In my last post, I described the evolution of hominids from
apes to modern humans. By evolutionary
standards, these adaptations were rapid and eventually produced the new
species, Homo sapiens, with many similarities to apes and all other animals. Everything we think of as uniquely human is
also found in other higher order animals.
Prototypical examples of reasoning, verbal communication and toolmaking
can be found in other species to a lesser degree.
People commonly believe that cats and dogs, for example,
can’t think and don’t reason like humans.
However, anyone who has closely observed animals can plainly see that is
not correct. Their brains work in the
same fashion as ours - taking in and evaluating sensory data, recognizing
patterns and matching them against their memories of similar patterns and past
consequences. Humans have the same 5 or
6 senses, the only difference being the size and sophistication of our brains. The physical and capability differences between
humans and other animals are simply a matter of degree, not kind.
What then makes us unique?
Since we are without a doubt the crown of creation on Earth at this
time, there must be something unique that enables us to dominate all life on
the planet. Physically, all the hominids
were fundamentally different from other animals by combining bipedal locomotion, forearms with
grasping hands, social organization and an omnivorous diet. This winning combination resulted in the two additional
distinctions between hominids, especially modern humans, and the rest of the
animal kingdom: toolmaking and language. Even the great apes don't come close, Only hominids are bipedal, and all of them are extinct (that we know of) except H. sapiens.
Apes and some birds use sticks to prise grubs from
deadwood. Otters use stones to crack
open shellfish. Great apes often throw
sticks and stones as primitive weapons.
Many animals build nests, dig dens and otherwise create fairly
sophisticated artificial environments for shelter and subsistence; consider the
lowly beaver and his dams.
Hominids, however, took toolmaking to a whole new
level. The earliest stone tools found so
far are stone hand choppers, several million years old. At about 1.8 million years ago, I believe, some of
the hominids began fashioning wooden spears by cutting off and sharpening a
branch of the right tree. The same with semi-sophisticated wooden clubs. Stone cuts wood quite nicely. The beginning of culture.
Before this watershed event, hominids probably competed in
Africa with baboons and other omnivorous, terrestrial apes, feeding on whatever
they could gather or kill at the edge of the savannah, but retreating to their
trees or cliffs at night. Baboons have
vicious teeth and in their groups can defend themselves quite well. It’s fair to assume the earliest hominids
that ran on two legs, about 4 million years ago, also primarily used their
teeth and thrown rocks, against enemies and small game.
After hominids began making and using the first portable,
reusable weapons, their whole world changed. They created them to catch and kill
big game that was everywhere around them.
Foraging for carrion also became more practical because an organized
band of adult hominids, armed with spears, could fend off other scavengers and
even some apex predators - strength in numbers.
Their evolutionary strategy involved a trade-off: tooth and nail in
exchange for bipedalism and grasping forearms wielding weapons.
After the widespread use of wooden spears and clubs, about
1.8 million years ago, evolution kicked in and hominid dentition and faces
began to change – optimized for vision, diminished nose in favor of ears, mouth
parts optimized for eating a varied diet, less need for fighting. Hominids became the only animals that carried
their tools, food and water with them, probably in simple rucksacks made of
animal skins. It seems significant that
at about this time, H. erectus broke out of Africa, expanding their range
across the lower latitudes of Asia. When you chase migrating herds for a living, those herds will eventually take you far away from your homeland in east Africa.
To put this into perspective, imagine a small band of
hominids chasing down the weakest member of a herd of ungulates, cornering it
and dispatching it with multiple spear thrusts.
Because they are bipedal, they are superb long distance runners, chasing
prey the same as packs of wild canines do. Next they butcher it with their handy
stone choppers, which they carry with them on hunting excursions. Dismembering a large animal with your bare
hands and teeth is not possible. They
had become dependent on the use of tools.
The earliest tools may have been made at the site of a kill, but not all
kills happen conveniently close to the right kind of rocks.
Because the hominids were social animals, they left their
children, and some adults, behind at their encampments, while the other adults
chased their prey for many miles across the savannah. Being bipedal with grasping forearms, it’s
fair to imagine the hunters dismembering their prey into right-sized pieces, packing them into simple rucksacks made from animal skins, and toting the meat,
tools and weapons across the plains back to their waiting families.
These circumstances favored the evolution of larger brains,
especially those parts involved in complex thinking and language. Conducting organized hunting expeditions and
gathering preferred plant foods is more efficient to the extent verbal
instructions can be memorized and shared among individuals.
As the hominid toolkit gradually became more sophisticated, the
techniques for making the tools were more readily passed down from one
generation to the next through the use of language. The “monkey see, monkey do” approach works
well enough, but augmenting the learning experience with language greatly
expands its efficiency and scope.
By the time hominids began making fire with friction tools; about
1 million years ago, language was part and parcel of human life, I believe. The use of verbal communication by animals is
instinctive. True, animals learn the
finer points from their parents or social group, but the innate capability for
verbal communication and drive to use it is deeply ingrained in the genes. One can observe this in human children under
the age of 3. They clearly exhibit an
intense, drive to talk and learn the words they hear other humans speak. Baby talk is their way of saying, “I can
do it too”.
This unique combination of toolmaking and language arts
produced a complex cultural component of human life. By culture, we mean the accumulated
information, aside from instinct, that is passed on to each new generation. Other animals do this too, e.g., mother cats
teaching their kits how to hunt prey, but without language and big brains,
there is only so much information that can be conveyed. With language and big brains, Paleolithic
hominids were able to accumulate and pass on a growing store of knowledge about
how to find and process food, how to build shelters and how to defend the band
against predators, including other hominids.
At time passed, growth in the cultural component of human
life accelerated. By 130,000 years
before present, hominids were decorating and burying their dead. By 40,000 years before present, anatomically
modern humans were creating representative art on cave walls. Although no one is sure, its stands to reason
singing was adopted much earlier, as a means of expressing shared emotions such
as a successful hunt or death of a prominent member of the band.
At the present, our Homo sapiens species is completely
adapted to advanced toolmaking and complex language arts. We could not survive as an apex predator
without them. The instinctive desire to
acquire a vocabulary and communicate with other members of our social groups is
very strong, as anyone who has raised young children can attest.
Now that Homo sapiens can think and communicate with other
humans across long distances and time spans, our minds have grown to an
immensely expanded scope compared to even the smartest dog, orca or chimp. All higher order animals
think, but always about very mundane subjects, immediate needs and memories.
At this point, only people create representative art, have religious
tendencies and wonder about the wider universe.
Humankind’s expanded form of mind has arrived and has taken on a life of
its own for, during the lifespan of the person it is part of. Collectively, through communication media, our
culture lives on, transcending the individual mind. Every human generation has to relearn much of this accumulated knowledge.
What is meant by mind?
It is not the same as the brain, which is the organ that contains and
sustains the mind. Instead, the living brain
creates a form of cyberspace, a separate entity, within which lies a rich set of accumulated information
content, i.e., memories, patterns, habits, etc. Also operating within this space are our
instincts, which are directly connected to the brain, not separate. Add to this an individual's freedom to listen to her/his conscience then choose to act or not, and you have a complete model of the mind
and its consciousness. All Psychology begins
with such a model, and this is the one I favor. I concede that ultimately our minds are both
a direct function of our brains and separate entities free to make their own
decisions. For as JP Sartre put it, we are
condemned to freedom, constantly choosing what to think about and how to behave.
I’ll have more to
say in later posts about the phenomenology of the mind (as in GWF Hegel’s Phanominologie
des Geistes), especially compulsive behavior, after I study the subject more thoroughly.
