How archaeologists are missing Pleistocene cultures

I propose a “Culture First” way of looking at ancient remains, instead of the “Culture Last” assumption so pervasive in the field.

Image: Noureddin Abdulbari (Wikimedia Commons)

Termites in some parts of the world live in mounds that are vastly more ancient than the colonies that occupy them. In the arid parts of western South Africa, radiocarbon dating suggests that some of their mounds are more than 30,000 years old, home over time to a succession of colonies. These insects have coevolved with their environments, using, reusing, and recycling materials, a case of niche construction on a geological time scale.

People, too, live amid environments that we began to create in ancient times. Rome has been constructed in part from its own ruins. Much like the ancient termite mounds, the 1900-year-long survival of the Pantheon has resulted from its continuous use. Tour guides will tell you how its great bronze doors swing easily upon their ancient hinges. (The guides likely won’t share a secret: the doors didn’t work properly before 1998.) The Tiber has flowed through the eternal city throughout its history, engineering always needed to keep the river’s destructive potential at bay.

If people disappeared from the planet, the infrastructure of human civilization would relentlessly decay. Steel buildings corrode, their structures fail, concrete crumbles, rivers, wind, erosion, and biology in the end erase or bury all. This raises a question: How long until our visible traces become almost invisible?

Tough to erase

I ran across this question on my social feed today. Someone claimed that in as few as 10,000 years, nature would erase all traces of human existence.

You hear this idea every so often, and the people who bring it up usually have an ulterior motive. If our civilization could be erased in a short time, they say, then maybe today’s archaeologists have missed subtle traces of lost cultures far more advanced than our own. If we can imagine future archaeologists oblivious to today’s cities, something equally huge may be waiting for us to discover from past times.

Ten thousand years is far too short a time to erase some of the signs of civilization. Pyramids and kurgans have lasted nearly five thousand years already.

A hundred thousand years hence, colossal wrecks of debris will mark where Phoenix, Las Vegas, Riyadh, Johannesburg, and hundreds of smaller cities stand today—all places where rainfall is sparse and off-floodplain land surfaces are stable. Buildings will crumble, but fragments of float glass, ceramic tile, exotic stone and xeriscaping quartzite imported from thousands of miles away will make the legacy of human presence obvious.

More subtle effects of our presence will be less apparent to the eyes but will yield easily to scientific analysis. Cores taken from lake bottoms contain pulses of heavy metals settled from the atmosphere after our burning of coal. The common dandelion, the black rat, the zebra mussel, the cane toad, and thousands of other species live today in places far from their biogeographic origins—impossible to explain without our global transport networks.

Future archaeologists won’t lack for evidence of our existence, even if they have come from interstellar space.

Ancient traditions overlooked

Still, that doesn’t actually answer the question of what past cultures archaeologists may be missing today. Consider what has emerged within the past few years as a result of archaeological detective work:

• Wooden structures. A half-million-year-old structure made from shaped and notched logs preserved at Kalambo Falls, Zambia. The preservation of wood is very rare across such long time periods. But archaeologists have added more and more evidence of the diversity and craftsmanship of wooden tools from older and older sites. In light of this kind of evidence, I think it’s fair to say that archaeologists have long underestimated the technological abilities of many hominin species.

• “Fat factory”. The site of Neumark-Nord, Germany, a 125,000-year-old lakeshore where Neanderthals hunted and had their behavior captured by sediment deposition, has a massive scatter of bone fragments from more than a hundred large mammals. The pattern of breakage of the bones shows that Neanderthals were boiling these in water to extract the bone grease, one of the big energy and nutrition-rich parts of a skeleton. The scale of the Neumark-Nord evidence is massive, suggesting it was part of a long tradition of culinary extraction—comparable in scale to some of the intensive foraging societies of the last 10,000 years. Archaeologists like John Speth had long speculated that Neanderthals might have boiled water and degreased bones in perishable containers like skins or birch, but these suggestions rooted in ethnographic descriptions of historic foragers were generally politely ignored when it came to Neanderthals.

• Landscape engineering. Neumark-Nord also has provided some strong evidence for Neanderthal use of fire to shape landscapes. Burning forested areas and refreshing grasslands is a common strategy for attracting game among recent foraging peoples. The practice has also been demonstrated in Malawi where the pattern of charcoal production from landscape burning increased markedly during MSA times from at least 85,000 years ago. A decade ago, many archaeologists were arguing that Neanderthals could not even reliably control fire; now it is clear that fire was used for intentional landscape ecology across continents.

• Tree management. Ancient people were shaping ecology by spreading seeds and possibly cultivating trees long before agriculture appeared. One of the most evocative examples is in Australia, where boab trees (Adansonia gregorii) were subject to intentional human dispersal by foraging peoples.

• Water transport. Just over twenty years ago, archaeologists commonly argued that dispersal of hominins across deep water barriers was impossible before around 50,000 years ago—despite 1950s-era reports of older stone tools on Flores, the Philippines, and other islands. The 2005 reporting of the Liang Bua, Flores, finds including Homo floresiensis transformed thinking about hominin dispersal. Subsequent work established Middle Pleistocene hominin presence on Sulawesi and Luzon. Some artifacts hint that Neanderthals may have reached some Mediterranean islands.

Every one of these examples has been exciting to see. Not one is a discovery of a unique event; every one of them demonstrates that one or more populations sustained traditions over a long time.

Together the implications of such discoveries are profound: Cultural traditions that spanned millennia were not merely overlooked; in many cases archaeologists had argued strongly against the evidence, based on the idea that such traditions were beyond the capabilities of our Pleistocene relatives.

Fighting the “Culture Last” assumption

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been talking a lot with friends and collaborators to dissect assumptions archaeologists long made about the past. One of the most entrenched is what I call the “Culture Last” assumption. The basic idea is that the cultural abilities of modern humans are special and unique. For those who accept this premise, it is a problem to use what we see in humans to understand other hominins. Instead, they assume the behavior of every hominin is noncultural until proven otherwise.

This assumption crops up in most discussions of “modern human behavior”, especially the discredited notion that so-called symbolic behavior—use of pigments, creation of engravings, wearing of ornaments—was impossible for Neanderthals or other hominins. The stereotype of the incompetent Neanderthal was hard to overturn and incredibly damaging for research while it lasted.

Another example of the Culture Last assumption is the long insistence by many archaeologists that only our own genus, Homo, made and used stone tools. Today many sites and fossils provide evidence that a broad array of hominins, from Australopithecus and Kenyanthropus to Paranthropus used stone and bone artifacts. Cultural traditions of wood toolmaking and use of stone are much deeper in our family tree than any hominins—they’re shared with chimpanzees, bonobos, and many other primates.

All hominins were cultural species. Cultural learning has always been part of their evolved strategies of adaptation to their environments. Culture isn’t last; culture is first.

Of course that doesn’t mean that every ancient species was just like today’s humans. The evolutionary histories of various hominins are linked as parts of a single tree, but they had their own challenges and opportunities, often within environments that no longer exist today. Neanderthals didn’t fly space missions, and they didn’t invent the VCR. They didn’t watch soap operas. They didn’t even have soap.

But most people today aren’t flying space missions either. Humans belonged to a vast diversity of cultures, and scientists’ primary way of understanding their challenges, opportunities, and environments is by examining those cultures. Biological adaptation does matter—as the examples of high altitude adaptation, milk drinking, and blood group variation all attest. Such biological adaptations are channeled, managed, and manifested through coevolution with culture.

Not culture last. Culture first.

What Culture First looks like

There are surely archaeologists who will say that I am setting up a straw man argument. Everyone acknowledges in principle that extinct hominins were cultural. They just want to curb the excesses of researchers who might otherwise see a small daub of birch pitch and imagine that Neanderthals must have engineered special fire pits to extract it.

What I am advocating is a change of stance. Instead of treating culture as a radioactive hypothesis not to touch outside of a lead-lined room, I’d like to see researchers lean forward to recognize coevolutionary processes as central to evolution across the great apes and hominins. Science lost enormous opportunities by maintaining the “stupid Neanderthal” stereotype. We have a world to gain by opening the aperture of inquiry.

Why does this matter? Every cultural tradition is like the city of Rome in an important way: The individuals that sustain a tradition live within, reuse, and recycle the concepts and practices of their predecessors. That continuity can sustain a population’s way of survival even as environments change, even as millennia pass. In this way some parts of cultures can persist vastly longer than cities, longer than Pyramids.

It is this scale of history that enabled genetic adaptation to unfold within the most persistent cultural contexts.

The Pliocene and Pleistocene hominin record often lack in breadth of representation across space. But the record excels in certain places in depth of representation across time. We can do much better leveraging the record within and across sites to examine culture.

A Culture First perspective opens new ways of looking at questions and data.

• Diet: great apes and hominins choose what they eat in ways that depend on cultural learning. Applied to the past this offers remarkable opportunities for understanding variation in diet. For example, the apparent specialization of some—but not all—populations of Paranthropus boisei to eating high amounts of C4-rich plant foods may be the longest setting for culture-gene coevolution ever yet identified in any hominin.

• Childhood: Learning was a part of all hominin lives. Life history coevolved with cultures, especially long childhoods and extended low-mortality periods of early adulthood to give a long runway for social and ecological learning. Combined with high mortality rates of adults over 25 or 30 in most hominins, this means that a very large fraction of stone artifacts were made by nonexpert knappers across most hominin populations. There has been some great work by April Nowell and other researchers understanding childhood in our Pleistocene relatives, and much room for extending this work’s application to the archaeological record.

• Sex: There have been strong recent debates about how male and female individuals balanced foraging effort in ancient societies. This is a cultural question! Sex roles in foraging vary enormously across historic human groups. It’s possible to recognize those roles through activity markers on skeletons, patterns of mortality, and material echoes of social networks—but like other cultural traditions, the answer may be different for different times and places.

• Fire: Archaeologists have often interpreted presence or absence of fire in a site as diagnostic of the firemaking ability of the hominins—at an extreme, some have argued that many Neanderthal groups couldn’t make fire, pointing to sites where certain layers lack charcoal particles or other fire evidence. But where human groups choose to make fires in and near their campsites varies quite a lot across cultures, sometimes for functional reasons and sometimes arbitrarily. Any site that represents hundreds or thousands of years of various groups is likely to record cultural variation in fire location preferences. Ignoring the cultural dimension of fire use leads to bad biological and cognitive inferences instead of correct cultural interpretations.

Instead of viewing hominins as simply reacting to environmental pressures, “Culture First” recognizes that culture has been the most important mode of interaction of hominins and environments. Ancient groups had varied and creative solutions to environmental challenges. This opens the prospect that different hominin groups in similar environments might have arrived at very different cultural strategies and genetic adaptations.

Some of those strategies opened new horizons, while others led only to dead ends. Across them all, I am not sure there was any evolutionary change in hominins that was not coevolutionary with culture to some degree.

Beginning a conversation

I began the post by noting that future archaeologists will never miss the signs of our civilization, even if humans were to disappear suddenly from the planet.

The signs of Pleistocene cultures are less evident. The Earth has indeed erased many of them. It’s sobering that so much evidence of past humans and our relatives is lost. It’s the reality of archaeology.

People who bring up the loss of information may have an ulterior motive, and I have one, too. Mine is not about cultures more technologically advanced than our own—although many of them may have had ways of interacting with their environments that we haven’t come across before. I think we can do better by recognizing how culture mattered to our relatives and by framing our studies of the past around that idea.

At the site of Malapa, South Africa, I’ve seen termites interacting with fossil layers with ancient termite material, two million years old. They seek out the same materials, recycling and reusing still. They don’t know it, but they are reconstructing a niche that was first built in their deep history.

Ancient hominins were remarkable. They interacted and learned from each other, and those interactions shaped their biological fates. We are living lives shaped by their traditions. If we look we can still discover those pathways.

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Notes: Neanderthals did engineer special fire pits to condense tar from plants, as shown recently at Vanguard Cave by Juan Ochando and coworkers.

The “Woman the Hunter” debate has unfolded across many recent publications, and I’ve included citations to two of these works, by Abigail Anderson and coworkers and by Sarah Lacy and Cara Ocobock.

References

Anderson, A., Chilczuk, S., Nelson, K., Ruther, R., & Wall-Scheffler, C. (2023). The Myth of Man the Hunter: Women’s contribution to the hunt across ethnographic contexts. PLOS ONE, 18(6), e0287101. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0287101

Barham, L., Duller, G. a. T., Candy, I., Scott, C., Cartwright, C. R., Peterson, J. R., Kabukcu, C., Chapot, M. S., Melia, F., Rots, V., George, N., Taipale, N., Gethin, P., & Nkombwe, P. (2023). Evidence for the earliest structural use of wood at least 476,000 years ago. Nature, 622(7981), 107–111. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06557-9

Kindler, L., Gaudzinski-Windheuser, S., Scherjon, F., Garcia-Moreno, A., Smith, G. M., Pop, E., Speth, J. D., & Roebroeks, W. (2025). Large-scale processing of within-bone nutrients by Neanderthals, 125,000 years ago. Science Advances, 11(27), eadv1257. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adv1257

Lacy, S., & Ocobock, C. (2024). Woman the hunter: The archaeological evidence. American Anthropologist, 126(1), 19–31. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13914

Nowell, A. (2021). Growing Up in the Ice Age: Fossil and Archaeological Evidence of the Lived Lives of Plio-Pleistocene Children. Oxbow Books.

Ochando, J., Jiménez-Espejo, F. J., Giles-Guzmán, F., Neto de Carvalho, C., Carrión, J. S., Muñiz, F., Rubiales, J. M., Cura, P., Belo, J., Finlayson, S., Martrat, B., van Drooge, B. L., Jiménez-Moreno, G., García-Alix, A., Lozano Rodríguez, J. A., Albert, R. M., Ohkouchi, N., Ogawa, N., Suga, H., … Finlayson, C. (2024). A Neanderthal’s specialised burning structure compatible with tar obtention. Quaternary Science Reviews, 346, 109025. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2024.109025

Rangan, H., Bell, K. L., Baum, D. A., Fowler, R., McConvell, P., Saunders, T., Spronck, S., Kull, C. A., & Murphy, D. J. (2015). New Genetic and Linguistic Analyses Show Ancient Human Influence on Baobab Evolution and Distribution in Australia. PLOS ONE, 10(4), e0119758. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0119758

Roebroeks, W., MacDonald, K., Scherjon, F., Bakels, C., Kindler, L., Nikulina, A., Pop, E., & Gaudzinski-Windheuser, S. (2021). Landscape modification by Last Interglacial Neanderthals. Science Advances, 7(51), eabj5567. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abj5567

Thompson, J. C., Wright, D. K., Ivory, S. J., Choi, J.-H., Nightingale, S., Mackay, A., Schilt, F., Otárola-Castillo, E., Mercader, J., Forman, S. L., Pietsch, T., Cohen, A. S., Arrowsmith, J. R., Welling, M., Davis, J., Schiery, B., Kaliba, P., Malijani, O., Blome, M. W., … Gomani-Chindebvu, E. (2021). Early human impacts and ecosystem reorganization in southern-central Africa. Science Advances, 7(19), eabf9776. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abf9776