The Dawn of Human Culture -- Book Review
The
Dawn of Human Culture: A Bold New Theory
on what sparked the "Big Bang" of Human Consciousness. By Richard G.
Klein and Blake Edgar. New
York: John Wiley & Sons. 2002.
This is the best overview of the archeological perspective
on human evolution that I have seen. I
have not seen them all, but I have followed developments in this field for at
least forty years. Reading about the
different fossils and different archeological finds and different human
ancestors in isolation can be confusing.
It is hard to tell the relationships between one ancient ancestor and
another. It is hard to keep the
chronology in mind. It is not clear what
came from what or how and when developments took place. This book straightens a lot of that out. It is a clearly written, readable,
interesting, well organized presentation, well illustrated with many drawings,
charts, and maps that powerfully enhance the text.
The dawn of culture doesn't really break until the last
chapter. Most of the book is just setting
the stage for the dawn of culture. But
that is very OK, because it underlines how long it took to get to the place
where what we think of as human culture could appear, and it emphasizes through
most of human evolution there was no "culture" as we think of
it. People have been making tools out of
stone for about 2.5 million years, but if culture means representing ideas to
one's fellow creatures, thinking beyond day to day survival, that did not exist
until very recently, say about 50,000 years ago.
It appears to have been a quantum behavioral and
psychological leap. There was no gradual
evolution toward "culture." It
seems to have exploded with modern humans after about 50-60,000 years ago, and
within a relatively short time spread to the far corners of the earth. This seems to call out for an explanation
since the ways of life, technology, economy, social organization, and
relationship to the natural world remained relatively stable in human ancestor
populations for eons prior. Human
anatomy has been stable for about 200,000 years. Brian Sykes tells us that all living humans
can be traced to a single woman living in East Africa about 150,000, years ago,
and all non-African modern humans can be traced through another East African
woman about 50,000 years later. (Sykes,
2001, pp. 276-78) So modern humans, homo sapiens sapiens, have been
established as a species for at least 150,000 years. But culture did not appear until about
100,000 years into that span. What took
so long? And when it did appear, it came
in a flood. It was around that time that
modern humans began to migrate out of Africa and displace all of the
proto-human ancestor populations like the Neanderthals, homo erectus, and
perhaps others in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. Technology dramatically changed. Stone tools developed much greater variety
and sophistication. Beads and jewelry
appeared. The first sculptures and
figurines were made. Cave painters began
painting magnificent murals on the walls of caves starting at least 32,000
years ago. What was the spark that lit
this fire?
Klein and Edgar think it had to do with a genetic mutation
that altered brain function and/or anatomy.
They cite a 2001 paper by Lai, et al.
(Lai, et al, 2001) that claims to have discovered a gene that plays a
role in language development. Were such
a gene to be missing or mutated in non-human hominids, it could explain why
humans have spoken languages and non-human hominids didn't. If that were a gene that mutated in a small
human population 50,000 or so years ago and allowed people to develop spoken
languages, it could have been the point at which modern humans leaped into the
Late Stone Age. The problem with it is
that it is putting a lot on one gene. This
kind of theory is going to be hard to validate from fossils. The human brain reached nearly its full size
by 600,000 years ago. The Neanderthals
actually had larger brains that we do.
So size isn't everything.
Klein
and Edgar think that a genetic modification altered the organization of the
brain that allowed for the development of spoken languages. Spoken languages are considered to be closely
linked to the development of "culture." Spoken languages powerfully change social
relations between people, facilitate organization, enable human beings to
develop ideas, modify behaviors, make corrections, improve things,
"advance." The Neanderthals lived
in Europe and the Middle East for at least 200,000 years. But their technology and way of life did not
change very much over that vast time period.
Once modern humans set the cultural snowball rolling it has been growing
and accelerating at an increasing pace ever since, to the point where we now
completely dominate the globe and are on the verge of destroying it, ourselves,
and everything else. Human intelligence
and human culture may turn out to be a failed evolutionary experiment.
I don't have an opinion on what sparked the advent of human
culture. Klein and Edgar's hypothesis is
speculative. It could have some
plausibility, but the arguments are inconclusive. The real value of this book, aside from
wrestling with the issue of how human culture originated, is its clear,
comprehensive, well organized, well illustrated exposition of the evolution of
the human species from the fossil record, how that record was assembled, and
the issues and controversies that accompanied its growth. This book makes it all much more
comprehensible than anything else I have seen to date.
Notes
Lai, Cecelia S. L.; Fisher, Simon E.; Hurst, Jane A.;
Vargha-Khadem, Faraneh; Monaco, Anthony P. (2001) A forkhead-domain gene is mutated in a severe
speech and language disorder. Nature 413: 519-23.
Sykes, Brian (2001) The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Science that Reveals our Genetic Ancestry. New York & London: W.W. Norton.