Hominins are a bush of species millions of years old, not one line leading to homo sapiens. Even if we’re the last standing. Our defining characteristic is coordination and creativity.
That’s from the 2017 book “The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional” written by anthropologist Agustín Fuentes.
I enjoyed his curation of academic research into an approachable narrative. Below I share my notes for future reference.
My notes:
- Four misconceptions of human development: that we evolved from violent competitive tribes; from super cooperators, from hunter gatherers; from intelligence beyond biology
- Extended evolutionary synthesis “is a theoretical framework that integrates concepts from multiple fields of evolutionary biology to explain evolutionary phenomena. It differs from the modern synthesis, which dominated evolutionary thinking from the 1930s”
- “Dominance is not a biological characteristic of an individual; it’s a social position”
- Ardipithecus is a genus of an extinct hominine that lived millions of years ago
- AL 333, commonly referred to as the “First Family”, is a collection of prehistoric hominid teeth and bones. Discovered in 1975 in present-day Ethiopia by Donald Johanson’s team in Hadar, Ethiopia, the “First Family” is estimated to be about 3.2 million years old, and consists of the remains of at least thirteen individuals of different ages
- We were bipedal before we were big brained, as Lucy fossils from 3.2 million years ago, shows
- Niche construction and adaptive radiation: hominins are a bush of species not one line
- In 2 million years we emerged as the dominating and then only hominin, we traveled far
- 30-40k years ago the last other hominin species are in fossil record
- Race is not a subsecies; humans closer to each other than different chimpanzees are to each other; term “biological race” is different than how we use race — but there may have been different human races hundreds of thousands of years ago
- 24% of our DNA is same as a Chardonnay grape
- 1966 conference “Man the Hunter”argued that distinction but it wasn’t true
- Scavenging and then “power scavenging” (where homo chased away predators who killed meat) came before hunting
- By 400k years in Qesm Cave, signs of using and eating fires foods (there are early examples but not consistent so we likely learned stuff but didn’t transfer due to small isolated groups and tribes)
- Psychoneuroendocrine system: hormones and emotions that guide mammalian kinship that help big brains to develop and learn complex social systems — and mammals also have a variety of “allomothers”
- The social group let brains grow bigger by feeding and protecting mothers: Leslie Aiello
- Sarah Hardy: “mothers and others” to raise humans, the “it takes a village”
- One argument for why humans go through menopause, to extend lives, not have competition and age into role wisdom: older females, then other kids and then males to support longer development stages. “ each step increases the flexibility and resilience of the group, but also increases the level of coordination and communication needed.”
- Kim Sterelny: without language or bigger brains, early homo used apprenticeship models to transfer stone tool making
- Tim Ingold “enskillment “
- Penny Spikins: three stages of the emergence of compassion: family 1.8m to 300k years ago (sharing scavenged meat); and development of allocare ; then community 300k-100k: coordinated hunting and burials, and 100k to today around all (strangers, animals and god)
- Authors three Fs of merging societies: flee, fight or fornicate (get along)
- Greger Larson and Dorian Fuller on domestication: Commensal (dogs, cats, chickens, carp, mice), prey (cattle, sheep, pig, goat, llamas, turkey) and directed (donkeys, camels, horses, honeybees, rabbits duck, and pets like hamsters and gerbils)
- When is a forest a garden? See screenshot of map of plant domestication
- Why did humans move with agriculture even though their health diminished initially (shorter, vitamin deficiencies, failing teeth and war)? You lock in to food (sunk cost of that investment) and mothers can wean faster with new diet to increase fertility rates
- Hobbes natural state of humanity: “war of every man against every man” and life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”
- Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson argued men evolved to be more violent and Steve Pinker’s Better Angels argued we only framed this inner beast (Remember ‘Dawn of Everything‘, which argued that the two approaches for early human development is either that we overcame our worst qualities in a Hobbesian model or that we fell from our ideal in a Rousseau like way)
- Biologist Edward O Wilson argues instead that our strength in forming tribes only resulted in war as a consequence
- Douglas Fry and Brian Ferguson argue we only became more violent with the advent of cities and agriculture
- Gran Dolina: cave of cannibalized children
- “There is no pattern in primates to which we could point as a shared evolutionary basis for violence in humans” 135
- The apes of chimpanzees and bonobos show different forms and levels of violence so do not tell a clear and consistent narrative about if and how old violence is among primates”
- Kissel and Piscitelli: From the fossil record across 400 sites and thousands of remains: from 2m to 14k years ago, 2% show violence; from 14k years to 7500 years ago, it’s 4% and then from 7500-5k years ago it is 7%
- Jebel Sahaba cemetery is earliest sign of coordinated war 12k-14k years ago, and it gets more violent for the next several thousand years — running counter to Pinker, Azar and Gat who talk of getting more peaceful based on archeologist Lawrence Keeley and economist Samuel Bowels
- “The rise and economic, political and social inequality correlates with the rise of war”
- Sedentary life of agriculturalists create sense of property and jobs and protection and stealing resources, inequality inspires rules and authority and symbols for culture
- Human menopause, in which females live long after reproductive capacity, evolved to support raising kids for longer period together
- “The formation of gender is the process by which males and females develop the expected psychological and behavioral characteristics that equip them for the tasks that their sex typically performs in the societies in which they grow up” 176
- We have lots more sex than other mammals
- More variety in human brains than between male and female ones (hard to tell gender just by a brain). Gender spectrum is different than sex, gender is cultural and a creative invention of humans
- Archeologists joke: if you dig up something old enough just call it art or religious
- Alcorta and Sois on four patterns of religious: supernatural agents and “counterintuitive concepts”, communal ritualized practice; separation of the sacred and secular and the learning of this during childhood
- Hard to determine by fossil record but it’s clear by 10k years — how active 40k years or others? We’re not sure
- By a million years ago, our ancestors were power scavenging, cooperative child rearing and stone tool making
- Two nuanced understandings of the origin of religious thinking: either it’s embedded in our meaning making culture, or it’s primarily an organizing device
- Ara Norenzayan: Big Gods religion created Big Groups and organizing
- Semiosis: sign reading, from indexical signs (like storm clouds) to iconic signs (painting of an antelope that means antelopes) even to symbolic signs 214
- “There is abundant evidence that humans were religious long before any of the modern day religions existed.” 217
- Apes paint in captivity and elephants and others may create art when prodded but not quite in the wild (maybe browerbird nests??)
- National Geographic crittercam and author showed Barbary Macaques appeared to have same aesthetic (ie. they preferred certain views)
- Kim Sterelny and Peter Hiscock: the first art was stone tools not cave paintings
- Matthew Pope: Achulean stone tools fit golden ratio more often than chance; it’s beautiful
- We assume song, dance and storytelling are very old but not in archeological record
- Steven Mithen: we sang before we spoke
- Maxine sheets Johnstone: says we danced first
- Of science: “ other animals do some ratcheting and scaffolding, but they lack the human combination of discovery, innovation, cooperation, and information transfer”
- David Giffels: suburban sameness rots American imagination
- Gender roles are not ancient
- We began doodling on clam shells 300k years ago (288)
- Oldest elements of humanity: food choice, sex, religion, faith, art and science