They have called it Excalibur, though it was plucked from a pit of bones rather than the stone of Arthurian legend.
To the ordinary eye it is a hand-sized, triangular chunk of ochre and purple rock, its surface slightly scratched.But to the palaeontologists who found this axe-head buried in a cavern on a Spanish hilltop it is proof of a terrible and defining moment in the evolutionary history of the human mind.
The discovery in a Spanish cave of what is claimed to be the world’s oldest burial artefact was set to provoke a fierce scientific debate about the exact moment when man’s mind was lit by the spark of creativity.
Palaeontologists who discovered the axe-head placed among ancient bones in a cave at Atapuerca, near the city of Burgos in central Spain, last week claimed that this key moment in the evolution of man’s mind had to be placed at a time well before our own race, Homo sapiens, reached Europe.
Deliberately tossed into a primitive burial chamber, the placing of the axe was a ritual act and evidence that, in the minds of some very ancient Europeans, death had become something more than a mere fact of nature.
This idea first dawned more than 350 000 years ago on the squat, powerful examples of Homo heidelbergensis, whose remains are being slowly excavated from the so-called Pit of Bones at Atapuerca.
The find means that man’s development of a mind capable of thinking beyond reality and into a world of shared ideas, symbols, fantasy and imagination may have developed 310 000 years earlier than was thought.
Controversy already rages in the palaeontological community over whether Homo sapiens was the first such deep thinker, or whether that honour goes to the slightly earlier Neanderthal. But it is generally thought that modern, thinking men and women did not arrive until between 30 000 and 40 000 years ago, sparking a creative explosion that produced art, among other things.
”The biggest debate in human evolution is when men’s minds appeared, when the spark was lit,” said Ignacio Martinez, one of the Atapuerca team, to El Pais newspaper. The only proof of that spark, he said, would come from rock art, the earliest examples of which are only 40 000 years old, from proof of language use or from burial ceremonies.
Experts said this week that they were surprised and generally rather sceptical about Excalibur.
”If they could prove it, it would be staggering,” said Michael Petraglia, a lecturer at Cambridge University’s Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies. ”It would push intentional or symbolic thought back much further than is currently accepted.”’
The director of the Atapuerca dig, Juan Carlos Arsuaga, argued in El Pais that the groups of Homo heidelbergensis probably brought their dead, one-by-one, into the cavern so they could be buried together.
”We had gradually become convinced that, incredible as it may seem, given the age of the site, this was a case of symbolic behaviour, the first of its kind in the history of humanity,” the professor wrote.
”In order to demonstrate that we needed a symbolic object, with its own significance. Then Excalibur appeared from the sediment,” he said. ”The Pit of Bones had produced a new historic discovery.”
But other scientists, while eager to see the written research, were sceptical, saying there did not seem to be proof that the axe had been deliberately placed.
”There might be other reasons for it to be there,” speculated Margarita Diaz-Andreu, an archaeologist at Durham University.
Petraglia said the find was ”potentially exciting” but doubted that it was sufficient to reach such scientifically explosive conclusions about the development of the human mind. ”We often have great difficulty in assessing if something is intentional,” he said. ”Often we require more evidence than one tool.”
The Atapuerca team has produced some of the most remarkable palaeontological finds of the past decade, producing 350 000-year-old crania and proof that Homo heidelbergensis was a cannibal.
Last week they seemed to have the backing of at least one scientific heavyweight for their claims that these were also thinking, imaginative, potentially artistic cannibals.
Henry de Lumley, director of France’s National Museum of Natural History, visited the cave and was told of Excalibur two years ago. He declared the combination of the two things to be ”proof of the birth of the first human myths”, El Pais reported.
Even if Homo heidelbergensis was an intelligent, creative, artistic type, it did him no good. He eventually evolved into a Neanderthal and then became extinct. Homo sapiens came out of Africa to replace him and start the line of all humans who inhabit the world today. — Â