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If
I were dropped in Africa's Great Rift Valley where we apparently
evolved, naked and without tools, I would almost certainly die. If
everyone in this room were dropped there naked and without tools,
after we were through giggling in embarrassment, we would all
probably die. 99 percent at any rate. We have come a very long way
from our ancestors who came down out of the trees and first walked
upright, who used sticks and then stones as tools and weapons, who
sought shelter in caves and learned to make fire by spinning sticks
or striking flint. But we've also forgotten much that our early
ancestors shared and we've created a culture that makes us deeply
co-dependent.
If our lives are longer and vastly more
comfortable than those of australopithecines, it is because we have
all together found ways to shape a harsh environment to serve our
needs and desires. This planet has never been Eden.
I think back to Stewart Brand's Last Whole Earth Catalogue. If we were dropped in the Great Rift Valley, naked, with a copy of that book, we might save our bacon. While this book was a bible for back-to-the-land hippies in the 1970s, the deeper meaning is in the subtitle "Access to Tools." That's the difference between human's joining the extinct 99 percent long ago and our current status as earth's dominant multicellular creatures. We learned to assess our environment and to invent tools to permit our survival in that environment.
So what ensured our current short term success?
We learned to make fire, and stone tools, and agriculture and written language and so on until we now routinely carry powerful computers in our pockets. We learned how to survive on a planet that has always been working to kill us. Not malevolently, but simply because it is a harsh environment where it takes luck, inherited habits and intelligence to thrive.
But others in our line weren't so successful. Neanderthals did pretty well. They did use fire and may have fared better during the ice ages in northern climes than we did. You might have seen news a couple of weeks ago that current research suggests they were doing cave painting 100,000 years before our nearest ancestors. And they must have been reasonably attractive since we modern humans have Neanderthal DNA in our genes, but Mother Earth or our predecessors killed them off. There's some evidence to suggest we ate them.
Arguably our most important invention was written language, around 1500 BC. Knowledge suddenly exploded beyond what could be remembered and shared orally. The human success story took off like a rocket.
Oral history had been astonishing in its own right. Cultures like that of the aborigines in Australia had oral histories which stretched back, perhaps, for millennia, and included useful information about where to find food or water in a fairly unfriendly landscape. But oral histories were more or less static. For one thing, there is a limit to what any one person can remember. They repeated old stories, often with great accuracy, over many generations. This required a prodigious effort of memorization, facilitated by that repetition.
The advent of written history was a game changer. Abruptly the knowledge gleaned by earlier generations wasn't remembrance stored in individual brains, a song line stretching back into the darkness of prehistory, but a much more useful tool in the struggle for survival. Ideas conceived in one place and time could be shared across thousands of miles and hundreds of years. They could be studied, picked apart, rearranged and improved. No one had to "reinvent the wheel" as the saying goes, and no one had to try to remember everything that might be of importance.
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