Archaic forms of Homo sapiens fi rst appeared about 500,000 years
ago. For example, Neanderthals lived from 320,000 to 30,000 years
ago. They are closely related to us—so close that we could produce
offspring with them. The brains of Neanderthals were a little bigger than ours. They were
stout but short (about 5’ 6’’) with a solid build, and they adapted
to living in colder climate of the last major ice age. They used a
wide variety of tools and weapons. They were hunters of big game,
and most importantly, Neanderthals cooked their food—from about
250,000 years ago—and show the oldest undeniable evidence of
widespread cooking of food, which is about 125,000 years old. Homo sapiens sapiens only appeared 120,000 years ago; we lived
at the same time as Neanderthals. About 40,000 years ago, Cro-
Magnon man was making tools for sewing clothes, sculpting,
decorating beads and ivory carvings, clay fi gures, instruments, and
cave paintings. It’s only here that there’s evidence of sophisticated
hunting strategies. They also took on dangerous animals, such as
wild boar and woolly mammoths. When we get to 30,000 B.C., or the Paleolithic Period (Old
Stone Age), we are the only hominid left. Presumably, our
advanced organizational skills gave us a distinct advantage over
the Neanderthals, and it may have been partly the advantage of
sophisticated cooking and socializing.Hunting-Gathering Life
Ninety percent of humans who have ever lived were gatherers
and hunters. Although hunter-gatherers were more closely tied to
the larger ecosystem along with other animals, it would be wrong
to assume that they lived in some kind of primeval harmony with
nature. They destroyed fi elds through burning, hunted animals to
extinction, and caused pollution.
Given the extremely low population density, however, they didn’t
do that much damage. About a million years ago, there were about