessarily with fully developed symbolic thought. It begins when lives become increasingly shaped by what has been learned through other lives. That is why the phrase governing this essay matters:
We inherited one another.
But this inheritance creates a new problem - and a new possibility.
If experience can pass between individuals and generations, what happens when humans become increasingly capable not merely of repeating what others have done, but of remembering what is absent, imagining what is not present, anticipating what has not yet happened, and representing one thing through another?
The inherited world can then become more than a world of practices.
It can become a world of meaning.
A landscape can become more than terrain. An animal can become more than prey or predator. An absent person can remain present within memory. A dead individual can continue to matter among the living. An object can signify something beyond itself. A sound can refer to something not immediately seen. An event can be remembered by those who did not experience it. Eventually, shared experience can become shared representation.
And here the character of our inquiry changes. Until now we have primarily followed creatures through the worlds they inhabited. Beginning with Essay 3B, we must increasingly ask how those worlds came to be inhabited within them.
How did experience become memory?
How did memory become imagination?
How did absence become mentally present?
How did communication become language?
How did objects, bodies, sounds, markings, and places become capable of carrying meaning?
And how did human beings gradually become creatures who inhabited not only the world immediately encountered, but also a world remembered, anticipated, imagined, and symbolized?
These questions take us towards the next great threshold in our prehistory. The creatures who inherited one another were becoming capable of inheriting something still more remarkable:
one another's worlds.
That is where Essay 3B - Becoming Symbolic begins.
Antón, Susan C., Richard Potts, and Leslie C. Aiello. “Evolution of Early Homo: An Integrated Biological Perspective.” Science 345, no. 6192 (2014): 1236828.
Harmand, Sonia, et al. “3.3-Million-Year-Old Stone Tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya.” Nature 521 (2015): 310-315.
Potts, Richard. Humanity's Descent: The Consequences of Ecological Instability. New York: William Morrow, 1996.
Roberts, Patrick, and Brian A. Stewart. “Defining the ‘Generalist Specialist’ Niche for Pleistocene Homo sapiens.” Nature Human Behaviour 2 (2018): 542-550.
Smithsonian Institution, Human Origins Program. “Climate Effects on Human Evolution.” Human Origins Program. Human Origins
Smithsonian Institution, Human Origins Program. “Human Characteristics: What Does It Mean to Be Human?” Human Origins Program. Human Origins
Smithsonian Institution, Human Origins Program. “Language & Symbols.” Human Origins Program. Human Origins
Smithsonian Institution, Human Origins Program. “Social Life.” Human Origins Program. Human Origins
Smithsonian Institution, Human Origins Program. “Stone Tools.” Human Origins Program. Human Origins
Timmermann, Axel, Pasquale Raia, Alessandro Mondanaro, Christoph P. E. Zollikofer, Marcia Ponce de León, Elke Zeller, Kyung-Sook Yun, et al. “Past Climate Change Effects on Human Evolution.” Nature Reviews Earth & Environment 5 (2024): 701-716. Nature
The sources used in this essay were selected to support several different dimensions of the reconstruction rather than to advance a single theory of human evolution. Paleoanthropology, archaeology, paleoclimatology, evolutionary biology, and studies of human behavior each illuminate different portions of the world we are attempting to recover. No single discipline can reconstruct that world by itself.
The Smithsonian Institution's Human Origins Program provides a particularly useful foundation because its research and educational materials bring together fossil evidence, archaeology, climate research, technology, social behavior, language, symbolism, and human dispersal. Its presentations also repeatedly distinguish established evidence from hypotheses that remain under investigation, an important discipline for a study that will increasingly approach questions of cognition, symbolism, and religion. Human Origins
Richard Potts was chosen because his work on environmental variability challenges older attempts to locate human evolution within a single environmental transition, particularly an overly simple forest-to-savanna story. His variability-selection hypothesis need not be accepted as an exhaustive explanation of human evolution for its central question to remain valuable: how did repeated environmental instability affect organisms increasingly required to live within changing ecological relationships? The more recent review by Axel Timmermann and colleagues provides a contemporary assessment of these climate-evolution relationships and, importantly, emphasizes their complexity rather than reducing human development to climatic determinism. Human Origins
Susan Antón, Richard Potts, and Leslie Aiello were included because their integrated treatment of early Homo helps undermine another misleading picture: that the characteristics associated with humanity emerged simultaneously as a package. Human evolution was mosaic. Different anatomical and behavioral characteristics emerged at different times, within different populations and ecological circumstances. This supports the historical approach taken throughout this essay, in which “becoming human” is understood as a long and branching process rather than a single biological threshold.
Sonia Harmand and colleagues are important because the Lomekwi discoveries pushed presently known stone-tool production to approximately 3.3 million years ago. The significance for our inquiry is considerable. Technology cannot simply be identified with Homo sapiens, or even confidently restricted to the genus Homo. The material engagement through which hominins increasingly altered their relationships with environments possesses a much deeper evolutionary history.
Patrick Roberts and Brian Stewart were chosen for their work on the extraordinary ecological breadth eventually achieved by Homo sapiens. Their “generalist specialist” formulation provides one way of examining a species capable of occupying highly diverse environments partly through behavioral and cultural flexibility. Their work belongs especially at the transition between biological adaptability and the increasingly cultural forms of adaptation that will become central to the essays that follow.
None of these sources demonstrates the relational philosophy through which we are interpreting this history. That distinction remains essential. Science reconstructs, as carefully as surviving evidence permits, what happened and the mechanisms through which evolutionary change occurred. Relational philosophy enters afterward and asks what ontological and metaphysical characteristics appear within that reconstructed history.
What we repeatedly encounter are organisms whose possibilities cannot be understood apart from inherited bodies, environments, ecological relationships, other organisms, other populations, material objects, learned practices, and increasingly cultural inheritances.
The scientific evidence does not therefore “prove” relational philosophy. It gives relational philosophy something real against which its claims must be tested. And this is precisely the order our larger project requires:
... reality first, interpretation afterward.
Before asking what prehistoric humanity believed about reality, we must first attempt to understand the reality within which prehistoric humanity actually lived.
Essay 3A has brought us to the threshold of that question.
Essay 3B will take the next step.
For once experience could increasingly be remembered, communicated, shared, and inherited, humanity acquired an extraordinary new possibility:
the ability to inhabit not only the world immediately encountered,
but a world remembered, imagined, represented, and eventually symbolized.
The history of humanity can be described through several different systems of time:
Geologists divide Earth's history into epochs such as the Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene, and Holocene.
Paleoanthropologists reconstruct the emergence and diversification of hominin populations.
Archaeologists organize surviving material cultures through technological and cultural traditions such as the Paleolithic and Neolithic.
These systems overlap, but they are not interchangeable. Geological epochs describe changes in Earth's history. Archaeological periods describe changing human technologies and lifeways. Evolutionary history describes changing populations and species. No single boundary in one system necessarily corresponds to a boundary in another.
For the purposes of our study, their relationship can be visualized approximately as follows:
~7 million years ago ───────── 2.58 million years ago ───────── 11,700 years ago ───── Present
Late Miocene → Pliocene │ Pleistocene │ HoloceneEarly hominins │ Diversification of Homo │ Homo sapiensEarly bipedalism │ Paleolithic worlds │ Neolithic → historical worldsFirst known stone technologies appear late │ repeated glacial-interglacial cycles │ agriculture, cities, states, writing
The boundaries should therefore be understood as overlapping frameworks placed beside one another, rather than as a single sequence of neatly synchronized stages.
| Approximate Time | Geological Framework | Archaeological / Cultural Framework | Evolutionary and Cultural Significance |
|---|---|---|---|
| 7-5.33 Ma | Late Miocene | Before presently known archaeological industries | Earliest probable hominins appear in Africa. Sahelanthropus and Orrorin occur near the beginning of the hominin story. Evidence concerning the earliest forms of bipedalism remains incomplete and debated. |
| 5.33-2.58 Ma | Pliocene | Earliest known stone technologies appear late in the epoch | Ardipithecus, australopiths, and other hominins diversify. Bipedal locomotion becomes increasingly established. The earliest known stone technology appears by about 3.3 Ma, before the emergence of the genus Homo. Early Homo appears near the end of this broad interval. |
| 2.58 Ma-11,700 years ago | Pleistocene | Paleolithic / Stone Age traditions | Repeated glacial-interglacial cycles reshape environments. Homo diversifies and spreads beyond Africa. H. erectus and later hominins inhabit increasingly extensive regions. Neanderthals, Denisovans, H. sapiens, and other hominins eventually coexist. Technologies, social learning, communication, and cultural transmission become increasingly consequential. |
| c. 300,000 years ago onward | Late Pleistocene → Holocene | Middle and later Paleolithic traditions → later prehistoric cultures | Homo sapiens emerges in Africa and eventually disperses widely. Populations encounter and interbreed with other hominins. Symbolic practices and increasingly diverse material cultures become archaeologically visible. |
| 11,700 years ago-present | Holocene | Mesolithic/Epipaleolithic → Neolithic → Copper/Bronze/Iron Ages → historical eras | Postglacial environments transform human lifeways. Agriculture and domestication arise independently in several regions. Some populations develop permanent settlements, towns, cities, states, writing, and eventually industrial and technological societies. Other lifeways continue alongside them. |
The early portion deserves particular caution. Smithsonian material describes the first hominins as diverging from other apes roughly 6-7 million years ago, while the locomotion of such early candidates as Sahelanthropus and Orrorin remains debated. Human Origins
I. The Earliest Hominin World - Late Miocene and PlioceneThe earliest chapters of hominin history unfolded within changing African environments. This was not simply a transition from “forest” to “savanna.” Forests, woodlands, grasslands, wetlands, and other habitats expanded, contracted, and formed changing mosaics as climate and geography changed.
Early hominins consequently did not suddenly abandon trees and begin walking upright across open grasslands. Fossil evidence suggests a much longer evolutionary mosaic in which climbing and increasingly habitual bipedal locomotion existed together in different combinations. Smithsonian summarizes the period from roughly six to three million years ago as one in which early hominins combined climbing with terrestrial upright locomotion. Human Origins
This period included Sahelanthropus, Orrorin, Ardipithecus, and eventually several australopith populations. Brain size remained relatively small compared with later Homo, but bodies, hands, feet, teeth, diets, locomotion, and ecological relationships were changing in different ways.
And importantly, technology begins before the Pleistocene. Stone artifacts at Lomekwi in Kenya date to approximately 3.3 million years ago. More systematic Oldowan technologies become visible later. Human Origins
Thus biological and cultural evolution should not be imagined as two completely separate stages in which biology happened first and culture suddenly began afterward. Their histories increasingly overlap.
II. The Pleistocene World - The Great Expansion of HomoBeginning approximately 2.58 million years ago, the Pleistocene brought repeated climatic oscillations rather than one uninterrupted Ice Age. Glacial and interglacial conditions repeatedly altered ice cover, rainfall, vegetation, coastlines, sea levels, habitats, and migration corridors.
Within this changing world, the genus Homo diversified.
Oldowan stone technologies were followed by Acheulean technologies, including handaxes by approximately 1.76 million years ago. Human Origins Homo erectus became one of the longest-lived and most geographically widespread early human species, occurring from Africa into western and eastern Asia. Fossils at Dmanisi document hominins outside Africa by approximately 1.8 million years ago, while archaeological evidence suggests dispersal into parts of Asia even earlier. Human Origins
Later Pleistocene worlds became even more diverse. Neanderthals inhabited Europe and western Asia. Denisovan populations inhabited portions of Asia. Other hominins persisted in Africa and island Southeast Asia. Eventually Homo sapiens, emerging in Africa roughly 300,000 years ago, entered this already populated world.
The Pleistocene therefore represents much more than an “Ice Age.”
It was an immense evolutionary and cultural world of movement, separation, encounter, adaptation, inheritance, and extinction.
III. The Holocene - From Postglacial Worlds to CivilizationApproximately 11,700 years ago, the Pleistocene ended and the Holocene began. But the geological boundary did not instantly produce agriculture or civilization.
Different human populations responded differently to postglacial environments. Hunting, gathering, fishing, increasingly persistent settlements, cultivation, and eventually domestication developed at different times in different places. The Mesolithic or Epipaleolithic therefore overlaps geographically and conceptually with the beginnings of what archaeologists later call the Neolithic.
The Neolithic likewise did not arrive everywhere simultaneously. Agriculture and animal domestication developed independently in several regions and spread into others through migration, exchange, imitation, and interaction. Some communities became increasingly sedentary while others continued mobile lifeways.
Eventually, in some regions:
settlement → agriculture and domestication → villages → increasing specialization → towns → cities → states → writing → recorded history
The Copper, Bronze, and Iron Ages followed different chronologies in different regions. Writing likewise did not arise because humanity entered a universal “Metal Age”; it developed within particular increasingly complex societies.
For our Prehistory of the Bible, this distinction becomes especially important. The human journey did not proceed through a single worldwide sequence towards Mesopotamia, Egypt, Canaan, Israel, or the Bible. Those societies emerged within one particular portion of a much older and geographically diverse human history.
A Relational Reading of the Whole SequenceSeen across these immense spans of time, the transitions are not simply:
ape → hominin → human → civilization.
They are better understood as a branching history:
inherited bodies → changing environments → differing populations → migration and separation → encounter → adaptation → technological and social inheritance → symbolic culture → settlement → increasingly complex societies
At every stage, what became possible depended upon relationships among organisms, inherited biology, other organisms, environments, climates, geography, learned practices, and previous generations.
That is why the geological history belongs in this essay at all. Humanity did not merely evolve during the Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene, and Holocene.
Humanity became through relationships within the changing worlds those names describe.