Introgression

Introgression

"But we're no longer rain, I said, we're no longer seeds. We're men. Now we can stand and decide. This is our first chance to choose our own unknown. I'm so proud of everything we've done, my brothers, and if we're fortunate enough to fly and land in a new place, we must continue. As impossible as it sounds, we must keep walking. And, yes, there has been suffering, but now there will be grace. There has been pain, but now there will be serenity. No one has been tried the way we have been tried, and now this is our reward." _Dave Eggers, What Is the What

Seven million years the Earth has shaped us. For 2 million years, enlightenment, above all other sentient beings on this planet. As far as we know, either necessity, curiosity, or both, led some driven mind in the Olduvi Gorge in Tanzania, some 2.6mya, to cleave two stones together. Then, apply that finished result to carving the remaining meat from carrion, and perhaps even carrying it to a safer place for consumption, out of predator's reach. Homo Habilis created the first tool-making industry. But our genus, Homo, which is Latin for human being, did not create the first tools.

It only takes patience and observation to realize tool use in the animal kingdom. Nest-building would be the basis for tool use - either altering your environment to lay eggs, i.e., sea turtles, or in addition to that, securing resources for such a nest to accomplish the first and attract a mate, i.e., bird nests. An otter uses a stone to crack a shell to get at its contents. The modern crows, occupying cities, will even use us humans for its purposes. They often perch atop utility poles, holding a shell of a nut or pod, high above the automotive traffic below. They will intentionally drop it into traffic, wait for it to be crushed or cracked open, and swoop down to eat the contents once traffic clears, or just slows to a safer degree. If birds are intelligent, then crows are Archimedes. If water levels in a pool or container are too low to reach - a crow will drop stones in it to raise the surface level to be within reach.

Elephants pull off twigs to create fly swatters. They'll chew up branches to plug water holes, keeping it only for their use against other animals. They will even use a large branch to short circuit, or crash an electric fence. Dolphins practically use tools as much as humans - they've been observed to carry sponges in their mouths, using it only to stir up the sand on the sea floor to scare up prey. There is a species of octopus that can "stack coconut shell halves that people discarded just as one might pile bowls, sits atop them, makes its eight arms rigid like stilts, and then ambles the entire heap across the seafloor, using them for shelter later when needed. These new findings are apparently the first reported instance of an invertebrate that acquires tools for later use." (Charles Q. Choi, LiveScience,  2009)

Here's where you will come to rethink animal intelligence, or consider humans the highly evolved animals we actually are.

Would you be shocked to know chimpanzees use spears to hunt?

Chimps use sponges to soak up water and drink, they use stones to hammer shells and nuts, eat certain plants for medicinal purposes and not for food, and twigs to extract ants, grubs or termites. Orangutans use bundled leaves for whistles - to warn of or ward off predators - this is tool use for communication. Gorillas use sticks to test the depth of water. They use large branches as bridges to traverse swamps. They use canes and walking sticks. It's not just the apes....Spider monkeys chew and crush leaves to rub on their bodies for medicinal purposes. Capuchins dry their nuts in the sun before cracking them with a stone. Macaques steal hair from human tourists in Thailand, and floss their teeth with it.

This is material culture. But we must think of it as evolving independently - not as a universal behavioral trait. Some species, like Bonobos, the smaller cousins of chimpanzees, rarely make use of tools. (Primate Archaeology, M. Haslam, et. al, 2009)

Whether it's for processing food, to ward off predators, to test the world around you - tool use is shaped by environmental need and intelligence. Like chimpanzees, the modifying of the tool is what sets us and our hominin ancestors apart. Assuming you've all heard of Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis (3.9 - 2.9mya)... Though she walked upright, at no more than 4'11" for the tallest of her species, her brain was close to the size of modern chimpanzees. And as it was 7 million years ago, when the first homind, Sahelanthropus Tchadensis, walked upright, so it was near the end of the time of Lucy (2.9mya) that major climate upheavals revisited the Earth. Tool use accelerated in these intelligent australopithecines as a result of rapid environmental change. Within 200,000 - 300,000 years after the appearance of Lucy, Australopithecus garhi, would be the first in our line of the technologically obsessed. Since Lucy could not adapt, she and her kind, perished. However crude, these Au. garhi were the first hominins to use stone tools as we know it. It is believed Homo Habilis, the first human being, evolved directly from them within a few hundred thousand years. The "Handy Man," not only picked up a rock and used it - H. Habilis decided to shape it, source it, and diversify its use (chop, scrape, pound) - creating a tool-making industry. They chose stones that would resemble the final product - not taking much of a conceptual leap. Still, a leap nonetheless - as a stone now had to have a proper shape for efficient application.

This industry - the first industry - is called Oldowan:

Oldowan Hand Axe

Homo Habilis was still food for predators - it did not evolve into the hunter Homo Erectus would become. Instead of hunting, scavenging was the main application of stone tool use. Yet, the response to climate change kept it alive, expanded its food sources and environment, increased it's brain size as a result, and began to further specialize its anatomy - because of stone tool technology.

You have evolved to manipulate technology. How easy your hands type and your eyes scan this page. You hold your tools intuitively because Au. garhi and Homo Habilis learned to make tool use a part of everyday life. There is a real anatomical/technological co-evolution at work. The same goes for how we interface with our ecology. You feel akward without clothing, hot without air conditioning, and primal when eating raw foods for this very reason. You are within an ever-constant evolution.

For Homo Erectus, for at least 1 million years, control of fire deterred the night and all of what death it brought. The warmth is brought in the cold night was the precursor to a deeper concept of "home." Cooking by fire altered our social dynamics, as well as, our diet - as well as, our anatomy, and our minds. Whether at Wonderwek Cave in South Africa (1mya+), at Chesowanja in Kenya (1.4mya), or perhaps even Yuanmou in China (1.7mya) - manipulation of fire itself is far more ancient than Prometheus.

The "Upright Man" refined their tools, conquered their environment, and began to shape humanity. A new industry comes with H. Erectus. Acheulean industry derives its name from Saint-Acheul, France, where they were first found in 1859. These tools had to be symmetrical. No more one sided axes, but dual-sided, or bi-faced, blades of sourced, choice stone. Tool-making truly became industry, made at the source - perhaps the skill itself was continually taught at the source - and then transported for use or even trade. Fine movement and motor skills are centered in the same region of the brain as language. They worked these skills more efficiently, thinking several steps ahead to ensure some of the remaining cleaved flakes could also be used for tools. A process of planning and refining, and specialization, they were used in a variety of ways - cutting wood, butchering, scraping, digging, cutting, etc. The aesthetic qualities indicate an appreciation of their work and a high intellectual, perhaps emergent social, order.Originating in Africa, it spread across the globe with Upright Man. And remarkably, their spread, along with the peoples who made them, is as a result of climate influence.

For over 1 million years, Acheulean was the dominant 

technological industry for the largest span of human existence:

Acheulean Hand Axe

But by the fireside of our hominin ancestors, increased socialization brought on increased information sharing. Information has always been the first technology. It's why peacocks display their feathers, why squid flash brilliant color, why butterflies mimic large eyes on their wings. It's why bees dance, avians chirp, and apes howl. It's what made the first tongue touch to teeth and interrupt a sounding breath. If you repeat after me, it's a language. Animals behave and speak mostly with their bodies - sound and smell better serves nocturnal species. I would experientially propose gesture is not so hard to make out by the camp fire. And as gesticulation precedes vocalization, perhaps the dual colorization of our hands (palms lighter than the back) first accentuated what was spoken - the lighter palm being more visible by reflecting light of the fire in camp. Gesture still accompanies everyday speech. Deicticts, pointing "this," "that," "here," "there," "peace," etc. appear alongside spoken words. As language obviously became advantageous, evolution would select for those with lighter palms, those best communicating, expressing and teaching. People who do not have speech will develop a sign language (originating in gestures accompanying language). The FOX P2 gene, the genetic basis for acquiring language, would be as old as fire and refined tools - circa 1.7my. The anatomy of our mouths and the development of our speech was altered by tool and fire use - by technology.  An epigenetic co-evolution.

Considering the Corpus Callosum (the bridge between left/right brain hemispheres) has far more inter-connectivity in the human female than in males, that females develop and learn language more completely than males - leads me to believe women have had a longer time in evolutionary history to master it. Within the brain itself - when females are learning, they're processing it directly in the areas pertaining to language. While when males are learning, they also process it in language centers, but visual and oral brain centers in addition to it. So males use sensory data - which in my view, indicates a learned application to the hunt. Learned from their wiser females.

Before agriculture, traditional human groups, or bands, consisted of 20-40 people, more or less. Though when food is abundant, as the seasons would allow, this group size can swell to over 100. This may be an extended family, a kinship, whose blood lines are all identifiable - a tribe extends this sense of identity on the basis of shared culture and belief. Robin Dunbar, of the University of Liverpool, has conducted research that suggests human brain size, and social group size are related. That, on average, no more than 150 full-identity relationships can be contained mentally. Even in the modern era. Once that number is breached, hierarchies, stereotypes and other simplifying models emerge. Sound familiar? More complex societies, including democracies, fall back on tribal instinct for the social organization of an entire nation.

As we will see with Neanderthals, larger brain size isn't the point - as theirs was larger than ours. Connectivity is the issue, along with the prefontal cortex in modern humans - where planning, strategy and personality exists. The modern human male's brain size is circa 10% larger than the modern human female, with 6% more grey, or "thinking," matter. (Settle down, gentlemen.) Women have 9.5% more white matter, that's 9.5% more connectivity. (Ahem.) The prefontal cortex in women is thus structured with more precision, and thus, more volume. More connectivity and more volume in the area of the brain that makes us distinctly modern and ultimately human. Females have driven human evolution. This superior connectivity suggest they have evolved this portion of the brain longer than we have. Females use both hemispheres when listening. Men? only the left. So, language skills and the motor sensory complex associated with it, mature 6 years, on average, earlier in girls than in boys.

Sexual dimorphism is when there is a size difference between the genders of a species. This emerges from female mate selection, particularly from females who are internally fertilized. She would rather request the males compete for her real risk of pregnancy; the winning male having demonstrated his prowess, fitness and bravery. Over evolutionary time, males grow larger from this competition.

Further cooperation emerges in Homo Erectus because of its use of fire and cooking. Being the apex hunter it became is truly significant. Hunting and gathering comprises over 99% of human history. Food sources for hunter-gatherers, we've been taught, are scarce, fluctuate and are vulnerable to over-exploitation. This is a modern and civilized view, where beliefs of scarcity rule the day. It is civilizations encroachment that makes the modern viewpoint a true one - as cities and their populations monopolize natural resources, and place claims on property. Hunter-gatherers actually work less hours than modern humans, and gain better nutritional value from their foods. Nearly 30% less hours. And they are so efficient because of gathering.

Gathering supplements when the meat is in low supply. Though meat is preferred, the hunt is difficult, dangerous, and not always successful. Small game tends to suffice most of the time - but it is difficult to share evenly among a band of 30-40 hungry people. Gathering not only includes the women of reproductive age in the band, but the young children not on their mothers breast, and their grandmothers - still strong and experienced - with no children to rear, and time and energy to assist the younger women with their hands full with nursing children. Menopause, thus, serves an evolutionary benefit to humans alone.

The Last Surviving Full Time Hunter-Gatherers in Africa, For Tens of Thousands of Years

Hadza Women, Tanzania

Cooking meat may have altered our guts - but eating starch altered our genes. We have more genes that are aimed towards the breaking down of starches than any other primate. When the meat is low, and the fruits are not yet blooming and ripe, starches in tubers, grains, seeds, nuts and legumes must suffice. So much so, that we crave french fries as much as a burger, and a baked potato compliments a steak. So much so that, still, women push men, and their children, to eat their salad and vegetables. Yet, it is women who crave the steak more than men. During menses, blood loss is significant, which pushes iron levels low in the blood. Iron is needed by the hemoglobin molecule to attach oxygen for circulatory distribution. She has a real need for iron, found in red meats - particularly post-menstrual. Though hunting was major, gathering was the driver. This specialization brought on pair bonding. It's the foundation of why we marry. Quite environmentally and biologically imposed, but an efficient way of organizing human energy within that environment via gender.

By the fire, she taught him the language she perfected with her counterparts while foraging. Females use language more efficiently. They maintain gossip (being nearly 85% of the information we communicate). Gossip is not a negative adaptation - it is, still, information transmitted informally. It informs you of the character of the individuals in your midst, or the potential, or real, danger of foreigners. We pick up useful, applicable and indirect information via gossip. Women use language to organize and build relationships, are more efficient at recognizing emotions. It's why we navigate differently - women tend to navigate by landmarks (though GPS will change this), as a result of knowing that large fig tree by the rock outcrop will produce ripe fruit 3 days before my menses when the moon is half full. The first to recognize time, with her own biology.

In regards to the beginning quote, I would prefer to think in this color. In my view, 7 million years of evolution is truly significant enough to prepare us for anything. Yet, today, despite technology, in front of us and bubbling underneath, that could properly direct humanity and our relational dependency on Earth in the same breath - old, archaic and unresolved psycho-social morass binds us, and constricts all possibility. Globalization and the Digital Age have shredded boundaries, and forcefully revealed those that were previously unclear....being so much to psychologically process in our lifetimes. So through millennia after radiating from Africa, geography, and dispersion colored our skins differently, and isolation inflected our cultures until we literally forgot our underlying commonality. Yet, we have always dispersed and eventually recombined. It is introgression. Thus, it'd be wise to reverse the trajectory of our socialization backwards into where religion begins, where oral tradition informed religions creation, and then the break with the hunter-gatherer lifestyle into an agricultural one. Within that very break we can find and empirically examine the origins of religion, sedentarism, farming, settlements, agriculture, cities, social stratification, wealth and poverty, technology and science.

The evolved human mind has a story to tell - one way or another - it points the way to and fro.