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A
Colourful Tale Of Early Humans In Zambia
By
Lawrence Barham
Colour is all around
us. We use it every day to warn of danger or to signal safety, to
enhance our individuality or show we belong to a group, to celebrate
or mourn. Our use of colour helps make us human. It’s almost a
language in its own right and indeed the way we use it to symbolise
meanings is dependent on us having the ability to use language. My
work in Zambia over the last 15 years has uncovered what I believe
to be some of the earliest evidence of humans using colour in their
lives in a non-functional way. It is controversial, there are many
who do not think our ancestors were behaving as we do 200,000 or
even 400,000 years ago - but I would beg to differ.
Human colour vision has
deep evolutionary roots in our primate heritage. As fruit eaters,
modern primates depend on recognising the reds and yellow of ripe
fruits and edible young leaves, as did our ancestors. From this
shared biological foundation, we have become the only primate that
deliberately and routinely manipulates colour as a medium of
communication, from the football fan with his painted face to the
green, red and amber of the traffic light, from the red rose on
Valentine’s day to the white, purple or black of mourning. Every
society today uses colour in some symbolic way.
The evolution of colour
symbolism is linked with the emergence of language, without which it
would be difficult to generate and communicate the arbitrary
meanings we attach to colours. Tracing the origins of colour
symbolism therefore becomes a search for language and ultimately for
human society as we recognise it today. The fossil record provides
indirect evidence for the evolution of speech by 500,000 years ago
in the species called Homo heidelbergensis - the common
ancestor of both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. (The
‘Kabwe Man’ skull found in 1921 at the Broken Hill mine is a well
known example of this species.) Some suggest that grooming was the
basis of group bonding and arguably communication, but the large
brain size of heidelbergensis suggests to me that language
was its main form of communication, judging by the close link
between brain size (neocortex) and group size found by eminent
scientist Robin Dunbar and others. This makes Homo
heidelbergensis a prime candidate for being the first user of
colour in human evolution. Is there any archaeological evidence for
such a colourful ancestor?
Currently the only
unambiguous evidence for colour symbolism is found with our own
species, Homo sapiens, in the form of rock art, and beads
with pigments. In Europe the earliest cave art appears later,
40,000 years ago : long after the evolution of Homo sapiens
about 200,000 year ago in eastern Africa. It is in Africa and the
Near East, however, that the earliest evidence of symbolism is
found. In South Africa, at Blombos Cave, shell beads - some ochre
stained - have been found with engraved blocks of red ochre
that suggest colour symbolism existed 75,000 years ago. But that is
still less than half the age of Homo sapiens. Older evidence
for symbolic behaviours comes from Israeli cave sites where shell
beads, burials and pigments are reported dating to 90-135,000 BP
(Science, 23 June 2006) and a shell bead from Algeria may be of
comparable age. This new evidence for bead making by Homo
sapiens reflects a long-lived and widespread tradition of
personal ornamentation, combined with pigment use, in Africa and the
Near East.
 But
there’s still at least an enormous gap between the evolution of
language and the expression of symbolic behaviours. Why? Well, the
gap may be more apparent than real.
In the past ten years,
archaeologists working in central, southern and eastern Africa - and
I am one of them - have reported discoveries of mineral pigments,
ochres, from sites between 200,000 and 300,000 years old. In each
case they have been found with stone tools typical of the Middle
Stone Age, the technology of early Homo sapiens, but also of
Homo heidelbergensis in its later stages. The colour
selection varies between sites, with yellow and red ochre found in
the southern Sudanese site of Sai Island, red ochre in the Kenyan
site of the Kapthurin Formation and red, yellow, brown, black and
sparkling purple in the Zambian site of Twin Rivers cave near
Lusaka. Ochre-stained grinding tools were found at each site,
showing that the minerals were intentionally processed into powders.
The use of red ochre is also reported from South Africa at
Wonderwerk Cave. The broad distribution of such early ochre use is
unique to Africa, as is its continuous record of use through the
Middle (300,000- ~25,000 BP) and Later Stone Age (~50,000-200 BP).
Ochre use on its own is
not convincing evidence of symbolic intent, as there are functional
uses for iron oxides, but the range of colours used and the later
links with other symbolic behaviours, such as beads, engraving, and
rock art (from 27,000 years ago at Apollo 11 cave, Namibia) argue
for a long tradition of non-functional uses.
We can never know with
certainty if early African ochres were used for ornamentation - a
300,000 year old bog body with face paint is too much to hope for -
but experimentation shows that reds and yellows in particular are
highly visible on human skin of different hues and they are still
widely used for ornamentation of the body for ritual or ceremonial
reasons, a classic case of asserting group identities. Meanwhile,
at the same time that ochres appear in the African archaeological
record we see the first evidence that stone tool types particular to
certain locations are emerging. Is this a coincidence, or a sign of
the formation of human social bonds based on language and shared
identity? If so, then colour played a role in our making and
Homo heidelbergensis may have first mixed the paints.
My early work in Zambia
was based at Mumbwa Caves, which led to the excavations at Twin
Rivers, outside Lusaka, where we found large quantities of the red,
yellow and sparkly purple pigments that have contributed to the
development of my theories. Since then we have been surveying sites
in the Luangwa Valley, ranging from early stone age to late iron
age, covering more than 1 million years of Zambia’s prehistory. This
summer we also spent a week at Kalambo Falls near Mbala, a world
famous site that the late Desmond Clark spent 14 years excavating in
the 1950s. With new technology now available for dating finds and
identifying how they were used I hope we will be able to come up
with more exciting news from Zambia to fill in more gaps in our
picture of human evolution in south central Africa. I can already
guess that colour will indeed play its part.
Acknowledgements
My work in Zambia has
been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Leakey
Foundation, National Geographic, British Academy and the University
of Liverpool and would not have been possible without the active
help and participation of the National Heritage Conservation
Commission and, more recently, Zambia Parks and Wildlife Authority.
Many individuals in Zambia have also given generously of their time
and facilities to help the team with its work for which we are all
grateful. We are grateful also to Patrick Roberts, who allowed us to
access the Twin Rivers site from his farm and also provided us with
facilities for camping for a hectic season.
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October
2006