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!
Hi everybody, and welcome back to Office Hours with
the Brofessor: the Show Where I Say Things!It’s been few months since my last video, I hope everyone’s been doing
well.It’s been a busy winter for
me—I’ve just been accepted to the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ graduate
program in Applied Linguistics.I’m so
happy, I have to tell everyone.I’ve
been dreaming of this for probably a decade now.Some people have asked me why in the world I
want to go to Alaska, of all places.After all, there are plenty of perfectly serviceable grad schools in
places where hot coffee doesn’t vaporize in midair:
Well, first of all, I love cold weather.Second of all, UAF is probably the single
best place in the world to get a background in the Na-Dene language
family.If you’re a fan of my show, you
might already know how important this is to me!Now that I have a little background with Ket, I’d really like to look at
the other side of the proposed Dene-Yeniseian family.The most important thing now, I think, is to
work on a solid reconstruction of Proto-Na-Dene, and start to reconstruct the
folklore passed down from such a culture.I believe this is going to be the ultimate key to solving the
Dene-Yeniseian question once and for all.Given the amazing work UAF’s Alaska Native Language Center has done with
the Na-Dene languages, there’s probably no better place in the world for me to
go to do grad school.Eventually, I’d
like to move onto my Ph.D., of course, but that’s still a few years off!
So anyway, back to cavemen!Yes, in the footsteps of the brilliant
Wu-Tang Clan, today we’re going back to 2 million years ago!A new Homo
species has emerged, the first to spread outside of Africa—although recent
evidence may dispute that.It is known
in Eurasia as Homo erectus—Upright
Man—and in Africa as Homo ergaster,
or Working Man.There are a lot of cool
facial reconstructions that you can google.Our ancestors, apparently, looked a lot like Charlie Day:
Apparently
DAYMAN is also a time-traveling H.
erectus.Cool!
It’s been a couple months since I’ve put anything up,
so let’s review.Sometime around 2.8
mya, the genus Homo emerged with
these weird little dudes that we call Homo
habilis.Since I’m focusing on
behavior, we talked about how they probably didn’t act very differently from
their Australopithecine brethren—although a careful observer might have noticed
certain traits arising from their much larger brains; for example, in greater
quality discrimination when using stone tools, or a greater tendency toward
teamwork.Around two million years ago
they had acquired a number of traits that began to set them apart as a new
species, arguably the first creatures that may have been recognizably human.In the words of my Paleoanthropology hero,
John Shea, “If you saw one from a distance, you’d say, well, there’s a large
naked man over there…but it’s a man.”
Somewhere around this time, an evolutionary split
happened.For now, we’re going to follow
the adventures of the H. ergaster
lineage, but I want you to keep this in the back of your mind: somewhere
between H. habilis and H. ergaster, a line split off that would
fall off the map for an astonishingly long time, only to pop up again in some
very unexpected places.
At any rate, these ergaster
creatures spread across Africa, and thence to the warmer regions of Eurasia.Due to the eternal conflict in the academic
community between “lumpers” and “splitters”, there is some debate over whether
the African and Eurasian finds represent the same species.Typically, as I say, African finds with these
traits are referred to as Homo ergaster,
and Eurasian finds as Homo erectus.And when we look at the clues they left
us, there’s something extremely humanlike in the way they lived. In my layman’s opinion, this must really have
been the time when humanity’s ancestors struggled and clawed their way out of
the animal world, and really developed that consciousness and awareness that,
more than anything, makes us who we are.
One of the wonderful things about ergaster/erectus finds is that here we can actually start working
out the details of individual lives is much sharper detail than before.In particular, let’s take a look at two
cases: one from Africa, and one from Eurasia.Let’s start with the older of the two: the remarkable find at Dmanisi,
in Georgia.
Grandpa George
These remains appear to reflect one of the earliest
migrations of Homo outside of
Africa.They represent a very early form
of H. erectus dating back to about
1.8 MYA, such that when these bones were first found there was some argument
whether they in fact represented a previously unknown species.The find included five skulls, which gave us
a look at the variation that existed between early erectus crania.The findings
therefrom have proven controversial, but that’s not really my area.Instead, what hit me like a freight train was
the more human side of the find, and this is really staggering: here we see the
first evidence of care for the elderly.
Let’s take a look at Dmanisi Skull 4, or as I like to
call him, “Grandpa George”.The skull
appears to be that of an elderly male:
Here’s what he looked like while alive:
That’s
one smug caveman.
Astonishingly, by the time of his death this dude had
lost all but one of his teeth.Well, that explains his dying, you might
say.Back then, without teeth you were
pretty much done for.Not so fast!Examining the jaws, we see evidence of bone
resorption—basically, the bone tissue around the empty tooth sockets was broken
down and released into the bloodstream.That implies that he survived for a while, maybe even years, without
teeth.During this time, someone else
must have supported him.Generally,
toothless geriatrics are not the spryest of people, so it seems unlikely that
he could have survived so long on his own.His family must have cared for him in his old age, perhaps even to the
point of chewing his food for him before he swallowed it—since, after all,
dentures had yet to be invented.Another
possibility is that he or his family processed it in some way—perhaps even by
cooking—to make it softer.
It’s really impossible to overstate how huge of a leap
forward this is.Elder care is a
uniquely human trait.Great apes don’t
do this.Older members of chimpanzee
communities fall behind the groups, and consequently don’t last long(1).Grandpa George, on the other hand, had a
prehistoric social security scheme to fall back on: he spent his youth “paying
in”—that is, contributing to the tribe’s welfare, protecting it from enemies,
and of course reproducing.Now that he’s
old, he has someone to fall back on who, apparently, felt some kind of familial
obligation toward him.Really
amazing.
For the first time in the human ancestral record,
we’re seeing evidence of a family structure vaguely echoing our own.Whoever took care of Grandpa George in his
old age loved him in the same way we love our grandparents.They understood that they had some special
duty to Grandpa George that went beyond simply what he could provide for
them—which, by the time he died, probably wasn’t much in terms of tangible food
or labor contribution.Regardless, they
saw something of value in his very being, a distant precursor to the same
respect in which our societies, properly ordered, hold the aged.
When we look at this skull, we are looking at nothing
short of the birth of human dignity.
I often wonder what the relationship was like between
Grandpa George and his larger community.Was he a patriarch, held in loving reverence by his family, a walking
link to the tribe’s past?Did he smile
as he clung to the back of the young man carrying him, remembering when he
carried that same young man piggyback as a child?When the tribe stopped for the night, was he
fussed over by his children and grandchildren, given the best morsels of each
kill, and tenderly embraced for warmth against the chill of night?Or was he a cringing scavenger derided and
resented by the tribe, fed on the tribe’s leavings and only grudgingly brought
along from one place to another?My
leaning is toward the former, since in the latter case, resentment toward him
as a freeloader would have gotten the best of the community as soon as his
productivity ceased.Just like with
modern great apes, he would have simply been left behind by the group, if not
outright killed.Besides, if we have
evolved in the present to respect the elderly, it only follows that our
ancestors did not act differently.
The follow-up question, then, would be this: how would
the younger members of the community have looked at him?Would the abstract concept of a parental figure
have taken root in their minds by this time?Would they have recognized him as their father or grandfather?Had the concept of the family been invented?
My guess is that no, they would not have looked at him
and had a thought equivalent to “This is my father.” However, perhaps it was
something more like “This is the old one, who I remember carrying me as a
child, who fed me with food he had killed, who protected me.He loved the one whose milk I drank.We belong to one another, and I must protect
him in his infirmity.”I was about to
write “so I must protect him”, but I
wouldn’t go that far.Causative
reasoning is a huge mental step forward, one that I doubt our ancestors had
made by this time.Of course, they probably
did not speak either, but if they could have, I imagine they would have said
something along those lines.
Whatever their relationship, Grandpa George was cared
for and loved, and when he did pass away, whether from disease, a bad fall, or
a lion finally getting the jump on him, I believe that he was mourned and
missed.Rest in Peace, Grandpa George:
Pour one out, we must.
Turkana
Boy
We’re now going to move two hundred thousand years
forward in time, but to a part of the world we’re already quite familiar with:
East Africa.In 1984, near Lake Turkana
in Kenya, a wonderfully complete skeleton of a young h. ergaster child was unearthed, leading to a plethora of
interesting discoveries.Let’s take a
look at who we’re dealing with:
And here’s a reconstruction of him looking miffed at
having suddenly been teleported into the
modern world:
Now, if you’re like me, you’re probably thinking: this
kid must be pretty badass to grow a beard at his age. Well, I’m no paleo-forensic reconstructionist,
but I think this is probably the best reconstruction that a Google image search
can offer at the moment—facial stubbery and all.My reasoning is that by 1.6 MYA, our
ancestors had lost most, but not all, of their body hair—hence the beard.We started losing our body hair around 2
MYA(2).However, this process probably
didn’t complete until we developed the dark pigmentation that would protect our
hairless bodies from the sun.This
development, as far as we know, didn’t emerge until about 1.2 MYA(3).
Let’s look at what the Turkana Boy can teach us.For one thing, we see that he probably did
not live a very comfortable life, even by Lower Paleolithic standards.For one thing, arrangement of his spinal
column shows us that he had a slipped disc in his lower back.If you’ve ever had one of these, you know
that they can be excruciatingly painful.These days we can go to the chiropractor or even get spinal surgery, but
poor Turkana Boy had no way of relieving his suffering, or even knowing why he
was in such pain.And as if that weren’t
enough, the little dude also had an abscessed jaw(5).When one of his baby teeth came out,
apparently something went wrong, and a terrible infection set in.In the end, he probably died of the resultant
blood poisoning.How awful.How full of suffering his life must have
been.His poor family, too, did their
best to take care of him, but in the end just couldn’t help him.
Similarly to Grandpa George, I often wonder about how
Turkana Boy interacted with his tribe.Was he taken care of willingly or grudgingly?Maybe he was taken care of along with the
younger children by the moms of the tribe, but was subject to some degree of
impatience from the males.After all, by
his age he would have been expected to begin contributing to group hunts.
Speaking of age, how old was he when he died?This is a cool question, because a different
story is told by his bones and his teeth.According to microscopic analysis of his teeth, he died around eight
years old(6).However, if we look at the
rate at which his bones were growing, he seems to have entered early
adolescence, perhaps comparable to a twelve-year-old kid today(7).That’s interesting, because it shows that H. ergaster reached maturity much faster
than modern kids.Compare this to the
life cycle of a chimpanzee, which reaches adulthood around ten years old(8).I’m not sure what the implications here are
for behavior—perhaps H. ergaster would
have been acting essentially as an adult by twelve or so.Now that I think about it, however, that’s
not that different from some traditional communities today.Lots of adulthood rituals and initiations
happen around that age—consider, for instance, the Bar or Bat Mitzvah of
Judaism.
Another important discovery from Turkana Boy is that
his vocal capabilities had not yet developed to the point where he would have
been able to speak, at least in the way we think of speech.Any form of vocal communication between these
creatures would be quite crude, and of a strictly utilitarian nature.It may be, however, that things like
specialized mouth movements and vocalization were just beginning to lead H. ergaster down the road that would
eventually lead not just to speech, but also to dance, music, and ritual.
Ergaster/Erectus
Sociality
Grandpa George and Turkana Boy, most importantly, show
that the goodness of humanity—compassion, familial love, and altruism—outdate
“humanity” itself.We certainly would
not have considered these creatures “human” in the sense that you and I are
human, but there certainly humanlike qualities to their social behavior.In addition to their willingness to take care
of one another, we can also infer that H.
ergaster/erectus lived in something approximating what we would call a
hunter-gatherer society.H. habilis and australopithecines, on
the other hand, probably lived in something closer to the communities of modern
chimpanzees.Rather than being formed
around a dominant male and his mates, H.
ergaster/erectus communities were probably more egalitarian and held
together by social and familial bonds(9).
So humanlike was this social behavior, in fact, that
we are reasonably confident that H. ergaster/erectus
lived, for the first time, what would be recognizable as a true hunter/gatherer
band society.Excavations of encampments
from this period show different areas used for specialized tasks, as well as
the remains of hunted, butchered and cooked game(10).Some of them, probably the elders, moms, and
kids, would have hung around the camp and taken care of things like food
processing, while the able-bodied adults were out hunting.
How do you hunt, you might ask, if all you have is a
rock?Easy, if a bit inconvenient.You find an animal, chase it until it’s
exhausted, and then kill it up close.H. ergaster/erectus was an accomplished
distance runner, on par with modern Olympians, as their skeletal remains show(11).Most big game mammals can run away in the
short term, but if chased over a long period of time—hours or days—they will
eventually overheat and get exhausted.As we lost our body hair, we became able to better
regulate our body temperature, and hence gained the ability to outlast our
prey.It’s just like the Tortoise and
the Hare, except in the end the Hare gets his head bashed in.
This kind of “endurance hunting” in small bands proved
quite successful, and in fact is a living tradition in some parts of the world(12).How awesome is
that?There are modern people, right
now, practicing a traditional way of life that goes back at least a million
years.A way of life older than modern
humanity itself. It’s really quite
humbling.Here in the West, we think a
tradition goes back a long way if your grandparents were doing it.In the Kalahari, the family business was
started by Homo ergaster.
