An Evolutionary View of Humans 1: Introduction
Published by Greg January 30th, 2007 in Science Essays, Human Evolution 1001, Evolution, Foraging |
| Efe people Ituri Forest Anthrophoto is an excellent source for anthropology stock photos |
Humans have been indistinguishable as far as the fossil record shows from today’s Homo sapiens for a minimum of about 120,000 years. Bones of Homo sapiens from back this far fit into the range of modern humans. But the archaeological record suggests that our species – just as it is today – goes back farther. The kind of material culture that the 120,000 year old humans (in Africa) had goes back to 250,000 years. But some of the key aspects of that material culture … mainly in the way stone tools are made … go back even farther, perhaps between 350,000 and 500,000 years, in southern Africa.
(Interesting aside: People often wonder if Neanderthals evolved into modern humans. That questions seems a little dumb when we consider that the earliest modern humans predate the earliest Neanderthals.)
Humans invented agriculture (domestic plants and animals) only about 10,000 years ago or so, and at that time some groups started to live in permanent settlements. But even so, many humans continued to practice hunting and gathering as their only, or at least primary, means of subsistence. A mere 4 or 5 thousand years ago, half of the human species probably lived this way.
In other words, humans evolved as hunter-gatherers and have mostly been hunter-gatherers for for more than 90% of our existence as a species.
For this reason, an evolutionary view of what we are … what human beings are all about … is best framed in the context of a hunting and gathering way of life. And this way of life has certain features that seem to be common to almost all foraging peoples. There is a large number of observations of foragers, living today or from recent times, that are helpful, given this premise, in understanding ourselves. These include, but are not limited to:
- The way our social groups are organized.
- The role of kinship and family in society and the nature of families.
- What we are anxious about.
- Our sleep patterns.
- Pride, cooperation, competition.
- What impresses us about specific members of the opposite sex.
- How our diet relates to health.
- How exercise relates to health.
- And much, much more.
It is actually amazing that humans today and in the recent past live in so many different kinds of societies. When we look only at hunter gatherers, it is hard to understand how certain social systems that exist today could emerge. This is probably best understood by realizing that the way we are as adults, and the way our societies are organized, is the product of extensive learning and enculturation. The fact that a typical grown-up human does not act in a way that is deeply determined by genetic programming, but rather is a result of extended childhood (a unique human trait) and social conditioning means that all sorts of humans, and all sorts of human societies can emerge.
In graduate school, I studied the forager way of life intensively. One of my advisors was Irv DeVore, who pioneered modern forager studies during the Kalahari Project in Botswana during the 1960s. I spent a total of about three years over four forays living with the Efe Pygmies, hunter-gatherers living in the Ituri Forest of what was then Zaire. A handful of other anthropologists have also spent considerable time with various forager groups. From this collective study, we can learn a great deal about what makes us tick as a species and as individuals. In many ways, we learn much more from understanding the foraging way of life than from all the psychological studies done on undergraduate volunteers and all the social science studies done on masses of data and all of the recent anthropological ethnography and philosophical naval gazing that happens in and near ivory towers around the world.
This is the first in a series of posts that will address some of these topics. The order of topics will be more or less random, as is the selection of which topics to cover. But if anyone would like to see a particular issue addressed let me know and I’ll see if it is possible.
NEXT INSTALLMENT: An Evolutionary View of Humans 2: Sleep
10 Responses to “An Evolutionary View of Humans 1: Introduction”
- 1 Pingback on Feb 25th, 2007 at 1:37 pm
- 2 Pingback on Feb 28th, 2010 at 10:27 pm
I can’t imagine what it was like to life in the jungle with these people. It must have been quite an experience!
I find it amazing to be reminded, even when reading history, of how recently concepts have emerged like nationalism or the ability to predict natural events.
Could you go into some detail about how the Jivaro shrink heads? My doctor told me I need to take up a hobby.
You know the sooner you get to the sex part the more hits you’re going to get, and then when you get to diet and exercise is when you start getting the hate mail from the Fat Liberation Front.
Just kidding Greg, this is an excellent idea and I look forward to reading all of it with great interest.
Is it the case that agriculture changed humans? But if that is true, are hunter-gatherers today “different” from the rest of us?
I would also like to know about shrunken heads. There was a documentary on the other night in which they used a shrunken head at the Nuremberg Trial. It had been made in one of the death camps and was used by the officer in charge of the death camp as a paper weight. The prosecutor, who was Christopher Dodd’s father, pointed out how powerful this was as a symbol. When they (the allies prosecutor) droned on about thousands dead here and thousands dead there the judges could become kind of used to it, but when you bring out the shrunken head that the officer kept every day on his desk, the inhumanity became very obvious.
I was not sure that shrunken heads were a real thing. Are they in other societies? Are they used the same way, to intimidate people?
According to Mr Google, the Jivaro used them for revenge, punishment (if you don’t eat your peas I’ll shrink your head) and similar magic, then after the ceremonials they fed them to animals or gave them to the kids to play with.
And I got a lousy second hand tinker toy truck. Probably explains why I became an engineer instead of an archaeologist.
Allegedly they were the only people who did it routinely as an entrenched part of their culture.
I met a very nice lady in Kota Kinabalu once who said her grandad had heads hanging up in the living room as part of the permanent decor when she was a little girl, but they weren’t shrunken, just the common-or-garden head-hunter variety.
Greg, does this give the lie to the oft repeated statement that Neanderthals lasted a longer time than modern humans have so far? I know it’s used to discourage people from thinking of Neanderthals as primitive brutes, but I think it is based soley on fossil evidence.
Hi Greg… even though the culture remains suggest the human species as similar hunger/gatherers goes back a few million years, has the brain size increased since that time? IIRC, the human brain has been about our size for something like 150,000 years. I’m wondering if the very fast pace at which we are changing has to do with the larger brain size in recent (150,000), years?
Yes, the full range for Neadnerthals is less than the full range of time for Modern Humans.
I think the point of that information is simply to dispel the myth that Neanderthals somehow “had to” evolve into modern humans. The problem with the comparison is that Neanderthal experts are rarely also experts on the African fossil record.
On the shrunken heads, I think the info you have is about right, I’m not an expert on them. But I do know how they are made because I met an artist who had reconstructed the technology to make shrunken grapefruits into cute little containers he sold to a lot of people as Christmas gifts. It involves hot ash and sand or small gravel rolled around inside the grapefruit (or de-boned head) again and again over several days, which shrinks the tissue much like your wool sweater shrinks in a hot drier. I guess…