A lot of people over thousands of years have thought about the nature of man. Philosophers, religious leaders, bartenders, social scientists … all have pondered the structure and nature of man. Let’s qualify that sentence by saying that the word “man” doesn’t refer to a gender, but rather a species, namely that which is categorized as homo sapiens, though there are times when I question the sapiens part.
Where did humans come from? How did this all happen? Giving the biblical rendition of creation, many allow that it is more of a poetic means to describe what the creator intended. Fossils, bones and their accompanying middens are the means by which the scientific world explains the biblical story … in rather rough-cut guestimates of who is an ancestor and who is not.
Modern DNA technology has upped the ante when it comes to identification of the remains of ancient hominids with a dramatically increasing ability to fill in the blanks of man’s family tree … making more educated guesses about how these fossils are like or unlike the current version of “man.”
As a noted example, there has been a spirited argument about whether the group of humans that we call Neandertal was really human. While we are very sure that they walked upright, until very recently, this group was depicted as a kind of brutish not quite human who wore unsewn animal skins, played a part in auto insurance commercials, rarely bathed and spoke in grunts. Compared with the athletic uprightness and most probably upperclass British accents that were associated with Cro Magnon humans, the Neandertals were the losers. Maybe. With new discoveries? Maybe not.
The guessing, which is the unscientific word for hypothesis (hypothoses is plural) mostly revolves around how apt the hominid would be in walking upright, thus freeing the forelimbs, notably the hands with the opposable thumbs and precision grip, to work on making tools and doing art on rocks. An equally important area for this guessing is the development of cognitive abilities connected to: 1. The size of the brain, figured by measuring how many mustard seeds you can fit into the fossilized skull and, 2. Language, the physical ability to talk and produce culture.
We have no idea at one point in the ascent of man from his primordial ancestors he crossed some threshold that separated him from the hairier guy or gal in the next valley when it came to walking and talking, remembering birthdays, etc. For most of the fossils, the differences are in degree, but, at some point, the differences cross a threshold into differences in kind. Speciation.
Stopping for a minute and thinking with my normal-sized human cranium, I’m wondering how these measurements of “human-ness” apply to humankind today.
Most of us walk upright. Some are better at this than others. We develop the ability to walk during early infancy – “Look Ma’, the baby is walking” – perfect it as we grow and experience the possibilities of mobility such as dancing the Samba or running track and for some, e.g. this writer, find that there are things that can severely limit this ability as you move on in years.
Then we take a look at our intellectual capacity as we gain language as a child and, again, perfect it as we grow. We can hold forth on culture in so many ways, making comparisons about the oh-so-many ways that human groups have concocted to solve the problems of living. Pasta? Bread? Miso paste? Falafel? Blubber? Which makes your mouth water is indicative of your culture.
As the paleontologists proceed and discover more about our ancestors, we are also questioning behaviors. It is now verified that the Neandertals had a vibrant culture with intellectual abilities to rival or even supersede the Cro Magnons. There is strong evidence of their ability to create a complicated chemical reaction which allowed them to haft their spear points. Equally strong is evidence that they buried their dead, not only in the ground, but with grave goods. The fact that their genes are found in all of those whose ancestors are from Europe tells us that they had … how shall I put this … dating practices that included the Cro Magnon family? We are not talking Romeo and Juliet here; more like Danny Zuko and Sandy Olsson from “Grease.”
We are fairly sure that we’ve inherited our upright posture and resulting bad back along with our ability to create and use language, but what else have we inherited?
While the bones can’t tell us why, there is evidence that as the numbers of humans grew, enmity arose. It does seem that small groups of people are peaceful, with the group providing the safe harbor when the environment became problematic. Sharing food, shelter, care … the group maintained relative peace among the members of the group. The group defined the individual.
Recent discoveries have demonstrated that many of those ancestors whose remains are still available for investigation were slain by other humans, ancestors who were apparently offed by an axe or done in by a projectile point. The sense that aggression toward members of their own kind begs the question why.
It does seem that when groups become larger or there are more groups of people in the same area, there is more competition for resources. Since we don’t know what generated these examples of human-on-human mayhem, we can only assume that there was some kind of reason … food, shelter, pride … yes, even pride of place or tribal membership. “West Side Story” could have been written 40,000 years ago…the ancient form of Sharks and Jets. It becomes the acting out of the concept of “us” and “them.”
Did we also inherit the “us and them” concept which, when mixed with the ability to construct words that define others as outsiders, give us a license to kill?
We are not appreciably different from our ancestors of 40,000 years ago, or even older when you consider that Neandertals were humans too.
We represent the overlay of designer jeans on animal skins, of smart phones on drums, of AK 47’s on stone spears as we see daily evidence of the “us” and “them” played out in politics, economics, etc.
We are all of the same species.
Many of us believe that we are all created by God in His image and likeness. It is important to ask this question: What can create enmity among us? What triggers the drawing of boundaries on the basis of one’s beliefs, one’s skin color, one’s politics, political yard signs, income, etc? Who profits by elevating perceived differences to the status of walls between one group and another?
What will future anthropologists discover from our bones?
