The following is taken from James Shreeve's book The Neandertal Enigma: solving the mystery of modern human origins (William Morrow and Company, New York, 1995.) This is an excellent book to read in its entirety. This along with another recent book The Great Human Diaspora: the history of diversity and evolution by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Francesco Cavalli-Sforza stands out as a up-to-date exploration of one of the most crucial issues in human evolution. The following section from The Neandertal Enigma is insightful as it relates to the Great Leap Forward as Jared Diamond calls it. (The Neandertal Enigma : pages 265-272) In the spring of 1986, near a village called Dolni Vestonice in the Czech province of Moravia, the bodies of three teenagers were discovered in a common grave. A specialist was immediately summoned from Brno, some twenty-five miles to the north, and under his care the remains were exhumed and faint remnants of the youths' identities revealed. Two of the skeletons were heavily built males. By its slender proportions, the third was judged to be female, aged seventeen to twenty. A marked left curvature of the spine, along with several other skeletal abnormalities, suggested that she had been painfully crippled. The two males had died healthy, in the prime of their lives. The remains of a thick wooden pole thrust through the hip of one of them hinted that his death might not have been entirely natural.

The bodies had been buried with curious attention. According to the expert Bohuslav Klima, of the Czech Institute of Archaeology in Brno both young men had been laid to rest with their heads encircled with necklaces of pierced canine teeth and ivory; the one with the pole thrust up to his coccyx may also have been wearing some kind of painted mask. All three skulls were covered in red ocher. The most peculiar feature of the grave, however, was the arrangement of the deceased. Whoever committed the bodies to the ground extended them side by side, the woman between her two companions. The man on her left lay on his stomach, facing away from her but with his left arm linked with hers. The other male lay on his back, his head turned toward her. Both of his arms were reaching out, so that his hands rested on her pubis. The ground surrounding this intimate connection was splashed with red ocher.

The skeletons lean into each other, like nestled question marks. In his written report, Klima speculated that the arrangement of the grave might reflect "a real life drama which precipitated the burials." His drama revolved around a young woman who had died in childbirth. The two male skeletons where those of her husband and a medicine man-the man wearing the mask. Held responsible for her death, the men had been compelled to follow her into the afterlife. One can imagine other dramas, other characters, leading to the same denouement. A tragic love triangle? A young queen and two consorts? A sacrificial surfeit of youth? Or is the semblance of urgency in that morbid tableau mere accident - the reaching of hands the meaningless effect of rigor mortis, or the cynical toss of the body into a hole in the ground? Whatever the truth, it was covered over by a layer of burning branches, then soil, and finally by 27,640 years of future, give or take a few decades.

At that age, the triple grave at Dolni Vestonice belongs to a period known as the Gravettian, the second in the succession of cultural industries that define the Upper Paleolithic Age in Europe. If human evolution were an epic, the Upper Paleolithic would be the chapter where the hero comes of age. Suddenly, after millennia of progress so slow that it hardly seems to progress at all, human culture appears to take off in what the writer John Pfeiffer has called a "creative explosion." New types of stone tools proliferate, taking on regional style where before there was global monotony. In Africa as well as Europe, elegant implements carved from bone, antler, and ivory appear in abundance. Change replaces stasis. In France, new industries rush in and disappear again like Paris fashions - the Aurignacian, the Gravettian, the Solutrean, the Magdalenian - each with technological styles and innovations all but unknown in the period preceding it. From Spain to the Urals, site lists begin to read like protoSears catalogs: sewing needles, barbed projectile points, fishhooks, rope, meat-drying racks, stone lamps, temperature-controlled hearths, complex dwelling structures.

Dolni Vestonice can boast its share of such functional gear, but it is also a generous witness to a wholly original aspect of the Upper Paleolithic. For acres around, the fine, fertile loess soil is seeded with carved and molded images of animals and women, strange engravings, personal ornamentations, and decorated graves. A few thousand years before, such fanciful objects did not exist. Representational art especially seems to blossom, fully refined, around the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic, without a gallery of clumsy, childlike renderings from earlier periods to serve as precedents. At a German site called Vogelherd someone picked up a piece of ivory 32,000 years ago and carved an exquisite horse in miniature - mouth, flared nostrils, jowls, curved haunches, and swollen belly, all breathlessly realistic. Before Vogelherd, there were no representational horses. Before Vogelherd, all horses were horses.
It is hard to overestimate the significance of this transformation. By all appearances, the people of the Upper Paleolithic came into an innocent, unexamined world and galvanized it with symbol, art, metaphor, and story. They did not simply invent better means of surviving. They invented meaning itself. "The Upper Paleolithic," according to Stanford's Richard Klein, "signals the most fundamental change in human behavior that the archaeological record may ever reveal, barring only the primeval development of those human traits that made archaeology possible."

Fundamental changes call for big, bold, fundamental explanations. The old one, still viable even a decade ago, filled the bill perfectly. The enormous elaboration of human culture in the Upper Paleolithic happened so suddenly because a new, modern kind of human being entered the European continent: Cro-Magnon Man. New behaviors explained new anatomy, and vice versa. This cozy synchrony has collapsed under the weight of the bones of Klasies River Mouth, Border Cave, Qafzeh, and Skhul. The old answer is dead. With a 60,000-year time lag between the appearance of modern human skeletons in one part of the world and the florescence of modern behavior in another, the most astonishing advance in the history of human culture has been orphaned of a cause.
The most popular way to cope with this crisis, like any other, is simply to deny that it exists. Many archaeologists continue to account for the cultural events of the Upper Paleolithic by tying them to the emergence of a more modern, intellectually superior form of human being. If the appearance of anatomically modern skeletons in Africa and the Levant comes too early to coincide with this crucial transformation, so what? There must have been a second biological event later on, something that did not leave its mark in skeletal shape, but was nonetheless far more important.

"There is a developing consensus now that specimens like Qafzeh and Klasies River Mouth are better described as near-modern," says Klein, a leading proponent of the "Biological Event" solution to the Upper Paleolithic. "They tell us that Africa is the place where modern people originate, although they are not themselves fully modern. But sometime around fifty thousand years ago, a breakthrough occurred in this African lineage, a neurological change that allowed them to develop all these new cultural behaviors. It could just as well have happened to the Neandertals instead. But it didn't."
In other words, the Upper Paleolithic did not happen before 40,000 years ago because there were no brains around developed enough to make it happen. Once the "neurological change" occurred in one human lineage, there was no stopping these well-endowed folk-our ancestors-from replacing archaic populations less favored by selection. This scenario has all the seductive simplicity of the old one and at the same time neatly folds in more recent theories like the Out of Africa hypothesis. But it has some nagging problems too. First of all, it is disturbingly short on evidence. There is no increase in brain size, no change in the markings on the inside of skulls that hint at brain structure, no trace whatsoever in the fossil record of this enormously important neurological development. Klein and other like- minded archaeologists cite the array of new, more sophisticated behaviors in the Upper Paleolithic as indirect support for their view. But since those impressive new behaviors are precisely the phenomena supposed to be explained by the change in neurological capacity, this argument sounds suspiciously circular.

Furthermore, the cultural evidence can be used to argue against the Biological Event solution too. If a neurological change in a discrete population of moderns was responsible for the Upper Paleolithic, one would expect the whole behavioral package-the art, the new tools, and so on- to begin in one geographic location and spread out, as the moderns themselves move into new territories. No such pattern can be seen, even in Europe, where most of the looking has gone on. The pattern is a complicated mosaic of mini-explosions that resemble one big explosion only when you stand back and take a long look at the whole. Different aspects of the Upper Paleolithic appear early in some areas and later in others. The Middle East is the last area where art appears, even though it is the first where people begin to rely on blade tools. In Eastern Europe, fully modern-looking fossils turn up thousands of years before any Upper Paleolithic artifacts. Furthermore, at the end of the Upper Paleolithic, around 12,000 years ago, all the restless creativity on the landscape seems to quiet down. In many ways, the Mesolithic Period that followed was relatively unoriginal, culturally speaking. If one judges neurological capacity by its expression in material form, it would appear that the new, biologically superior moderns had somehow de-evolved. This hardly seems likely.

Supporters of the Biological Event scenario also must be willing to spend a lot of time accounting for places in the archaeological record where the neurological capacity for Upper Paleolithic behavior seems to leak backward in time into Middle Paleolithic brains. Alison Brooks's alleged 82,000-year-old bone harpoons are just one extreme example of this paleo-leakage. Mary Stiner and Steven Kuhn's work in Italy is another. If you poke around enough, you can probably find somewhere a Middle Paleolithic version of most of the technological innovations of the Upper Paleolithic. The classic definition of Upper Paleolithic technology centers upon the "three Bs": blades, bone tools, and buries-chisel-like implements made by knocking a spell or two off a flake. But as we have seen, blade tools dominate the Howieson's Poort industry in South Africa 60,000 years before they become the rage in Europe. Around the same time, they are also common in another Middle Paleolithic culture called the Amudian, which flares up and then disappears in the Levant. Another distinguishing feature of the Amudian is an unusual abundance of buries. And even if one can explain away the Katanda harpoons, a few, less care fully crafted bone tools dot the digs of Neandertals and other archaic humans, from southern Africa to northern Europe.
Foreshadowing of the symbolic paraphernalia of the Upper Paleolithic can also be summoned up from before 40,000 years ago, though it may take a bit more effort. While there is no representational art before Vogelherd, scratched lines on an ox rib at the French site of Pech de l'Aze and zigzag markings from various other Neandertal sites could be called symbolic. A couple of pierced canine teeth show up here and there in France too, and etched ostrich- egg shell in southern Africa. Ancient stone hand axes have been found in Europe where the knapper seems to have carefully worked around a mollusk fossil, altered the shape of a tool to acknowledge a band of color in the raw stone, or otherwise demonstrated the flickering of an aesthetic sense. There are splashes of ocher here and there, and signs that Middle Stone Age Africans were mining hematite, a silvery, incandescent mineral with the sole useful feature of looking pretty.

Gathering up all these precursors and adding the evidence for Neandertal burials, archaeologists on the opposite extreme from Richard Klein explain the creative explosion by arguing that nothing particularly explosive really occurred. If every novelty flows from some slightly more primitive prototype earlier in time, then the whole business is better seen as just another step in the gradual progress of human culture, requiring neither a better brain, nor any other special biological trigger. "Neandertals may not have been quite capable of doing nuclear physics or calculus" writes Brian Hayden of Simon Fraser University. "However, it is a travesty of the available data to argue that they did not have the full complement of basic human faculties or act in recognizably modern fashions."

This gradualist point of view accounts for the Upper Paleolithic without resorting to an invisible genetic transformation, hauled in like a deus ex machina resolution to a hung plot. In the end, however, it too must be swallowed with a heavy dose of denial. No amount of precedent pointing can explain the astonishing increase in the sheer volume of culture in the Upper Paleolithic and what that increase reflects in the lives of people. A handful of pierced teeth and beads have indeed been found in several late Neandertal sites. But what connection do these isolated curiosities have to the torrent of personal ornaments showered across France and Germany in the Aurignacian, right at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic? How can they explain the ornamental munificence of Sunghir, a grave site near Moscow about the same age as Dolni Vestonice, where the bodies of three people were festooned with dozens of bracelets, necklaces, painted pendants, and ten thousand ivory beads? According to Randy White, an archaeologist at New York University, each of those beads took about an hour to make. That equals ten thousand hours of labor, all to decorate three corpses and lay them in the ground. The Neandertals buried their dead, but they did not devote much time and attention to the act. Sunghir does not represent a little more of the same. It is a different quality of culture altogether.

Another defining feature of Upper Paleolithic culture is its potent infectiousness. Innovations no longer flare up in little pockets and disappear. They metamorphose and diversify and inspire innovations. According to White, the ivory beads made in one site in France 33,000 years ago are exactly the same, in raw material, workmanship, and design, as the ivory beads in another French site two hundred kilometers away. Yet the ones from Germany are utterly different, bespeaking another tradition, another variation on the theme of bead. The Aurignacian industry itself is characterized by an abundance of large, unbeautiful blades, "beaked" buries, and carved-bone projectile points whose bases had been split to accept a shaft. The earliest known Aurignacian sites are in the Balkans, around 43,000 years old. Three thousand years later at the most, the Aurignacian appears across the continent in Spain. Within a few thousand years it covers most of the rest of Europe, picking up regional styles and acquiring new complexions as it goes. This is not simply a little more culture than there was before. For some reason, culture has become an epidemic.

"After two or three hundred thousand years of nothing new," says Berkeley's Tim White, "suddenly, in a tiny segment of time, after this huge gulf of nothing, you've got everything. There's one style over here and another one over there; there's trade, there's art, there's differentiation, all of this stuff just blowing up in your face. So you say to yourself, how come?"

Tim White is a demandingly meticulous researcher, one who does not like to waste time with speculations on grand questions. But on this one, he hardly hesitates a moment before answering his own question. "There's only one thing that I can think of that is big-time enough to render such a huge behavioral shift," he says. "It's got to be language."

It seems almost too obvious. Take any other innovation - a bone harpoon, for instance - and lay it down on the landscape. Now wrap it up in words. How to make it. How to use it to catch fish. When to expect what sorts of fish to arrive at what time of year, and communicate that information to others with whom you have dealings. How to have dealings. How to fillet fish in long thin strips and dry them on racks, extending their nutritional benefit into a future-a concept incommunicable without language. How to organize a cooperative fishing strategy and trade fish for other goods. While we are at it, how to name the river god and seek his intervention so that the catch will be plentiful. Which innovation will travel faster: the naked harpoon, or the one dressed up in language? Language similarly greases the flow of other ideas and inventions-new hunting tactics, new ways of constructing a hearth, preserving meat, or tanning hides. These may have been conceived of before. They may even have been a part of life in one isolated area or another for a thousand years. But language supplies the medium needed to send them zipping across space, human group to human group, brain to brain. It explains the contagion, the pumping up of the cultural volume, even the Neandertals' demise. One has only to imagine two populations, one talking freely among themselves and the other communicating only with grunts and gestures. If they came into competition, would there be any doubt which would survive and which vanish? No wonder so many influential evolutionists from different disciplines ponder the Upper Paleolithic and converge on language as its prime mover: paleoanthropologists like Tim White, archaeologists like Lew Binford, Desmond Clark, Paul Mellars, and Richard Klein, geneticists like Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Allan Wilson before his death, to name just a few.