Yves here. Lambert and I both found the news tonight to be oddly slow. So a cultural offering, this one on what might be gleaned from human prehistory and the dawn of technology, seems like a welcome change of programming.
By Jan Ritch-Frel, executive director of the Independent Media Institute. Oroduced by the Independent Media Institute
Discoveries in the fields of human origins, paleoanthropology, cognitive science, and behavioral biology have accelerated in the past few decades. We occasionally bump into news reports that new findings have revolutionary implications for how humanity lives today—but the information for the most part is still packed obscurely in the worlds of science and academia.
Some experts have tried to make the work more accessible, but Deborah Barsky’s new book, Human Prehistory: Exploring the Past to Understand the Future (Cambridge University Press, 2022), is one of the most authoritative yet. The breadth and synthesis of the work are impressive, and Barsky’s highly original analysis on the subject—from the beginnings of culture to how humanity began to be alienated from the natural world—keeps the reader engaged throughout.
Long before Jane Goodall began telling the world we would do well to study our evolutionary origins and genetic cousins, it was a well-established philosophical creed that things go better for humanity the more we try to know ourselves.
Barsky, a researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution and associate professor at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) and Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona, Spain, who came to this field through her decades of studying ancient stone tool technologies, writes early in her book that lessons learned from the remote past could guide our species toward a brighter future, but “that so much of the information that is amassed by prehistoric archeologists remains inaccessible to many people” and “appears far removed from our daily lives.” I reached out to Barsky in the early stage of her book launch to learn more.
Jan Ritch-Frel: What would you suggest a person consider as they hold a 450,000-year-old handaxe for the first time?
Deborah Barsky: I think everyone feels a deep-seated reverence when touching or holding such an ancient tool. Handaxes in particular carry so many powerful implications, including on the symbolic level. You have to imagine that these tear-shaped tools—the ultimate symbol of the Acheulian—appeared in Africa some 1.75 million years ago and that our ancestors continued creating and re-creating this same shape from that point onwards for more than a million and a half years!
These tools are the first ones recognized as having been made in accordance with a planned mental image. And they have an aesthetic quality, in that they present both bilateral and bifacial symmetry. Some handaxes were made in precious or even visually pleasing rock matrices and were shaped with great care and dexterity according to techniques developed in the longest-enduring cultural norm known to humankind.
And yet, in spite of so many years of studying handaxes, we still understand little about what they were used for, how they were used, and, perhaps most importantly, whether or not they carry with them some kind of symbolic significance that escapes us. There is no doubt that the human capacity to communicate through symbolism has been hugely transformative for our species.
Today we live in a world totally dependent on shared symbolic thought processes, where such constructs as national identity, monetary value, religion, and tradition, for example, have become essential to our survival. Complex educational systems have been created to initiate our children into mastering these constructed realities, integrating them as fully as possible into this system to favor their survival within the masses of our globalized world. In the handaxe we can see the first manifestations of this adaptive choice: to invest in developing symbolic thought. That choice has led us into the digital revolution that contemporary society is now undergoing. Yet, where all of this will lead us remains uncertain.
JRF: Your book shows that it is more helpful to us if we consider the human story and evolution as less of a straight line and more so as one that branches in different ways across time and geography. How can we explain the past to ourselves in a clear and useful way to understand the present?
DB: One of the first things I tell my students is that in the field of human prehistory, one must grow accustomed to information that is in a constant state of flux, as it changes in pace with new discoveries that are being made on nearly a daily basis.
It is also important to recognize that the pieces composing the puzzle of the human story are fragmentary, so that information is constantly changing as we fill in the gaps and ameliorate our capacity to interpret it. Although we favor scientific interpretations in all cases, we cannot escape the fact that our ideas are shaped by our own historical context—a situation that has impeded correct explanations of the archeological record in the past.
One example of this is our knowledge of the human family that has grown exponentially in the last quarter of a century thanks to new discoveries being made throughout the world. Our own genus, Homo, for example, now includes at least five new species, discovered only in this interim.
Meanwhile, genetic studies are taking major steps in advancing the ways we study ancient humans, helping to establish reliable reconstructions of the (now very bushy) family tree, and concretizing the fact that over millions of years multiple hominin species shared the same territories. This situation continued up until the later Paleolithic, when our own species interacted and even reproduced together with other hominins, as in the case of our encounters with the Neandertals in Eurasia, for example.
While there is much conjecture about this situation, we actually know little about the nature of these encounters: whether they were peaceful or violent; whether different hominins transmitted their technological know-how, shared territorial resources together, or decimated one another, perhaps engendering the first warlike behaviors.
One thing is sure: Homo sapiens remains the last representative of this long line of hominin ancestors and now demonstrates unprecedented planetary domination. Is this a Darwinian success story? Or is it a one-way ticket to the sixth extinction event—the first to be caused by humans—as we move into the Anthropocene Epoch?
In my book, I try to communicate this knowledge to readers so that they can better understand how past events have shaped not only our physical beings but also our inner worlds and the symbolic worlds we share with each other. It is only if we can understand when and how these important events took place—actually identify the tendencies and put them into perspective for what they truly are—that we will finally be the masters of our own destiny. Then we will be able to make choices on the levels that really count—not only for ourselves, but also for all life on the planet. Our technologies have undoubtedly alienated us from these realities, and it may be our destiny to continue to pursue life on digital and globalized levels. We can’t undo the present, but we can most certainly use this accumulated knowledge and technological capacity to create far more sustainable and “humane” lifeways.
JRF: How did you come to believe that stone toolmaking was the culprit for how we became alienated from the world we live in?
DB: My PhD research at Perpignan University in France was on the lithic assemblages from the Caune de l’Arago cave site in southern France, a site with numerous Acheulian habitation floors that have been dated to between 690,000 and 90,000 years ago. During the course of my doctoral research, I was given the exceptional opportunity to work on some older African and Eurasian sites. I began to actively collaborate in international and multidisciplinary teamwork (in the field and in the laboratory) and to study some of the oldest stone tool kits known to humankind in different areas of the world. This experience was an important turning point for me that subsequently shaped my career as I oriented my research more and more towards understanding these “first technologies.”
More recently, as a researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA) in Tarragona, Spain, I continue to investigate the emergence of ancient human culture, in particular through the study of a number of major archeological sites attributed to the so-called “Oldowan” technocomplex (after the eponymous Olduvai Gorge Bed I sites in Tanzania). My teaching experience at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) and Rovira i Virgili University (Tarragona) helped me to articulate my findings through discussions and to further my research with students and colleagues.
Such ancient tool kits, some of which date to more than 2 million years ago, were made by the hands of hominins who were very different from ourselves, in a world that was very distinct from our own. They provide a window of opportunity through which to observe some of the cognitive processes employed by the early humans who made and used them. As I expanded my research, I discovered the surprising complexity of ancient stone toolmaking, eventually concluding that it was at the root of a major behavioral bifurcation that would utterly alter the evolutionary pathways taken by humankind.
Early hominins recognizing the advantages provided by toolmaking made the unconscious choice to invest more heavily in it, even as they gained time for more inventiveness. Oldowan tool kits are poorly standardized and contain large pounding implements, alongside small sharp-edged flakes that were certainly useful, among other things, for obtaining viscera and meat resources from animals that were scavenged as hominins competed with other large carnivores present in the paleolandscapes in which they lived. As hominins began to expand their technological know-how, successful resourcing of such protein-rich food was ideal for feeding the developing and energy-expensive brain.
Meanwhile, increased leisure time fueled human inventiveness, and stone tool production—and its associated behaviors—grew ever more complex, eventually requiring relatively heavy investments into teaching these technologies to enable them to pass onwards into each successive generation. This, in turn, established the foundations for the highly beneficial process of cumulative learning that was later coupled with symbolic thought processes such as language that would ultimately favor our capacity for exponential development. This also had huge implications, for example, in terms of the first inklings of what we call “tradition”—ways to make and do things—that are indeed the very building blocks of culture. In addition, neuroscientific experiments undertaken to study the brain synapses involved during toolmaking processes show that at least some basic forms of language were likely needed in order to communicate the technologies required to manufacture the more complex tools of the Acheulian (for example, handaxes).
Moreover, researchers have demonstrated that the areas of the brain activated during toolmaking are the same as those employed during abstract thought processes, including language and volumetric planning. I think that it is clear from this that the Oldowan can be seen as the start of a process that would eventually lead to the massive technosocial database that humanity now embraces and that continues to expand ever further in each successive generation, in a spiral of exponential technological and social creativity.
JRF: Did something indicate to you at the outset of your career that archeology and the study of human origins have a vital message for humanity now? You describe a conceptual process in your bookwhereby through studying our past, humanity can learn to “build up more viable and durable structural entities and behaviors in harmony with the environment and innocuous to other life forms.”
DB: I think most people who pursue a career in archeology do so because they feel passionate about exploring the human story in a tangible, scientific way. The first step, described in the introductory chapters of my book, is choosing from an ever-widening array of disciplines that contribute to the field today. From the onset, I was fascinated by the emergence and subsequent transformation of early technologies into culture. The first 3 million years of the human archeological record are almost exclusively represented by stone tools. These stone artifacts are complemented by other kinds of tools—especially in the later periods of the Paleolithic, when bone, antler, and ivory artifacts were common—alongside art and relatively clear habitational structures.
It is one thing to analyze a given set of stone tools made by long-extinct hominin cousins and quite another to ask what their transposed significance to contemporary society might be.
As I began to explore these questions more profoundly, numerous concrete applications did finally come to the fore, thus underpinning how data obtained from the prehistoric register is applicable when considering issues such as racism, climate change, and social inequality that plague the modern globalized world.
In my opinion, the invention and subsequent development of technology was the inflection point from which humanity was to diverge towards an alternative pathway from all other life forms on Earth. We now hold the responsibility to wield this power in ways that will be beneficial and sustainable to all life.
45 comments
Comments are closed.
Then we will be able to make choices on the levels that really count—not only for ourselves, but also for all life on the planet. Our technologies have undoubtedly alienated us from these realities,
According to Bloom there was no “self” or “human” until Shakespeare. I think Bloom overstates the case, but nevertheless, the “alienation” which the author refers to is what, from a religious perspective or Heideggerian one, is meant by “fallenness.” It is the process by which the self is created/emerged,
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/070674370004500911
I’ve always found this bit of evolutionary neuropsychology, the insistence that selfhood emerged in recent centuries so weird
Etrigan: I’ve always found this bit of evolutionary neuropsychology, the insistence that selfhood emerged in recent centuries so weird
Bloom was presumably riffing on Julian Jayne’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which is pretty much the most extreme, original statement of this theory.
So, In the third chapter of his book, “The Mind of the Iliad”, Jaynes claims that people of Homer’s era essentially had no consciousness.
There is in general no consciousness in the Iliad. I am saying ‘in general’ because I shall mention some exceptions later. And in general therefore, no words for consciousness or mental acts. The words in the Iliad that in a later age come to mean mental things have different meanings, all of them more concrete. The word psyche, which later means soul or conscious mind, is in most instances life-substances, such as blood or breath: a dying warrior bleeds out his psyche onto the ground or breathes it out in his last gasp. The thumos, which later comes to mean something like emotional soul, is simply motion or agitation. When a man stops moving, the thumos leaves his limbs. But it is also somehow like an organ itself, for when Glaucus prays to Apollo to alleviate his pain and to give him strength to help his friend Sarpedon, Apollo hears his prayer and “casts strength in his thumos” (Iliad, 16:529). The thumos can tell a man to eat, drink, or fight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind
Jayne’s concept is intellectually fascinating in a science-fictional way — i.e. What if it were like this?
I don’t think it was like that for a moment, however. As I point out elsewhere btl, the further we look back into prehistory towards Cro Magnon man, the more it appears our ancestors had bigger brains than modern Homo sap does.
What a great book, even if not solidly grounded in conventional science. I found his analysis that originally the two hemispheres of the human brain were not integrated fascinating. Jaynes suggested that in the Iilad that when Achillias or Hector heard the gods speaking to them they literally heard voices. It was only through the corpus colosseum that the sides of the brain where harmonized thus the title of his book. It’s as if the “I” and the “me” or the “I” and “thou” (Martin Buber) where both encapsulated in our skulls.
Sounds as good a theory as Terence McKenna’s theory of monkeys tripping on mushrooms and expanding their consciousness leading to homo sapiens.
Horses have a very minimal corpus callosum and their brain hemispheres operate quite independently compared to man’s. This is allegedly why a horse can see a ball pass across its left field of vision and then be startled when it appears on its right.
A paper’s width from madness, horses. Don’t trust them!
Horses have a very minimal corpus callosum and their brain hemispheres operate quite independently compared to man’s.
A bit like dolphins when they sleep, then.
Dolphins, being cetaceans, have to surface to breathe. So only one hemisphere of a dolphin’s brain sleeps at a time while the other hemisphere stays alert to enable the dolphin to continue breathing and looking out for dangers in the environment. Likewise, they only close one eye when they sleep; the left eye will be closed when the right half of the brain sleeps, and vice versa.
Apparently, the first time they tried to anaesthetize a dolphin, they made both hemispheres of the creature unconscious, and it stopped breathing and died.
https://pubs.asahq.org/anesthesiology/article/129/1/11/18796/History-of-the-Development-of-Anesthesia-for-the
The human brain evolved to its final form about 40, 000 years ago, although there is argument about this. By comparison with pre-humans, modern humans are “gracile”, leaner, less bulky. Upright posture and neoteny allowed for a brain with a efficient neural network. In particular, as I write in my book, the cerebellum at the base of the brain, whose main function was always thought to be control of movement evolved. It now has a least three times the neural density of any other part of the brain and serves to coordinate all neurological functions, including those of the frontal lobes, amygdala and so on. Human “self” is the result of several things. One are newly evolved centers for empathy and altruism — mid brain. Mirror neurons help too. And neoteny – extended juvenescence. We are one of the most neotenous species – certainly much more than any other primate — which accounts for our long lifespan and our ability to learn lifelong.”Self” depends on awareness of and identification of other selves. We are not one but many. And the ability to stand alone depends also on the ability to suspend ego and act altruistically. Only a psychopath acts continually in his or her own interest and while psychopaths often have the intelligence to “see” other selves and use them– they cannot empathize or sacrifice. Ultimately, however it all comes down to neoteny, which allows self-domestication. That’s why my book title is Ageing Young. http://www.ageing young.com
https://www.amazon.com/Ageing-Young-Youre-Never-Rock-ebook/dp/B08T9G1YB4/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=ageing+young&qid=1636884520&sr=8-2
@ Julian —
Thanks for bringing those facts up. Yes, all that is also fascinating.
Trouble is, Jaynes was wrong about Homeric characters – demonstrably so. See Bernard William’s Sather Lectures, “Shame and Necessity” for all this.
Trouble is, Jaynes was wrong about Homeric characters
Yup.
Again.
Homo Sspiens on edge of extinction
Big brain developed the ultimate tool
The nuclear bomb. Nuclear is
Inherently “out of control” Faustian
Archetype Hubris always wins out
Ancient Greeks were wise. Tragedy
Is woven in our DNA.
Now we are facing. Covid Will we survive?
Can our big brain evolution deal with this?
Time will tell? Hopi Snake dance as
Co-existence with dangerous forces. Sometimes
The dancer is fanged and dies! Zorba – we have
To dance.
Barsky: In my opinion, the invention and subsequent development of technology was the inflection point from which humanity was to diverge towards an alternative pathway from all other life forms on Earth.
Eh. Other terrestrial species use tools extensively. Octopuses, for instance —
Animal Cognition: Defensive Tool Use in Octopuses
Barsky: …genetic studies are taking major steps in advancing the ways we study ancient humans, helping to establish reliable reconstructions of the (now very bushy) family tree, and concretizing the fact that over millions of years multiple hominin species shared the same territories
Archeogenetics is actually where the action is. The archeogeneticists have been on the cutting edge on these questions, starting with Colin Renfrew — who in the 1960s was already producing results on the connections between human tool use and intelligence — to John Hawks and Pääbo Svabo today. This Barsky person is someone with a book to sell, following fourth-hand in the archeogeneticists’ footsteps (and a half-century behind them). For instance : —
Barsky: data obtained from the prehistoric register is applicable when considering issues such as … social inequality that plague the modern globalized world.
One of the primary facts about human social inequality the archeogeneticists have revealed is that the evolution of humans was characterized by a continuous increase in brain size. But then: –
[1] This trend abruptly reversed starting around 30,000 years ago, and this reversal became entrenched with the start of permanent settlements and ‘civilization’ about 10,000 years ago. The average Cro Magnon had a substantially larger brain than the average modern Homp sap — so was substantially smarter than us, presumably.
[2] The average modern homo sapiens also exhibits a number of biological characteristics more typical of pets than of wild animals — what’s now now called a domestication syndrome. If you look at our skeletons, there are a lot of peculiarities that are characteristic of pets. Four of them stand out compared to our ancestors: a shorter face; smaller teeth; reduced sex differences, with males becoming more female-like; and, finally, a smaller brain.
So, modern humans are pets. But whose “companion animal” are we?
The work of James C. Scott offers some insights here, it seems to me. Particularly, Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed
.
“So, modern humans are pets. But whose “companion animal” are we?”
I’d answer that question except that the cat is demanding to be fed and her litter box needs attending to.
Dogs much more than cats. Humans and dogs have been domesticating each other about 30,000 years. Human-cat co-domestication began around 8,000 years ago.
Yeah, I’m much more of a dog than a cat person. Alas, over the last couple of decades I’ve had three dogs, then two, then one and now sadly none.
The imaginary owners we keep dreaming up to replace patriarchal authority.
“Our technologies have undoubtedly alienated us from these realities, and it may be our destiny to continue to pursue life on digital and globalized levels.”
I am not sure exactly what realities we are alienated from. How do our technologies accomplish that alienation?
“As I began to explore these questions more profoundly, numerous concrete applications did finally come to the fore, thus underpinning how data obtained from the prehistoric register is applicable when considering issues such as racism, climate change, and social inequality that plague the modern globalized world.”
How does data obtained from the prehistoric register apply to current issues? Do we have to buy the book to find out?
I have the impression that for Deborah Barsky tool making — of which stone handaxes are emblematic — is somehow equated with technology and technology is the root of human divergence from the rest of life on Earth. I thought the idea that tool making is the defining characteristic of modern humans has been undermined by the discovery that other animals make tools. Even accepting that stone handaxes are equivalent to technology I am not sure how to conclude that technology is the source of human alienation from unspecified realities.
I can understand why the study of stone tools, given their relative ubiquity as prehistoric artifacts, might occupy archeological studies of human prehistory. I fail to understand how stone tools address what for me is one of the big questions — what happened some mere tens of thousands of years ago that suddenly transformed Humankind from constructing stone tools to the level of technology, and culture evident from Neolithic cities and agriculture. Another big question — what difference or differences between Humankind and other creatures explains the mysterious and monumental transformations of Human Society that took place so recently. Tools, hands, language, art, other[?] have all been proposed as the crucial difference(s). I am a fan of language as the crucial factor — what Chomsky describes as the “Biolinguistic Program”.
Addressing a particular of your comment: ” The average Cro Magnon had a substantially larger brain than the average modern Homp sap — so was substantially smarter than us, presumably.” — I believe brain size is not predictive of intelligence. If it were, then how can we regard ourselves as more intelligent than elephants or whales? How do parrots and crows fit that measure?
The issue of how whatever size brain one possesses is used is also a central issue. The famous example of physical brain size not correlating to observed intelligence is Einstein. His brain was smaller than ‘average.’
See: https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/4-geniuses-who-have-had-their-brains-studied-by-science/
The real question to me is how the brain is organized for function. Different sections of the brain are responsible for discrete functions. (The holographic theory of brain organization is still being worked out as far as I can find out.)
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holonomic_brain_theory#:~:text=Holonomic%20brain%20theory%2C%20also%20known,in%20or%20between%20brain%20cells.
As mentioned above, whales and dolphins have larger brains than hominids.
See: https://louisegund.com/the-extraordinary-intelligence-of-whales-and-dolphins/
Yet, much larger sections of those aquatic mammal’s brains are adapted for “echo location” navigation. Plus, those creatures are aquatic and thus directly experience their environment in three spatial dimensions. Humans can, unaided, run around roughly in two dimensions. The cetaceans swim in three dimensions continuously. Those “sonar” brains are thus critical to their perception and navigation of their environments.
To me, the defining aspect of Terran human “uniqueness” is their wholesale manipulation of their surrounding environment. True, ants and termites do something similar, but those beings are instinctual and “programmed.” Terran humans plan ahead, can imagine in a non physical way, and cooperate to carry out tasks of no immediate, direct consequence to the organisms participating in the work.
Finally, we are here debating the relative merits of Terran humans versus other possibly sentient species that inhabit the Earth. Where are the whale and dolphin designed and run websites?
As for the question of why now, geologically speaking, Terran humans developed “civilization,” I must wonder how much of our past history has been lost to us. The Younger Dryas events, no matter your opinion about them, were a watershed event in Terran human history. roughly speaking, Mother Nature tried to wipe us out. Now, we seem H— bent on wiping ourselves out. We are the smart ones?
Stay safe.
I read somewhere that the basil ganglia is called the “brain in the brain” and that a higher density of neurons there correlates to higher intelligence. (I looked but I cannot find anything to support this claim.) If this is the case, it may be our basil ganglia’s are denser on average than our ancestors were. No evidence of this would survive.
This Basil?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_Fawlty
ambrit: Humans can, unaided, run around roughly in two dimensions. The cetaceans swim in three dimensions continuously. Those “sonar” brains are thus critical to their perception and navigation of their environments.
All true. And of course, too, bigger creatures need bigger brains to run their greater mass. Thus, the sperm whale with a brain weighing up to 20 pounds, or 7-9 kilograms.
Though the physically bigger the species gets, the smaller the brain mass tends to be relative to body mass. Conversely, the smallest animals have relatively the largest brains in relation to their body mass, with the ant having by far the largest brain to body mass ratio of any animal, at 1:7.
Humans’ brain to body mass ratio is 1:40, about on a par with rodents.
ambrit: Where are the whale and dolphin designed and run websites?
Underwater conditions prevent technology development by these species. It’s unfair.
The octopus’s condition is particularly unfair and particularly fascinating. Enteroctopus dofleini, the giant Pacific octopus, has nine brains—one central brain, with a subsidiary brain in each of its eight arms capable of operating and sensing independently, with those subsidiary brains amounting altogether to about two-thirds of its brainpower.
Nature has played an extremely cruel joke on these creatures, unfortunately. It’s given them these brains of enormous complexity and, presumably, an inner experience of equal richness. Yet they endure no longer than the least beasts of the field, like rats and mice.
Some species live only six months and even the giant Pacific octopus lasts only five years at best. Reproduction is the limiting factor: as soon as the males mate and the females lay their eggs, an octopus’s optic glands, its analogue of a vertebrate’s pituitary gland, are programmed to trigger senescence—cellular breakdown without repair or replacement.
This also means octopuses can’t develop innter-generational knowledge or culture, which makes their tool use even more amazing.
I didn’t know that about octopus lifespans. That is indeed a major ‘cheat’ on the part of Nature.
Underwater technology is problematic. I am left wondering about the memory capacity of cetacean brains. Could there be dolphin bards?
Be safe.
Brute physical brain size and its relationship to “intelligence“ – phrenology – was debunked at least 150 years ago. Stephen J. Gould’s “The Mismeasure of Man” rehashed it 40 years ago.
What really interests me is this nagging, prevailing, uber-sense that we are… not like, smarter, more sophisticated, whatever, than our ancient ancestors. I see little evidence of that, and plenty of the exact opposite. If there is a word for it, it hasn’t revealed itself to me. It’s an “ism” of some sort, all I can come up with is “era-ism”.
Not to glorify the ancients. I see no reason to believe the Neanderthals were assimilated with Homo sapiens. Surely there was violence.
This is what I’m getting at. Do we think they were too simple-minded to be mean to each other? Why do we think that? Because the flip side is true, perhaps? That, because we are so “sophisticated” we are allowing ourselves to be brutal to each other? That it’s justified? That “they wouldn’t understand”? We need to get over ourselves. And by doing this quickly the rest of the species we share this rock with would appreciate.
Yeah. Bunch of jumped-up monkeys, if you ask me.
@ Jeremy Grimm —
You wrote: I believe brain size is not predictive of intelligence. If it were, then how can we regard ourselves as more intelligent than elephants or whales? How do parrots and crows fit that measure?
First of all, I should be specific.
In the last 10,000 years, the average human brain has shrank two-hundred cubic centimeters. Putting that in context, if we shrank another two-hundred, we’d have a brain the size of Homo erectus, the earliest member of genus Homo, dating back two million years to the Pleistocene and the predecessor of Homo heidelbergensis, who preceded Homo neanderthalis and Homo sap.
That’s a pretty massive shrinkage in brain size in 10,000 years.
Secondly, brain size within a shared evolutionary lineage does tend to be fairly predictive.
In other words: if, as here, you’re trying to claim that elephants, whales, parrots, crows, and humans are comparable, they simply are not. They’re species with very different sizes — and therefore brain to body mass ratios — and with very different evolutionary histories (i.e. they’ve evolved to occupy very environments/ecological niches).
Conversely….
“Encephalization quotient (EQ), encephalization level (EL), or just encephalization is a reliable brain size measure that’s defined as the ratio between observed to predicted brain mass for an animal of a given size, based on nonlinear regression on a range of reference species. For this purpose it is a more refined measurement than the raw brain-to-body mass ratio, as it takes into account allometric effects. Expressed as a formula, the relationship has been developed for mammals and may not yield relevant results when applied outside this group.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient
So reference species for Homo sapiens would obviously include our nearest living evolutionary relatives, chimpanzees, who have 98 percent the same genetic structure.
Human brain are about three times as big as chimpanzee brains. Moreover, a part of the brain called the cerebral cortex – which plays a key role in memory, attention, awareness and thought – contains twice as many cells in humans as the same region in chimpanzees. And this difference in human and chimpanzee brain sizes correlates pretty directly with the observed differences in human and chimpanzee intelligence.
Let us now return to the shrinkage of human brains in the last 30.000 years as compared to our Cro Magnon ancestors. Could the reduction in size be due to down to greater efficiency? That is, our brains might be using less energy, signaling faster, and so forth.
Pretty to think so. But hard to support given the extent of the shrinkage.
Again, in the last 10,000 years, the average human brain has shrank two-hundred cubic centimeters. If we shrank another two-hundred, we’d have a brain the size of Homo erectus, the earliest member of genus Homo, dating back two million years to the Pleistocene
Ayumu is a 7-year-old chimpanzee…. Can you beat Ayumu in this memory test?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyJomdyjyvM
Can you beat Ayumu in this memory test?
No, and I can’t beat the memory on my cell phone either. Nor, likewise, can I navigate in three dimensions like a sparrow. And so on.
Ayumu’s memory is specialized for spatio-visual tasks. Their memory is useless, on the other hand, for reciting back an aural sequence of ordered sounds — a verbal account of a series of events — lasting for up to half an hour, as humans from some non-literacy-based cultures can.
And Ayumu’s memory cannot look through a whole book and copy it back out word for word as a human outlier like John von Neumann could — nor can Ayumu do what else von Neumann could do and make deep contributions to: ergodic theory; group theory; lattice theory; representation theory; operator algebras; matrix theory; the initial maths to explain quantum mechanics; game theory; and computing — Von Neumann architecture, linear programming, scientific computing, self-replicating machines, stochastic computing the development of the electronic digital computer. (Von Neumann also came up with the implosion device that made the original Los Alamos-produced fission bombs possible, so it’s a mixed bag.)
John von Neumann was a terrible driver, though, crashing cars regularly. He and Ayumu might be about equal there.
It’s interesting. I suspect that as with physiological comparisons of the capabilities of humans and other animal species — e.g. we can’t run as fast as deers but human hunters could run longer and wear them out and kill deer that way — a similar tendency applies with the human mind, with our minds tending to be more generally adaptive and having greater plasticity across a range of contexts.
So we can learn to navigate in three dimensions like birds when we fly planes, for instance. Likewise, it might even be that a human brain, if its owner trained for some time, would come within reach of the chimpanzee’s spatio-visual memory. I suspect an outlier like von Neumann could naturally do what the chimpanzee could. Whereas the chimpanzee can’t do almost everything else that von Neumann — and most humans — could do mentally.
As to the relationship between brain size and capability, have a look at this.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12301-man-with-tiny-brain-shocks-doctors/
“So, modern humans are pets. But whose “companion animal” are we?”
Humans domesticate other humans.
We are the “pets” of those at the top of the hierarchy aka the rich/powerful. Anarcho-primitivist/anti-civ anarchists use the term domestication in such a way, and refer to it as primarily a civilizational process. You can see this with colonialism, where incorporating the Africans into the body politic is seen as a civilizing mission, vs./against the outsider others who are barbaric, aka uncivilized aka not fully human.
At larger population scales than small hunter-gatherer bands, we can offload more of our individual intelligence (already inherently collective/socially developed) to the collective. And the more technology (tools) we make, the more we offload our collective & individual intelligence to systems, although they must be maintained and have their creation skills passed on as this article points out.
NoFreeWill: Humans domesticate other humans. We are the “pets” of those at the top of the hierarchy … Anarcho-primitivist/anti-civ anarchists use the term domestication in such a way, and refer to it as primarily a civilizational process.
Yes. I agree. I don’t see the evidence supporting another explanation.
[1] The archeological record’s clear. Paleolithic humans were taller, healthier, lived longer as hunter-gather nomads, and worked far less. Conversely, permanent settlement and agriculture were seriously detrimental for Neolithic humans, who had lower life expectancies, were physically shorter, and worked long, back-breaking days as a result.
[2] So why the hell did people do it?The standard explanation is that selective breeding of grain produced more edible foods, and surpluses requiring storage. Milk and meat from domesticated animals provided added nutrition, and animals could be used for tasks like pulling a plough, making more intensive farming possible. Taken altogether, these gains led humans to adopt agriculture and permanent settlement.
But the physical record shows that’s nonsense. Neolithic humans were shorter and had lower lifespans precisely because those selectively bred crops produced steep nutritional declines. Similarly, having domesticated animals around mostly meant that a bunch of pathogens jumped species to humans. Plus, diseases like rickets, osteomalacia, rheumatoid arthritis, tuberculosis, osteitis, poliomyelitis and leprosy all showed up.
[3] Here’s an explanation that makes more sense. Look at things from the viewpoint of a human predator who preys on other human beings in a Paleolithic kinship group of twenty to thirty hunter-gatherers. Your scope for predation is limited. Maybe you can threaten or kill members of your group so the rest comply with your demands, but they can still gang up on you or run off while you’re sleeping at night.
What you can do, though, is point to some other tribe and say they’re a threat. Any of your group’s members who argue, you attack as weak and disloyal to the tribe, while you excite the rest with stories about taking whatever the other tribe has—women, food, tools, access to some particular land—that your group wants.
[4] So far, this is just bog-standard intertribal raiding, straight out of Anthropology 101, right?The few Paleolithic-type hunter-gatherers surviving into the modern era, like the Kalahari bushmen and the Kukukuku in Papua New Guinea, still do it.
But it’s also Anthropology 101 that no Paleolithic group ever came into conflict with and ultimately prevailed against a Neolithic group. And that’s because once a group was in the business of predation on other groups, it did that most successfully by having the most numbers and being better organized. Once the Neolithic Revolution–agriculture and permanent settlement– happened, in other words,organized warfare appeared alongside it.
[5] Could it be that agriculture and permanent settlement emerged to support the predation and warmaking and not the other way around?
The evidence suggests so. After all, we know a Neolithic group’s average member didn’t benefit from farming and permanent settlement. To the contrary. But it made more food, so more people were born—and we know that because we know more women died during childbirth. Then, once the group grew larger, it couldn’t return to foraging. Effectively, they were trapped, with their leader(s) controlling the granary and them, and whatever surpluses they created. And the bigger the numbers of the group, the more surpluses were created for predatory elites at the top of the group.
[6] Here it gets interesting. Individuals who resisted whatever conditions and beliefs were imposed by their communities’ elites would tend to get either killed or forced out. Either way, they were culled from the breeding pool. Simultaneously, individuals who wouldn’t have survived in a state of nature and couldn’t get by as hunter-gatherers, now got their food handed to them because they were willing to do the stupidest jobs and create surpluses for elites. And they did survive and breed.
In the real world, after all, we’ve observed two related facts. These are that in contrast to all preceding human evolution, our species’s average brain size began declining at the point when permanent human settlements and ‘civilization’ emerged, and, simultaneously, we began displaying the typical traits of domestication syndrome .
So it’s reasonable to assume these things are correlated and culture has selected for lower average IQs and domesticated humans to some extent in the last 30,000 years — in the last 10,000, particularly. Simultaneously, in some groups it has also selected for higher intelligence.
Nice thinking. I hope someone takes this up. It sounds logical, explains a lot.
Stone tools nothing.
Try industrialized farming for a much larger, and more recent, shift.
Traditional Christmas dishes are what they are thanks to the seasonality of farming of old. But now urbanites believe they can buy fresh strawberries year round. This is largely thanks to extensive use of industrially produced fertilizer and greenhouses heated by fossil fuels.
I wonder if the narrative about the Neandertals is going to be that we absorbed them. Maybe there was no killing. Maybe we just overwhelmed them. We are the Neandertals. But it is a problem now. The gene that allows SARS-CoV-2 to cause so much trouble came from them. That may be why SARS-CoV-2 is causing more trouble in Europe than in Africa.
The men were killed, the women taken, as has been the case for most of history.
And the Scots got it, literally, backwards. [I’m part Scot so I can talk.]
Elucidate, please.
Even though we do not exactly know what happened to them what is crystal clear is that there was some mixing and there is some Neardental genetic material on us. Homo sapiens and H. nearthenthalensis shared territories for about 3000-6000 years and at some point at about 40.000 years ago their tool culture disappears in the registries but we still have about 4% of genetic material attributed to them. Whether for instance it was H. sapiens tool culture what was first assimilated by them replacing their own and they were genetically absorbed/assimilated/eliminated thereafter, who knows? I think it can be argued that they never disappeared totally and they were just diluted, mixed, assimilated, absorbed… But one thing you point about diseases might be important. It could well be that diseases brought by H. sapiens could have had a major role on this dilution/extintion, very much like diseases brought by Europeans (well, Spanish mainly, I admit) decimated native populations in the Americas.
I don’t know if there is any researcher doing full microbiome research on Neardental vs Human remnants. It could tell a few things. We tend to forget about microbes…
Of course, it is “all of the above”. That is what hominins do. We love, kill, f*ck, rob, hug, maim, talk to each other. Often at the same time.
I wonder if it was through tools that the idea of personal property came into existence as an idea. So if everybody just uses stone chips as cutting tools, they are of small significance as one is as good as another. You might carry one with you to use on meat but that is about it. But with the increased sophistication of tools, you would tend to want to use the one that you had spent so many hours in making as it suited your needs and was shaped just right for your hand. If you were a good tool-maker, you probably would make good tools for others in your social group that would suit their grip but there would be only one that is actually yours. And there was the start of the concept of property which over time came to be extended to other material possessions, then land and then people themselves.
Rev kev: I wonder if it was through tools that the idea of personal property came into existence as an idea.
Huh! All of what you suggest seems quite plausible to me.
Thanks!
This you say about property it is something this article made me think about. Particularly the ‘property’ of know-how (how to do best handaxes for instance). Know-how that might have been sometimes shared, kept exclusive or secret, might have been copied… What evolutionary role might have had these behaviours? Did we go through ‘globalist’ episodes of sharing followed by occultism periods? Can we then project to our current status on IP protection as the author claims it can be done? Is this something that is shaping our current evolution for better or for worse?
“…for better or for worse.”
You have hit upon a main strength of the Terran human species, abstract thinking. We have the ability to imagine something and make decisions based upon said images. “For better or worse” implies indirect effects, consciously taken into account.
Again, other species make similar ‘actions.’ Chimpanzees use primitive tools, as do some birds, crows for instance. Yet neither group possesses “civilization,” just ‘culture.’
This entire “civilization” concept is a can of worms just waiting to be fully opened.
Stay safe in Iberia!
writing and the attendant alphabets changed our brains in fundamental ways according to David Abram in “The Spell of The Sensuous” driving the ability to analyze while making intimate knowledge confined to personal experience. Climate change is going to close the feedback loop. The bicameral mind allowed for critical thinking, artistry to coexist, to say we exalt intellect is onion, treating emotional life like a trach heap.
And @ClaudiaSahm is pounding fintwit with NO to the fed raising rates so that’s news to me
“In my opinion, the invention and subsequent development of technology was the inflection point from which humanity was to diverge towards an alternative pathway from all other life forms on Earth. We now hold the responsibility to wield this power in ways that will be beneficial and sustainable to all life.”
This statement practically says it all as to this article and the book written by Jan Ritch-Frel, that being, the exceptionalism of our species, or to the point, our “so-called” civilized species. There is this “belief” that we as a species are somewhat, again, exceptional: we’re not! We just are, just as all other life on this planet, just are! I sit outside (where I work as a Crossing Guard having free time in-between the morning and afternoon crossing) while reading and I marvel at the social behaviors of the many crows in the neighborhood where I work, they are so fascinating. It goes without saying that all species have culture, and when Ritch-Frel states:
“I think that it is clear from this that the Oldowan can be seen as the start of a process that would eventually lead to the massive technosocial database that humanity now embraces and that continues to expand ever further in each successive generation, in a spiral of exponential technological and social creativity”
Is she not saying that our human species is better than all the rest because of our big brains, which by the way, we’ve really screwed this planet to the point of extinction: Good work humanity! Two more things I’d like to say concerning the subject in this article:
1. “small sharp-edged flakes that were certainly useful, among other things, for obtaining entrails and meat resources from animals that were scavenged as hominins competed with other large carnivores present in the paleolandscapes in which they lived. As hominins began to expand their technological know-how, successful resourcing of such protein-rich food was ideal for feeding the developing and energy-expensive brain.” My response to such nonsense:
a) Only human brains are capable of “protein-rich food was ideal for feeding the developing and energy-expensive brain”? Seems very human-centric to me, now does it!
b) That we are omnivores, an animal or person that eats food of both plant and animal origin, indeed, meat is certainly a source of protein, but I challenge anyone to prove that meat is actually a higher source of protein than say, peas, lentils, and/or other legumes- this’ certainly an extremely prejudicial notion especially in Western culture. and
2. When Ritch-Frel states:
“…increased leisure time fueled human inventiveness…” I must object! Why?
From Christopher Ryan’s excellent work ‘Civilized to Death’ from pg. 164 “There is not too much of it. Anthropologists in various parts of the world have determined that foragers rarely “work” more than a few hours per day.” God help us all! Ritch-Frel, in asserting that “…increased leisure time fueled human inventiveness…” falls into the absurd notion that humanity has really advanced, which we haven’t. We’ve neither moved forward nor have we moved back to the “Garden of Eden” sort to speak. What we, with our vast “human inventiveness” have done is this: again from ‘Civilized to Death’ pg. 207 “The continuum has been broken because the human animal no longer lives in a human world. We live in a world created by and for institutions that thrive on commerce, not human beings that thrive on community, laughter, and leisure.” Wherein Ryan quotes Aldous Huxley “Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness, millions of (let’s make that hundreds of millions) abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted”
All of that, to say this: the “so-called” “fueled human inventiveness” is a “creation” (in total sarcasm) of Ritch-Frel’s belief that her “science” is correct, it’s not. Going back to my statement “We’ve neither moved forward nor have we moved back to the “Garden of Eden” sort to speak. What we, with our vast “human inventiveness” have done is this,” we have set ourselves upon a gigantic hamster wheel, running as fast as we can, yet getting: Nowhere!
Ritch-Frel concludes her article with “In my opinion, the invention and subsequent development of technology was the inflection point from which humanity was to diverge towards an alternative pathway from all other life forms on Earth. We now hold the responsibility to wield this power in ways that will be beneficial and sustainable to all life.”
This borders on perverse, why? The human condition is being given so much more “power” Ritch-Frel uses this word, incorrectly I must say, than we really have, ask any of those in the path of extreme weather occurring everywhere here on planet Earth. Extinctions happen, and not always due to human interference in and/or with nature, hardly.
To close, I would like to share three disciplines which I have been studying in the past five or so years.
(1) Economics, and why? If our species is to survive, we must change the way we do our economics, and if not, we’re doomed.
(2) Cultural Anthropology, and why? We must redefine what is work, and why? From Bertrand Russell (which Ryan placed in his work ‘Civilized to Death’ and here’s why. From Russell’s 1932 easy entitled ‘In Praise of Idleness’
“…the morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world (hasn’t changed a bit since 1932, if fact, it’s gotten worse, much worse) has no need of slaves… only a foolish asceticism, usually vicarious, makes us continue to insist on work in excessive quantities now that the need no longer exists.”
In short, we can no longer afford to keep consuming just for its own sake. And if the loss of so many natural resources has demonstrated, the very ecological devastation that our big brained species (our very “fueled human inventiveness”) has brought to the other species living on, once again, planet Earth; we’re in short supply as we MUST slow down, relax, and focus on the basic necessities to preserve our species. Again, work must be redefined.
(3) Government! and why? Unfortunately, this’ all a political process whereas we must be able, if not willing, to change our entire systems of planetary administration, an absolute must.
A final word from Ryan’s ‘Civilized to Death’ where Ryan quotes from Marshall Sahlins’ Stone Age Economics “The world’s most primitive people have few positions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.”
Once again, if only to pose my complete if not total objection with Ritch-Frel’s theories concerning pre-history,
increased leisure time fueled human inventiveness
I think not!