In this video Marean explains how that unique landscape and its natural resources would have been important to early humans – and allowed new cultural innovations.

What do you think of Marean’s hypothesis that South Africa was an important refugium in tough climatic times?

You can see also some behind-the-scenes footage and photos from our campfire shoot.

What do you think of Dominique’s answer to our favorite question: what is the human spark?

The first Neanderthal skull discovered in modern times hid in a cave in Engis, Belgium until a local doctor pulled it out in 1829. In this video, archaeologist Michel Toussaint describes how the discovery was ahead of its time — three decades before publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species.

Can you think of other scientific ideas or breakthroughs that took time for society to accept?

Randall White with Alan Alda in the Abri Castanet rock shelter excavation. Credit: Maggie Villiger

By Randall White, New York University

I have had a love affair with southwestern France and its prehistory for all of my adult life. I first visited the collapsed rock shelter of Abri Castanet, nine kilometers downstream from Lascaux Cave in the Vézère Valley of France, when I was a young graduate student some 33 years ago. At that time, I was doing thesis research on the geographic locations of Cro-Magnon living sites in southwestern France, seeking to understand the logic behind prehistoric choice of living places. Abri Castanet stuck in my mind for reasons both good and bad.

Some of the ancient beads unearthed at the site are displayed in a nearby museum. Credit: Larry Engel

The bad: There had been no excavations at Castanet since the 1920s and the site was in a terrible state of abandon, even serving as the garbage dump for the farmhouse above the site. As a young, idealistic archaeologist in 1976, this seemed to me to be a shocking state of affairs for a site that had yielded much of what was then the oldest known evidence for art and body ornaments.

The good: It was apparent to me that much of the site remained intact and unexcavated. Since the early excavations at Castanet had been done with rather crude, pre-modern excavation techniques, the fact that there remained substantial intact deposits meant that new excavations could someday provide a wealth of data on the precise dates of the early symbolic artifacts and on the context of their production and use more than 30,000 years ago. Was Castanet an ordinary living site…or something more special? What time of the year was it occupied? How exactly were the dozens of engraved and painted limestone blocks related to other human activities and living structures at the site? Were the hundreds of personal ornaments manufactured here or were they brought in by exchange only to be lost or abandoned on-site?

A number of the Abri Castanet finds are housed just up the road at the tiny Musée de Prehistoire du Site de Castel Merle. Credit: Larry Engel

In 1976, as I contemplated the desolation of the site, then obscured by a thick mat of moss, ivy, and decomposing debris, it did not even cross my mind that someday I would undertake decades of research here that would lead to discoveries shedding new light on the evolution of human society and symbol-use. I simply tucked away the fact of its intact deposits into some remote corner of my professional memory.

Who knew that in the 1980s I would become a leading researcher on the subject of Ice Age body ornamentation and that I would return to Castanet several times that decade to study the ornaments from the early twentieth century excavations? Those old collections left so many unanswered questions that, in 1994, I came back to Castanet to dig, hoping that I was right in thinking that it still had secrets to reveal about the ancient Cro-Magnons.

Abri Castanet kept up its part of the bargain. By the time Alan Alda and the Human Spark crew arrived at Castanet in the summer of 2008, I had already directed a Franco-American research team during nine seasons of unimaginably meticulous excavations, recovering even the dust and debris from bead-making, thus proving the existence of workshops for ornament production.

Our work at Castanet might have ended this year had not a major discovery occurred during the 2007 season when we discovered a one-ton fragment of the collapsed roof of the Castanet shelter. The roof had fallen (undoubtedly with an enormous wooompff) directly onto an ancient living surface bearing stone tools, fireplaces and animal bones. On July 9, 2007, we would discover that its undersurface, the former ceiling under which the site’s Ice Age occupants had lived, had been painted and engraved by them.

The Human Spark crew films the excavation team hard at work in the rock shelter. Credit: Maggie Villiger

At the moment of collapse, bits and pieces of animal bone from the living surface became stuck to the decorated ceiling. Six radiocarbon dates on these bone fragments provide dates of 32,400 years ago, making the Castanet decorated ceiling one of the three or four oldest examples of engraved/painted imagery on the planet. Better yet, much of the remainder of the collapsed ceiling, in direct contact with the living surface upon which the artists stood, is still in place. Over the next ten years, we plan to excavate and study more than 20 square meters of the ancient decorated ceiling and the artifactual evidence for human activities that took place under the decorated ceiling before its collapse.

It was great fun to share our work with Alan Alda, Graham Chedd and the Human Spark crew and to illustrate for them the hard-won knowledge of the past that comes from years of patience, persistence and teamwork. If there is a Human Spark II in ten years, come back to see us… We will still be there adding solid new bricks to the edifice of knowledge of the human past.

Archaeology is an exceedingly expensive endeavor and the Castanet project would not be possible without generous assistance from: United States National Science Foundation, the Direction des affaires culturelles de l’Aquitaine (French Ministry of Culture), the LSB Leakey Foundation, the Reed Foundation, the Institute for Ice Age Studies and New York University.

Veronica Waweru shares some of her recreated arrows with Alan as Larry Engel and Peter Miller capture the video and audio and Producer Graham Chedd looks on. Credit: Maggie Villiger

By Veronica Waweru

Ancient human inventions always engender debate among paleoanthropologists. Models are developed to explain the appearance and timing of new “novel” technologies or behavior. I am no different from these researchers and harbor a fascination with the origin of the bow and arrow. This technology is central to discussions on the hunting abilities of ancients. Were they not-too-smart creatures that scavenged leftovers from big cats, did they only hunt docile animals or were they proficient hunters who brought down dangerous animals? These debates often also include comparisons of Homo sapiens of the last 200,000 years to their Neanderthal contemporaries. Often, the discussion pivots on whether early Homo sapiens were better hunters than Neanderthals. The evidence cited by most researchers suggests that our cold-adapted relatives in Eurasia were not such adept hunters – what with their rodeo-rider-type injuries and their large spears that would force them to engage prey face to face. The most damning evidence for Neanderthals’ technological ineptitude is their extinction – at least for those who do not believe that they interbred with Homo sapiens. But that is a different debate altogether!

Veronica holds a stone point that dates to 100,000 years ago.

Stone armatures or points are amongst the most durable artifacts found in the archaeological record. These were used to arm the business end of knives, javelins, stabbing spears, atlatls and the bow and arrow. All of the organic elements of these implements dating back to 200,000 years ago have decomposed, of course. We are left with the stone tips to determine what weaponry system they were part of. Here we apply laws of physics and ballistics, take copious measurements of the stone tips and attempt to extract ancient blood serum and fats from their edges to make our cases. Then we cite evidence of indigenous people who still use spears and arrows to hunt.

My work focuses on finding evidence of the bow and arrow using stone points from Cartwright’s site, located on the Kinangop plateau in Kenya. I have used most methods employed by researchers in the field but also went ahead and had replicas of the prehistoric tips made and hafted onto arrow shafts. We then shot them at sides of pork and a complete goat carcass (very humanely dispatched and used for food afterward). The results indicated that in terms of distance traveled and penetration, some of the points worked well as “arrowheads.”

Veronica examines the arrows of a modern hunter in Kenya while the Human Spark camera captures their exchange. Credit: Maggie Villiger

To any hunter, putting distance between yourself and prey that might potentially fight back is important. Here, arrows have an advantage over spears. Weapons also need to deliver lethal blows, induce massive bleeding or cause damage to internal organs. Penetration depth is therefore important. In a nutshell, we have a lightweight projectile weapon dating to approximately 100,000 years ago in east Africa! One that can be transported for long distances, the head easily replaced, and the arrow shot from a variety of positions and potentially by a group of hunters, without alerting prey. Modern hunters often add a cocktail of poisons to the shafts of their arrows. These are derived from plants (such as the arrow poison tree) that have wide distribution in Africa. Did prehistoric hunters use arrows to deliver poisons to quarry? We may never know because poisons are unlikely to survive that long.

If arrows could be used effectively against large dangerous prey, why not against our enemies? Here the gore starts – coalitionary violence against members of our own species. What might prehistoric people fight over? Perhaps not oil or ideology but scarce food resources during dry climatic conditions brought on by glacial cycles. Would such a weapon, when used in tandem with poisons, not threaten the very survival of a group if people took to shooting each other over resources?

After showing that prehistoric stone tools were likely used with the bow and arrow, I am now investigating the implications of this invention. Many researchers have argued that human aggression has a genetic substrate. I suspect that cultural mechanisms would have evolved to protect members of a social group from each other. I am presently studying poison-tipped arrow use in interethnic violence in Kenya. This will give insights into lethal violence between members of an ethnic group and non-members. 100,000 years ago, long before Hammurabi’s law or the Ten Commandants were in place, ancients may have had an unwritten — albeit tempered — Second Amendment. Thou shall posses and use poison tipped projectiles, but only on outsiders.

Veronica became the center of attention at the Kariokor Market in Nairobi when she showed up with our film crew. Here a vendor exhibits the modern arrows he sells there. Caption: Maggie Villiger

My fascination with the gore and science of ancient projectiles and poisons, led me to join the Human Spark film crew in Kenya last summer. I did some background work to find people to interview about bows and arrows and poisons. Metal-tipped arrows for sale were easy to find. The poison sources and makers were more elusive. Do you want to kill a stray dog? A person? Why not try bewitching them? The best answer I got was that only very old men made poisons, but they lived “very far away” and may not to want talk to women or strangers. So when the Human Spark crew arrived, I had but one contact who made bows and arrows for sale and who failed to persuade his great uncle to speak about poisons. Our first shooting site was a local market in downtown Nairobi. The crew appeared very much at ease among the throngs of curious crowds and open sewers. My favorite part of the whole event was getting pulled over by local policemen on our way out of Nairobi. They are notorious for taking bribes, but one look at the huge camera and they let us go. I almost dared them to ask for a bribe.

Next summer, I will get a big dummy camera to scare away corrupt traffic police, and endure more rides through potholed dirt roads to coax recipes of poison cocktails from unwilling old men of the Kamba ethnic group. The curiosity is intense and unrelenting. I blame it on a primordial curse – The Human Spark!