My apartment, as I said
in my last post, is generally ok, but there’s one problem.
I
don’t have my own washing machine, which means that once a week I have to take
my clothes to the laundry mat in the strip mall.Of course, the only time I have time for this
is on weekends, when the bus doesn’t run.Which means I have to walk.That
wasn’t a problem at the beginning of the semester, when I could just stick my
stuff in a suitcase and wheel it along behind me.It worked for a time, but I knew those
halcyon days wouldn’t last forever.I
knew the snow would come.
Which,
of course, it did.And with it, my life
has taken a surreal, Jack Londonesque turn.My fifteen-minute stroll to school has become a desperate struggle
through a blinding white void.The mile
walk to the laundry mat has become a tactical expedition through sheets of
blowing snow and howling winds as cold as death.My poor suitcase, designed for a carefree
career of being rolled across marble airport floors, is not quite up to the
challenge.The snow gets stuck in the
wheels, and you may as well be dragging the stupid thing.So I take a plastic sled and some rope, tie
the suitcase (with the laundry in it) to the sled, and then drag it behind me
through the snow.Which sounds
ridiculously annoying, and it is, but I also get to pretend I’m a Ket hunter
dragging his sled through the endless forests of Siberia.Which is fun.
Fun
Ket fact: the traditional Ket unit of land measurement (like a mile or km) was
the itaŋ, literally “day-drag”: the
distance a man could drag a sled in one day.
So
the other day I got my sled and suitcase together as usual and set off for the
laundry mat.I walked for what seemed
like an eternity.The cold pierced
through my coat, but I trudged on, leaning into the freezing wind.Time and space blended together in the
storm’s rage.Somewhere in the distance
I could hear Yes playing “South Side of the Sky”:
I
staggered on, and in the corner of my eye, visions of Vikings stepped from the
snow and beckoned me to join them.Tall
and proud they stood in their horned helmets and chainmail loincloths
(ouch).Fair rang the song of the
Valkyries, wheeling above my head.My time
had come, they told me.They beckoned me
to join them, to let the storm consume me, that I might take my place at the
feasts of Valhalla!
But no…I hadn’t finished
my quest to become Midgard’s mightiest comparative philologist!My journey was not over yet.My eyes met the Viking chief’s, and I shook
my head.My road did not end here.He nodded, understanding my quest yet
regretting the loss of such a mighty ally in the war of Ragnarok.A single tear rolled from his battle-weary
eye.I adjusted the laundry sled’s rope
on my shoulders, and turned my back on the gates of Valhalla.
I looked around me,
hoping to fathom some landmark in the void, something to tell me where I
was.Somewhere in the distance, a vague
outline could be seen through the whirling snow.It was…my mailbox.
I was standing at the end
of my driveway, perhaps fifty feet from my front door.
Screw this.I turned around and headed back inside.It’s
time for the big guns.Deep in the
recesses of my closet I unearthed a misshapen cardboard box, and took out my
secret weapon against winter: my Mongolian winter robes:
Ladies
and gentlemen, I give you, a winter deel.Used in Mongolia by the world’s baddest-ass
nomads, this is a garment that not only keeps you warm when eagle-hunting/Eurasia-conquering
in thirty-five below, but it also makes you look good doing it.Quilted on the inside with wool felt and
topped with a padded hantaaz jacket,
the warmth of this thing is only exceeded by the jaw-dropping awesomeness of freakin’ cool as hell dragons woven in
freakin’ gold silk.In fact, when
I’m wearing it, I have to go outside right away or I start sweating.But just to be safe, underneath I layered
with long underwear, fleece, sweatshirt and a camel-hair vest (also Mongolian).Around my neck I wound an Andean llama-wool
scarf, and put rabbit-fur mittens on my hands.Upon my head I placed a Russian hat that had once been something alive
and cute.Thus attired, I stepped back
outside, astronaut-like, into the frigid vacuum.
Except
it wasn’t a frozen white void anymore, it was a frozen black void.It was 2:45 PM, you see. The sun had gone
down.
I
walked along the forest trail—that’s right, in Alaska the laundry mat’s on the
other side of a frozen Forest of No Return, full of angry wolves, bigfeet and,
for all I know, wooly mammoths.But at
least I didn’t have to worry about the cold anymore.The blizzard unleashed its fury on my deel; it did as much to me as much as a
gentle wind to a stone pillar.What was
I thinking earlier—this, cold?You call
this winter?Pathetic.
In
fact, I was hot.Wishing Fairbanks would get some cool weather
for a change, I took off my dragon jacket, badass as it was.I continued on through the heat of the day
(night?), unfastening my top buttons to let a little air in and cool off.Global warming.We used to have real winters when I was a
kid, not these wimpy death-rattles of an ecosystem destroyed by the avarice of
Man.I didn’t come to Alaska to die of
heat exhaustion.If I wanted that, I’d
go back to Hangzhou.Ridiculous.
I
made a triumphant entrance in the laundry mat that day.Ice clung to the rims of my glasses, and I
dusted snow from my princely Mongol garb as I stepped in.Around my shoulders was lashed a rope leading
to a plastic sled carrying an oversized suitcase.The owner of the establishment, always one to
choose his words carefully, regarded me for a moment over his newspaper.
“What
the fuck’s this?” he said by way of greeting.
I
paid for a machine, threw my clothes in, and sat down in a plastic chair.On the TV a courtroom drama was playing.Year-old People
magazines littered the table in front of me.I exchanged awkward nods with the fat man next to me.I could have been in any laundry mat in the
country, and compared the manner of my laundry trip to that of a reasonable,
well-adjusted person.
So as a
few of you guys might know, I’m currently in Fairbanks, Alaska to do grad
school.This is my first time in Alaska,
and I wasn’t sure what to expect.Same
as any other American town, I figured, just colder.So I got an apartment about a fifteen-minute
walk from school, but on the very edge of town.There’s a bus stop, which is fortunate because there’s no other way to
get to the supermarket unless you feel like walking for hours in subzero
wind.But there’s no true civilization
nearby, except a strip mall a mile or so away from my apartment.
Speaking
of my apartment, it’s quite a place.My
landlord decided to take an old single-family house and turn it into an
apartment building.To get to my
apartment, you go inside, down the stairs, and take a right.That is to say, I’m a denizen of the lower
depths.The underdark.I am…a basement dweller.Not in the sense that I’m living in my Mom’s
house having 3:00 AM online arguments with strangers about Boba Fett, but in
the sense that my apartment is literally in the basement and all you can see
out the window is dirt.Frozen dirt
actually. Permafrost.
My
apartment is an ok place to live, if you don’t mind the front door not closing
and the bedroom door not existing—“an open-concept apartment”, they said.The hole in the front door’s frame doesn’t
match up with the doorknob, so it never really closes.When I leave in the morning, I just set the
deadbolt, which I tell myself works just as well.I sleep on an air mattress and have exactly
one plate, one glass, one fork, and one beer stein that I drink oolong tea out
of.But that’s ok, because I’m in grad
school and this is apparently how it’s supposed to be.
The apartment has a fireplace (that
doesn’t work) and tile floors, which of course is great to walk on barefoot
when it’s freezing.Still, it turns into
a decent enough place with a six pack in the fridge and a Conan the Barbarian
poster on the wall:
It really ties the
room together.
Being as it is on the edge of town,
my place is on a dirt road in the middle of this great little redneck
wonderland that somehow got transplanted from the Ozarks.My neighbor on one side is a guy with a
“Don’t tread on me” flag and an upside-down jeep in his lawn.Across the street the house is surrounded by
a chainlink fence topped with barbed wire.Perched on the roof is a satellite dish almost as big as the house
itself.This, I can only assume, was
installed the purpose of intercepting transmissions between Bigfoot, the
Pentagon, and their alien overlords.Behind the houses is the vast, eternal forest stretching far, far into
the distance.I like reminding myself
that if I started walking west from my apartment, I would not leave this forest
until I reached Norway.The forest behind
my house forms part a circle around the world,the immensity of the Canadian and Alaskan subarctic.
It’s an
interesting neighborhood. A couple months ago I was coming home from school.I walked
up my driveway and I saw my neighbor standing in front of my house:
JUST
KIDDING THAT’S A MOOSE.A MOOSE WITH
HORNS.A BULL MOOSE IS IN MY LAWN.I didn’t notice him until there couldn’t have
been more than twenty feet between us (picture taken later).It
was huge.Each noticed the other at the same time, and froze with the same jolt
of adrenaline.Our eyes met.These
things charge people, don’t they?I
thought.Shit.I moved as fast as I
could without making sudden movements behind my landlord’s car.There now being a physical barrier between
us, I backed away down the driveway, and into the dirt road.
Well,
what do I do now?There he was, blocking
my building’s front door, gnawing cheerfully on a shrub.I decided I wouldn’t try to scare him away,
since I didn’t feel like getting killed.But I couldn’t get inside with him in front of my door.All I could do was wait in the street.
I
must’ve stood for twenty minutes, watching him eat.His bored, dumb eyes mocked me.So,
moose, I thought.Despite the toys and contrivances of Man, you
have defeated me.it was then that
the door opened, and my landlord stepped out.His eyes, too, met the moose’s, and they regarded each other with what I
can only call a bored acknowledgement, like when you see a coworker on a
Tuesday morning.There clearly being
some mutual understanding between them, he walked out the door, perhaps five
feet from certain death, and asked me what I was doing standing there.“He won’t hurt you,” my landlord said,
rolling his eyes at the effete delicacy of people from the Lower 48. “Just walk
by him and go inside.”I looked
back.The moose had moved to about ten
feet from the door.Just walk by him…
So, gathering up my courage, that’s
what I did, more than meeting my recommended daily intake of mortal
danger.Sure enough, the moose didn’t
bother me at all, probably because my landlord told him I was cool.
Hello again friends, welcome back to Office Hours with the
Brofessor, the Show that’s Proudly Irrelevant.Today we’re continuing Cavemen, but I’m changing the name.The new name of this series is “Cavemen
ROCK,” since, obviously, rocks, cavemen, ha ha ha.It’s so obvious, I don’t know why I didn’t
think of this.Even now, my friend
suggested this to me.Oh well.
Anyway, let’s move on.We last talked about the species known respectively as Homo ergaster
and Homo erectus in the context of African and Asian assemblages.I’ve also hear the expression “African H.
erectus” used, but I’m not sure what the difference is here with H.
ergaster.If you know, please tell
me!
Ergectus, as I’ve recently taken to calling them,
held on from almost 2 MYA until well into the last five hundred thousand
years—maybe even as recently, relatively speaking, as 150 KYA.During time we have seen the emergence of
true hunting and gathering, sporadic fire use, and maybe even primitive
seafaring.We also see the very first glimmerings
of human consciousness as we know it: care for the elderly and infirm, family
units, and maybe even a sense of the aesthetic in their wonderfully knapped
hand axes.According to Iain Davidson at
the University of New England, by the ergectus era our ancestors were
able to control our vocal utterances independently of our emotional state(1)—and,
indeed, the vertebrae of the classic Turkana boy specimen show humanlike vocal
capabilities.These creatures may have
had names for the things around them, or even had names themselves—though I
doubt they had anything close to what we would call “articulated language”.
Still, as with H. habilis, I don’t think we could
have interacted with ergectus the same way we interact with each
other.Although, as evidenced by Grandpa
George and Turkana Boy, that they cared for infirm members of their own groups,
they probably hadn’t yet mastered the art of not tearing each other apart when
meeting new acquaintances—this will factor in today’s discussion, so keep that
in mind.
It was into this milieu, around 1.2 million years ago, that
one European strain branched from the ergectus lineage.Unlike ergectus, these guys had more
humanlike facial features, especially in, according to Smithsonian Magazine,
“the shape of the nasal region and the presence of a facial depression above
the canine tooth called the canine fossa”(2).That sounds like a small difference, but these features are more gracile
than those of ergectus.These
creatures, attested from the Atapuerca Mountains of Spain, were christened Homo
antecessor, or “Pioneer man”, by modern science.
Atapuerca is an important site, so let’s familiarize
ourselves with the area.This is a
mountain range in Northern Spain, although to be honest, it looks more like a
hill to me.Maybe the name comes from
Don Quixote’s fevered imagination:
“Behold, Sancho!
Mountains, soaring up to the heavens!
Surely, these peaks must hide the secret of Dulcinea’s enchantment!”
Or, maybe I’m just a snob, being as I am from the heart of Colorado’s
majestic Rocky Mountains!At any rate Atapuerca
has a number of sites stretching across prehistory, from the lower Paleolithic
to the Bronze Age.The finds here are
quite remarkable for their diversity of time depth!
H. antecessor, documented from this site, was present
between 1.2 and 0.78 MYA.Behaviorally
and technologically, they appear not to be markedly different from their ergectus
brethren, in that their tools are a continuation of the Acheulean industry(3).We can tell by examining their teeth that they
subsisted on tough, difficult-to-chew foods (4).This implies that, like H.erectus,
they did not have (regular) access to fire.There is little else we know about antecessor’s behavior, apart
from one more point that I’d like to bring up now.
In fact, this is a bit of an elephant in the room.I don’t want to spend too much time on this,
because it’s not that big of a deal, and it’s not very nice to think
about.Here goes: the bones of some antecessor
specimens had had the muscles removed with stone tools, before the bones
were scattered among those of game animals.The implication is that these individuals had been hunted, butchered and
eaten by other H. antecessor.
I know, I know!That’s disgusting, and I hate to even mention it.Also, it’s annoying to talk about because
this stuff gets heavily sensationalized by non-academic media.There’s this deeply-ingrained disgust we feel
at the idea of cannibalism, be it survival, mortuary or otherwise.So that’s what the non-academic press likes
to jump on, I guess as a kind of clickbait.We also see it in caveman movies, from “Quest for Fire” to “The
Thirteenth Warrior”.I don’t know why
it’s such a big deal in our popular perception of cavemen, but there it
is.It may be related to the racist
image of the “cannibal savage” used to justify Western imperialism during the
Age of Exploration.That is to say,
focusing on this behavior among our ancestors may be a way of distancing
ourselves from them and making them out to be inferior to us.I don’t know, and it’s a gross, strange thing
for everyone to dwell on as much as they do.I wouldn’t have mentioned this point at all, if it didn’t have an important
implication for behavior.
First, eating these guys appears not to have been ritual or
funerary behavior, which is unsurprising, since the mind of H. antecessor
probably wasn’t quite there yet.We know
this because the bones were treated exactly the same as those of game
animals.So, what exactly happened
here?
One easy explanation is that if one of your bros keels over
and dies, eating him is kind of a convenient thing to do, since it gets rid of
the body and you guys don’t need to go hunting that day.You can stay home, crack some cave-brews and
play Cave Mario Kart.That’s possible,
but why don’t we see evidence of this with, say, Grandpa George or Turkana
Boy?Did H. erectus not connect
the dots that far?Furthermore, I have
yet to see evidence of pathology in the bones of these individuals.That doesn’t mean they didn’t die of illness
or injury, but there’s no published evidence thereof from the fossil
remains—which we have with Grandpa George and Turkana Boy.The latter was old and weak, and the former
died from an infection.Neither was
cannibalized.That said, H.
antecessor is almost a million years, and thousands of miles, removed from
Grandpa George and Turkana Boy, so perhaps it’s not appropriate to bring them
into the discussion.
Another possibility is that there was a famine or something,
and there was that thing that happens in cartoons where they looked at each
other and their buddies turned into talking steaks.But by all reconstructions, the environment
of the time wouldn’t have made a very difficult place to live(5).That said, there’s always the possibility of
a lean season.
Let’s look again at the individuals that became dinner.Examining the butchered remains, we realize a
commonality shared by the victims: these individuals were children, as young as
ten years old.Again, disgusting and
disturbing, I know, sorry.But that fact
is important because we see a parallel behavior among chimpanzees: male chimps,
when patrolling their territory, will kill and eat infants that they come
across(6).We could be seeing a similar
behavior here.The juvenile H.
antecessor specimens that were eaten could have been members of an
out-group encountered by adult males on patrol.
One problem with this scenario is, of course, that ten years
old isn’t exactly an infant, unless we’respeaking French.Indeed, we know
from other specimens, one of them being Turkana Boy, that archaic hominins
reached adolescence faster than kids today.Turkana Boy was eight when he died, but had adolescent skeletal
morphology.H. antecessor was
about 800 thousand years after Turkana Boy, so even if the rate had slowed
somewhat in the intervening time, it would still be reasonable to guess that a
ten-year-old antecessor might have already entered adolescence.In that case, this situation would differ
even more from that of modern chimpanzees, since killed infants of outgroups
are eaten, but for some reason killed adults are not—at least, such behavior
has not yet been observed.For this
reason, it’s important not to discount the in-group death or famine
hypotheses.Still, the “Patrol Hypothesis”
seems to me to be the most probable, or at any rate the least improbable.That is to say: the cannibalized H.
antecessor remains found represent the same phenomenon observed among male
chimpanzee patrols. This has serious
implications for our attempt to reconstruct H. antecessor behavior.
If in fact the Patrol Hypothesis is true, it provides a
serious counterpoint to the various baby steps we’ve seen in the progression
toward modern behavior.We’ve seen ergectus
care for its elderly and sick, knap symmetrical tools, probably use fire,
and very possibly use rafts and simple word-like utterances.But for all that, the discovery of these poor
kids demonstrates starkly that raw animal instinct still had a heavy influence
upon these creatures, at least in terms of their dealings with out-groups.Deep down, they were in many ways quite far
from “human” in terms of cognition.
Do you remember way back at the beginning of this series,
probably a year ago now, when I talked about a mark of “peopleness” as being
morally responsible for your actions?If
the Patrol Hypothesis explains this incident, Homo antecessor and its ergectus
predecessors were not morally responsible for what they did.Chimpanzees don’t think about cannibalizing
the infants that they kill on patrols, they just do it.In the same way, they don’t think about not
cannibalizing the adults that they kill.It’s simply something that’s hardwired into their brains, and may have
been hardwired into the brains of early Homo.
How could we test if the Patrol Hypothesis is true?We would have to look at other fossils of the
same time period and before, with a special eye toward both juvenile bones and
those which show evidence of having been butchered.If there is an overlap, perhaps this
hypothesis is worth considering.
So, here’s what I think happened: one day, some H.
antecessor males were walking around on patrol.They knew that there were other groups in the
area, with whom they occasionally clashed in conflicts not unlike those between
modern chimpanzee troops.Along they
came, minding their own business, when in the distance they saw some punk kids
skateboarding on their driveway—or the Lower Paleolithic equivalent.The kids knew that they should stay off the
other group’s territory.However, they
were acting with the same rashness and impulsiveness characteristic of today’s
twelve-or-thirteen-year-olds, and they paid the price.The patrolling males ran them down, killed
them, and ate them without really considering what they were doing.They acted entirely on impulse.Had the victims been adults, the patrol would
have simply killed them and left the bodies, but juveniles, for whatever
evolutionary reason, triggered a different response.Whatever explanation this behavior had, it is
the same thing that we observe today among chimps.
So, to sum up: here was a creature that was capable of
touching tenderness toward members of their in-groups, but remained quite
aggressive toward members of out-groups.Which, if you think about it, is quite human in a way!Goodness knows that we have enough trouble
with racism and xenophobia in our time.But, unlike them, we have gained the amazing ability to think through
our actions, and consciously decide to cooperate with members of out-groups,
rather than instinctively kill them.I
think there’s a lesson here for us today—when we give in to prejudice toward
those who might not be in our “tribe”, we are stooping to the same level as H. antecessor all those years ago!
In my discussion of Grandpa George and Turkana Boy, I talked
about how these two cases demonstrate how the goodness of humanity predates
“humanity” itself.Well, the antecessor
finds show us that humanity’s bad side goes back a long way too.So, to any Paleolithic kids out there: stay
off Old Man Antecessor’s lawn!
What’s up people, welcome to Office Hours with the
Brofessor: the show that’s proudly irrelevant.You’re probably thinking, wow: Proudly Irrelevant.What a cool new catchphrase!Well, thank you.My last one, The Show Where I Say Things, I
got from the brilliant theological comedy channel Lutheran Satire.Check them out if you haven’t, especially
“Frank the Hippy Pope”.The old
catchphrase fit the show pretty well, because that’s what it is: a show where I
say things.My friends kept encouraging
me to start a Youtube show because it would give me an outlet for stuff I would
otherwise yammer on about at parties.So
the original concept was really just a show where I talked about whatever topic
was my flavor of the month.Still, I
like “Proudly Irrelevant” more because it really captures the show’s essence:
nothing here is applicable to modern, everyday life, and I hear people all the
time saying there’s no point to knowing this stuff.Well, guess what?
I DON’T
CARE.
I think it’s
too bad that people belittle the Humanities for their supposed lack of
relevance.Whether or not something is
marketable or timely shouldn’t matter, as long as it’s cool and
interesting.Just as an example, the
other day I was talking to some German gap-year kids at a hostel in
Vientiane.They were talking to me about
how studying languages was boring.So, I
started talking about the ancient correspondences that exist between Germanic
languages, and from there to Proto-Indo-European, and the prehistoric cultural
concepts that live on in the words we use every day.All of a sudden, learning foreign languages
seemed a lot more interesting.Now, what
I told these guys isn’t going to help them order in a restaurant or give
presentations at work, but it is going to give them a contextual frame for the
language points they do learn—and, more importantly, it’s cool and interesting,
and instills a love of the language.
As another example,
let’s talk about classical knowledge.It’s appalling to me that students aren’t taught Latin and Greek in
school anymore.It robs students of the
intellectual heritage of Western civilization.I use the verb “rob” deliberately—I really feel that the modern
educational system steals a treasure of enormous value from students in not
teaching them the classical languages of the West.An important component of this knowledge is
literature.So even if you did read
Homer in school—I didn’t—you probably didn’t read him in Greek, unless you were
very lucky.If you were one of those
lucky ones, a baton was passed to you that has been carried for three thousand
years over the yawning depths of history.Reading Homer in Greek or Virgil in Latin, or the Eddas in Old Norse—
or, for that matter, the Popol Vuh in Classical K’iche—connects you to
something larger than yourself, a connection sorely needed in this generation
of egotism and fatuousness.
But what, in
our day, do we say of this knowledge of the ages?“It’s not practical” and “it’s not
relevant”.That’s not the point,
dingus.The point is that a) the
knowledge of the ages connects us to something greater than ourselves, and b)
by nature of that connection, it’s badass and cool.It’s worth learning for its own sake.This, I think, is the thread that connects
everything I talk about here, whether it’s prehistoric hominid behavior,
Xiongnu word etymology, or Ket shamanism.It’s knowledge that intimately connects us to the greater narrative of
human existence, and consequently ignites within us a sense of wonder.So it doesn’t really matter if this stuff is
“usesful” or not—it’s still worth learning.That’s the message of my channel, and that’s why I’m “Proudly
Irrelevant”.
Anyway, I
know that was a bit of a rant, but thanks for bearing with me.Next time, it’s back to cavemen!
Ergaster/Erectus
was
the most successful Homo species,
attested from almost two million years ago to as recently as 150 thousand years
ago.Sometimes you’ll see weird dates
like fifty thousand years ago, or even ten thousand years ago, but the former
was re-dated in 2011(1), while the latter is more likely the result of
artificial cranial deformation among modern humans(2).Personally, in the latter case, I think it would be cool to sample the
DNA, just to be sure—but the remains in
question were repatriated to the indigenous people on whose land they were
found .
At any rate, the most recent undisputed Erectus remains were found near the Solo
River in Indonesia; they were dated to between 140 KYA and 550 KYA.This seems like a big gap, but even at the
most conservative estimate, that would mean these guys were around for a
million and a half years.
Compare that
with our species, Homo sapiens, which
has only been around for 200 KYA—an eighth of that time!By timespan alone, that makes them much more
successful than us, especially if things keep going they way they are with
North Korea!
I jest, of course.Hopefully.
Geographical
Range
Ergaster/Erectus
not
only made it out of Africa, they spanned the whole of tropical and subtropical
Eurasia, as far north as France in the west and Beijing in the east.I haven’t heard about any Erectus discoveries further north, or in
the Western Hemisphere at all.This
suggests to me that they hadn’t yet developed technology needed to survive in a
cold climate—for example, fur clothing or reliable control of fire.Of course, such technology would have been a
prerequisite for entry into the Americas, which they appeared not to have done.
In the south, as I’ve already mentioned, Erectus definitely made it as far as
Indonesia.Now, the way I see it, if
they made it to Indonesia, there’s nothing that would have prevented them from
reaching Australia; but we can’t be sure.Australia has yet to yield any Homo
remains dating from before the arrival of modern humans around 65 KYA(3).
Fire
and Other Technology
As I say, the inability of Erectus to expand its
range to the north suggests to me that they did not have things like warm fur
clothing or the reliable control of
fire.It does appear, however, that Ergaster/Erectus had occasional access
to fire.We have pretty good evidence
for controlled fire in South Africa around a million years ago (4).Southwest China has yielded blackened mammal
bones dating to 1.7MYA, although that doesn’t necessarily mean that the fire
was anthropogenic.Over the course of Ergaster/Erectus’ existence, brain
volume increased substantially, which has led some experts to suggest that
easily-digestible cooked meat was available.The excellent PBS documentary Becoming
Human talks about how fire and cooking could have led Ergaster/Erectus to become more social—e.g. by sharing fires for
cooking and warmth.At any rate, fire
use would have been a very gradual process.Perhaps it could have begun with discovery of embers in the wake of
wildfires, which led to fires being maintained over long periods of time.If you’ll allow my imagination to step in
here for a moment, we may even have a faint psychological memory of a
“fire-carrying” past, before fire could be reliably created, in ceremonies like
the Olympic torch.Even recently,
indigenous populations in wet climates like Tasmania preferred to carry coals
from one campsite to another, so that they didn’t have to go to the trouble of
finding dry wood for a new fire(5).
Finally, it’s very worth mentioning that Ergaster/Erectus may also have been the
first human ancestor to travel by sea.Heading back to Indonesia, we find evidence of Erectus habitation from 900 KYA.Although most of Indonesia was, at the time, linked by a land bridge,
there were still some areas that were cut off by water—the island of Flores,
for example, whence comes the 900 KYA figure(6). It seems plausible that Erectus was able to put together simple rafts that allowed them to
reach this remote island—and to discover that even here, they were not alone.But
we’ll get to that later.
As far as the Ergaster/Erectus
toolkit is concerned, we see an interesting new technology emerging in
their wake: the Acheulean industry, a toolmaking tradition that spanned a
mind-boggling 1.7 million years, from about 1.8 MYA to 100 thousand years
ago.Typifying the Acheulean tradition
are what we call the “hand-axe”.These
tools, to me at least, are remarkable not just for their practicality, for
their rough beauty.Let’s take a look:
I’m no flintknapper, but I think it’s very important
to note the symmetry that we see with these tools, as compared to the earlier
Oldowan industry.To me this suggests
greater planning ability: these tools were made with an end result in mind.Unlike Oldowan tools, Acheulean hand axes
were sourced from high-quality material, often at a distance of several miles from where they
were found.Their owners invested
significant time and effort into their creation, and probably kept them for
some time.
Looking at these beautiful tools, I can’t help but
wonder if there could possibly have been an aesthetic element to their
creation.Surely their symmetry and ease
of handling had a practicality to it, but there must have been something
more.This “moreness” becomes most
evident when we compare these artifacts with the crude pebble tools of the
Oldowan industry.Indeed, the Acheulean
hand axe may have been a catalyst for the birth of human aesthetic sensibility
as we know it.Could we be
witnessing—dare I say it—the birth of Art?
Art
and Abstraction
If indeed the Acheulean knappers had some primitive
aesthetic sensibility beyond the mere utility of their artifacts, that’s a huge
jump forward, and in a way, the birth of human consciousness itself.Abstract imagination is what sets us apart from
the animals in a way that nothing else does.From these tools, we can already see that Ergaster/Erectus was able to sit down with a rock, visualize a
hand-axe, and turn that visualization into a reality.That’s powerful stuff, and at a very
visceral, “gut” level, that must have been almost traumatizing in its
immensity.It must have taken thousands
of generations to work through—imagine!You have this picture in your mind—and at this time, neither the concept
of a picture nor the concept of a mind existed.It was only there as potential, and then you recognized that potential
and made it into a physical reality.I’m
no philosopher, as you can probably tell, but…wow.Imagine experiencing that and trying to work through
it with your friends and family, some of them getting it, some of them not…and,
generation by generation, the number of those “getting it” gradually getting
larger.
Toward the end of Erectus’ tenure, we see some tantalizing glimpses of what may have
even been art, or at least abstract symbolism, in the proper sense.In Indonesia, at the remarkable Trinil Erectus site, there was a seashell
discovered that had carved into it this beautiful zigzag pattern.
(7)
Now, this doesn’t look like much, and you may roll
your eyes when I call it beautiful, but it is!Just think: this is an original abstract pattern from five hundred thousand years ago.This is the birth of art!Now, the question is, were these
absentmindedly scratched onto the shell—that is, a doodle—or was it more
deliberate?In other words, was this the
prehistoric equivalent of you drawing spirals and zigzags in the margins of
your math textbook?
There appears to have been some genuine effort that
went into this item—after all, it’s much more difficult to carve a pattern into
a hard surface than it is to doodle on paper.However, I’m not sure that means the pattern had a special
significance.Here’s what I imagine
happened: some Erectus—let’s name him
Lucas—was sitting around camp one day, processing shellfish.His task complete, Lucas got bored, and
amused himself by scratching a cool zigzag pattern onto one of the shells.It was cool and interesting because first it
went up, then it went down.And then up
again!Wowie!How pleased with himself he would have
been!His line went up and down!He then gave it to his girlfriend as a
romantic gesture.
Now, I’m kind of having a laugh at the poor guy’s
expense, but if you think about it, by Erectus
standards a zigzag doodle would have been a pretty big deal.And Lucas wasn’t the only one!The Bilzingsleben Site in Germany(8) has
these enigmatic engravings on an elephant tibia:
I always get chills when I look at these radial
lines engraved onto the bone.Clearly
this wasn’t an attempt to scratch the meat off of the bone or to get the
marrow; these marks were made for their own sake.Some people are calling this a potential
calendar, or a ruler, or even a protractor.I don’t know about all that.Regardless the critical fact here is that someone sat down, imagined
lines engraved onto the bone, and then made them.For these early creatures, bringing the conceptual
into physical reality must have been an almost mystical experience.
The Bilzingsleben finds are dated to about 370 KYA,
and the bones found there are classified as E.
erectus--that surprises me a little, since that’s a very late date for H. erectus in Europe.For the most part, we see H. erectus being phased out in Europe by
around 600 KYA or so by the more modern H.
heidelbergensis.Still, I assume
that the professionals know better than I do, so I’ll buy it.
Regardless, in my view, which exact species made
these engravings is a technical point, the relevancy of which pales in
comparison to the cognitive development that’s demonstrated by these
engravings.Even a chimpanzee would
never do something like that by itself.But here we have a pre-human creature conceptualizing a geometric
pattern, and then working it into a physical reality.Whether or not it carried some symbolic
meaning, this is a huge step.When
considered together with the hunter-gatherer societies formed by these
creatures, the Trinil shell suggests to me that these creatures were much
closer to us in behavior than to chimpanzees, australopithecines, or even H. habilis.Would they have understood, say, the concept
of time?I doubt it, since ideas like
that must have come around very slowly over thousands of generations with
herculean mental effort.But on the
other hand, they amused themselves by doodling, which is perhaps just as
monumental.
Before I move away from the Bilzingsleben finds, I
would like to mention one other cool discovery that may well have to do with
the increased cognitive aptitude of late H.
erectus: the skulls that were found at this site appeared to have been
smashed in…postmortem.That is, these individuals were already dead
when they had their skulls smashed.Now
why would you do that to someone who’s already dead?Incredibly, we may be seeing evidence of some
sort of funerary ritual.Think about it:
if you don’t want your friend coming back as a zombie, what do you do?It sounds ridiculous, but I’m really only
half-joking here.
Could
They Talk?
While we’re on the topic of abstract symbols,
let’s talk about whether Ergaster/Erectus
was able to talk.Language is inherently
symbolic—after all, if I say the word “cat”, there’s nothing about that word
that is inherently cattish, and you wouldn’t know what it meant unless you were
“initiated” into the language club.
Physiologically, there is some controversy.Two parts of the body most intimately
connected with language are the vertebrae, which reflect vocal capability, and
the Broca’s area of the brain, which controls speech production.Turkana Boy’s vertebrae, when examined, show
that he could probably not have produced the same speech sounds as we can.On the other hand, the older Dmanisi finds
show not only humanlike vertebrae, but also the presence of a Broca’s Area(9).But even if they could speak, did they?I doubt that they woke up one day and
suddenly began making sentences in the third conditional.I like to think that they did have what we
would call words, but they were used only in short utterances, in the strictly
physical and pragmatic realm.It
probably started out as a series of nouns, since “cat” is an easier concept to
grasp than “go” (Going where?Who is
going?) or “bad” (What happened?Why is
this bad?).
I also like to think that sooner or later they must
have started naming each other.For
example, if I my brother has a big nose, I could call him Nose.If my friend likes eating berries, I could
call him Berry.Simple things like
that.Of course, this is all in my
imagination, and I’m certainly no neurolinguist, but it could well be during
the ergaster/erectus era that this
stuff began to happen.
Conclusion
So, that's my whirlwind overview of H. ergaster/erectus. What do you guys think? Are my imaginings too fanciful, or could have some of my hypotheses been accurate regarding their behavior? Tell me your thoughts. Next time we'll talk about the guys who phased out H. erectus in Europe: Homo antecessor and Homo heidelbergensis. See you then!
