Saturday, July 31, 2010
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
BBC: Day We Learned To Think
NARRATOR (JOHN SHRAPNEL): [...] Hidden on the wild coast of South Africa where the Indian Ocean joins the Atlantic, there is a cave. Today it's abandoned, but once it teemed with life. For here, tens of thousands of years ago, some of our earliest ancestors lived.
PROF CHRIS HENSHILWOOD (African Heritage Research Institute): I like to think of areas along this coast as being the original Gardens of Eden. You really had everything that you needed.
NARRATOR: For the last 10 years this cave has been anthropologist Chris Henshilwood's life. Every year he's dug further and further down back into time searching for clues about the people who lived here and one day he came across something he never expected to see, something that, according to all the textbooks, just shouldn't have been there at all.
CHRIS HENSHILWOOD: This absolutely incredible image appeared. There was enormous excitement as you can imagine. Everybody was jumping around the place. Here was a definitive image that nobody would argue with was deliberately created.
NARRATOR: Henshilwood's discovery is threatening to revolutionise our understanding of one of humanity's biggest puzzles. History books may have to be rewritten and long-held theories torn up. Because of what he found one of the great scientific detective stories may finally have been solved: when did our ancestors cease being brute animals and first become truly human? When did we learn to think? [...]
PROF RICHARD KLEIN (Stanford University): Well I suppose if I had to isolate one trait that I would say marks modern humans, its innovativeness, creativity, the ability to introduce and invent new things all the time. No other animal species is continually reinventing its own behaviour.
NARRATOR: But when did this crucial ability to be creative and to dominate the world around us actually happen? Find the day we learned to think and you would have identified perhaps the single most important moment in human history.
PROF ALISON BROOKS (George Washington University): We essentially live in a world that we create in our heads. If you look around us everything that you live in is created by humans. This is a fascinating development. How do we come to behave the way we did? When did this happen?
NARRATOR: The search for the answer to that question has become one of science's greatest missions, but it was not going to be simple. Thinking leaves no traces. There are no fossilised thoughts waiting to be dug out of the ground and dated. It was like investigating a murder scene without a body. So scientists had to look for indirect clues - not fossils, but other evidence for when thought began and then they realised that thought must have come hand-in-hand with something else.
MONTAGE MAN: Come on, four pound a pound banana... WOMAN: Oh yes, I tried to speak to her yesterday. WOMAN: Yes, did you not... WOMAN: No, I didn't know...
NARRATOR: Thinking also means talking.
MAN: Give me a few...
NARRATOR: For us to be able to transform the world our thoughts need communication.
WOMAN: Thanks very much, thank you...
NARRATOR: So scientists concluded thinking could only have happened when we developed language.
MONTAGE MAN: ...utterly vacuous. MAN: ...make a simple mistake. MAN: ...some day he discovered mobiles... GEORGE BUSH: Read my lips.
PROF RANDALL WHITE (New York University): Language, it's really a critical threshold to cross. The ability to have things stand for other things and to recognise and to agree within a culture or, or even within a species that a certain thing stands for something, something else.
NARRATOR: But then archaeologists ran into the same problem all over again. There are no ancient tape-recordings and writing was only invented recently.
ALISON BROOKS: What are we going to look for? First of all it's going to give us evidence that humans were behaving in a modern way.
MAN: ...the high esteem in which she's held.
ALISON BROOKS: We're very stumped for how we're going to get evidence of these kinds of things, so we look in a way for proxies. NARRATOR: But there was one kind of evidence archaeologists could look for, something that was proof of thought and as clear a form of language as you could ever hope to see.
RICHARD KLEIN: How do we detect creativity in the, in the archaeological record? One obvious line of evidence is art. When you get unquestionable art that's widespread and common I think you could say that you're dealing with people just like us.
NARRATOR: Only humans create, and can make sense of, art.
PROF TERRENCE DEACON (University of California, Berkeley): I'm sure that dozens of dogs have walked down this street in the past years and perhaps not one has glanced up in awe or wonder and thought to himself what does this mean? For a dog this is colour on a wall, perhaps even less than that.
NARRATOR: But to a human being a painting is far more than just a collection of colours. It is a language, an expression of thought.
TERRENCE DEACON: In a lot of ways this becomes a way of talking. This is a story. In fact many, many stories. The listener, the reader, the onlooker has to decode the story, so when you look at this mural and see all of these different images you don't look at these for the pictures, you don't look at these for the colour, you don't look at these for what they do to the building, you look through them to meaning.
NARRATOR: For archaeologists this realisation that art, language and thought were all the same thing was a huge breakthrough. Suddenly what they had to look for was clear. Discover the earliest forms of human art and you would have found the day we learned to think. So starting decades ago archaeologists went hunting for art. They looked in the obvious place: Africa, the cradle of human evolution itself, but they found nothing. They traced the path the early humans took out of Africa through the Middle East. Still nothing. So archaeologists turned to Europe and then a wonder- the first ever cave paintings, stunningly crafted and detailed.
RANDALL WHITE: This is their representation of the world around them, so when I walk into one of these caves it just, absolutely gives me chills to think that in some miniscule percentage I'm able to actually peek into the way that they saw their world. We can walk into a cave like that and say I understand, I understand the mystery. A modern human would have done that, I would have done that.
NARRATOR: And they found far more: intricately worked statuettes; thousands of pieces of jewellery. Here at last in Europe was the evidence archaeologists had been searching for - symbolic art that could only have been made by people who could talk and think, like us, and it all dated from the same period - around 35,000 years ago. The European evidence was beyond doubt. It was as if a light bulb had gone on inside the human brain, a thinking Big Bang. For some reason we'd suddenly become truly modern humans.
RANDALL WHITE: All of the elements of the human mind were in place to create everything that exists subsequently - to go to the Moon, to create writing, to create agriculture, to do all of the things that we've done over the subsequent 35,000 years.
NARRATOR: And so, it seemed, the moment we'd learned to think had been found. This landmark moment in human history became known as the Human Revolution. Just how powerful this Human Revolution must have been was shown by something else, something more disturbing. For when our ancestors first arrived in Europe 35,000-40,000 years ago there were people already waiting for them, another species of human who'd been living in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years. They were called the Neanderthals.
PROF JEAN-JACQUES HUBLIN (University of Bordeaux): It's difficult for us to, to accept, even to understand this notion of different species of humans living in the same world. Very, very strange.
NARRATOR: The Neanderthals were as much a part of the human family as we are, closer to us than any living animal like chimpanzees, but because they'd come out of Africa long before our immediate ancestors they had evolved along very different lines.
JEAN-JACQUES HUBLIN: The face of a Neanderthal is a very long face and it's also very projecting in the middle portion of the face. It's very likely that Neanderthals had very big and very projecting nose. That was probably a very spectacular feature.
NARRATOR: The Europe the Neanderthals had made their home had been wracked by a succession of Ice Ages. It was a punishing environment and one which shaped their whole physical appearance.
JEAN-JACQUES HUBLIN: They have long trunk and rather short limbs which is something which allows to retain some warmth in the body. I would say they look a little bit like Eskimos. They were very well adapted to this very challenging and very changing environment, but about 40,000 years ago something happened to them that never happened before.
NARRATOR: What happened was the arrival of the modern humans. After 250,000 years of life the Neanderthal species was wiped out almost overnight. For scientists the arrival of the modern humans and the disappearance of the Neanderthals had to be more than a coincidence. The first clues to understanding what might have happened emerged when they studied Neanderthal tools.
RANDALL WHITE: When you're confronted with certain aspects of Neanderthal, of the Neanderthal archaeological record you scratch your head because you say I don't understand, I wouldn't have done it that way, why didn't they do it this way?
NARRATOR: Neanderthal tools were very different to ours in one crucial respect: everything was much simpler and above all, unlike the modern humans, there was no Neanderthal art and so no evidence these primitive humans could actually think.
RICHARD KLEIN: Neanderthals don't seem to have produced anything that we would really call art. They don't seem to have produced personal ornaments. They were in fact truly primitive people. Sure they were human, they just weren't modern human.
NARRATOR; And so archaeologists put together a theory to explain their disappearance. 40,000 years ago modern humans arrived in Europe and suddenly started to think. This gave them a unique advantage over the Neanderthals. In the battle for the scarce resources left by the Ice Age brains won out over brawn as our superior minds allowed us to defeat our physically tougher neighbours.
RANDALL WHITE: One population capable of communicating better, capable of inventing better, capable of organising better in the face of a population that had none of that in their 300,000 year tradition. It seems to me that the, the competition would not have lasted very long.
NARRATOR: Unable to think like us the apparently inferior Neanderthals were pushed to the brink of extinction until, finally, they vanished altogether. This then was the final proof of the power of the Human Revolution. That sudden dawning of thought had allowed us to surpass even our nearest relatives. The Human Revolution had given us the power to take over the world. But then the mutterings started. A strange anomaly emerged that didn't quite fit with the Human Revolution story. It began when scientists started looking for the first traces of that other supposed proof of thinking, not art but language. It was Jeffrey Laitman who started the confusion. He's an expert in anatomy and in particular one small part of the human body, the part we use to speak: the throat.
PROF JEFFREY LAITMAN (Mount Sinai School of Medicine): The throat is arguably the most important region in all of human anatomy and physiology. As a native New Yorker I like to think of this as the Grand Central Station of the human body. (Background voice) These are really nice. This is a really clear picture...
NARRATOR: Laitman began studying the human voice box, or larynx. He discovered that in the course of evolution our larynx had moved to a very different position to that of all other mammals.
JEFFREY LAITMAN: Something has happened in you and me and what's happened has been rather remarkable. Our larynx has descended in the throat. One key gain, of course, is that by the larynx being lower in the throat you have space above it, so what we get in the deal is a mechanism which has turned us, sound-wise and turned us vocal-wise from being a, a bugle to being a trumpet. (Background voices) Around the... Which one am I following (TALKING TOGETHER) Beautifully here, beautifully...
NARRATOR: What the lower larynx gives us is the ability to speak.
(Background voice) ...the upper lip is over here. Right, you can see it clearly on the...
NARRATOR: So Laitman started to wonder: when did this lowering of the larynx actually happen, when did we acquire this ability to speak? His research revealed that over the course of millions of years of evolution the shape of our skulls had changed in a way that had caused the larynx to descend.
JEFFREY LAITMAN: The big difference is when you find adult humans. When you look at the bottom of their skulls you see a little valley, a gully, which is very different and the relationship we found were that skulls that are very bent bottom, like this, relate to a larynx not positioned high on up, but a larynx that has gone much further down.
NARRATOR: The gully-shaped skull went hand-in-hand with the ability to speak, so Laitman began to investigate. When had this key development needed for language actually happened? Looking at skulls from further and further back in time he found something deeply puzzling.
JEFFREY LAITMAN: By the time of early members of our own species, Homo sapiens, some 100,000-200,000 years before the present, we start to see features that are almost identical to living humans.
NARRATOR: The modern gully shape and so the ability to speak had been reached at least 200,000 years ago, long before the Human Revolution.
JEFFREY LAITMAN: So they had the anatomy for it. Were they speaking like us? Now we get into the world of hypothesising. I wasn't there. However, if you have a car that has a nice, big engine and all the tyres you assume that car is going to run and it's going to run pretty fast otherwise why does it have that big engine and why does it have all those nice tyres? That's what we're dealing with.
NARRATOR: And then in Israel something happened to thicken the plot even further. In 1989 an archaeological site yielded for the first time a tiny and precious piece of a Neanderthal skeleton called the hyoid bone.
DR MARGARET CLEGG (University College London): The hyoid bone is a bone in your vocal tract and it sits about here and if you press with your fingers you can actually feel the shape of the bone.
NARRATOR: Just as in modern humans the Neanderthal hyoid would have been crucial in forming the larynx. For the first time scientists could compare our ability to make sounds with the Neanderthals and they were in for a surprise. The hyoid bones were virtually identical.
MARGARET CLEGG: The relationship between the hyoid bone and the cranial base and the face and the skull is the same in the Neanderthals as it is in modern humans and the implication of that is that the hyoid bone is going to sit in the same place as it does in modern humans. It's going to be low in the throat.
NARRATOR: In other words, like modern humans the Neanderthals had a low larynx. It meant they too would have been physically capable of speech. In fact in some ways they might even have done it better.
MARGARET CLEGG: The thing about the Neanderthals is that although they would have had a similar sort of vocal tract to ours there were differences in the Neanderthals. They've got great big chests, they've got huge noses and massive sinuses. Now the big chest and large nose is going to give them a much bigger sound, much more in common, perhaps, with an opera singer than with an ordinary person.
NARRATOR: There was now a clear paradox. The Human Revolution theory said we only learned to think 40,000 years ago and the proof of that was the sudden appearance of art in Europe, but according to the fossils that other apparent proof of thought, speech, had emerged 160,000 years earlier. It just didn't make sense.
[...]
NARRATOR: For supporters of the Human Revolution theory, like Richard Klein, there was now a real difficulty. How to reconcile the contradictory evidence of the art and the anatomy, so Klein proposed a radical theory. Even if humans had the anatomy for speech much earlier they didn't have the ability to use it. Then, in contrast to every other process in evolution, where change happens gradually, the human mind had been switched on suddenly through a single, freak genetic mutation. Only then did we start to think, to talk and to create art.
RICHARD KLEIN: I think that what happened 40,000 or 50,000 years ago was that there was a genetic mutation that allowed people to be very much more creative than they had been before, to think differently, to ask questions about what if I make my tools this way, what would be the result, in a way that no one had been able to do before.
NARRATOR: According to Klein thought had not emerged through gradual evolution, but in a sudden, dramatic leap forward. It was as if we'd been genetically touched by God. For Klein this sudden awakening was so powerful it was the only possible explanation for why we'd replaced the Neanderthals. We had the thinking genes and they didn't.
[...]
NARRATOR: It was a bold hypothesis and a compelling one. The Human Revolution theory remained the best explanation of the day we learned to think. But then, in the year 2000, on the other side of the world from Europe, in Africa, came something utterly unexpected. At Blombos, on the east coast of South Africa, anthropologist Chris Henshilwood had been quietly excavating his prehistoric cave for over a decade.
CHRIS HENSHILWOOD: This is Blombos cave, a very special find. We're really looking at what has been left here almost as if it was put down yesterday.
NARRATOR: As they dug down through the floor of the cave his team were going back to an ancient time of human habitation tens of thousands of years ago.
CHRIS HENSHILWOOD: We came down onto this layer you can see over here which really was quite remarkable. On the surface were lying the most beautifully made artefacts, bone points, spear points as well and immediately I realised we'd gone back a very, very long way in time.
NARRATOR: The beautifully crafted objects were dated to over 70,000 years ago, long before the Human Revolution, but there was still no proof the people in the cave were thinking people, like us.
CHRIS HENSHILWOOD: You always hope and think that perhaps one day you will find some really definitive evidence that'll tell you these people were modern. Are we going to find art in this environment, did these people even produce art? We didn't know that, we had no idea at all.
NARRATOR: Then one type of item started appearing over and over again.
CHRIS HENSHILWOOD: We noticed large numbers of pieces of ochre. Ochre is a soft stone, comes in reds and yellows. If you scrape it it'll produce a powder and that powder can be mixed with animal fat, for example, and used as a paint.
NARRATOR: At first no one could work out what the ochre was doing in the cave. It didn't occur there naturally. In fact, it could only have come from miles away. It must have been brought there for a reason, but why?
CHRIS HENSHILWOOD: I think ochre is very important to these people and we can see that simply because of the great numbers. 8,000 pieces of ochre in the old levels alone. They have scraped these pieces of ochre to, first of all, obtain the powder and I think secondly, so they could use the ochre to apply colour directly to other surfaces.
NARRATOR: Then one day Henshilwood found a piece of ochre that was different from the rest.
CHRIS HENSHILWOOD: One afternoon we were excavating here we found another piece of ochre. We'd been recording all the pieces of ochre we'd taken out. We found this piece of ochre, brushed up the side and there was this absolutely remarkable pattern revealed. There was huge excitement you can imagine.
NARRATOR: The ochre piece appeared to have been marked with a clear image, what seemed like an abstract geometric pattern.
CHRIS HENSHILWOOD: This was a deliberate construction of a series of cross-hatchings in each direction, a line across the top, a line through the middle and a line down the bottom, so it actually circumscribed that engraving as if it was they'd made the crosses and they'd deliberately surrounded it with these other lines as well.
NARRATOR: Henshilwood believed he'd found what was possibly the world's oldest ever work of art, but he had to be sure. Was it really that old and was it really art? So first they dated the ochre. The cave layers it was found in showed it to be 77,000 years old, twice as old as the Human Revolution. Then was it art? Archaeologist Francesco d'Errico is a specialist in prehistoric markings. He had to verify whether the lines were deliberately created to form a work of art and were not accidental knife marks.
DR FRANCESCO D'ERRICO (University of Bordeaux): These lines were produced with a point rather than a knife or a cutting tool because there is movement, there is a certain wobbly character to the line, so the lines on the piece are the results of a deliberate series of actions by the engraver with a tool specially designed for that purpose.
NARRATOR: D'Errico's analysis showed the slab of ochre had been specially rubbed down before being carefully, and deliberately, engraved. It meant there could be no more doubt.
CHRIS HENSHILWOOD: Here is the first example of the ability of humans to store something outside the human brain. You are storing the message that somebody else, who's part of that same group, could pick up and they would understand what that meant. This is the beginning of things like art, writing and everything else that follows.
NARRATOR: And this was no one-off find. Henshilwood found a second slab of ochre with a similar, abstract pattern. His discoveries at Blombos spread like wildfire through the scientific community.
ALISON BROOKS: I was at a scientific meeting and Francesco, who was sitting in the fourth or fifth row, turned out to have a photograph of this thing sort of in his pocket. He pulled out this photograph and I, I really felt as if my hair stood on end. It was like a definitive moment to see it. It couldn't be anything but the product of a modern human brain and yet it was old.
NARRATOR: The evidence of Blombos pointed to one conclusion: modern human behaviour had not started in Europe 40,000 years ago, but in Africa at least 30,000 years earlier. The Human Revolution theory had to be wrong. In the wake of the Blombos finds suddenly a whole host of other puzzling discoveries in Africa made sense - sophisticated stone tools that dated from 80,000 years ago; intricate harpoon points from over 90,000 years ago; and Jeffrey Laitman's research on the evolution of speech - all had been dismissed as signs of thinking and modern behaviour, but now everything is being reconsidered.
CHRIS HENSHILWOOD: We've a period. a mosaic if you like, of the evolution of the human mind that is not just focussed on Blombos, but spread across Africa and different things are happening at different times.
[...]
NARRATOR: So it seems there was no single day we learned to think. The art found in Europe was just the culmination of a long process that had taken hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of years. Human beings had not been genetically touched by God. Instead, like everything else in nature, thought and language had emerged gradually, just as the laws of evolution said they should, but there was one final puzzle that still needed to be solved. If thought had emerged over hundreds of thousands of years then why hadn't the Neanderthals evolved it too and if they had, then why had they been wiped out? The cave of Pech de L'Aze in France was home to generations of Neanderthals before the arrival of the modern humans in Europe. Excavated in the 1960s everything found here seemed to fit the typical picture of the Neanderthals as a primitive species, incapable of thinking like the modern humans, but then Chris Henshilwood's colleague, Francesco d'Errico noticed a whole class of evidence had been overlooked.
FRANCESCO D'ERRICO: These pieces of manganese have remained in museum drawers for more than 30 years.
NARRATOR: 450 pieces of black manganese oxide had been found in the layers of the cave. It's a rock whose powder can be used as a pigment, just like ochre, and again it seemed to have been used for a very particular purpose.
FRANCESCO D'ERRICO: Some of the pieces, like this one, are in the shape of a pencil. The two sides have been worked to produce a point which has been worn down. The pigments were then rubbed on a soft surface and our microscopic examination of the pigments show this must have been done on either animal skin or on human skin.
NARRATOR: If d'Errico was right and the pigment was used as a pencil it meant the Neanderthals must have been capable of some form of symbolic expression, some form of art.
FRANCESCO D'ERRICO: Some of these pigments must have been used symbolically, but from a period when the Neanderthals were not in contact with modern humans, a period which was the same as when red ochre was being used by modern humans in Africa.
NARRATOR: And d'Errico examined other evidence, like these stunning pieces of Neanderthal jewellery that dated from the time they were living side-by-side with modern humans.
FRANCESCO D'ERRICO: These objects were made by the Neanderthals, polished by the Neanderthals and equally worn by the Neanderthals. For me this is the proof the last Neanderthals were capable of symbolic thought.
NARRATOR: In other words, the evidence suggested that the Neanderthals may have been thinking and speaking too and they might have been doing it even before they met our ancestors. These revelations have meant the traditional view of the Neanderthals as a brutish, primitive species is being discarded. It means their disappearance may not have been as simple as the extermination of an inferior species by a superior one. Instead, d'Errico suspects something else may have been at work, something more mundane and random, like disease.
FRANCESCO D'ERRICO: The disappearance of the Neanderthals is still today a mystery. It could well be for epidemiological reasons due to the arrival of new illnesses, as has often happened when people invaded new territories.
NARRATOR: It would not have been the first time in history one invading population had led to the accidental extinction of another. It was the fate of the North and South American native peoples, devastated by 'flu and smallpox, brought in by Westerners. Perhaps it was a similar end that befell our last human cousins tens of thousands of years earlier.
FRANCISCO D'ERRICO: I think that if the Neanderthals had not disappeared they would have no doubt developed their own kind of modern behaviour, perhaps of a kind not so different from our own.
NARRATOR: Our picture of the Neanderthals is still far from definite, but it does raise a fascinating possibility. Had history taken a different turn perhaps the Neanderthals would have survived to be living amongst us today. It's an extraordinary thought. The collapse of the Human Revolution theory means that modern humanity did not suddenly arise in Europe as the textbooks once said. It began to emerge slowly long ago in places like Blombos in South Africa. This is where the first truly modern humans grew up over 70,000 years ago.
CHRIS HENSHILWOOD: I like to think about what the people must have thought and done when they lived at this cave. We sit in the same place those people sat 70,000 years ago. What were they doing, what were they thinking? I believe very much the same as we're doing right now. They were capable of symbolic thought. In other words, they could talk about yesterday and today and tomorrow. That is a remarkable step forward.
PROF CHRIS HENSHILWOOD (African Heritage Research Institute): I like to think of areas along this coast as being the original Gardens of Eden. You really had everything that you needed.
NARRATOR: For the last 10 years this cave has been anthropologist Chris Henshilwood's life. Every year he's dug further and further down back into time searching for clues about the people who lived here and one day he came across something he never expected to see, something that, according to all the textbooks, just shouldn't have been there at all.
CHRIS HENSHILWOOD: This absolutely incredible image appeared. There was enormous excitement as you can imagine. Everybody was jumping around the place. Here was a definitive image that nobody would argue with was deliberately created.
NARRATOR: Henshilwood's discovery is threatening to revolutionise our understanding of one of humanity's biggest puzzles. History books may have to be rewritten and long-held theories torn up. Because of what he found one of the great scientific detective stories may finally have been solved: when did our ancestors cease being brute animals and first become truly human? When did we learn to think? [...]
PROF RICHARD KLEIN (Stanford University): Well I suppose if I had to isolate one trait that I would say marks modern humans, its innovativeness, creativity, the ability to introduce and invent new things all the time. No other animal species is continually reinventing its own behaviour.
NARRATOR: But when did this crucial ability to be creative and to dominate the world around us actually happen? Find the day we learned to think and you would have identified perhaps the single most important moment in human history.
PROF ALISON BROOKS (George Washington University): We essentially live in a world that we create in our heads. If you look around us everything that you live in is created by humans. This is a fascinating development. How do we come to behave the way we did? When did this happen?
NARRATOR: The search for the answer to that question has become one of science's greatest missions, but it was not going to be simple. Thinking leaves no traces. There are no fossilised thoughts waiting to be dug out of the ground and dated. It was like investigating a murder scene without a body. So scientists had to look for indirect clues - not fossils, but other evidence for when thought began and then they realised that thought must have come hand-in-hand with something else.
MONTAGE MAN: Come on, four pound a pound banana... WOMAN: Oh yes, I tried to speak to her yesterday. WOMAN: Yes, did you not... WOMAN: No, I didn't know...
NARRATOR: Thinking also means talking.
MAN: Give me a few...
NARRATOR: For us to be able to transform the world our thoughts need communication.
WOMAN: Thanks very much, thank you...
NARRATOR: So scientists concluded thinking could only have happened when we developed language.
MONTAGE MAN: ...utterly vacuous. MAN: ...make a simple mistake. MAN: ...some day he discovered mobiles... GEORGE BUSH: Read my lips.
PROF RANDALL WHITE (New York University): Language, it's really a critical threshold to cross. The ability to have things stand for other things and to recognise and to agree within a culture or, or even within a species that a certain thing stands for something, something else.
NARRATOR: But then archaeologists ran into the same problem all over again. There are no ancient tape-recordings and writing was only invented recently.
ALISON BROOKS: What are we going to look for? First of all it's going to give us evidence that humans were behaving in a modern way.
MAN: ...the high esteem in which she's held.
ALISON BROOKS: We're very stumped for how we're going to get evidence of these kinds of things, so we look in a way for proxies. NARRATOR: But there was one kind of evidence archaeologists could look for, something that was proof of thought and as clear a form of language as you could ever hope to see.
RICHARD KLEIN: How do we detect creativity in the, in the archaeological record? One obvious line of evidence is art. When you get unquestionable art that's widespread and common I think you could say that you're dealing with people just like us.
NARRATOR: Only humans create, and can make sense of, art.
PROF TERRENCE DEACON (University of California, Berkeley): I'm sure that dozens of dogs have walked down this street in the past years and perhaps not one has glanced up in awe or wonder and thought to himself what does this mean? For a dog this is colour on a wall, perhaps even less than that.
NARRATOR: But to a human being a painting is far more than just a collection of colours. It is a language, an expression of thought.
TERRENCE DEACON: In a lot of ways this becomes a way of talking. This is a story. In fact many, many stories. The listener, the reader, the onlooker has to decode the story, so when you look at this mural and see all of these different images you don't look at these for the pictures, you don't look at these for the colour, you don't look at these for what they do to the building, you look through them to meaning.
NARRATOR: For archaeologists this realisation that art, language and thought were all the same thing was a huge breakthrough. Suddenly what they had to look for was clear. Discover the earliest forms of human art and you would have found the day we learned to think. So starting decades ago archaeologists went hunting for art. They looked in the obvious place: Africa, the cradle of human evolution itself, but they found nothing. They traced the path the early humans took out of Africa through the Middle East. Still nothing. So archaeologists turned to Europe and then a wonder- the first ever cave paintings, stunningly crafted and detailed.
RANDALL WHITE: This is their representation of the world around them, so when I walk into one of these caves it just, absolutely gives me chills to think that in some miniscule percentage I'm able to actually peek into the way that they saw their world. We can walk into a cave like that and say I understand, I understand the mystery. A modern human would have done that, I would have done that.
NARRATOR: And they found far more: intricately worked statuettes; thousands of pieces of jewellery. Here at last in Europe was the evidence archaeologists had been searching for - symbolic art that could only have been made by people who could talk and think, like us, and it all dated from the same period - around 35,000 years ago. The European evidence was beyond doubt. It was as if a light bulb had gone on inside the human brain, a thinking Big Bang. For some reason we'd suddenly become truly modern humans.
RANDALL WHITE: All of the elements of the human mind were in place to create everything that exists subsequently - to go to the Moon, to create writing, to create agriculture, to do all of the things that we've done over the subsequent 35,000 years.
NARRATOR: And so, it seemed, the moment we'd learned to think had been found. This landmark moment in human history became known as the Human Revolution. Just how powerful this Human Revolution must have been was shown by something else, something more disturbing. For when our ancestors first arrived in Europe 35,000-40,000 years ago there were people already waiting for them, another species of human who'd been living in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years. They were called the Neanderthals.
PROF JEAN-JACQUES HUBLIN (University of Bordeaux): It's difficult for us to, to accept, even to understand this notion of different species of humans living in the same world. Very, very strange.
NARRATOR: The Neanderthals were as much a part of the human family as we are, closer to us than any living animal like chimpanzees, but because they'd come out of Africa long before our immediate ancestors they had evolved along very different lines.
JEAN-JACQUES HUBLIN: The face of a Neanderthal is a very long face and it's also very projecting in the middle portion of the face. It's very likely that Neanderthals had very big and very projecting nose. That was probably a very spectacular feature.
NARRATOR: The Europe the Neanderthals had made their home had been wracked by a succession of Ice Ages. It was a punishing environment and one which shaped their whole physical appearance.
JEAN-JACQUES HUBLIN: They have long trunk and rather short limbs which is something which allows to retain some warmth in the body. I would say they look a little bit like Eskimos. They were very well adapted to this very challenging and very changing environment, but about 40,000 years ago something happened to them that never happened before.
NARRATOR: What happened was the arrival of the modern humans. After 250,000 years of life the Neanderthal species was wiped out almost overnight. For scientists the arrival of the modern humans and the disappearance of the Neanderthals had to be more than a coincidence. The first clues to understanding what might have happened emerged when they studied Neanderthal tools.
RANDALL WHITE: When you're confronted with certain aspects of Neanderthal, of the Neanderthal archaeological record you scratch your head because you say I don't understand, I wouldn't have done it that way, why didn't they do it this way?
NARRATOR: Neanderthal tools were very different to ours in one crucial respect: everything was much simpler and above all, unlike the modern humans, there was no Neanderthal art and so no evidence these primitive humans could actually think.
RICHARD KLEIN: Neanderthals don't seem to have produced anything that we would really call art. They don't seem to have produced personal ornaments. They were in fact truly primitive people. Sure they were human, they just weren't modern human.
NARRATOR; And so archaeologists put together a theory to explain their disappearance. 40,000 years ago modern humans arrived in Europe and suddenly started to think. This gave them a unique advantage over the Neanderthals. In the battle for the scarce resources left by the Ice Age brains won out over brawn as our superior minds allowed us to defeat our physically tougher neighbours.
RANDALL WHITE: One population capable of communicating better, capable of inventing better, capable of organising better in the face of a population that had none of that in their 300,000 year tradition. It seems to me that the, the competition would not have lasted very long.
NARRATOR: Unable to think like us the apparently inferior Neanderthals were pushed to the brink of extinction until, finally, they vanished altogether. This then was the final proof of the power of the Human Revolution. That sudden dawning of thought had allowed us to surpass even our nearest relatives. The Human Revolution had given us the power to take over the world. But then the mutterings started. A strange anomaly emerged that didn't quite fit with the Human Revolution story. It began when scientists started looking for the first traces of that other supposed proof of thinking, not art but language. It was Jeffrey Laitman who started the confusion. He's an expert in anatomy and in particular one small part of the human body, the part we use to speak: the throat.
PROF JEFFREY LAITMAN (Mount Sinai School of Medicine): The throat is arguably the most important region in all of human anatomy and physiology. As a native New Yorker I like to think of this as the Grand Central Station of the human body. (Background voice) These are really nice. This is a really clear picture...
NARRATOR: Laitman began studying the human voice box, or larynx. He discovered that in the course of evolution our larynx had moved to a very different position to that of all other mammals.
JEFFREY LAITMAN: Something has happened in you and me and what's happened has been rather remarkable. Our larynx has descended in the throat. One key gain, of course, is that by the larynx being lower in the throat you have space above it, so what we get in the deal is a mechanism which has turned us, sound-wise and turned us vocal-wise from being a, a bugle to being a trumpet. (Background voices) Around the... Which one am I following (TALKING TOGETHER) Beautifully here, beautifully...
NARRATOR: What the lower larynx gives us is the ability to speak.
(Background voice) ...the upper lip is over here. Right, you can see it clearly on the...
NARRATOR: So Laitman started to wonder: when did this lowering of the larynx actually happen, when did we acquire this ability to speak? His research revealed that over the course of millions of years of evolution the shape of our skulls had changed in a way that had caused the larynx to descend.
JEFFREY LAITMAN: The big difference is when you find adult humans. When you look at the bottom of their skulls you see a little valley, a gully, which is very different and the relationship we found were that skulls that are very bent bottom, like this, relate to a larynx not positioned high on up, but a larynx that has gone much further down.
NARRATOR: The gully-shaped skull went hand-in-hand with the ability to speak, so Laitman began to investigate. When had this key development needed for language actually happened? Looking at skulls from further and further back in time he found something deeply puzzling.
JEFFREY LAITMAN: By the time of early members of our own species, Homo sapiens, some 100,000-200,000 years before the present, we start to see features that are almost identical to living humans.
NARRATOR: The modern gully shape and so the ability to speak had been reached at least 200,000 years ago, long before the Human Revolution.
JEFFREY LAITMAN: So they had the anatomy for it. Were they speaking like us? Now we get into the world of hypothesising. I wasn't there. However, if you have a car that has a nice, big engine and all the tyres you assume that car is going to run and it's going to run pretty fast otherwise why does it have that big engine and why does it have all those nice tyres? That's what we're dealing with.
NARRATOR: And then in Israel something happened to thicken the plot even further. In 1989 an archaeological site yielded for the first time a tiny and precious piece of a Neanderthal skeleton called the hyoid bone.
DR MARGARET CLEGG (University College London): The hyoid bone is a bone in your vocal tract and it sits about here and if you press with your fingers you can actually feel the shape of the bone.
NARRATOR: Just as in modern humans the Neanderthal hyoid would have been crucial in forming the larynx. For the first time scientists could compare our ability to make sounds with the Neanderthals and they were in for a surprise. The hyoid bones were virtually identical.
MARGARET CLEGG: The relationship between the hyoid bone and the cranial base and the face and the skull is the same in the Neanderthals as it is in modern humans and the implication of that is that the hyoid bone is going to sit in the same place as it does in modern humans. It's going to be low in the throat.
NARRATOR: In other words, like modern humans the Neanderthals had a low larynx. It meant they too would have been physically capable of speech. In fact in some ways they might even have done it better.
MARGARET CLEGG: The thing about the Neanderthals is that although they would have had a similar sort of vocal tract to ours there were differences in the Neanderthals. They've got great big chests, they've got huge noses and massive sinuses. Now the big chest and large nose is going to give them a much bigger sound, much more in common, perhaps, with an opera singer than with an ordinary person.
NARRATOR: There was now a clear paradox. The Human Revolution theory said we only learned to think 40,000 years ago and the proof of that was the sudden appearance of art in Europe, but according to the fossils that other apparent proof of thought, speech, had emerged 160,000 years earlier. It just didn't make sense.
[...]
NARRATOR: For supporters of the Human Revolution theory, like Richard Klein, there was now a real difficulty. How to reconcile the contradictory evidence of the art and the anatomy, so Klein proposed a radical theory. Even if humans had the anatomy for speech much earlier they didn't have the ability to use it. Then, in contrast to every other process in evolution, where change happens gradually, the human mind had been switched on suddenly through a single, freak genetic mutation. Only then did we start to think, to talk and to create art.
RICHARD KLEIN: I think that what happened 40,000 or 50,000 years ago was that there was a genetic mutation that allowed people to be very much more creative than they had been before, to think differently, to ask questions about what if I make my tools this way, what would be the result, in a way that no one had been able to do before.
NARRATOR: According to Klein thought had not emerged through gradual evolution, but in a sudden, dramatic leap forward. It was as if we'd been genetically touched by God. For Klein this sudden awakening was so powerful it was the only possible explanation for why we'd replaced the Neanderthals. We had the thinking genes and they didn't.
[...]
NARRATOR: It was a bold hypothesis and a compelling one. The Human Revolution theory remained the best explanation of the day we learned to think. But then, in the year 2000, on the other side of the world from Europe, in Africa, came something utterly unexpected. At Blombos, on the east coast of South Africa, anthropologist Chris Henshilwood had been quietly excavating his prehistoric cave for over a decade.
CHRIS HENSHILWOOD: This is Blombos cave, a very special find. We're really looking at what has been left here almost as if it was put down yesterday.
NARRATOR: As they dug down through the floor of the cave his team were going back to an ancient time of human habitation tens of thousands of years ago.
CHRIS HENSHILWOOD: We came down onto this layer you can see over here which really was quite remarkable. On the surface were lying the most beautifully made artefacts, bone points, spear points as well and immediately I realised we'd gone back a very, very long way in time.
NARRATOR: The beautifully crafted objects were dated to over 70,000 years ago, long before the Human Revolution, but there was still no proof the people in the cave were thinking people, like us.
CHRIS HENSHILWOOD: You always hope and think that perhaps one day you will find some really definitive evidence that'll tell you these people were modern. Are we going to find art in this environment, did these people even produce art? We didn't know that, we had no idea at all.
NARRATOR: Then one type of item started appearing over and over again.
CHRIS HENSHILWOOD: We noticed large numbers of pieces of ochre. Ochre is a soft stone, comes in reds and yellows. If you scrape it it'll produce a powder and that powder can be mixed with animal fat, for example, and used as a paint.
NARRATOR: At first no one could work out what the ochre was doing in the cave. It didn't occur there naturally. In fact, it could only have come from miles away. It must have been brought there for a reason, but why?
CHRIS HENSHILWOOD: I think ochre is very important to these people and we can see that simply because of the great numbers. 8,000 pieces of ochre in the old levels alone. They have scraped these pieces of ochre to, first of all, obtain the powder and I think secondly, so they could use the ochre to apply colour directly to other surfaces.
NARRATOR: Then one day Henshilwood found a piece of ochre that was different from the rest.
CHRIS HENSHILWOOD: One afternoon we were excavating here we found another piece of ochre. We'd been recording all the pieces of ochre we'd taken out. We found this piece of ochre, brushed up the side and there was this absolutely remarkable pattern revealed. There was huge excitement you can imagine.
NARRATOR: The ochre piece appeared to have been marked with a clear image, what seemed like an abstract geometric pattern.
CHRIS HENSHILWOOD: This was a deliberate construction of a series of cross-hatchings in each direction, a line across the top, a line through the middle and a line down the bottom, so it actually circumscribed that engraving as if it was they'd made the crosses and they'd deliberately surrounded it with these other lines as well.
NARRATOR: Henshilwood believed he'd found what was possibly the world's oldest ever work of art, but he had to be sure. Was it really that old and was it really art? So first they dated the ochre. The cave layers it was found in showed it to be 77,000 years old, twice as old as the Human Revolution. Then was it art? Archaeologist Francesco d'Errico is a specialist in prehistoric markings. He had to verify whether the lines were deliberately created to form a work of art and were not accidental knife marks.
DR FRANCESCO D'ERRICO (University of Bordeaux): These lines were produced with a point rather than a knife or a cutting tool because there is movement, there is a certain wobbly character to the line, so the lines on the piece are the results of a deliberate series of actions by the engraver with a tool specially designed for that purpose.
NARRATOR: D'Errico's analysis showed the slab of ochre had been specially rubbed down before being carefully, and deliberately, engraved. It meant there could be no more doubt.
CHRIS HENSHILWOOD: Here is the first example of the ability of humans to store something outside the human brain. You are storing the message that somebody else, who's part of that same group, could pick up and they would understand what that meant. This is the beginning of things like art, writing and everything else that follows.
NARRATOR: And this was no one-off find. Henshilwood found a second slab of ochre with a similar, abstract pattern. His discoveries at Blombos spread like wildfire through the scientific community.
ALISON BROOKS: I was at a scientific meeting and Francesco, who was sitting in the fourth or fifth row, turned out to have a photograph of this thing sort of in his pocket. He pulled out this photograph and I, I really felt as if my hair stood on end. It was like a definitive moment to see it. It couldn't be anything but the product of a modern human brain and yet it was old.
NARRATOR: The evidence of Blombos pointed to one conclusion: modern human behaviour had not started in Europe 40,000 years ago, but in Africa at least 30,000 years earlier. The Human Revolution theory had to be wrong. In the wake of the Blombos finds suddenly a whole host of other puzzling discoveries in Africa made sense - sophisticated stone tools that dated from 80,000 years ago; intricate harpoon points from over 90,000 years ago; and Jeffrey Laitman's research on the evolution of speech - all had been dismissed as signs of thinking and modern behaviour, but now everything is being reconsidered.
CHRIS HENSHILWOOD: We've a period. a mosaic if you like, of the evolution of the human mind that is not just focussed on Blombos, but spread across Africa and different things are happening at different times.
[...]
NARRATOR: So it seems there was no single day we learned to think. The art found in Europe was just the culmination of a long process that had taken hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of years. Human beings had not been genetically touched by God. Instead, like everything else in nature, thought and language had emerged gradually, just as the laws of evolution said they should, but there was one final puzzle that still needed to be solved. If thought had emerged over hundreds of thousands of years then why hadn't the Neanderthals evolved it too and if they had, then why had they been wiped out? The cave of Pech de L'Aze in France was home to generations of Neanderthals before the arrival of the modern humans in Europe. Excavated in the 1960s everything found here seemed to fit the typical picture of the Neanderthals as a primitive species, incapable of thinking like the modern humans, but then Chris Henshilwood's colleague, Francesco d'Errico noticed a whole class of evidence had been overlooked.
FRANCESCO D'ERRICO: These pieces of manganese have remained in museum drawers for more than 30 years.
NARRATOR: 450 pieces of black manganese oxide had been found in the layers of the cave. It's a rock whose powder can be used as a pigment, just like ochre, and again it seemed to have been used for a very particular purpose.
FRANCESCO D'ERRICO: Some of the pieces, like this one, are in the shape of a pencil. The two sides have been worked to produce a point which has been worn down. The pigments were then rubbed on a soft surface and our microscopic examination of the pigments show this must have been done on either animal skin or on human skin.
NARRATOR: If d'Errico was right and the pigment was used as a pencil it meant the Neanderthals must have been capable of some form of symbolic expression, some form of art.
FRANCESCO D'ERRICO: Some of these pigments must have been used symbolically, but from a period when the Neanderthals were not in contact with modern humans, a period which was the same as when red ochre was being used by modern humans in Africa.
NARRATOR: And d'Errico examined other evidence, like these stunning pieces of Neanderthal jewellery that dated from the time they were living side-by-side with modern humans.
FRANCESCO D'ERRICO: These objects were made by the Neanderthals, polished by the Neanderthals and equally worn by the Neanderthals. For me this is the proof the last Neanderthals were capable of symbolic thought.
NARRATOR: In other words, the evidence suggested that the Neanderthals may have been thinking and speaking too and they might have been doing it even before they met our ancestors. These revelations have meant the traditional view of the Neanderthals as a brutish, primitive species is being discarded. It means their disappearance may not have been as simple as the extermination of an inferior species by a superior one. Instead, d'Errico suspects something else may have been at work, something more mundane and random, like disease.
FRANCESCO D'ERRICO: The disappearance of the Neanderthals is still today a mystery. It could well be for epidemiological reasons due to the arrival of new illnesses, as has often happened when people invaded new territories.
NARRATOR: It would not have been the first time in history one invading population had led to the accidental extinction of another. It was the fate of the North and South American native peoples, devastated by 'flu and smallpox, brought in by Westerners. Perhaps it was a similar end that befell our last human cousins tens of thousands of years earlier.
FRANCISCO D'ERRICO: I think that if the Neanderthals had not disappeared they would have no doubt developed their own kind of modern behaviour, perhaps of a kind not so different from our own.
NARRATOR: Our picture of the Neanderthals is still far from definite, but it does raise a fascinating possibility. Had history taken a different turn perhaps the Neanderthals would have survived to be living amongst us today. It's an extraordinary thought. The collapse of the Human Revolution theory means that modern humanity did not suddenly arise in Europe as the textbooks once said. It began to emerge slowly long ago in places like Blombos in South Africa. This is where the first truly modern humans grew up over 70,000 years ago.
CHRIS HENSHILWOOD: I like to think about what the people must have thought and done when they lived at this cave. We sit in the same place those people sat 70,000 years ago. What were they doing, what were they thinking? I believe very much the same as we're doing right now. They were capable of symbolic thought. In other words, they could talk about yesterday and today and tomorrow. That is a remarkable step forward.
#BBC: The Lost Pyramids of Caral
NARRATOR (JOHN SHRAPNEL): It is one of humanity's epic journeys. Thousands of years ago people first came out of the wild and formed civilisation. They would build huge monuments, like the pyramids and all the great cities of the Ancient World, but why did they do it? What forces gave birth to civilisation? For years archaeologists have been trying to get back to when it all began to find the answer and now at last it seems they may have done it, for they are now exploring a lost city of pyramids in Peru. It is nearly five thousand years old and the story it tells about why we embarked on this great journey is more extraordinary than anyone had ever expected. Peru's desert coast, trapped between the Andes mountains and the Pacific Ocean. Nothing survives out here. Explorers once hurried through in search of the gold and the treasures of the Incas hidden in the mountains beyond, but no one stopped, but then seven years ago somebody did. Ruth Shady had heard of some mysterious unexplained mounds and, alone, set off through the desert to find them and then right in the middle of this dead land she found this: a huge hill rising out of the desert.
DR RUTH SHADY (University of San Marcos, Lima): When I first arrived in the valley in 1994 I was overwhelmed. This place is somewhere between the seat of the gods and the home of man. It is a very strange place.
NARRATOR: Then as she looked closer she thought she could see something hidden under the rubble and stones. In her mind's eye she could make out the faintest outline of a pyramid and as she looked around she could she another and then another. Ruth Shady had stumbled on a lost city. It was a discovery that would stun the world of archaeology because it would finally begin to solve one of the great unanswered questions: why our ancestors abandoned a life of simplicity and started down the road to civilisation. Today's modern city is the pinnacle of human civilisation. Millions of people choosing to live and work together. In a civilisation everyone has a specific task that helps towards a common goal. Workers, professionals, home-makers - they all come together to build the same society. Above them all, powerful rulers. They command who does what and when and where they do it, but it was not always like this. How this complex system came about has long been a huge puzzle to scientists.
PROF C.C. LAMBERG-KARLOVSKY (Harvard University): For more than a century surely one of the most important questions addressed by archaeologists is also its biggest. What is the origin of civilisation? This has been a central theme, a guiding post for virtually all archaeologists working on every continent of the world.
NARRATOR: Because civilisation was not inevitable. For more than a hundred thousand years there were neither rulers nor cities. Humanity either roamed the world in small family groupings, or lived in tiny villages. There was little planning, little leadership and no future. Just survival and then something happened. Six thousand years ago people started to move out of their villages and build huge cities. Archaeologists called this crossing the great divide. This happened in six places across the world - in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and India - and in the New World in Peru and Central America. Without these pioneers crossing that great divide our modern world would not exist.
DR KEN FEDER (Central Connecticut State University): And what's exciting for us is that here we are in the 21st century living in societies that ultimately are, that ultimately result from that historical change, that historical divide.
NARRATOR: Archaeologists examined each early civilisation in turn searching for clues as to why they'd suddenly appeared and again and again they found they had many things in common.
C.C. LAMBERG-KARLOVSKY: For instance, numeracy, mathematics and calendrical systems. Writing.
KEN FEDER: Pottery. Metallurgy.
NARRATOR: But above all there was something else.
KEN FEDER: Monumental architecture.
NARRATOR: In every early civilisation it was the same. Huge, monumental structures. This was the ultimate sign of people coming together under rulers for a common goal. Pyramids marked the arrival of civilisation.
KEN FEDER: You can't build a huge structure like that on the basis of consensus. You have to have leaders and followers, you have to have specialists, you have to have people who are in charge, people who can tell individual groups alright today you will be doing this, this group you're going to be doing something different.
NARRATOR: But none of this explained why our ancestors crossed this historic divide. What had made us give up the simple life for the city? That question still bewitches archaeologists because to explain it is to understand the very soul of modern humanity.
KEN FEDER: And that's the key question: how does that happen, when does it happen and why does it happen?
NARRATOR: There were, of course, plenty of theories. Some said it was irrigation, others trade, some claim even today it was aliens, but many said it was something else entirely, something terrifying: warfare. The theory was simple. Warfare forced groups of villages to huddle together for protection. This led to new ways of organising society. Powerful leaders emerged and these leaders became pharaohs and kings. They would assign tasks and organise lives. Complex society was born out of fear. For 20 years Jonathan Haas and Winifred Creamer have tested the warfare theory around the world. A husband and wife team of archaeologists, they've found the tell-tale signs of battle in every early civilisation.
JONATHAN HAAS (Field Museum, Chicago): As you look at culture, as it becomes more complex, warfare seems to be everywhere, that these societies seem to be always at war, or war's depicted in the art, war's depicted in the architecture, you see a warrior class or you see standing armies, you see generals. When you get writing, writing is about warfare.
NARRATOR: While it is not universally accepted, many agree with Haas's conclusions that warfare was a crucial driving force behind the birth of modern society.
C.C. LAMBERG-KARLOVSKY: I frankly find it difficult to conceive of the emergence of urbanisation complexity civilisation in the absence of degrees of conflict, or the presence of, of warfare.
NARRATOR: But it was only a theory. Archaeologists had no proof, so they spent years scouring the earth, hunting for a way of turning theory into fact. What they needed to find was what archaeologists call a mother city. This is the missing link of archaeology, the very first stage of civilisation, just as humanity crossed the great divide.
KEN FEDER: So if we could find one of these absolutely earliest stages of civilisation it would make an enormous contribution to our understanding of the process of the development of civilisation.
NARRATOR: If their theory was right, then the mother city should be filled with the signs of battle, but they always hit the same obstacle. Civilisations constantly build upon themselves. It means the earliest stages are all but wiped out.
KEN FEDER: Human beings reconstruct buildings, human beings recycle materials. It is very often difficult to be able to coax out of that mass of material sort of the base of that civilisation. What constitutes the original civilisation.
NARRATOR: After years of searching in the Old World they'd found little. They still needed to find the earliest stage that had not been built on, somewhere pristine and so the search for the mother city switched from the Old World to the New. Peru, home to one of the greatest of all civilisations - the Incas. Here high in the Andean mountains they ruled a mighty empire until destroyed by the Spaniards five hundred years ago, but the origins of this great civilisation stretch back thousands of years and its earliest stages remain shrouded in mystery and so the search for the mother city settled here, this time on the Peruvian coast where, thousands of years ago, it all began. Seven years ago the search to find that elusive first stage of civilisation arrived here, just 10 miles from the coast in the Casma Valley. Something truly spectacular was discovered, one of the biggest pyramids in the world. This pyramid is so huge that for a century explorers ignored it, convinced it could only be a hill. It is the rival of anything in Egypt.
DR TOM POZORSKI (University of Texas-Pan American): This is a pyramid that ranks as one of the largest in the world, period. It's one that covers on the surface of the mound it covers like 15 football fields. The volume of it is some, we calculate something like two million cubic metres of material.
NARRATOR: But the pyramid was only the beginning. The whole site spreads out over six miles and includes a host of lesser pyramids. In front of the main pyramid four plazas extend out for over a mile. Thousands of people could have met and done business here. The Casma Valley is one of the wonders of Peru and it is a site that reeks of civilisation.
TOM POZORSKI: Visitors of this valley, upon first seeing this pyramid, what is said this society that built it had its act together. This society's very powerful, this society is, is a society that really is very highly organised.
NARRATOR: Tom Pozorski and his wife Sheila were about to make Casma into one of the sensations of archaeology because four years ago they unearthed some wooden poles inside the main pyramid. Wood can be carbon dated. The results showed it had been built in 1500 BC. It made Casma the oldest city ever discovered in the Americas and an instant candidate to be the mother city. Then they dug deeper and everywhere they found the tell-tale signs of a civilisation at its very earliest stage. There was pottery, but it was very simple and there was art, but again it was crude. Everything was at its most basic. It all seemed to point to one thing - Casma had to be the mother city, but the final question for the archaeologists was were there signs of battle, was it really true that the first civilisations were born out of warfare? Then came the final breakthrough. It happened in one of the outlying pyramids. There they found some carvings.
TOM POZORSKI: We have warrior figures next to their victims who are cut up, they're beheaded, their bodies cut in half.
JONATHAN HAAS: Heads have blood flowing from their eyes and blood flowing from their mouths and then you have body parts so you'll have just the leg and you'll have a torso or you'll have feet and you'll have crossed hands.
NARRATOR: For archaeologists like Jonathan Haas these carvings confirmed what they'd long suspected: warfare really did seem to be the force that gave birth to civilisation. It appeared the answer to why we'd crossed the great divide from the simple to the civilised had been found. Archaeology's great quest seemed to have ended at Casma, the mother city, but Casma's days as an archaeological sensation were numbered. Just as it was reaching the height of its fame, Ruth Shady found her mysterious hills and they would transform everything. Ruth went back to the site again and again and she took with her a team of students and archaeologists. Their first task: to get a rough idea of how old Caral, as the site was known, actually was. For this they needed to find pottery because archaeologists are skilled at dating sites just by the style of the pottery they find, but after weeks of searching they found nothing.
RUTH SHADY: For two months we looked for pottery. Every night we asked each other if anybody had found any, but nobody had. We were completely baffled.
NARRATOR: This was very puzzling. Every early civilisation is littered with pottery, even Casma, but not this one, so they looked for something else you'd expect to find in a civilisation: metal tools, but the only tools they found were made not of metal but stone. There was only one conclusion: this was a civilisation at an extraordinarily early stage.
RUTH SHADY: Little by little as we analysed our findings, we began to realise that this place was completely different to anything we had seen before and it was much older than we'd expected.
NARRATOR: But how old? They'd still found nothing they could date and so they decided to dig inside Caral's biggest structures - the pyramids. This was a massive undertaking. The site was enormous and the pyramids huge. Ruth needed help, so she recruited the Army. In their way lay thousands of tons of sand, rubble and stones built up over millennia. It would have to be shifted and so as to avoid any damage to the original structures it could only be done one bucket at a time. Gradually they caught glimpses of what lay beneath: some of the original stones, traces of plaster, paint not seen for thousands of years, a series of staircases and the wall at the front of the pyramid. There was no doubt these pyramids would have required craftsmen, architects, a huge workforce and leaders, all the trappings of civilisation and then at last one of her team found what they were looking for. Sticking out of the foundations of one of the buildings were reeds. These reeds had been woven into what are called shicra bags and the bags clearly had been used to carry the stones from the mountains. It's a technique found only in the very oldest buildings in Peru. Reeds can be carbon dated. it meant that at last Ruth could find out just how old Caral was, but she lacked the facilities to do it herself and so she sought help from abroad and so last year Jonathan Haas and Winifred Creamer were invited to the site. What they saw stunned them.
JONATHAN HAAS: It was the most incredible assemblage in the, of archaeological sites that we had ever seen anywhere in the world. it was literally one of those double-take moments when your mouth drops open and you go my God, I've never seen anything like that in my life.
NARRATOR: They had no doubt Caral was a site of potentially huge importance. It made their dating of the shicra bags all the more crucial. They took 12 samples to the University of Illinois for testing. If the bags were from about 1400 BC Caral would certainly be an important discovery, but younger than Casma. Dates around 2000 BC would make it the oldest city in the Americas. Dates any earlier seemed inconceivable. Three months later the results arrived.
DR WINIFRED CREAMER (Northern Illinois University): I was at work and Jonathan called me and he said they are absolutely great, they're all early.
NARRATOR: The bags were dated at 2600 BC. Caral was nearly five thousand years old, as old as the pyramids of Egypt, older than anyone had thought possible.
JONATHAN HAAS: I was virtually in hysterics for three days afterwards.
NARRATOR: Caral was a thousand years older than Casma. it meant Casma could not be the mother city. it had to be Caral. It was now Caral's turn to be a sensation. The new mother city meant archaeologists could at last seek answers to their great question: why had civilisation begun?
KEN FEDER: We've eliminated some of these false starts and blind alleys. We say OK, this is the point that wherever we look in the world where civilisation develops this happens and this allows for everything else.
C.C. LAMBERG-KARLOVSKY: In the context of archaeology worldwide it is of major significance. It allows us a new, independent laboratory. We can look here for all of those common questions that we ask of every civilisation.
JONATHAN HAAS: We have here a unique opportunity, historically an unique opportunity to look at the start, to look at that transition, to, to, we have our missing link, if you will.
NARRATOR: Ruth could now show the world what a society looked like at the very dawn of civilisation. Her work revealed that at the heart of Caral was six pyramids arranged around a massive central plaza. Alongside them an amphitheatre and temple, the religious heart of Caral. it contained a furnace which Ruth believes fired a flame that was meant to burn forever. In the centre of the plaza were houses, some ornate, some simple. Dominating everything the main pyramid, seat of the city's rulers, and the symbol that the people of Caral had left behind the primitive life and discovered civilisation. This then is what modern society might have looked like at its very beginning, but why was the city here, why did civilisation start at Caral and that's when the trouble started. It began when Jonathan Haas, the world's expert on the warfare theory, paid another visit. He was searching for evidence to back it up. The first thing he thought he might find were battlements.
JONATHAN HAAS: I began walking and climbing all of the hillsides around Caral and it finally dawned on me that there weren't any fortifications round these sites.
NARRATOR: Meanwhile, Ruth and her team were searching Caral for weapons, for depictions of warfare, anything, but again there was nothing.
RUTH SHADY: We found no sign of the sort of weapons you see in later periods of history, like stone cudgels. I don't see any evidence of conflict. The city isn't walled, its inhabitants did not feel under any treat of war, there are no weapons of war.
NARRATOR: Haas was now extremely puzzled, so he widened his search. He headed to the valley's mouth through which any invaders would have had to pass.
JONATHAN HAAS: I was an approaching army that's where I'd come and that's where I should find defensive fortifications. There should be a wall going across it. They're easy places to put walls across all of these access routes.
NARRATOR: But again nothing.
JONATHAN HAAS: There should be something to slow down the enemy and in fact there's nothing. There are no fortifications round any of these sites.
NARRATOR: Jonathan Haas was now facing an uncomfortable truth. He had spent years pursuing the theory that warfare was the force that created civilisation and now it was falling apart in front of him.
JONATHAN HAAS: You seemed to really have the beginnings of that complex society and I'm able to look at it right at the start and I look for the conflict and I look for the warfare, I look for the armies and the fortifications and they're not there. They should be here and they're not and you have to change your whole mind-set about the role of warfare in these societies and so it's demolishing our warfare hypothesis. The warfare hypothesis just doesn't work.
NARRATOR: The message of Caral was clear: warfare had nothing to do with the creation of civilisation, here at least. The whole quest to find out why civilisation was formed would have to start again. The eyes of the world were now on Ruth. Everyone wanted to know what had been going on at Caral. If it wasn't warfare what was it that brought these people to build their magnificent city? What emerged was that Caral was a society that knew how to have fun. Near the main temple Ruth and her team found beautifully carved flutes made from the bones of condors.
RUTH SHADY: The flutes were the first things we found that showed people working as specialised craftsmen in Caral.
NARRATOR: But the people of Caral also enjoyed more worldly pleasures. back in the laboratory Ruth's team unearthed fragments of the fruit of something called the achiote plant. Even today, it's used by rainforest tribes as body paint and food colouring, but it has one other use: to enhance sexual performance. They also found the shells of a creature called the megabolinus snail. These were used as ornaments for necklaces and inside one of them they spotted traces of a mysterious white powder. It was lime. The team also found seeds from the coca plant at Caral and that meant drugs. The lime when mixed with the coca enhances the effects of the cocaine in the coca plant. It's a powerful stimulant.
RUTH SHADY: There are indications that they used drugs because we have found little containers in which there was some lime. We also found inhalers made out of bone.
NARRATOR: The shamans, or holy men, among certain Amazon tribes use something similar even today. The effects are dramatic. During the trance they believe they're possessed by animal spirits. Ruth believes this kind of thing could have been happening during festivals in Caral all those years ago.
RUTH SHADY: It's probable that during the very frequent religious ceremonies in Caral there would have been some hallucinatory drug present.
NARRATOR: But these finds told Ruth even more about Caral. The plant, the snail and even the flutes were a clue to the basis of the whole civilisation because they had one other very special quality. They were entirely alien to the deserts surrounding Caral. They came either from high in the Andes, or the rainforest and that was two hundred miles away. All these goods had been brought to Caral from far away, but why? The mystery deepened further. Ruth's team found that Caral didn't just import its pleasures. It also brought in the most basic commodity of all: food. It seemed the staple diet of Caral was completely bizarre for a city deep in the desert. It was fish. There were endless fish bones, mainly of sardines and anchovies. They could only have come from the Pacific coast more than 20 miles away. There was now a real puzzle. Goods of all kinds seemed to be flooding into Caral from all over Peru. Why? What was happening at Caral that drew them there? The mystery of Caral was now captivating Jonathan Haas and Winifred Creamer. Ever since the collapse of the warfare idea they'd roamed the valleys around Caral hunting for clues for an alternative theory. Their wanderings took them over the hills to the neighbouring valleys and it dawned on them all the valleys of Caral had one thing in common: rivers. Even today Caral is fed by rivers flowing down from the Andes to the sea. These rivers would be the key in unlocking the mystery of why civilisation first formed here at Caral because with rivers had come a huge technological advance: irrigation.
WINIFRED CREAMER: This is the simplest possible kind of irrigation system. All you needed to do was to take a hoe, or something like that, and scratch a little ditch from the river to a piece of land and you could tell that you were going at the right angle 'cos the water'd follow right in.
NARRATOR: The valleys near Caral are crisscrossed with ancient irrigation trenches and irrigation would have transformed the desert.
JONATHAN HAAS: Once I bring water off of that river to the Peruvian desert that desert blooms. Once I get water to it it just is the most productive land you could possibly hope for.
NARRATOR: Jonathan believed Caral was once a huge Garden of Eden. Here in the middle of the desert it would have been a vast oasis of fruit and vegetable fields. It would have made Caral one of the wonders of the Ancient World and irrigation led to something else, the thing that would turn out to be the crucial innovation behind the rise of civilisation at Caral. Ruth's researchers had begun to look for the kinds of vegetables the people of Caral had been eating. In amongst all the beans and nuts they found cotton seeds, lots of them. In fact cotton seemed to be everywhere.
RUTH SHADY: Practically every building contained cotton seeds or cotton fibres or textiles. We were very surprised at the beginning at the sheer amount of cotton.
NARRATOR: Some of the cotton was used for clothes, but it had another use that had nothing to do with Caral: fishing nets. This net was found at the coast not far from Caral. It's nearly 5,000 years old, as old as Caral itself. It was then that it all became clear to Ruth. Caral was engaged in trade. it made cotton nets for the fishermen who sent fish as payment.
RUTH SHADY: A trading link was established between the fishermen and the farmers. The farmers grew the cotton which the fishermen needed to make the nets and the fishermen gave them in exchange shellfish and dried fish.
NARRATOR: This was Ruth Shady's great insight. Trade in cotton led to a huge, self-sustaining system. Caral made the cotton for the nets. With the nets the fishermen could catch more food. More food meant more people could live at Caral to grow more cotton and so Caral became a booming trading centre and the trade spread. Goods have been found from as far away as Ecuador, the Andes and of course the rainforests hundreds of miles away.
RUTH SHADY: There is trade with people in the mountains, the jungle and also with the coastal people from further away. There is a trading network which is far more widespread than just the internal trade within the valleys around Caral.
NARRATOR: It seemed then that they'd found the answer to that great archaeological quest. The driving force that led to the birth of civilisation at Caral five thousand years ago was not warfare. it seemed to be trade. Ruth Shady, the archaeologist from Peru, had cracked it.
JONATHAN HAAS: It looks like exchange is what's unifying this system together and is kind of emerging as the most effective theory we have today to explain how this system developed.
NARRATOR: And amazingly this trade seems to have built a contented world. There were no battles, no fortresses. Civilisation in Peru appeared to have been born of a time of peace - or had it? Just as everything seemed to be solved, Ruth's team made a chance discovery that threatened to undermine everything. In one of the grander houses, perhaps home to one of the elite, they spotted something unusual.
RUTH SHADY: We thought we had finished work on this section. We looked at the floor and we didn't think there was anything else there, but when we came back the following day we noticed that there was a slight dip in one section of the floor of the building.
NARRATOR: At first they thought they'd found a personal object, perhaps an ornament. When they looked closer they could see it was a reed basket. It had lain under the floor of a house for nearly five thousand years. When Ruth cleaned the dust away she found something much more disturbing inside: human bones. They'd stumbled upon the body of a small child, perhaps even a baby. Suddenly it raised the frightening possibility. Perhaps the people of Caral started a tradition which was to be common in later civilisations in the Americas: human sacrifice. Perhaps Caral was not a civilisation of peace and happiness after all, perhaps it was brutal and held together not by trade, but fear. It became vital to find out how this child had died. Was it really a victim of some barbaric practice? The body was sent back to the labs for analysis and with it the objects found buried alongside. Ruth was surprised to see the baby had been placed in the foetal position before being buried and even more surprised to see the body had been carefully wrapped in several layers of fine cloth. Alongside the body were small stones. They'd been carefully polished and holes drilled through their centre. They had to be beads, perhaps of a necklace. Then they examined the bones. They were of a two month old baby and then, slowly, each bone was examined for signs of violence, but there were none. They suspected this child had died of natural causes. it had been lovingly prepared for burial. This first citizen of American civilisation was not a sacrifice, but a much loved child. Caral really had been a city of peace after all, so this is the real story of Caral. In the desert a city of pyramids arose built on riches gained peacefully through trade. It spawned a civilisation that lasted unbroken for more than four thousand years. It is a story that may yet contain the answer to archaeology's greatest question: why human beings crossed the great divide from the simple to the civilised?
RUTH SHADY: Caral was the first city with the first central government ever to be created. Caral changes all our current thinking about the origins of civilisation.
NARRATOR: Because it seems that five thousand years ago they had no need for warfare. Caral enjoyed a peace that lasted almost a millennium, an achievement unmatched in the modern world.
JONATHAN HAAS: That's a period of a thousand years of peace. I can't have a thousand years of peace if warfare's natural to human beings. Warfare's part of human nature. You don't get a millennium of no war.
NARRATOR: Perhaps that is Caral's real legacy. Human civilisation was not born in bloodshed and battle. Warfare was a later part of the human story. Great things can come from peace.
DR RUTH SHADY (University of San Marcos, Lima): When I first arrived in the valley in 1994 I was overwhelmed. This place is somewhere between the seat of the gods and the home of man. It is a very strange place.
NARRATOR: Then as she looked closer she thought she could see something hidden under the rubble and stones. In her mind's eye she could make out the faintest outline of a pyramid and as she looked around she could she another and then another. Ruth Shady had stumbled on a lost city. It was a discovery that would stun the world of archaeology because it would finally begin to solve one of the great unanswered questions: why our ancestors abandoned a life of simplicity and started down the road to civilisation. Today's modern city is the pinnacle of human civilisation. Millions of people choosing to live and work together. In a civilisation everyone has a specific task that helps towards a common goal. Workers, professionals, home-makers - they all come together to build the same society. Above them all, powerful rulers. They command who does what and when and where they do it, but it was not always like this. How this complex system came about has long been a huge puzzle to scientists.
PROF C.C. LAMBERG-KARLOVSKY (Harvard University): For more than a century surely one of the most important questions addressed by archaeologists is also its biggest. What is the origin of civilisation? This has been a central theme, a guiding post for virtually all archaeologists working on every continent of the world.
NARRATOR: Because civilisation was not inevitable. For more than a hundred thousand years there were neither rulers nor cities. Humanity either roamed the world in small family groupings, or lived in tiny villages. There was little planning, little leadership and no future. Just survival and then something happened. Six thousand years ago people started to move out of their villages and build huge cities. Archaeologists called this crossing the great divide. This happened in six places across the world - in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and India - and in the New World in Peru and Central America. Without these pioneers crossing that great divide our modern world would not exist.
DR KEN FEDER (Central Connecticut State University): And what's exciting for us is that here we are in the 21st century living in societies that ultimately are, that ultimately result from that historical change, that historical divide.
NARRATOR: Archaeologists examined each early civilisation in turn searching for clues as to why they'd suddenly appeared and again and again they found they had many things in common.
C.C. LAMBERG-KARLOVSKY: For instance, numeracy, mathematics and calendrical systems. Writing.
KEN FEDER: Pottery. Metallurgy.
NARRATOR: But above all there was something else.
KEN FEDER: Monumental architecture.
NARRATOR: In every early civilisation it was the same. Huge, monumental structures. This was the ultimate sign of people coming together under rulers for a common goal. Pyramids marked the arrival of civilisation.
KEN FEDER: You can't build a huge structure like that on the basis of consensus. You have to have leaders and followers, you have to have specialists, you have to have people who are in charge, people who can tell individual groups alright today you will be doing this, this group you're going to be doing something different.
NARRATOR: But none of this explained why our ancestors crossed this historic divide. What had made us give up the simple life for the city? That question still bewitches archaeologists because to explain it is to understand the very soul of modern humanity.
KEN FEDER: And that's the key question: how does that happen, when does it happen and why does it happen?
NARRATOR: There were, of course, plenty of theories. Some said it was irrigation, others trade, some claim even today it was aliens, but many said it was something else entirely, something terrifying: warfare. The theory was simple. Warfare forced groups of villages to huddle together for protection. This led to new ways of organising society. Powerful leaders emerged and these leaders became pharaohs and kings. They would assign tasks and organise lives. Complex society was born out of fear. For 20 years Jonathan Haas and Winifred Creamer have tested the warfare theory around the world. A husband and wife team of archaeologists, they've found the tell-tale signs of battle in every early civilisation.
JONATHAN HAAS (Field Museum, Chicago): As you look at culture, as it becomes more complex, warfare seems to be everywhere, that these societies seem to be always at war, or war's depicted in the art, war's depicted in the architecture, you see a warrior class or you see standing armies, you see generals. When you get writing, writing is about warfare.
NARRATOR: While it is not universally accepted, many agree with Haas's conclusions that warfare was a crucial driving force behind the birth of modern society.
C.C. LAMBERG-KARLOVSKY: I frankly find it difficult to conceive of the emergence of urbanisation complexity civilisation in the absence of degrees of conflict, or the presence of, of warfare.
NARRATOR: But it was only a theory. Archaeologists had no proof, so they spent years scouring the earth, hunting for a way of turning theory into fact. What they needed to find was what archaeologists call a mother city. This is the missing link of archaeology, the very first stage of civilisation, just as humanity crossed the great divide.
KEN FEDER: So if we could find one of these absolutely earliest stages of civilisation it would make an enormous contribution to our understanding of the process of the development of civilisation.
NARRATOR: If their theory was right, then the mother city should be filled with the signs of battle, but they always hit the same obstacle. Civilisations constantly build upon themselves. It means the earliest stages are all but wiped out.
KEN FEDER: Human beings reconstruct buildings, human beings recycle materials. It is very often difficult to be able to coax out of that mass of material sort of the base of that civilisation. What constitutes the original civilisation.
NARRATOR: After years of searching in the Old World they'd found little. They still needed to find the earliest stage that had not been built on, somewhere pristine and so the search for the mother city switched from the Old World to the New. Peru, home to one of the greatest of all civilisations - the Incas. Here high in the Andean mountains they ruled a mighty empire until destroyed by the Spaniards five hundred years ago, but the origins of this great civilisation stretch back thousands of years and its earliest stages remain shrouded in mystery and so the search for the mother city settled here, this time on the Peruvian coast where, thousands of years ago, it all began. Seven years ago the search to find that elusive first stage of civilisation arrived here, just 10 miles from the coast in the Casma Valley. Something truly spectacular was discovered, one of the biggest pyramids in the world. This pyramid is so huge that for a century explorers ignored it, convinced it could only be a hill. It is the rival of anything in Egypt.
DR TOM POZORSKI (University of Texas-Pan American): This is a pyramid that ranks as one of the largest in the world, period. It's one that covers on the surface of the mound it covers like 15 football fields. The volume of it is some, we calculate something like two million cubic metres of material.
NARRATOR: But the pyramid was only the beginning. The whole site spreads out over six miles and includes a host of lesser pyramids. In front of the main pyramid four plazas extend out for over a mile. Thousands of people could have met and done business here. The Casma Valley is one of the wonders of Peru and it is a site that reeks of civilisation.
TOM POZORSKI: Visitors of this valley, upon first seeing this pyramid, what is said this society that built it had its act together. This society's very powerful, this society is, is a society that really is very highly organised.
NARRATOR: Tom Pozorski and his wife Sheila were about to make Casma into one of the sensations of archaeology because four years ago they unearthed some wooden poles inside the main pyramid. Wood can be carbon dated. The results showed it had been built in 1500 BC. It made Casma the oldest city ever discovered in the Americas and an instant candidate to be the mother city. Then they dug deeper and everywhere they found the tell-tale signs of a civilisation at its very earliest stage. There was pottery, but it was very simple and there was art, but again it was crude. Everything was at its most basic. It all seemed to point to one thing - Casma had to be the mother city, but the final question for the archaeologists was were there signs of battle, was it really true that the first civilisations were born out of warfare? Then came the final breakthrough. It happened in one of the outlying pyramids. There they found some carvings.
TOM POZORSKI: We have warrior figures next to their victims who are cut up, they're beheaded, their bodies cut in half.
JONATHAN HAAS: Heads have blood flowing from their eyes and blood flowing from their mouths and then you have body parts so you'll have just the leg and you'll have a torso or you'll have feet and you'll have crossed hands.
NARRATOR: For archaeologists like Jonathan Haas these carvings confirmed what they'd long suspected: warfare really did seem to be the force that gave birth to civilisation. It appeared the answer to why we'd crossed the great divide from the simple to the civilised had been found. Archaeology's great quest seemed to have ended at Casma, the mother city, but Casma's days as an archaeological sensation were numbered. Just as it was reaching the height of its fame, Ruth Shady found her mysterious hills and they would transform everything. Ruth went back to the site again and again and she took with her a team of students and archaeologists. Their first task: to get a rough idea of how old Caral, as the site was known, actually was. For this they needed to find pottery because archaeologists are skilled at dating sites just by the style of the pottery they find, but after weeks of searching they found nothing.
RUTH SHADY: For two months we looked for pottery. Every night we asked each other if anybody had found any, but nobody had. We were completely baffled.
NARRATOR: This was very puzzling. Every early civilisation is littered with pottery, even Casma, but not this one, so they looked for something else you'd expect to find in a civilisation: metal tools, but the only tools they found were made not of metal but stone. There was only one conclusion: this was a civilisation at an extraordinarily early stage.
RUTH SHADY: Little by little as we analysed our findings, we began to realise that this place was completely different to anything we had seen before and it was much older than we'd expected.
NARRATOR: But how old? They'd still found nothing they could date and so they decided to dig inside Caral's biggest structures - the pyramids. This was a massive undertaking. The site was enormous and the pyramids huge. Ruth needed help, so she recruited the Army. In their way lay thousands of tons of sand, rubble and stones built up over millennia. It would have to be shifted and so as to avoid any damage to the original structures it could only be done one bucket at a time. Gradually they caught glimpses of what lay beneath: some of the original stones, traces of plaster, paint not seen for thousands of years, a series of staircases and the wall at the front of the pyramid. There was no doubt these pyramids would have required craftsmen, architects, a huge workforce and leaders, all the trappings of civilisation and then at last one of her team found what they were looking for. Sticking out of the foundations of one of the buildings were reeds. These reeds had been woven into what are called shicra bags and the bags clearly had been used to carry the stones from the mountains. It's a technique found only in the very oldest buildings in Peru. Reeds can be carbon dated. it meant that at last Ruth could find out just how old Caral was, but she lacked the facilities to do it herself and so she sought help from abroad and so last year Jonathan Haas and Winifred Creamer were invited to the site. What they saw stunned them.
JONATHAN HAAS: It was the most incredible assemblage in the, of archaeological sites that we had ever seen anywhere in the world. it was literally one of those double-take moments when your mouth drops open and you go my God, I've never seen anything like that in my life.
NARRATOR: They had no doubt Caral was a site of potentially huge importance. It made their dating of the shicra bags all the more crucial. They took 12 samples to the University of Illinois for testing. If the bags were from about 1400 BC Caral would certainly be an important discovery, but younger than Casma. Dates around 2000 BC would make it the oldest city in the Americas. Dates any earlier seemed inconceivable. Three months later the results arrived.
DR WINIFRED CREAMER (Northern Illinois University): I was at work and Jonathan called me and he said they are absolutely great, they're all early.
NARRATOR: The bags were dated at 2600 BC. Caral was nearly five thousand years old, as old as the pyramids of Egypt, older than anyone had thought possible.
JONATHAN HAAS: I was virtually in hysterics for three days afterwards.
NARRATOR: Caral was a thousand years older than Casma. it meant Casma could not be the mother city. it had to be Caral. It was now Caral's turn to be a sensation. The new mother city meant archaeologists could at last seek answers to their great question: why had civilisation begun?
KEN FEDER: We've eliminated some of these false starts and blind alleys. We say OK, this is the point that wherever we look in the world where civilisation develops this happens and this allows for everything else.
C.C. LAMBERG-KARLOVSKY: In the context of archaeology worldwide it is of major significance. It allows us a new, independent laboratory. We can look here for all of those common questions that we ask of every civilisation.
JONATHAN HAAS: We have here a unique opportunity, historically an unique opportunity to look at the start, to look at that transition, to, to, we have our missing link, if you will.
NARRATOR: Ruth could now show the world what a society looked like at the very dawn of civilisation. Her work revealed that at the heart of Caral was six pyramids arranged around a massive central plaza. Alongside them an amphitheatre and temple, the religious heart of Caral. it contained a furnace which Ruth believes fired a flame that was meant to burn forever. In the centre of the plaza were houses, some ornate, some simple. Dominating everything the main pyramid, seat of the city's rulers, and the symbol that the people of Caral had left behind the primitive life and discovered civilisation. This then is what modern society might have looked like at its very beginning, but why was the city here, why did civilisation start at Caral and that's when the trouble started. It began when Jonathan Haas, the world's expert on the warfare theory, paid another visit. He was searching for evidence to back it up. The first thing he thought he might find were battlements.
JONATHAN HAAS: I began walking and climbing all of the hillsides around Caral and it finally dawned on me that there weren't any fortifications round these sites.
NARRATOR: Meanwhile, Ruth and her team were searching Caral for weapons, for depictions of warfare, anything, but again there was nothing.
RUTH SHADY: We found no sign of the sort of weapons you see in later periods of history, like stone cudgels. I don't see any evidence of conflict. The city isn't walled, its inhabitants did not feel under any treat of war, there are no weapons of war.
NARRATOR: Haas was now extremely puzzled, so he widened his search. He headed to the valley's mouth through which any invaders would have had to pass.
JONATHAN HAAS: I was an approaching army that's where I'd come and that's where I should find defensive fortifications. There should be a wall going across it. They're easy places to put walls across all of these access routes.
NARRATOR: But again nothing.
JONATHAN HAAS: There should be something to slow down the enemy and in fact there's nothing. There are no fortifications round any of these sites.
NARRATOR: Jonathan Haas was now facing an uncomfortable truth. He had spent years pursuing the theory that warfare was the force that created civilisation and now it was falling apart in front of him.
JONATHAN HAAS: You seemed to really have the beginnings of that complex society and I'm able to look at it right at the start and I look for the conflict and I look for the warfare, I look for the armies and the fortifications and they're not there. They should be here and they're not and you have to change your whole mind-set about the role of warfare in these societies and so it's demolishing our warfare hypothesis. The warfare hypothesis just doesn't work.
NARRATOR: The message of Caral was clear: warfare had nothing to do with the creation of civilisation, here at least. The whole quest to find out why civilisation was formed would have to start again. The eyes of the world were now on Ruth. Everyone wanted to know what had been going on at Caral. If it wasn't warfare what was it that brought these people to build their magnificent city? What emerged was that Caral was a society that knew how to have fun. Near the main temple Ruth and her team found beautifully carved flutes made from the bones of condors.
RUTH SHADY: The flutes were the first things we found that showed people working as specialised craftsmen in Caral.
NARRATOR: But the people of Caral also enjoyed more worldly pleasures. back in the laboratory Ruth's team unearthed fragments of the fruit of something called the achiote plant. Even today, it's used by rainforest tribes as body paint and food colouring, but it has one other use: to enhance sexual performance. They also found the shells of a creature called the megabolinus snail. These were used as ornaments for necklaces and inside one of them they spotted traces of a mysterious white powder. It was lime. The team also found seeds from the coca plant at Caral and that meant drugs. The lime when mixed with the coca enhances the effects of the cocaine in the coca plant. It's a powerful stimulant.
RUTH SHADY: There are indications that they used drugs because we have found little containers in which there was some lime. We also found inhalers made out of bone.
NARRATOR: The shamans, or holy men, among certain Amazon tribes use something similar even today. The effects are dramatic. During the trance they believe they're possessed by animal spirits. Ruth believes this kind of thing could have been happening during festivals in Caral all those years ago.
RUTH SHADY: It's probable that during the very frequent religious ceremonies in Caral there would have been some hallucinatory drug present.
NARRATOR: But these finds told Ruth even more about Caral. The plant, the snail and even the flutes were a clue to the basis of the whole civilisation because they had one other very special quality. They were entirely alien to the deserts surrounding Caral. They came either from high in the Andes, or the rainforest and that was two hundred miles away. All these goods had been brought to Caral from far away, but why? The mystery deepened further. Ruth's team found that Caral didn't just import its pleasures. It also brought in the most basic commodity of all: food. It seemed the staple diet of Caral was completely bizarre for a city deep in the desert. It was fish. There were endless fish bones, mainly of sardines and anchovies. They could only have come from the Pacific coast more than 20 miles away. There was now a real puzzle. Goods of all kinds seemed to be flooding into Caral from all over Peru. Why? What was happening at Caral that drew them there? The mystery of Caral was now captivating Jonathan Haas and Winifred Creamer. Ever since the collapse of the warfare idea they'd roamed the valleys around Caral hunting for clues for an alternative theory. Their wanderings took them over the hills to the neighbouring valleys and it dawned on them all the valleys of Caral had one thing in common: rivers. Even today Caral is fed by rivers flowing down from the Andes to the sea. These rivers would be the key in unlocking the mystery of why civilisation first formed here at Caral because with rivers had come a huge technological advance: irrigation.
WINIFRED CREAMER: This is the simplest possible kind of irrigation system. All you needed to do was to take a hoe, or something like that, and scratch a little ditch from the river to a piece of land and you could tell that you were going at the right angle 'cos the water'd follow right in.
NARRATOR: The valleys near Caral are crisscrossed with ancient irrigation trenches and irrigation would have transformed the desert.
JONATHAN HAAS: Once I bring water off of that river to the Peruvian desert that desert blooms. Once I get water to it it just is the most productive land you could possibly hope for.
NARRATOR: Jonathan believed Caral was once a huge Garden of Eden. Here in the middle of the desert it would have been a vast oasis of fruit and vegetable fields. It would have made Caral one of the wonders of the Ancient World and irrigation led to something else, the thing that would turn out to be the crucial innovation behind the rise of civilisation at Caral. Ruth's researchers had begun to look for the kinds of vegetables the people of Caral had been eating. In amongst all the beans and nuts they found cotton seeds, lots of them. In fact cotton seemed to be everywhere.
RUTH SHADY: Practically every building contained cotton seeds or cotton fibres or textiles. We were very surprised at the beginning at the sheer amount of cotton.
NARRATOR: Some of the cotton was used for clothes, but it had another use that had nothing to do with Caral: fishing nets. This net was found at the coast not far from Caral. It's nearly 5,000 years old, as old as Caral itself. It was then that it all became clear to Ruth. Caral was engaged in trade. it made cotton nets for the fishermen who sent fish as payment.
RUTH SHADY: A trading link was established between the fishermen and the farmers. The farmers grew the cotton which the fishermen needed to make the nets and the fishermen gave them in exchange shellfish and dried fish.
NARRATOR: This was Ruth Shady's great insight. Trade in cotton led to a huge, self-sustaining system. Caral made the cotton for the nets. With the nets the fishermen could catch more food. More food meant more people could live at Caral to grow more cotton and so Caral became a booming trading centre and the trade spread. Goods have been found from as far away as Ecuador, the Andes and of course the rainforests hundreds of miles away.
RUTH SHADY: There is trade with people in the mountains, the jungle and also with the coastal people from further away. There is a trading network which is far more widespread than just the internal trade within the valleys around Caral.
NARRATOR: It seemed then that they'd found the answer to that great archaeological quest. The driving force that led to the birth of civilisation at Caral five thousand years ago was not warfare. it seemed to be trade. Ruth Shady, the archaeologist from Peru, had cracked it.
JONATHAN HAAS: It looks like exchange is what's unifying this system together and is kind of emerging as the most effective theory we have today to explain how this system developed.
NARRATOR: And amazingly this trade seems to have built a contented world. There were no battles, no fortresses. Civilisation in Peru appeared to have been born of a time of peace - or had it? Just as everything seemed to be solved, Ruth's team made a chance discovery that threatened to undermine everything. In one of the grander houses, perhaps home to one of the elite, they spotted something unusual.
RUTH SHADY: We thought we had finished work on this section. We looked at the floor and we didn't think there was anything else there, but when we came back the following day we noticed that there was a slight dip in one section of the floor of the building.
NARRATOR: At first they thought they'd found a personal object, perhaps an ornament. When they looked closer they could see it was a reed basket. It had lain under the floor of a house for nearly five thousand years. When Ruth cleaned the dust away she found something much more disturbing inside: human bones. They'd stumbled upon the body of a small child, perhaps even a baby. Suddenly it raised the frightening possibility. Perhaps the people of Caral started a tradition which was to be common in later civilisations in the Americas: human sacrifice. Perhaps Caral was not a civilisation of peace and happiness after all, perhaps it was brutal and held together not by trade, but fear. It became vital to find out how this child had died. Was it really a victim of some barbaric practice? The body was sent back to the labs for analysis and with it the objects found buried alongside. Ruth was surprised to see the baby had been placed in the foetal position before being buried and even more surprised to see the body had been carefully wrapped in several layers of fine cloth. Alongside the body were small stones. They'd been carefully polished and holes drilled through their centre. They had to be beads, perhaps of a necklace. Then they examined the bones. They were of a two month old baby and then, slowly, each bone was examined for signs of violence, but there were none. They suspected this child had died of natural causes. it had been lovingly prepared for burial. This first citizen of American civilisation was not a sacrifice, but a much loved child. Caral really had been a city of peace after all, so this is the real story of Caral. In the desert a city of pyramids arose built on riches gained peacefully through trade. It spawned a civilisation that lasted unbroken for more than four thousand years. It is a story that may yet contain the answer to archaeology's greatest question: why human beings crossed the great divide from the simple to the civilised?
RUTH SHADY: Caral was the first city with the first central government ever to be created. Caral changes all our current thinking about the origins of civilisation.
NARRATOR: Because it seems that five thousand years ago they had no need for warfare. Caral enjoyed a peace that lasted almost a millennium, an achievement unmatched in the modern world.
JONATHAN HAAS: That's a period of a thousand years of peace. I can't have a thousand years of peace if warfare's natural to human beings. Warfare's part of human nature. You don't get a millennium of no war.
NARRATOR: Perhaps that is Caral's real legacy. Human civilisation was not born in bloodshed and battle. Warfare was a later part of the human story. Great things can come from peace.
#Parenti: Terrorism, Globalism & Conspiracy
Michael Parenti | Terrorism, Globalism And Conspiracy | 9.10.02 | yt |
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