Professor Timothy White knows African plains apes.
He talked about the Middle Awash paleontology dig in the Afar Depression of Ethiopia and about related matters as well--the intense poverty of the herders of the area, who have very little indeed and how the annual the dig team "is the economy" of the area; the finding of three 150,000 year-old anatomically-modern (i.e., "Cro-Magnon") skulls in the Middle Awash, and how this is another brick in the picture of human evolution according to which we replaced and destroyed (and probably ate) the Neanderthal branch of the human evolutionary tree; the six million years of evolution since we diverged from our chimpanzee cousins; the 1.8 million year ago first excursion out of Africa of groups of (small-brained) African plains apes; and the homo sapiens sapiens population bottleneck of 150,000 years ago, in which our numbers fell to perhaps a few hundred.
Of course, he could not answer the question everybody wanted to know the answer to: when over the past six million years did our ancestors change from being African plains ape--a smarter plains-dwelling version of chimpanzee--into people? He has just fragments of bone, and a few marks of stone tools on human and other animal bones. But he did say two things that were very interesting.
The first came when I opined that our ancestors had been "people" for a very long time--after all, baboon troops do not make stone tools and butcher hippopotamos, and the extraordinary distribution of very similar Achuleuan stone tools from the Cape of Good Hope to Cairo seemed to indicate a remarkable degree of cultural transmission across long distances that seemed impossible without language or something very similar. His response was twofold: First, that I should not underestimate the intelligence of the chimpanzee. They lack language, but they have sophisticated models of the world and the ability to plan across large gaps of time and large distances. Second, that what impressed him about the Achuleuan tool complex was not its distribution across space but its constancy across time. "That's not human," he said. Humans experiment with their tools, vary them, and decorate them. Human tools do not stay constant in shape and form across hundreds of thousands of years. It seemed to him that the making of Acheleuan tools might perhaps be something as much like a bird building a nest as a human making an axe.
The second was a speculation that perhaps the key moment came 1.8 million years ago accompanied by a short description of a dig in ex-Soviet Georgia: a carnivore cave filled with bones in which some of the bones have been marked by proto-human stone tools, and in which there are lots of small palm-sized basalt rocks that are not from the neighborhood. The belief is that the proto-humans threw the rocks to drive the carnivores from their lair, and then took and scavenged their kills. That's pretty gutsy. And once we had made the transition to this kind of pack super-hyena--an animal that can take and guard whatever carcasses it wants--we were on the way.
Posted by DeLong at September 16, 2003 05:03 PM | TrackBack
this sounds like a pleasant and interesting evening of secular entertainment. but i would question its scientism. you realize, of course, that these wierd apes would go on to form archaic mythic conceptions, borne from the perplexities of their language, that would later be elaborated into bizarre religious ideas authorizing an oppressive hierarchy that built the pyramids of egypt, by which the self-divinization/divine communion of the few would command the misery of the many. why concern yourself with the eons of naturalistic adaption of these clever apes, while skipping over the millenia of anxiety of beings who were, frighteningly, far more like ourselves?
Posted by: john c. halasz on September 16, 2003 06:55 PMRegarding the sheer and monotonous constancy of some stone tool types among early hominids, I'm always reminded of a comment I heard about this.
"Yes, they used the same tools for an incredibly long time. And they didn't even work that well compared to later designs. It's kind of like bell-bottoms. Imagine what we would think about our immediate ancestors if bell-bottoms were the only style of pants for 500 years."
Sometims I think physical anthropologists must have more fun than most people...
Posted by: Jonathan King on September 16, 2003 07:21 PMRe bell bottoms.
Funnily enough, one of the comments made about modern Europeans by the pre-modern Persians and Japanese, when the Europeans starting showing up circa 1600, was how inconstant European fashion was, and how their cultures were still wearing the clothes that were worn 500 or more years ago.
Check Braudel's Perspective of the World (vol 3 of Civilisation and Capitalism) for more on this topic.
Ian Whitchurch
Posted by: Ian Whitchurch on September 16, 2003 10:33 PMRe bell bottoms.
Funnily enough, one of the comments made about modern Europeans by the pre-modern Persians and Japanese, when the Europeans starting showing up circa 1600, was how inconstant European fashion was, and how their cultures were still wearing the clothes that were worn 500 or more years ago.
Check Braudel's Perspective of the World (vol 3 of Civilisation and Capitalism) for more on this topic.
Ian Whitchurch
Posted by: Ian Whitchurch on September 16, 2003 10:39 PMPlease, not "Achuleuan" but Achelean, from Acheul, (Saint-Acheul that is).
As to the invariancy of that cultural stage, I reckon it was a consequence of the low number of individuals, even if someone had some better way, that way could die with the group before having opportunity to be transmitted. A similar situation is language evolution on islands, which tends to retain archaic aspects for a long time, Iceland respect to Scandinavian languages, Sardinia respect to Latin, Majorca respect to Catalan.
DSW
Posted by: Antoni Jaume on September 17, 2003 06:59 AMThe stagnant nature of pre-Sapiens' toolmaking is hardly news to those who follow developments in the field more closely - read Steven Mithen's "Prehistory of the Mind" (Thames and Hudson, 1996), and you'll see what I mean.
Posted by: Abiola Lapite on September 17, 2003 07:44 AMBy the way, to add my two cents, I am extremely doubtful that the Awash hominids were fully cognitively "human" in the sense in which we understand that term. If they were, it wouldn't have taken them 100,000 years to spread out of Africa.
I believe that a different interpretation of the DNA information that is available also supports my thesis; from a genetic viewpoint, there is no difference between bottlenecking caused by a population crisis, and an actual speciation event with a small founder population. The only reason that paleantologists prefer the former interpretation to the latter is because they see the continuity in skeletal forms from 150,000 years ago to the present, and so they assume that because those people LOOKED like us, they must also THINK like us; but this is a bias imposed by the limitations of their field, rather than an objective statement about the world.
I believe, as with Richard Klein, that when we see genetic evidence of a population expansion beginning about 70-80,000 years ago, what we are looking at is the REAL birth of our species in its' modern, culturally creative form. I don't think it an accident that nobody has been able to find evidence of the slightest bit of creativity on the part of our ancestors that predates this period.
NB - Brad, could you please turn on HTML tags? At the very least, the ability to use the <em> and <strong> tags would be helpful in emphasizing certain words or phrases. The use of all-caps for emphasis has the unpleasant side effect of making one seem to be shouting.
Thanks.
Posted by: Abiola Lapite on September 17, 2003 08:07 AMFascinating, especially the constancy across time.
IIRC, they've recently drastically shortened estimates for how long humans took to get from the Aleutians to Tierra del Fuego.
The key isn't making tools, it's domestication of(partnership with) dogs. Only after the African Plains Ape could "outsource" the missions of hearing/smelling/watching for danger to the pack could they develop their "core-competencies" of thinking/planning/communicating.
Posted by: Pouncer on September 18, 2003 06:32 AMIIRC dog descends from an middle east wolf.
DSW
Posted by: Antoni Jaume on September 18, 2003 10:39 AM