Man resting while sweet potato garden work
is in progress, Oksapmin, Papua New Guinea
Photograph © by Arnold Perey
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PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
We are always meeting what is not ourselves, and we have to do something about it.
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— Eli Siegel, Self and Worldl
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Our Bodies Meet the World Outside Us
Physical anthropology studies the body of humankind: what it is now and how did it come to be?
Physical anthropologists have studied fossil bones of ancient humans, or our nearly-human ancient ancestors, asking: how human are the teeth? Does it have feet like ours? Is the pelvis well-adapted to walking on two feet? Is the spine S-curved like modern person or C-curved like the gorilla? Is there a hand with fully-opposable thumb?
Physical anthropology is to archaeology as body is to mind. Archaeology is concerned with what the minds of ancient people could do: paintings on the walls of caves, stone axes and spear points, the houses or tents they made, the necklaces they made, did they have religion, did they honor their dead when they buried the bones we see in the ground today?
But it takes a certain kind of brain, a certain kind of body to make fine implements and to think honoringly about people, to decorate ourselves. So more and more physical anthropology and archaeology are becoming one field: paleoanthropology. (Paleo means "old" or "ancient.")
Perhaps archaeology and physical anthropology have been two separate fields for so long because people see mind and body too separately. Everyone knows they are opposites with a long history. Mind has seemed opposed to body. Body has seemed opposed to mind.
As we realize how mind and body are opposites that are inseparable, physical anthropology, archaeology, and the other branches of anthropology will join better. After all, the bones in a cave are bones that once moved, often intelligently; bones that sang, danced, painted on the face of a rock, wove baskets and fabrics perhaps.
Stone axes are part of the culture of a people, and it took a certain kind brain (physical anthroplogy) to make them. Ralph Halloway of Columbia University has done a lot of work making casts of the insides of skulls of ancient humans and cousins to humans to reveal what the brain must have looked like. He's showing how the way the brain developed over time (which, again, is physical anthropology) may be connected to the ability to speak well, using words and sentences, and to make tools that are at once beautiful and practical.
The World and You
Adapting to the Immediate Environment (Which Is the Part of the World Closest to You)
The Theory of Evolution Through Natural Selection, first developed by Charles Darwin and set forth in his great Origin of Species, 1859, is the most widely accepted and used idea in the field of physical anthropology. We find throughout nature, as Darwin wrote, structures like that of " the woodpecker, with its feet, tail, beak, and tongue, so admirably adapted
to catch insects under the bark of trees." The bodies of animals and plants meet their immediate environments "admirably" and so do their instincts and habits. All this arose through natural selection, or the selection by nature of traits that efficiently relate a living being to its habitat.
It is important to see how Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection is related to Eli Siegel's theory that the deepest desire in every person is to like the world honestly or accurately. "We are always meeting what is not ourselves," Mr. Siegel explained, "and we have to do something about it. We have to be ourselves, and give to this great and diversified [world around us], which is not ourselves, what it deserves." [P. 91, Self and World]
The fact that every animal, including man, has a drive to adapt well to the environment, which modern animal psychologists call the "competence drive," is one indication that the desire to be in the most valuable possible relation to the world around us is a deep instinct. We can infer from Darwin that without this drive there would be no struggle for survival, and therefore no Natural Selection, and therefore no evolution at all. Evolution itself could not be without the desire to like the world, which Eli Siegel identified and described.
Charles Darwin writes this important description of the basis of evolution:
As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. Prom the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form. [Origin of Species]
Modern people arose from earlier forms, including the "man-apes" by natural selection. And that includes our brains, and whatever capacity we have to think and talk.
Recent and Ancient
The Earliest Prehistory (6 million years to 100,000 years ago) and More Recent Evolution (Everything since 100,000 years ago)
As I wrote earlier, physical anthropology is divided into two main areas: the study of the prehistoric past and the study of people now and in the more recent past—especially races, or varieties, and how they came to be. Generally a physical anthropologist either studies the remote past or studies the more recent past, but not both.
It has been hard to bridge the gap between the people who lived so long ago that only fossil bones remain, and the people of the more recent past whose DNA we can trace pretty well and connect it with people like us living today.
Of course Reality itself tells us the past and present are not separate. When does the past end and the present begin? The dividing line hasn't been found yet.
Knowing and Feeling
Looking at the Desire to Know the World and Have Accurate Feelings about It
How much does evolution demand we "be interested in other things?" The demand is constant. That's why we have all five senses.
The sense of smell was keenest amongst our earliest ancesters. The first primate ancestor we know about (at the time I'm writing this) was like a present-day tree shrew, a little four-legged long-snouted insect eater which scampered about the branches and used its nose to sense the environment. Then came the prosimians, including the lemurs, who sat up in the trees, erect, and looked around. Monkeys do this as well.
Taking in information about the world through listening and seeing came later. The brain of humans and our closest primate relatives takes in the world through vision and hearing. Both vision and hearing are more comprehensive than smell. You can't smell the title of a book, but you can see it. You can't smell a rattlesnake in a bush near your foot but you can hear it.
Touch also gains importance. Touch is also a big way of getting information. While sitting or standing, the hands of people are free to grasp things and learn about the world through touch. A big point in evolution is when the hands were freed from all other jobs—about 6 or 7 million years ago, it seems, at the point where we made the transition from ape to human.
The Brain. Finally in man, the brain is structured to gather, remember, interconnect, and organize tremendous amounts of information about the world and to respond to it: be for or against. Our responses are impelled by feelings. Our feelings are how we are for things and against them, how we get pleasure and pain, how we want to welcome and attack (opposites in everyone's life).
The Brain developed even more when we became upright and began to depend more heavily on our hands as tools to do all sorts of things with.The upright posture, never using the hands for locomotion, means the hands are always free to carry things, grasp things, make things, know things by touch. The hand of the chimpanzee and gorilla, while wonderful hands and capable of removing even a tiny splinter, are somewhat compromised by the fact that they are used for locomotion too. They're used for"knuckle-walking" and sometimes for swinging from one branch to another (in the case of the more lightweight chimpanzee).
As the body became upright, we no longer carried our heads on a forward slant—our heads were balanced on top of a vertical spinal cord. This balance allowed the brain to grow in size and get much heavier.
All this evolution of the body, including the brain, makes possible more complete ethics than before—that is, being so interested in being fair to an outside object that you take care of yourself at the same time. I quote here the definition of ethics that Eli Siegel gives in Self and World: “To be ethical is to give oneself what is coming to one by giving what is coming to other things” (p. 243).
Me and All That
The Conflict Between Fairness to Things Outside Us and "Taking Care of Me"
Meanwhile, as Aesthetic Realism so importantly explains, human beings have a continuous conflict that interferes with our living up to the dazzling possibilities that evolution has endowed us with. Our egos think giving attention to anything but ourselves is a betrayal of the home base. Meanwhile, at our best, humans feel that we will be more complete the more we know and the fairer we are. We don't "forget" ourselves when we're interested in other things, we add to ourselves. And when we do, not only ethics but aesthetics has occurred. Eli Siegel explained it this way:
If a way were shown to Louis Robinson — and this would be the one useful kind of advice — by which he could be himself proudly by giving everything that was coming to them to other people and things — that way would be aesthetic: nothing less.
The evolution of the human body from earlier forms, then, includes a desire to be fair. It's larger and more conscious than in earlier living creatures, but as Darwin describes in The Descent of Man we wouldn't have that desire if they didn't have it first. We got it from our animal ancestors. That is why the United Nations (UNESCO) document on race says this:
Biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood; for man is born with drives toward cooperation, and unless those drives are satisfied, men and nations alike fall ill.
(The UNESCO Statement on Race by Social Scientists, 1950)
Physical anthropology, concerned with the biology of human beings, is thus concerned with our deepest drives. The three main stages of our evolution had to have the drives we're now talking about.
Early, Now, and What's in Between
Three Main Stages of Human Evolution
These stages are, roughly, Early, Middle, and Late—or, Australopithecus, Homo erectus, and Homo sapiens.
1. Early: the Amazing Australopithecus, or "Taung Child" of Raymond Dart
The amazing Australopithecus is the oldest. This is the earliest "man-ape" or "woman-ape." He and she stood up on two feet, were well adapted to walking, and from the neck down looked very, very much like us. In 1924, Raymond Dart was shown the very old fossilized skull of a child, in Taungs, South Africa. He looked at the back of it and saw that the way the spinal cord inserted below the skull was pretty much vertical. The child was standing on two legs! —not at all like a chimpanzee whose head projects horizontally. And the child did not have the big canine teeth in its upper jaw like an ape. It had little ones like we do. It was definitely ancestral to modern humans. Of course, he was ridiculed by experts who said it was just the skull of a fossil ape. But he knew what he'd seen and never changed his mind. And now everyone knows he was right.
Quite a few variations of Australopithecus have been discovered by paleoanthropologists. And, it's true, to a swift observer some features of their skull shape are noticeably a bit ape-like. But there is no doubt that we came from them: they stood upright as we do and have every essential feature in common with us. They would include Lucy (almost 4 million years old), probably the best known fossil, discovered by the Don Johanson expedition in Ethiopia.
2. Midway: the Homo Erectus, or "Java ape-man" of DuBois
Then came Homo erectus, even more nearly identical to ourselves below the neck than Australopithecus was. But still Homo Erectus was smaller-brained and larger-jawed: 900cc. brain volume and strong, heavy jaws and teeth. The best known Homo erectus was discovered by Eugene Dubois in 1857 on the Solo River in Java, Indonesia. He found the top of a skull that looked very primitive, like this:
The Homo Erectus skullcap found by Dubois in 1857.
From: http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/history_17
—and a thigh bone that looked just like ours. He was convinced that they belonged to one individual—and called this person Pithecanthropus Erectus: "Ape-Human Who Stands Upright." Some experts tore Dubois down: it was the skull of an ape and the thigh bone of a man, they insisted. But more of these ancient people were found elsewhere and this proved Dubois right.
This kind of person (now called Homo Erectus—"Human Who Stands Upright") also lived in Africa and all the way from the French Riviera to Beijing, China. They were hunters and lived in camps. Apparently they was not so careful about hygiene. The remains of their meals—many bones—seem rarely to have been thrown away.
They lived about 500,000 years ago. Inside, the shape of their throat was like the shape of a baby's throat today. So if Homo erectus could speak (and they probably could) it's likely to have sounded like baby-talk!
3. Now: The Modern Human
Finally we have modern Homo sapiens, beginning, according to some, a few hundred thousand years ago, evolving from Homo erectus.
We now know that Louis B. Leakey, although he too was ridiculed by the "experts" (and I heard some of this ridicule at Columbia University) was right about our species. Leakey felt there were many species of humans and pre-humans, just as horse, zebra, and donkey are species of one genus. But, he believed, only one species survived to the present day. That species was us. The earliest member of our species he named Homo habilis. He showed us how the shape of Homo habilis's skull is very much like the shape of our skulls today, and unlike the shape of the australopithecus skull. It was a remarkable correspondence. He believed, then, that all other species of human are extinct, only to be found as fossils within the sheltering earth. And now, as I said, everyone realizes he was right.
The first modern humans to exist lived in Africa south of the Sahara. At this writing, the earliest who have been found lived in Blombos Cave in South Africa, near the coast. We don't yet have their skeletons but they're the earliest people with finely made bone tools and incised symbols on clay. This was 80,000 to 100,000 years ago. They most likely looked like the Bushmen (also called San people) of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa. And it does seem that the Bushmen are the ancestors of us all, that everyone alive today came from them—and has facial features arising from theirs. The earliest female ancestor for all modern humans (dated by mitochondrial DNA) is about 90,000 years ago. This date is mathematically calculated, but it squares very well with the range of dates for the Blombos people. That is when the mother of all modern people was alive.
Knowlege vs. Anger
The General Direction of Human Evolution Can Be Called "Meet the World with Your Brain Not Your Teeth"
The general direction of human evolution is toward a more intelligent way of combining self protection and knowledge. The dinosaur of 175 million years ago had large jaws and small brain. This creature took in the world by eating, and by thinking, just as we do. But the thinking function was not as efficient as it would become in the mammals who would take its place. Imaginary dinosaur fights show them using their teeth, horns, tails, and claws before asking any questions. At our best, we use our capacity to ask questions and understand before reacting in a self-destructive violent way. If we respect this capacity, which evolution very kindly gave us, our species might survive into the future. If we do not, as everyone today fears, we may extinguish ourselves.
The early pre-primate or tree shrew of 75 million years ago was already showing progress. This tiny creature had, propotionately, a smaller snout and bigger brain than dinosaurs in general. The much later Australopithecus had a smaller jaw still, if you look at the proportions of both, and larger brain. And modern people have the largest brain and smallest jaws and teeth. We should be making much better use of that brain!
Meanwhile, the structure of the brain was improving, there, within the skull; for Neanderthals had the largest brains of all—but perhaps the way they used it was not the best, for they are now extinct.
It is a fact that as humans evolved, the shape of the skull showed the greater and greater dependence on activities related to knowing and less and less dependence on activities related to self-protection, attack, and retreat. This is an observation made by Ellen Reiss some years ago. She pointed out that the bony projection protecting the eyes in Homo Erectus skullcap (see the picture above) is all but gone. The eyes have come into a less protected openness, and the curve of the brain case comes forward in a well-developed forehead—like the foreheads painted by Rembrandt with a glowing light on them. The "simian shelf" of the ape's mouth—where the front teeth come forward in a projection that's used for biting food and threatening enemies—is gone in modern humans—and instead, the nose comes forward: a sensory organ. The flaring, protective cheek bones of the robust form of Australopithecus have retreated in the modern human. In fact, it is our species that persistently did not require the bony protectors of our cousins.
On the whole, there is less bony protection against the world in the modern human face and head, and more welcoming it by means of forward-looking senses. We must live up to our evolutionary heritage, not work against it. Awareness of the world and respect for it is the direction evolution is pressing toward. It is important to the survival of our species that we cultivate this awareness and this respect assiduously and not allow ego to be victorious over it.
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