CARTA: Combinatorial Technology and the Emergence of the Built Environment
[MUSIC] Combinatorial technology is a term most people are not familiar with. One of my missions here is not just introduce it, but also to integrate it into the discussion of human evolution with respect to climate change, but also to the development of structures. Combinatorial tools, I'll explain what they are, are part of all the structures we work in today. Everything in this room, what I'm wearing, where you're sitting, our tools, our phones, are made through the concept of combinatorial technology. I hope that's intriguing.
Buckle up, seven million years to cover in what's left to the 18 minutes with some climate change thrown in because it's highly relevant, what's happened the last six million year for what's coming in the next few decades. I'm going to look for the earliest evidence for structures in the archaeological record, and I feel privileged to offer to you what is currently the earliest evidence. Then I will introduce this term combinatorial technology and just put simply, is combining tools with handles. Let's make it even simpler, putting stones on sticks. But I'm going to make it, I hope, a bit more interesting than that. This busy diagram shows seven million years of time, and it shows the 20 or more fossil species which we attribute to a group called hominins.
All of us in here are hominins. What does that mean? It means we habitually walk on two legs. We are bipedal. Our daily lives, we move about in the world on two legs.
Darwin recognized the importance of this for freeing the hands for making things, for carrying things. I think we could add to this the freeing of hands for gestures for communicating. All of these species are hominins. The genetic fossil evidence points that we split from the last great apes about seven million years ago. I've distinguished in here early hominins. These live in woodland environments, and I'm just going to introduce one more definition, humans.
You may think you know what a human is, but there are different ways of using this term. Paleoanthropologist often think of humans in a very broad perspective, not homo sapiens, but members of the genus Homo. I've highlighted this genus of which there are 10 or more species of Homo, and it's within this genus, our genus, we find the first evidence of structures. Now, climate change, the diagram behind me shows in the blue, wavy line, it almost looks like an electrocardium garam, but heartbeat through time, and that's a way I think about it. You will see that the blue diagram is shifting.
There's a gradual change over time, and this is in temperature. We're looking at six million years here. The first three million years, it's quite stable. Temperature's quite warm. It's even warmer than it is now. This is the world of the early hominins in the woodlands of Africa. Three million years ago, there's a change, a gradual one, a marked change to cooler conditions.
Maybe it correlates with what we see there, the first stone tools. It's the beginning of the archaeological record. Then that trend increases, getting cooler and cooler. As you look towards the middle of a diagram, you'll see the next black bar, that is the first formal tool in the archaeological record, the first shaped object in the archeological record. This represents to me, the beginning of what I would call accumulative cultural tradition of learning, learning from others. We've seen that with the birds learning from others and passing that information on to the next generation.
That's an interesting question. How is that done? I think our next speaker is going to deal with this, Michael, certainly, it's yours. That's 1.7 million years ago. Then look what's happening to not just the heartbeat of climate change, but the amplitude, so the difference between the peaks, in this case, peaks of warm at the top and peaks of cold. These are ice ages. All of these are ice ages, so remove from your mind the idea of one ice age.
There are hundreds. Then I'm out here just about 800,000 years ago, lots of numbers, I know. The heartbeat gets into a condition which if it was me, human, I would call this a medical emergency., I'd get myself to hospital paramedics, please help me. The amplitude is not only getting extremer, it's getting colder.
But the time range of these climate cycles is getting longer, 100,000 years for glacial cycle. We're here, it's 41,000 years. These cycles rewrite habitats. They stress us as humans in these habitats. For these 800,000 years, I'm going to say this is a long term climate change emergency.
I'll just use that term again. What do we see happening in this emergency? The first evidence of structure, and later on, we emerge about 300,000 years ago. I'm going to the next slide, but before I move on, we've heard about ChatGPT. I'll introduce you to the first GPT.
It's the first general purpose technology, and that's striking sharp flakes of stone from blocks of stone, which have certain properties which are understood by the hominins who made them. What do these stones do? They open up the environment for us. They allow us to extract animals, kill them, butcher them, allow us to process plant food.
The evidence from this particular site three million years ago is really interesting to me because there are traces of woodworking. Now, wood is going to feature this story. But just already from the beginning of the archaeological record, we have hominins who have replaced the loss of claws, bodily strength with technology. That enables early hominids to move out of Africa soon after three million years ago.
We don't know who they were, but we find their tools from Jordan to China. Now, I'm just going to choose one species, the homo erectus, a long lived human. First appears 1.9 million years ago in East Africa, and becomes extinct about 110,000 years ago in Southeast Asia, so it's widespread geographically. Homo erectus has my body shape, has your body shape. It's a terrestrial species.
It doesn't have the facility for climbing the trees like earlier hominins did. It didn't nest in trees, we think. This species is important, not just for its spread, but we also have that archaeological record that I was told you about, which I think is the early evidence for cumulative learning.
These are complex tools. They are large cutting tools. They are called hand axes as an off hand name, but they are symmetrical and plan view, symmetrical and side view, and symmetrical in cross section. They're not easy to make. They are learned through observation, perhaps, yes, but you need to learn from an expert. That's important. We know from the study of these tools,
they too, were used for woodworking. Last stop for homo erectus the basal human from which other species evolve during this time of, call the long term global climate crisis. Eight hundred thousand years, then we've got this heartbeat, which is in spasm. I'm going to give you a case study of how rapid climate change can be, how it affects people's adaptation. There's a concept here, hypothesis called variability selection. It was put together by Rick Potts from the Smithsonian Institution in the '90s.
The idea here is that humans didn't evolve to a single environment, the East African savanna. No, it's about the evolution of flexibility, versatility in the face of variability, and the variability here is climate change. As archaeologists, we can pick up some of this variability.
We can see some new things that are created or used or curated. Fire becomes a focal point in settlements, not just for cooking, you could also say, perhaps, fire is also a way of extending the daylight and time for communication. We have this combinatorial technology, we have shelter. We also see some biological changes, extended childhood. What happens with extended childhood? That's more time to learn. But who were you learning from, and how is that learning taking place? I've used this term cumulative learning as a very cultural element of us.
Do we see it with birds? Perhaps Sue would say, yeah. Just as an aside, we see within this climate change crisis the development of the modern human brain size in relation to body size. Then we see that by 500,000 years ago. Then we think about when did language evolve and how did it evolve? I`ll leave Michael to take us through that.
Look at these three words, the green Sahara. Does that seem strange? It's meant to challenge you. The challenges you preconception. What? Is he talking about? Well, let me.
He's talking about this. That's what we think of the Sahara, sand, rock, no water. It's a difficult place to live.
That's how it is today. Have a look, 10,000 years ago. It's a land of lakes, rivers, deltas, full of animals, full of people. I'm not saying this really meaning this.
It's the Garden of Eden. Life was easy. The people there are hunters and gatherers and fishers. They start making pots. They've settled down. That lasted 4,000 years. Then it ended. That is the climate stress in a microcosm.
I'm going to introduce a small period of stability. Having said about all this stress, this is 500,000 years ago. In the southern end of the Riff Valley of East Africa, this place called Kalambo Falls, which is where I worked.
But behind these beautiful falls lie sediments that have remained water logged for half 1 million years. We excavated these in 2019. The students here are working on two water logged pieces of wood. They're actually trees that have been shaped to work together. This is not a natural formation. They lock together and talk more about this.
This site is roughly 500,000-years-old. We never expected to find this. That's why this has been such a remarkable find. The world is coming and saying, what? What are people that are not us, homo sapiens doing making substantial structures? Well, let me just show you some of the evidence in the last six weeks, so this is new, don't tell anybody about this. But this is the top of the structure.
This is a mapping using a variety of photographic techniques of the intentional manipulation of the wood color coded for directions, so green, which is more vertical, and then long purple strikes here. They're working with the grain of the wood. That's the top. They are flattening it. You may just see there's a little bit of rounding here. This is a notch. Flip the wood over, and you see intensive working on the inside here. These people, whoever they were, knew what they were doing, what they wanted, it's intentional.
It's active changing of that material. What does the notch do? On the right here on my right, this is a Scandinavian notch making log cabins. People make notches because it holds logs together. On your left, that's the notch from Kalambo Falls. What does the notch do?
When I first saw this, in the ground, I saw my first thought was Lincoln Logs. Anybody grew up with Lincoln Logs hands, please? I'm not going to look at the age range. Here. Look, I just carry these around. I don't know why.
But, here's a Lincoln log. Here's a notch underneath. Here's a link an log, and it fits on the top, and the notch locks this one from side to side movement and the notch, locks this from back to forward movement. What do we seeing in Kalambo Falls is one locking the side to side. But they solve the problem of back and forth another way, and I call this folk engineering. It's a deliberate and intentional understanding of materials and changing the way it works.
Here is the notch, and the log under here has been shaped, so it drops. It means that this top log, as it moves down, it will hit the underlying log and can't move any further. These clever people shape the underlying log at its end, which you can't see it, but the marks here show that the end has been flattened and is broader than the width of the notch on the top.
They've locked it in. It created a stable framework to hold something we don't know what's on top. Platform for a hut, platform for storage, a walkway. That's the great mystery that still remains from Kalambo Falls. But the point is, they are raising whatever activity it is above a damp environment. They've understood the environment.
They are manipulating, I call this the earliest evidence of the built environment. Maybe I'm exaggerating, that wouldn't be news to many people. This is not the only find of its kind from Kalambo Falls in the 1950s, Archaeologist Desmond Clark, who was based in Berkeley. He found three other of these large trees that were cut and shaped and with a notch in the middle.
But he didn't have the evidence that they were actually formally worked. When you look at his excavations, I see this and I see these big tree trunks and forming a rectangle underneath, and you can see there's one of these notches in the middle, and I almost salivate with the prospect, here is a hut foundation. But, again, I didn't say that. How is this made? This is one of the large cutting tools of this period, it's called a cleaver, and I'm holding it in my hand.
It's beautifully designed, it has a very fine, strong and long, broad cutting edge. This piece from Kalambo Falls maps onto the marks. In this artifact from Kalambo Falls, they're exactly the same dimension. They were using cleavers to cut the trees down and to do the initial shaping. They knew what they were doing. We tried to replicate those cleavers and use them.
Let me just go back. We tried to use them handheld to work small pieces of wood that were green, and we just could not generate the leverage to cut what would have been a tree of this size, hardwood in the Zambian forest half 1 million years ago. This is where combinatorial comes to the rescue. It's a new concept of making tools. It's additive. You combine things together to work together in a way that's never been seen before everything's designed to be held in the hand and used directly in the hands.
This additive approach, a modular technology increases the length of the arm, increases the power you put into the working edge, increases the efficiency of the human body. I'm going to show you a test of the efficiency hypothesis, but also just in passing, say, this is the foundation of the first machine. What's the first machine? Well, I've given you answer here. It's the bow and arrow. There is stored energy in the bow and in the string, and you add the human and you've got a beautiful working thing. In the African agget they appear about 70,000 years ago.
Here's a published experiment. Sue's got experiments, so I'll go put one in, but, I'll be very brief because I know my time's running out. This is a test of the efficiency hypothesis.
We had 40 students, male and female. They're rugby player, so they're physically fit, it's going to be a tough task. We've got hafted tools and non-hafted.
They're using them in a short way. The hafted tools, we could show after we've recorded their muscle movement, their physiology in terms of oxygen consumption, heart rate, that the hafted tools were more efficient. Efficiency has an advantage here, not just in terms of producing more food, but it may have evolutionary advantage in terms of the individual fitness in terms of passing able to generate offspring in their offspring, able to generate offspring and survive through this greater efficiency of the technology.
That may be pushing it a bit too far. Pushing it even further, it may even contributed ultimately to population growth in some areas. Let's see this inaction. This is the get up in the lab, so the combination of physiological and kinematic recording, and this is going to be loud. [NOISE] This is a hafted hatchet with a set piece of wood.
We're recording the bodily movements in this form here, we got the XY and Z coordinates. Wow. We did that with handheld, and I can tell you it's painful. But we were able to demonstrate it quantitatively that hafting is an element of efficiency.
Who were the makers possibly. Homo heidelbergensis is a species that is part of this time period, 700,000 to 300,000 years ago. This is possible maker. The next oldest object, and I can see, I've got a minute left, so this is going to be very quick is a deep cave structure made by Neanderthals 176,000 years ago. This is extremely unusual. They went down into the cave, took torches, lit fires, broke pieces of the cave formations, stalagmites and built.
Semicircular walls with a cross piece to give stability, we had no idea what was going on. Let's call it ritual. In advance, go back [inaudible] The makers were Neanderthals, very similar to us. They lived in northern climates. They had a broad range of diet.
They made lentil cakes. They made wooden spears 300,000 years ago. They decorated their bodies, decorated their caves, decorated with paintings and engravings.
They were different from us, though. They lived in small populations, which means in terms of cultural learning from others, they have a smaller pool of sources of information. Maybe that's the reason they're no longer with us, but many of us have their genes in our bodies. I'm 1.1% Neanderthal. We can talk about that. Then finally, I know my time's up, but you need to see this because very few people have seen this. We're back to homo sapiens.
Or, we are now with homo sapiens, the last 300,000 years. From my understanding of the African record, this is the earliest evidence I can find of a structure, and it happened to be one I excavated back in the 90s. It's a windbreak inside a cave. Why would you do that? You can ask me about that, but it's a temporary structure, unlike what we saw at Kalambo Falls. This is very distinctive and very typical of homo sapiens of the last 300,000 years adapted to mobility through the technology to cope with the climate emergency. One more image here from the fabulous Kennis and Kennis Brothers, they've humanized the hominin record for us as archaeologist and also I hope for you as the public.
That's the face of the earliest member of us, homo sapiens from 300,000 years ago, from the site of Jebel Irhoud in Morocco. That leads me to the summary here. We have been shaped culturally, biologically, technologically. Technology is part of culture, so I just make that as part of this climate emergency.
Structures our response to limitations, but also opportunities in the environment. As I began saying everything we make is based on combinatorial concept, I'll end on that too, because we take that concept forward as we try to cope with our current climate emergency. I have to thank the finders, the British taxpayer, in particular, through the Arts and Humanities research council and have to do this.
But all people were involved in the project in Zambia. Thank you for your time.[MUSIC]
2024-11-10 17:58
