Melvin Konner
The Tangled Wing

The Taung youngster also reminds us that our ancestors were evolving the long childhood of our species. Braininess in the animal world goes with lengthy growth, and both had to come into play before we could be human. As psychologist Jerome Bruner presciently said long ago, foreseeing a new approach to child psychology, 'The nature and uses of immaturity are themselves subject to evolution, and their variations are subject to natural selection.' Our ancestors were selected for longer childhoods in part so that they could play, observe, and learn more. They needed the time to grow larger brains, but they also needed to bend those brains to the purposes of culture. Controversy continues as to whether the australopithecines had an apelike or humanlike plan of childhood growth, but either way, their brighter descendants, up to and including us, were under selection for bigger brains with more complex functions. Comparison of the toothy australopithecine skull with the more globular first skulls of Homo led to an apt distinction: the "eating brain" and the 'thinking brain.'

But thinking about what? Among the more plausible claims are puzzle-solving ability, needed to track game without a decent sense of smell; information storage, for memory-guided gathering; language and planning, for group hunting; intersubjectivity, for teaching skills like toolmaking; foresight, for the protection and training of offspring during that same long childhood; 'Machiavellian' intelligence, for reading the plans of rivals, to do unto others before they do unto you; and abstract thought, for reckoning complexities of kinship, marriage, and economic exchange. What is certain is that brain size and cultural complexity, as reflected in stone-tool traditions, increased in concert over the last 1,000,000 years.

There is no doubt that hunting played a role in this process, engaging some of the highest features of prehuman emotion and intelligence. Recent hunting-and-gathering cultures have elaborate and moving beliefs and rituals for hunting. Among the gentle Pygmies of the Ituri Forest, for example, young men learn to kill elephants, and a successful hunt of any kind promotes band solidarity and gives rise to a clay of ritual and story. The Siriono of eastern Bolivia rub their bodies with the feathers of a harpy eagle they have killed, to take on some of the bird's awesome power. The simple, persuasive remark, "Women like meat," made by the !Kung of the Kalahari to anthropologist Lorna Marshall, became the title of Megan Biesele's book about their myths. With such a preference embedded in female choice, it is little wonder that even non-hunting-and-gathering cultures like the Sambia of New Guinea and the Masai of East Africa made hunting central to their rituals of manhood. And as shown by anthropologist Matt Cartmill in his profound meditation on the role of the hunt in human culture, A View to Death in the Morning, hunting is a transforming and passionate experience, celebrated in the classic art and literature of great civilizations. Despite all skepticism it is likely to have played a crucial, if still mysterious, part in our evolution.

Until the late 1990s it was thought that human control of fire first appeared at Zhoukoudian in China, about 500,000 years ago. That Homo erectus roasted meat seemed to be proven by the charred bones of various prey species littering the floor of the Zhoukoudian caves. But now it seems that the roasting there may not have been deliberate. Still, at some point in the early evolution of our species, fire did come under our ancestors' control. If their taste apparatus was anything like ours, such cooking must have greatly increased the appeal of the meat in their diet. It must have made certain parts of the carcass more digestible and relaxed selection pressure on the teeth, jaws, and face, allowing them to shrink even further. Fire would ultimately figure in the spread of agriculture and the founding of civilizations. But the dawn of controlled fire has deeper implications. If these near-human creatures reacted to fire the way we do—especially those of us in hunter-gatherer and other small-scale societies—then control of fire meant a quantum advance in human culture: rituals centered around a steady, managed blaze and, as language emerged, the chance for nightly discussion of each day's events, plans for the next day, important events in the personal and cultural past, myths and tales, and future possibilities for the people and the band.

Of course, such talk can go on during the day or in the dark. But the day must generally serve more urgent purposes, and anyway, there is something about the night—the fear of isolation, the deep need for social life, the longing for light and warmth, the soothing, even mesmerizing effect of the nickering burning. 'Look not too long into the fire,' says Melville's Ishmael in Moby Dick, a warning against the lapses of pragmatism—the lapses, even, of self—that such gazing may occasion. We can visualize a group of these early people, huddled together, touching, talking, and gazing into the fire, safe from the night behind, attaining perhaps a new plateau of human consciousness—a distinctively cultural consciousness—and perhaps too, the rise of an impulse that we might be inclined to call religious.

Human ingenuity soon created spaces. Four hundred thousand years ago, in what are now the environs of Nice, there were not only hearths but houses built around them. We may call them huts, but they are as much houses as many dwell in today. They are oval— twenty to fifty feet long and twelve to eighteen feet wide—and could shelter between ten and twenty people. They have pestholes for large branches, a wall of stones, and odd slabs of limestone for sitting or working at. There is much debris on the floors, but immediately around the hearths places are cleared—perhaps for sleeping beside the fire, as native Australians used to do. There is clear evidence of repeated brief occupation. Pollen in coprolites—the fossils of feces—comes from spring and early-summer plants, showing that the occupation of these sites was seasonal, much in the style of modern, seminomadic, gathering-hunting peoples. Thus the French Riviera, 400,000 years ago.



  The World was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They, hand in hand, with wand'ring steps and slow,
   

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

Through Eden took their solitary way.