Reading Note: The Dawn of Human Culture

Years ago in London, I trudged up to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead to listen to a doctor lecture on “the origins of the self.” I actually wasn’t so interested in the particular answer as I was in the implied definition—what did this (or indeed) any doctor mean when he spoke of “the self.”

As I recall, the lecture was a disappointment. I can remember something about “burying their dead,” but it was pretty clear that the speaker hadn’t much more to offer on the subject than I had myself or, at any rate, that what he had to offer was not memorable.

It does flag an issue, or pair of issues, that have stuck in the back of my mind—when did we become “human” and, by the way, what does it mean to be human? I’ve given it odd bits of thought over the years—enough to grasp that I don’t have any special talent for metaphysics—but I do come up with a workable definition: creatures are human when they start “acting like us.” That would include not just killing and dying—all creatures do that—but the stuff of archaeology: bead-making, wall-painting, elaborate tools, long-distance exchange and, oh yes, complex burial rites.

The Dawn of Human Culture (2002), by Richard G. Klein with Blake Edgar, is a readable, recent contribution to the inquiry, though the authors do not quite clarify just what is “bold” or “new” about what they call their “bold new theory.” In a way, it is a narrative summary (“rehash” would be too unkind a word) of major developments in physical archaeology from, say, 500,000 to 50,000 years ago, give or take. The author do stake out their claim that we started “becoming human”—in the sense here identified—more or less around the latter end of that time line.

They do a satisfying job of explaining why they plump for that date, and provide some interesting discussion/analysis of possible competing dates. But perhaps the most interesting point of the analysis—readily conceded by the authors—that there isn’t really any physical evidence why or how it happened that way. None, nada, bupkas, zip. Only the evidence that it happened. Saying that it must be the result of a “behavioral revolution” is no help, because it makes the consequent the antecedent. But fossil evidence—changes in skull size or frame construction—nothing. And they admit that this itself is, at least, a fascinating fact.

They do flirt with the notion that this revolution is somehow tied up with the origin of language—the capacity to manufacture complex yet comprehensible methods of communicating abstract notions. All of which makes it possible to share information, to organize, and perhaps most important (though if they mentioned it, I missed it) the capacity to accumulate knowledge and to pass it on to later generations.

Merely saying “language” may take you a little way, but not very far: exactly where did it come about (probably Africa) and how (not a clue)? Again, no fossil evidence, etc. (recall: it would take place in the soft tissue of the brain, and that stuff rots). But they do mention what might be the single most revolutionary recent contribution to the debate: a paper by Cecilia Lay of Oxford University and others, published in Nature (4 October 2001, it says here), in which they identify a single gene that “is probably ‘involved in the development process that culminates in speech and language.’” (Klein/Edgar at 271), “A single mutation,” they say, “couold underly the efully modern capacity for speech.”

It’s not everything, but it’s a start. And in context, it is the kind of item that makes Klein/Edgar worth reading. Wonder if the guy at the Royal Free has read it; wonder if he is planning another speech.