Everybody has moments of thought and musing, asking himself: Who am I? What is all about? Where do we come from and where we are going to? Big Questions. People are entitled to answers; they need firm ground under their mental feet. Especially young people need answers in order to establish their identity. Those who have access to big money, without a shared Story no longer feel that they have anything to do with someone else. Big Questions are philosophical stuff. It ought to be the core business of philosophers to generate those answers.

However, today’s philosophers remain silent. When it comes to Big Questions, they don’t offer relevant answers. Philosophical schooling didn’t include any actual study of human nature. This is a consequence of the many centuries when it was the privilege of the churches to define human identity from the pulpit. When in the past philosophers tried to formulate a more scientific alternative, they skated on thin ice: it could be dangerous to speculate in a way that deviated from the ecclesiastic doctrine.

When in the end the churches lost their grip on people’s minds, philosophy just wandered into the desert of postmodernism, with its pessimistic and relativistic view on knowledge as being prejudiced, culturally and gender-biased. And … with a phobia for Big Stories. Unaware that it had been the new economy of the free market that had put an end to the oppressive Great Stories of history and had brought the free West into a new situation, that of consumerism. But that consumers were still people and so needed a bearing story to live together well.

This is why you still don’t know how humans became humans from apes and what is the essence of our human nature. But we are sure that sooner or later, with or without the help of humanosophy, philosophy will rediscover itself and remember the commission that the patriarch Kant at the end of his life had given to philosophy: mapping man.

Bookstores offer many good books about human evolution. The internet has the Smithsonian Human Origins Project^[1], and much more. They all tell the same story about human origins. Wouldn’t that be enough for us?

These sources are nice indeed, but too limited in scope^[2] to generate the answers for the Big Questions. They tell us what kind of fossils and stone tools have been found from various periods in human history. They tell us about the evolutionary development of the hominid species, from australopiths till Homo sapiens. They tell us about the increasing size of brains (based on researching humanoid fossil skulls) but they don’t ask themselves what was going on inside that skulls. They don’t ask why our ancestors started making stone tools, while the ancestors of other species did not. Paleos offer no answers on questions such as: What made those apes into humans? They don’t have a coherent story of what made the behavioral evolution of our earliest australopithic ancestors deviate from the behavioral patterns of all other species. So that even today many people think that we were conjured up on Earth by a Higher Power.

The scientific approach most close to the humanosophic approach is Evolutionary psychology (EP). Evolutionary psychologists argue that much of human behavior is “the output of psychological adaptations that evolved to solve recurrent problems in human ancestral environments”. The EP approach is increasingly influential in the general field of psychology and according to Steven Pinker, one of the most important adepts^[3], EP may become foundational to the entire field. But even Pinker’s approach remains that of a linguist, in simply assuming that our species developed from other ape-men by a blind variation-selection-reproduction mechanism, like in all living species. Of course basically they are right. But the course of events that played a role in this physical, behavioral an mental evolution of mankind can be told far more specifically, as we hope to prove here.

If we google “what made us into humans?”, we will find mainly articles that describe some consequences of early human development, instead of searching for the root causes of that development^[4]. For example, a popular explanation is “we became humans because we developed ever larger brains”. But it is evidently a two-ways effect: larger brains can just as well have been the consequence of changing behavior, as a cause. As an explanation by itself this is remains unsatisfactory, because it still does not answer the question what triggered the development.

Where did this innovative behavior of our ancestors (making stone tools, using fire, and so on) come from, and why didn’t the other apes do those things? Why religion, why agriculture, why civilization, why God?

If we try to really answer that question, we need to combine very different sources – not just paleo-anthropologic sources from millions of years ago. One can also infer a lot from our behavior of today: people are walking archives. Especially babies and their mothers. Typical male or female behavior implies inclinations and reactions that are only explicable from our prehistoric past.

Another source today are the most ‘primitive’ populations, either those few that still exist, or those that became extinct over the last centuries, but were described by anthropologists, missionaries, or other travelers.

The third source are our next of kin: the bonobos and the chimpanzees. They can serve as a source because basically, these highly evolved apes are group animals just like we ourselves once were and still are. Consequently we share several characteristics of our behavior, such as compassion and altruism, with these apes.

Combined with insights based on paleo-anthropologic research, a global picture arises of our past and of the crucial driving force behind human development.

It yields a story, a ‘creation story’ that can finally be the western alternative to the backward Adam and Eva story that has not been challenged by science so far and thus retains its control in large parts of mankind.

As we will see, the most important of these driving forces was the invention of enriching our group animal communication with names for things.

It is important to realize what having names for things does with an animal. It does five things and we will list them for you. This ability to use symbolic language made our ancestors to a linguistic species. Acquiring this communication tool, new in the animal world, enabled our species to exchange individual ingenuity, ideas, skills and goods.

We will try to make it plausible when this happened in our cultural evolution and that it must have been a female expression.

do we need a shared account of human nature?

Humanity longs for a coherent, science-based, universally valid creation story in the form of a philosophical project that only ends when mankind ends. After all, until then science will never stop.

One of the famous public intellectuals of the past decennia has been the late Tony Judt, British-American historian. In the last year of his life, imprisoned in the evermore narrow cocoon of the illness ALS, he dictated Ill fares the land (2010). He expounded that for the past thirty years, our Western societies have been frittering away post-war achievements such as reducing the inequality between poor and rich through welfare facilities and social opportunities for everyone. As the cause of this, he saw the loss of a common narrative as the foundation of everybody’s decisions and conscience.

Judt had not yet a solution to offer, but one could feel his anxiety and commitment.

We try to contribute what he was missing in Part One, and in Part Two a scenario according to which the common narrative can be introduced without imposing it on anyone.

So here it comes: the humanosophic mapping of

human nature.

Yes, in the Introduction. Because it is an important notion in both Part one and in Part Two while it does not fit organically in either.

We see human nature as a ‘three stage rocket’. And it should be noted that each of these stages is still active in all of us.

The first stage (mode, state of mind, tendency, drive, instinct) we share with all living creatures, even with bacteria and plants. It is the individual drive to take as much energy as possible from the environment (nearly all energy origins from the Sun) to stay alive and procreate. It is this self-centered survival drive, this me-myself-and-I behavior, that still gets the upper hand in real or imagined panic situations.
[It is notable that the situation of power or big money throws us back in this most primitive mode, being a situation contrary to our third stage, so of real or imagined panic.]

The second stage: our ancestors were group animals such as elephants, hyenas, dolphins and apes. For this second stage we especially have to look to the bonobos and chimpanzees: our next of kin.

In the permanent survival fight between their groups, chimpanzees have an individual interest in being a member of the strongest group. To keep their group strong, they must minimize the internal fights. When two chimpanzee males do have a fight, then afterwards they try desperately to reconcile.

Bonobos on the other hand use sex for minimizing internal group tensions.

So these group animals (to which also humans belong) are driven by two contradictory impulses: egoism (the me-myself-and-I drive), and altruism (you have more chances to survive and to pass on your DNA in an harmonious group, so you must curb your egoism).

These two impulses, being at right angles to each other, would condemn individuals to a paralyzing indecision if they did not have a calming mechanism in their culture: rules for social intercourse, manners, ‘norms and values’, the characteristics Frans de Waal has described so well in his Good Natured (1996).

This ‘norms and values culture’ does not hamper aggression and violence against any other groups. In overpopulation situation other groups are food competitors, so enemies.

This mode, instinct, is still working in us as xenophobia (aversion to people of other color, language, belief, sexual orientation, whatsoever, and populists like to call on it: own people first! America first!

Now the third stage.

Chimpanzees and bonobos, our ‘next of kin’, never lost their rain forest environment.
Our ancestral ape ancestors, however, lost their rainforest and ended up in a savannah environment. In those harsh environments, groups with harmony flourished more than quarreling groups. After thousands of generations, our species built a third stage on our group nature: inclination to harmony as an innate tendency. Purely as the result of natural selection.

For humans, harmony is good. We still long for harmony, we still feel that being kind to each other is the most livable basis for society. However, we still are products of a whole evolution of life. So all three drives are working in us, and it depends on circumstances (such as upbringing, living environment, faith) which of the three tendencies prevails in our behavior and it depends of the situation in which we are in which mode we end up.

Since we became AMHs^[5] (the last 100.000 years after 5 million years of being gatherer-scavenger/hunters) this basic inclination to harmony got already somewhat frustrated when larger groups of 150-200 individuals evolved. It got really frustrated when we became horticulturalists, with all the warfare and machismo that this recent lifestyle implied. The curbed primitive stage two (own group first!) got virulent again.
The lowest point was reached in the class-based societies since 5000 years ago, when the lowest inclinarion of stage one became virulent again, with private property, with slavery, mass cruelties and despotism. But only in despots and their henchmen. Most people keep good natured.

The innate longing for harmony is like a cork: jumping op wherever it gets a chance. The unique quality of humanity is that we are capable of reflection. This capability may be seen as a further refining step on the path of extracting energy.

Since the lowest point we see a slow but steady decline in warfare.

Our recent Western free market economy can only flourish with democracy and harmony, and it is globalizing, slow but steady. It is the end of history of the lowest point since 5000 ya and the beginning of the way back to harmony.

People think in accordance with their prevailing economy.

Gatherers/hunters (GHs) stand accepting in life, taking things it as it comes.

Food growers (AGRs) such as horticulturists and farmers feel themselves in control of nature and want to effectuate it by magic and shamanism. Later farmers live in a society dominated by despots and think in accordance with their imposed religion.

Free market consumers think freely. Our humanosophy is a result of free market thinking. But consumers remain people and are longing for one globalizing and meaningful human story, for dancing/singing in harmony just as our ancestors.

So are Wrangham & Peterson wrong with their Demonic Males? Not wrong, but biased and overlooking the long-long evolutionary human history of low population density that repeatedly brought us to the verge of extinction.
Wrangham & Peterson and most of other mainstream paleos see only ‘stage’ 1 and 2 as human nature. They are obviously ignorant of the peaceful nature of our longtime pure gathering-hunting existence in which stage 3 of our human nature nestled in our genome. They are unaware of the more recent effects of overpopulation, of male domination, of breed as rabbits. Mainstream anthropologists are still unfamiliar with the difference between how GHs live and how AGRs live.

1. http://humanorigins.si.edu/ ↑
2. One only has to look at this conventional image, which depicts only iconic men. Even white men. Our ancestors would be surprised! ↑
3. Steven Pinker The Language instinct (1994) , How the Mind Works (1997), Language as a Window to Human Nature (2007), Stuff of Thought(2007) ↑
4. Here are ten of the most popular explanations from such a Google search:1. turning-over genes much faster than chimps and other mammals2. evolutionary changes in the regulation of a gene implicated in perception, behavior, and memory3. the diet4. cooking (Wrangham) (luckily most of the hits!)5. dogs and other pets (anthropologist Pat Shipman)6. the plasticity of our brains7. starch (Perry, Dominy, e.a.)8. animals (ecologist Paul Shephard)9. business innovation (Mat Ridley)10 schizophrenia (D.F. Morrobin)

   ↑

5. Anatomic Modern Humans; ‘sapiens’, the Linnaeus (1707-1778) name for all people who populate Earth today, has become popular again thanks to the popularity of the backward (but nice)  book of Harari …. It suggests that our ancestors, the Early People, would not have been sapiens ↑

The post INTRODUCTION (incl. ‘human nature’) appeared first on HUMANOSOPHY.

Ten million years ago the climate became cooler and drier. Miocene jungles, that until then reached halfway into Eurasia, gradually retreated in the direction of the equator, being replaced by open savannahs. Five million years ago the jungle where our earliest ancestors lived in Northeast Africa, especially east of the Great Rift^[1], started to undergo this change. It is here that our story begins.

Humanosophic version of the human family tree

Our earliest ancestors were hominid apes. Frans de Waal (Bonobo 1997) says that, if we want an image of our earliest ancestors, we should look at the bonobos. They are the only kind of chimpanzee whose environment never changed. A species will only change when its environment changes. The environment of our earliest ancestors^[2] changed totally, so our early ancestors changed totally. The environment of the chimpanzee ancestors changed much later and partially, so the chimpanzees changed partially.
Here, we will name our earliest ancestors ‘our^[3] ancestor-bonobos’ (ANBOs).

It took millions of years for their jungle to turn into a savannah. Our ANBOs never were aware of this change; for them the world was in every phase like it always was. So the adaptations to the new conditions passed unnoticed. But for our story these adaptations are crucial. Not the physical adjustments so much, but especially the social and mental, in short the cultural evolution.

The savannah is a diverse environment consisting of open woodlands, mixed with impenetrable shrubs and grasslands accommodating herds of many kinds of grass eaters.

Our ANBOs lived in the woodlands, where like many present-day apes, they spent the nights in nests high in the trees. But these woodlands along the shores of rivers and lakes didn’t contain the fruit trees their ancestors used for sustenance. For food, our ANBOs had to roam the open grasslands: a dangerous area because of the big cats that preyed on the grass eaters. The saber-toothed tigers were specialists in preying on pachyderms: rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses and (ancestors of the) elephants.

I want to emphasize that the Miocene (22 – 5 million years ago) savannah was characterized by megafauna (large animals) and was much more dangerous than the current Serengeti. Lions, saber-toothed tigers and giant hyenas were formidable predators. Though the little ANBOs were much stronger than we are now, they needed special armament to roam the grasslands safely. This was: throwing stones to keep the predators on distance.

This can be illustrated by the behavior of apes today. Jane Goodall tells the story of the adult chimp male ‘Mister Worzle’. The bananas she left for the chimpanzees in order to study their behavior in the neighborhood, also allured baboons (large and brave monkeys) that frightened some female chimpanzees. But Mister Worzle did not give a centimeter of ground and threw anything he could grasp: grass, branches, once a bunch of bananas (baboons happy!). Soon he discovered that stones worked better and that bigger stones worked even better. And he began to gather them on a heap.

Our ANBOs needed to become ‘professional’ stone throwers. They could not take a step on the open grasslands in safety without their armament of stones. Who did throw men or women?
Women carried babies and had to gather food stuff. Men with their stones made sure that the group went safely around over the open grasslands. Division of tasks from the beginning .
One stone was not enough to ensure their safety; the men needed a handful of stones. But how you can as an ape carry a handful of stones?

 skull sabre cat

Sabre cats – we already mentioned them – were specialists in predating fat-skins like elephant-like and rhinoceroses. They stalked such a meat fort and after a fierce sprint they turned open its soft underbelly (these cats could open their mouth unusually wide, the sabres laying in the extension of the skull (see photo). So they were not really ‘cats’.

Sabres ate only the entrails of their kill. The rest of the carcass was left to other animals. As soon as vultures started circling around from their high vantage point, lions and hyenas knew that a meal was coming. Lions were first, then the hyenas and the vultures ate the left-overs. Because of the steady supply of carcasses by the sabers the basically inedible, hairy or leathery skins and the skeletons stayed there. The ANBOs beat the bones for the marrow with their stones and used the hides to carry things^[4]; with their long experience in braiding and wattling their sleep nests, tying these hides was easy.

But how will apes carry bags filled with stones? How do bonobos and chimps carry heavy things? They use their hands, so they must walk upright on their feet. Our ANBOs needed to become bipeds: without carrying some stones for armament, it would not be safe for them to venture into the open grasslands.^[5] In tens of hundreds of thousands of years our ANBOs, having no other choice, turned into bipeds with longer and stronger legs, special pelvic and buttock muscles, special midriff and blood circulation^[6]. At least they made a good start developing these properties, good enough for foraging on the savannah. They kept using their hands and feet for climbing: it was not safe to sleep on the floor, so they still needed them to make sleeping platforms high in the trees of the woodland.

Females had to carry their babies and gather food for themselves and the rest of the troupe, so they couldn’t carry and throw stones. Males couldn’t gather food: they had to offer protection, because hungry predators were always watchful for moments of unalertness. So our ANBOs cultivated a division of labor from the very beginning. Women and children gathered food: grass seeds, tubers and roots which they dug up with digging sticks^[7], larvae and insects, eggs and small animals. The adult men did nothing but provide safety. The groups who practiced those behaviors most effectively, flourished (by keeping more young alive) and soon outnumbered the groups that were clumsier at these things. Through hundreds of generations, the population exhibiting these behaviors, were the fittest and survived.

The same mechanism applies to group harmony. Because of the big cats and the giant hyenas, the open savanna was a dangerous environment for apes and forced them to maintain strict group harmony. That was not a big problem at all: bonobos live in female-dominated groups characterized by group harmony, and solve tensions with sex.

Dentitions. Left: chimpanzee. Middle: australopith. Right: human

Clearly, our ANBOs probably ‘professionalized’ and optimized this behavior. The dentition of male bonobos still shows large canine teeth that can be used as weapons in sexual competition – although, chimpanzee canines are larger. Fossil australopith dentition shows reduced size of the canines: partially as a result of the need for grinding hard food like grass seeds, but also as a result of reduced male competition.^[8] That our ANBOs solved all tensions with sex, is clear because while the size of the canines was reduced, the penises were enlarged! Of course the ‘attractive’ red vaginas of bonobo females and the heavy scrotums of bonobo males were not practical for bipeds, so those were reduced in size too. Every time the women were in estrus, this intensified male competition and group tensions. Therefore, the women’s periods became less noticeable as well. All these reductions were compensated with nice breasts and buttocks for the women, and continuous sexual willingness: mechanisms for reducing tensions and fostering group harmony.

Didn’t the men hunt? No way. Australopith bipedal locomotion was not fast enough to compete in hunting with the savannah predators. Nevertheless, besides birds eggs, insects and larvae there was yet another protein source for them on the savannah: hides.

Savannah today: more open space than in the ‘cradle of humanity’ which we suspect was in the Afar region of Ethiopia of 5 mya: woodland with less open spaces; but we can imagine an AP-group walking one after another between the grazers on their foraging trip. They were no danger to the grazers; as long as those kept quietly grazing, this meant for the ANBOs that it was safe for them as well, and they walked calmly, with their free hand occasionally stripping off grass seeds to chew them; in the meantime the women were searching for the edible tubers, recognizable by their leaves; and then the group had to stop for some time while the men watched with their stones.

As already mentioned, the hides all over the place, left behind as less edible by the other meat-eaters of the savannah, provided a new niche for the handy ANBOs. There was protein-rich tissue left on the hides to pick and scrape them with the sharp edges of bones, shells and stones. And when a hide was scraped totally clean, it made a perfect bag to carry things such as stones, or it made a blanket to use in cold nights, a screen against sun, wind, or rain. These multipurpose hides were the ANBOs’ first and only property. The paleos lack attention for the importance of the hides in the technical development of our ancestors, an omission that is understandable because hides are not preserved at archaeological sites (just like digging sticks and similar soft-material tools).
But philosophers are allowed to speculate more freely for the benefit of our Great Story, to immediately correct it as soon as a scientific evidence disproves a speculation^[9].

Actually, this use of hides marked the beginning of ‘the stone age’: the beginning of the use of stone flakes for processing hides.

Processing hides, soon slaughter of found carcasses, later slaughter of the prey carcasses of the men: until recent HG-times it is females work. Turning stones into useful tools as scrapers and knives is females work. Our primatologists tell us that male chimpanzees use stones only for impressing behavior but female chimps use them for cracking hard nuts. Stone technology was a female invention, even before the birth of mankind.

All these environmental changes and physical adaptations developed unnoticed by our ANBOs. Just like all apes 7 million years ago, they made their daily foraging routes in a vast foraging territory. In the course of two million years, ever more open grasslands became part of their territory and daily route. All necessary adaptations developed during this time. By 5 million years ago, the hominins (australopiths, bipedal apes), including our future ANBOs, were experienced woodland/savannah foragers.

What remained rather unchanged was their way of life. They would leave their woodland nests early in the morning, wander along a route they knew perfectly, gathering food along the way, and finally arrive at the next woodland where they would share the gathered food and then make their nests high in the trees. The only part of the routine that changed, was that instead of eating their food while ranging on the grass lands, they carried most of the gathered food (tubers, grass seeds, larvae, eggs, and so on) to their overnight place in some wood, to be distributed equally among all group members. This was necessary because the men had less opportunity to get food enough during the foraging: their vigilance could not be allowed to weaken for a moment because of the permanent threat of the hungry predators.
After dinner and before the evening twilight, everybody had to climb in a tree and braid her or his nest.

Like their ancestors they lived in groups. Not too large: too much mouths to feed; not too small because there were enough men needed for the protection against predators. This asks for a number of around 25 individuals. But the composition of a group constantly changed and there was also constant exchange with nearby groups.
This meant that harmony within the groups as well as between the groups was conducive to the flourishing of the population. Therefore natural selection selected harmonious behavior as ‘good’. Our ancestors became ‘good natured’^[10].

During 99.5 % of the long time span our species existed, our ancestors were first gatherer-scavengers and later gatherer-hunters.

1. Paleo Tim White points to the Middle Awash (Ethiopia) as ‘the window on human past’ ↑
2. Assuming that they lived in the forest of today’s Ethiopia, now desert but in the words of paleo Tim White at the time ‘a lush environment’ with lakes and rivers. ↑
3. ‘our’ because bonobos and chimps have their ANBOs too ↑
4. See also Nancy Tanner and Adrienne Zihlman in Mothers and Daughters of Invention (1995). ↑
5. Other speculations about the origins of bipedalism, such as: better sight or less body parts exposed to the sun, lack the answer on the obvious question: why then didn’t the other savanna-dwellers like zebras or baboons become bipeds? ↑
6. For the physical adaptations: Elaine Morgan Scars of evolution . London, 1990 ↑
7. Today’s woodland chimpanzee females are observed digging up tubers with self-made digging sticks! ↑
8. Mind also the reduction of the chewing apparatus from ape to human.↑
9. After all, we did it thousands of years with Great Stories that were entirely dreamed up. ↑
10. For Frans de Waal even chimpanzees are Good Natured (1979) ↑

The post 1.1 How it started appeared first on HUMANOSOPHY.

For us, what we are going to tell now has been a familiar story for decennia. But yesterday (June 11, 2018) we read the article by Richard Nordquist^[1] on ThoughtCo and again we knew that for philosophers in general and for linguists in particular it is still new. He quotes Bernard Campbell^[2]”We simply do not know, and never will, how or when language began”, and continues with the enumeration of the five most common theories which nevertheless have been put forward to then pull all five down. He ends by citing Christine Kenneally^[3] “To find out how language began is the hardest problem in science today.”

Certainly, discipline scientists have to limit themselves to hard facts and the first words have left no trace. But reconstructing our Genesis story is philosophical work and for humanosophers, making use of as much discipline as possible is sufficient. Moreover, the astronomers leave with their Big Bang from an unproven just-so-story, in order to explain their universe phenomena satisfactorily. So we consider ourselves entitled with ours.

Again a women’s invention. No invention that resulted from a change in their environment, no new form of adaptation. Today there are chimpanzee women in Ugalla (Tanzania) who leave the protection of the woodland during the wet seasons to excavate tubers on the open grasslands with homemade digging sticks. For us the proof that our ANBOs did fine without any linguisticness. We would today still be ape-men (so normal animals) somewhere in Africa, if not 5 mya had happened something accidental in one of the ANBO groups.

But where something is possible, it happens too, sooner or later. So it was bound to happen somewhere and sometime in the australopitic world, that in one group, presumably in a forwarded group, and probably again a woman, somebody started with the first name for a thing. Because we are a symbolic species now and no other species has names for the things – if there was another species with names for things, then we would have noticed this for a long time. Because disposing of names for the things does something with an animal. It does 5 things and later on we will list these 5 things.

Of course there were forwarded and backwarded living-groups, and different environments. In forwarded groups, in more savanna-like environment such as the Rift valley around 5 millions of years ago (mya), one may imagine that in the early mornings a patrol of three adult men scouted the route that the alpha woman had in mind for the next foraging trip. So that not the whole group of old people and children had to go back and decide to another route if some danger had been identified. In this case the patrol returned and imitated [sabre tiger!] or [hyenas!]. ^{[ 4]}

Our speculation is – and if you can imagine a better one, you are welcome – that on one morning a young girl of such a vicious group was very happy because she knew that the group would come across bushes with tasty berries on the foraging route of that day. Her two girlfriends looked at her in astonishment: why was this euphoria? The girl racked her brain: how could she communicate what she had in her mind?

I made a painting of this pivotal moment: the birth of humanity

Inspired by the gestured imitations of the morning scouts she imitated [berry], [picking], [putting in mouth’], facial expression of delicious tasting and finally pointing with her digging stick in the direction of the group, already being on its foraging way.
No understanding. Another time. And another time. One girl became impatient: it was dangerous to detach the protection of the group. The older girlfriend racked her brain: and after again the berry-pick-imitation the penny dropped at her. Yess!!

The girls ran after the group, laughing, and they had fun with the berry-pick pantomime the whole day. Some women understood the imitation and also got fun.
The next morning the older girl friend invented something the group might encounter that day: digging tubers! And she imitated for her friends [digging] [corms]. And again fun with the new imitation, and some more women joined the fun of the imitation.

Except that the game was fun, it was also useful: so women could communicate what they had in mind. It was an extension but also an enrichment of their normal group animal communication. It improved their cooperation, benefited survival, and the group flourished more than australopithic groups without this handy practice. When young women moved to a neighboring group to find a mate, they took this habit along, spreading this gesturing practice over the whole clan and tribe. Our ancestors! Our ANBOs.

This was an incidental, casual beginning of a new group culture. It must have been contingent, because it was not necessary for surviving.^[5] The childish game might have been forgotten, in which case we would be still a kind of ape men in the African savanna today. But this new ‘culture’ turned out to be helpful and useful. It improved group cooperation.

Keep in mind that in our opinion this has been the second women’s invention that has made us from apes into people. Why a female again (after stone technology)? Because most (if not all) new things in apes begin with young females^[6].
You may notice that it was the men of the patrols after all? No, because their imitations were no more than the delayed warning cries of the vervet monkeys: stimulus-response reactions.

An incidental new habit … a huge step towards becoming human! This was a totally new phenomenon in the history of life on earth. All group animals have their own means of communication. But in no other species individuals can communicate about something beyond their awareness, about something in another place, in another season, in the past or in the future. These gesture-imitations of things by our ANBOs were (the beginnings of) names for things, enabling them to communicate on a new level.

A new level?

Disposing of names for things does something with an animal. It does 5 things, and you can better memorize these 5 things if you want to know what had made our species so special in the animal world. I will briefly list them here, and I will repeat them in more detail in the following section, so that they have a better chance of ending up in your memory.

1. A name IS not the thing . With the enrichment of their communication with names for things, a sense of distance developed between the appointing ANBOs and the appointed environment. The ANBOs became emotionally ‘detached’ from their environment, while the other animals remained unwillingly part of it. 
   
2. With the name you ‘grasp’ the thing (or action, whatever). The ANBOs began to “grasp” their environment. She entered the path of ever better understanding things. We are still on that path today.
3. “Grabbing” things by name gives a sense of power over things. With the name of the saber-toothed tiger the ANBO got a feeling of power over the dreaded monster. It was this mechanism that caused the ANBOs to use the fire that their fellow animals continued to flee from.
4. You know the thing with the name of the thing. Knowledge acquired in one generation could be transferred to the next. Knowledge could accumulate at our ANBOs.
5. Individual intelligence could be thrown in a heap, the ANBOs could brainstorm. They could forge plans. Together with their fire, they developed from frightened apemen to the hooligans of the savannah.

Notes

1.”Five Theories on the Origins of Language”
2. author of “Humankind Emerging”, 9the ed. 2018
3. “The First Word: Search for the Origins of Language”, 2007
4. or a male buffalo …
5. PNAS, December 4, 2007: “Savannah chimpanzees use tools to harvest underground storage organs of plants” Recent addition: To our surprise, the scientific research of the Australian research group led by Prof. Fay (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 9 March 2022) confirmed our HINTS speculation!
6. For instance, the young macaque IMO on the Japanese island Koshima who started with washing her sweet potatos in 1953, a ‘culture’ that is still in use long after her dead

The post 1.2 Names for things appeared first on HUMANOSOPHY.

A name for a thing is not the thing. There is an unbridgeable mental gap between  the thing and the name (symbol, word, image) of it. The French painter dedicated a painting to this phenomenon in 1922: Ceci nést pas une pipe. Going to live with an enrichment of our normal group animal communication with names for things has brought our species into a world of words, a spiritual (or ‘virtual) world of named things. This phenomenon has already occupied our philosophers from Plato.
It creates a feeling of distance between the namer and the named thing: the ‘mental gap’, the human condition.
In other words: it creates a distance between the subject (the namer) and the object (the named thing): we are distant from our environment, while normal animals willlessly remain part of it.

As a result of these five effects of disposing of names for things our ancestor-australopiths developed more flexibility and inventiveness than other animals and even than other australopiths. Australopith groups without this facility of conferring with each another – boisei, robustus, aethiopicus, even afarensis– died out, presumably with some help of the ancestor-australopiths, the ‘hooligans’ of the Pliocene savannah.

Darwinian biologist and philosopher Richard Dawkins has introduced the concept meme as the cultural twin of the biological gen. Just like genes ensure transfer of physical properties, memes (ideas, melodies, fashions, techniques, practices) ensure transfer of cultural elements. It is important to note here that the names for things we are talking about, constitute a concept on a more fundamental level than Dawkin’s memes. In a way, this name thing – the linguistic capacity – is a condition that is necessary for, and at the root of, the development of cultural memes.

1. with the exception of pets and … birds ↑

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Of course, this last fact may have been the result of geographically separation: the bonobos remained rainforest inhabitants and the australopiths became savannah inhabitants.

But the temptation to speculate that more was going on is great.
That time is close to the behavioral changes that have followed (use of fire, making stone knives and scrapers). Behavior that only can be attributed to a species that has names for things.

Not sophistication of group animal cries! For our ANBOs, normal ape communication (cries, gestures, facial expressions and other body language) was only extended with names for things. But those names were produced with hand gestures, not with cries.

Animals – apes are animals – have no neurological control over their voice.
Animal cries are controlled by the limbic system. So the extending of their normal ape communication with names for things – being a conscious action – included facial expressions and all other body language but excluded cries – being produced only by the limbic system.

However, our ANBOs weren’t deaf, like present-day sign language users. The thousands and thousands of the ANBOs’ signed words were formed with silent gestures but accompanied by consonants. Consonants such as t-k-f-s-ch-p are muscle-formed, are controlled by the neocortex!
To form more and more names for the things, the voiceless consonants (!clicks and puffs and mmums and ch’s ) were crucial.
Although the emotional cries continued to be part of their communication. After all, they remained bonobos and those are very noisy.

Perhaps the ANBOs initially silenced their few sign words, meaningfully looking at the other and waiting to see if the gesture was understood. After all, it started with nothing. And it has long remained a women’s affair, especially during the day when gathering food. And then for a moment to distribute the collected food after arrival in the overnight forest.

It is also the women who always have their hands full with picking and other activities that are also necessary when communicating. So the urge to also use the mouth muscles meaningfully in women is great.
Our conclusion:  from the beginning, consonants have been part of the sign language of our ancestors ens especially of the women.

The Singing Neanderthals of paleo Stephen Mithen (2005) were still !click-language sign language communicators in our opinion, and the oldest GH-tribes that are examples for our original GH-phase, the Hadza, the San and the Pygmies, still haven !click-languages

In the long nightly hours around the campfire, the growing gestural communication with names for things the proto-form of sign language underwent an accelerated development towards real singing. The accompanying cries became a proto-form of singing.
Later more about the campfire and the dancing/singing.

The post 1.4 ANBOS a new species? appeared first on HUMANOSOPHY.

For the first use of fire the mainstream paleos can only find evidence in caves. But there is no indication that the ANBOs lived in caves, they made their forage trips over the open grass areas and spent the night in tree tops until they could stay on the ground around the campfire. We’ll talk about it further. But even campfires don’t leave an archaeological trace after let us say ten years. And certainly not if the researchers are not looking for it.
Stone tools do.

For years this image of the Kada Gona tools figured in my texts, from the 2000 article of the Journal of Archaeological Science^[1] of the Kada Gona stone tools.
At 15 locations east and west of the Kada Gona river, Ethiopia, Sileshi Semaw and his team recovered more than 3000 surface and excavated artifacts, dated 2.6 –2.5 million years ago. But slaughter sites are not normally places where the slaughterers leave behind fossil remains of themselves!
The paleos suspect that the makers of these well-flaked artifacts are : Australopithecus garhi.
Archaeological name of these earliest stone industry: Oldowan.
Other early Oldowan sites, older than 2 million years ago: Olduvai, Omo, Bouri, Lokalei.

[We are not sure which fossil, if any, belongs to the population of animals that could name things. Brunet, head of the French group which found the 6-7 million year old hominid skull in Chad, is shown with the skull, saying: “It’s a lot of emotion to have in my hand the beginning of the human lineage…” But there is no label on the skull, and it is impossible to know if the skull in his hand is from an ancestor-bonobo, or from a prey of the ancestor-bonobos. If this fossil is found in context with fossil remains of prey animals, thus in context of a slaughter place, then one may see this skull as a prey^[2].]

All these 2.5 million years old artifacts on the image above were found together with animal bones, many of them with stone-tool cut-marks. For us, these Kada Gona tools were longtime  the hallmark of the second big jump of our ancestors, as the consequence of the first jump: names for things. Was it the climate again that triggered the jump?

For five million years, the climate had been stable without giving much reason for changing behavior. But 2,5 mya the Ice Ages, the periodical increase of ice caps on the poles and around the high mountains, began. From now there were cold periods (stadials, maxima) interspersed with warm periods (interstadials, minima).
By 2.5 mya it started with a dramatic cooling and drying. Jungles receded to a narrow and interrupted belt around the equator; savannahs turned into deserts. There were ever less trees to sleep in, ever more natural fires …

Until a more recent publication^[3] about cut-marks on bones from the Dikika site in Ethiopia demonstrates that stone ‘knives’ for processing of bones of scavenged carcasses may have been used much earlier: 3,4 million years ago.

Butchery tools: the cut-marks on the bones are the result of “hunting and/or aggressive scavenging of large ungulate carcasses”.

So the butchering of carcasses with stone tools must have preceded the start of the Ice Ages!

And who butchered? Even today (Inuit) it is the women who butcher the spoils brought in by the men! This division of tasks may already be so ancient. All the more reason to consider the refining of stone tools as a woman’s skill.

Names for things must have preceded this manufacturing of stone tools if we take some recent experiments with groups of students in learning to manufacture stone tools seriously.
One group was only showed stone tools, cores and flakes. The second group got the same basic material but also a skilled toolmaker, showing his skill without words. The third group got all of the second group but now with verbal guidance of the toolmaker.
Needless to say that the last group was the fastest in getting hold of the tool manufacturing.

1. Journal of Archaeological Science (2000) 27, 1197-1214, ↑
2. We think that the first H. habilis fossil, found in context with fossils of prey animals, was a prey ↑
3. Nature, 12 Aug.’10 . More recently corroborated by the Lomekwi slaughter place discovered on the left bank of the Lake Turkana (Kenya) , dated 3.3 mya ↑

The post 1.5 The oldest stone tools appeared first on HUMANOSOPHY.

The ANBO-females knew that some tubers and other plants, normally not edible, were edible after the work of the fire.
Why about women again? Women have to feed their children. In everything they do, they are motivated by the need for more and better food for their children.
Further, it were the women who not only started with the enrichment of the australopith communication with names for things but who were also generation after generation working on expanding the ANBOs’ vocabulary. And again names for things does something to an animal. Five things. Including power over things. Power over fire. Fire that nutritious tubers that are roasted without being inedible are edible.
It had to be in a wonan’s mind that rose the idea to use the fire.
It was an old and experienced woman, a grandmother who had the courage to take a glowing branch of an smoldering natural fire.
Trembling with fear, she took it to a safe place, fed it with dry grass and wood and breathed in new life: fire. The other ANBOs observed from a distance, screaming in fear. at what the grandma was doing.
She held a tuber on her digging stick in the flames.
When she thought the tuber was done, she tasted it.
Then she got up with difficulty and went with the tuber to her granddaughter. Granddaughter would remember this moment ever in her life.

Too nice, this ‘just-so-story’? Then consider this: gorillas have been observed sitting near a smoldering fire in nights when the temperature on the savannah approached the freezing point. But no ape is known to ‘feed’ the extinguishing fire with combustible material. But our ANBOs did. Because they already had a name for fire! They got a feeling of power over it and gradually lost their instinctive fear of the fire.
After this, of course it took many generations before they had developed the technique to carry the fire from one campsite to the other, as live charcoal in a bovine’s horn or in some similar way.^[1]  But time plays no role for cultural evolution.

How dare we assume that this taming of fire occurred some 4 million years ago?
Most paleos don’t go farther back than the 790,000 years old Gesher Benot Ya’aqov site in Israel, where charred wood and seeds were recovered^[2]. Some brave paleos accept the evidence from Swartkrans and Chesowanja dating 1.5 million years ago.

San women stop en route to roast an excavated tuber. What can be found after two years of such a road-fire? After ten years? After a hundred years?

There are two kinds of clear evidence that are indicate an earlier use.
One: as experimentally proven by Richard Wrangham^[3], a raw (not cooked, not grilled, not roasted) chimpanzee diet would be simply inadequate to sustain larger-brained beings of human size. So there is no other way our ancestor-australopiths could have evolved into larger beings, than through some kind of radically improved food supply.

The paleos of the Wonderwerk-cave in South Africa have found traces of fire use and are convinced that they will also see these traces in the lower layers of 180,000 ya.

So! Still 2 million years to go!

But it remains traces in caves. We continue to claim that the ANBOs did not live in caves but foraged in open areas. The traces of the on-the-way fires are untraceable after ten years already. Certainly not if the researchers are not looking for it. So we assume that controlled fire existed far more earlier than these 2 million years ago.

The first ‘professional’ stone tools found at Lomekwi are 3.3 mya and the Dikika cut marks even 3,4 mya. They attest to a new niche for protein: meat. And with it a new behavior, unknown in other species. Behavior that can only ascribed to disposing of names for things.

Not for the start of meat consumption, however. Already the common ancestor was a part-time meat eater: both bonobos and chimpanzees are. For the ANBOs we have to look back to the hides that could be found all over the Miocene savannah. In the following millions of years the hooligans of the savannah, ever more audacious with their stones, learned to chase away feeding predators from their prey. That was the moment when the males began to contribute to the diet: carrion became an increasingly important part of nutrition.

The best sources of carrion, the pachyderms (elephants, rhinos, hippos) had skins that were too thick for lions and hyenas and vultures to penetrate. Those predators had to wait until, after two or three days, the skin cracked open by decomposition gasses. But the ANBO’s with their knife-sharp stone tools could start processing the dead animal immediately! And again: women slaughtered, and men kept hungry hyenas and vultures at bay with their stones.

The Dikika stone tools of 3.4 mya may have had their first precursors 4 mya, and this date is close to the mentioned 4.5 mya, the date from the split of Max Planck Institut Leipzig!

For millions of years, the standard way to make a ‘knife’ or scraper had been to smash a stone against another stone or rock, and then pick out the best ‘knife’.
In the new circumstances, this was no longer sufficient.
I think knapping the ‘knife’ from a core stone with a hammer stone was too risky for long, bent ape fingers (they still needed those ape fingers for climbing quickly into trees for sleeping and safety). But in order to improve the stone ‘knives’ they needed some knapping technique; and in order to develop a knapping technique they would need shorter, “handier” fingers.

Evolution had to find a balance between the need for long, bent fingers for climbing and making nests in trees on one side, and the need for shorter, handier fingers for knapping better knives on the other. It was the use of the fire that altered this balance.
Since the fire provided protection from predators, this made it possible to stay on the ground instead of climbing in a treetop to build nests. Because our ANBOs no longer needed to climb trees at night, they no longer needed long “ape” fingers. This allowed the development of shorter, handier fingers suitable for better knife production.

2,5 mya, the earth climate became even more cool and dry: the onset of the Ice Ages. Woodland savannah began to turn into desert savannah. The carrion competition grew more fierce. This is the time that the other australopith apes died out and that our ANBOs, thanks to their names for things, their ability to communicate with each other and the resulting wisdom of the crowd gained power over their circumstances.

1. If you don’t believe that such an early ‘taming’ of fire can be postulated, ask Ralph Rowlett of the University of Missouri-Columbia in Missouri. ↑
2. In a recent PNAS article (March 2011) the paleos Roebroeks and Villa suggest that the real control of fire is not older than 400.000 years; we have to take in consideration that their research only concerns European archaeological sites, and that they emphasize that earlier use of fire was possible in an opportunistic way: using smoldering wood from a natural fire, keeping it smoldering in a gourd or something ↑
3. Cooking Up Bigger Brains (2008); Wrangham himself did a research experiment by trying to live on a chimpanzee diet of fruit and raw meat: he found it not feasible for humans! ↑

The post 1.6 The fire appeared first on HUMANOSOPHY.

What did they communicate during this long nightly hours?

One might say: nothing at all, they just wrapped themselves in a hide and went to sleep while only one of them (a man of course) kept his eyes open and the fire burning. Speculating in this way however, one might easily overlook that they were a subspecies of bonobos: fervent communicators!^[1] In their new, more dangerous habitat they lived in closer togetherness than their rain forest ancestors, so they needed to be even more social. The new circumstances in combination with their bonobo-like inclination had already lead them to their new habit of names for the things.

So: what did they communicate? I propose it was the exchange of thoughts, expressions of what was going on in their mind: in other words, they were sharing emotions. For example the memory of some shocking event in the past day. Communicating these emotions took the form of performances. Let me dish up a possible ‘performance’ here.

The threatening encounter with the dangerous buffalo! The males had made a line with their stones at hand. The buffalo had hesitated, perhaps he remembered an encounter with a troupe of those apes, resulting in a hailstorm of painful stones. He scraped with his hoofs. After some long lasting seconds the buffalo had turned his back and moved.

Now, quietly around the campfire, a woman, with that threatening event in her mind, got up and imitated it with emotional gestures. The others screamed in approval. A man jumped up and imitated the buffalo. The emotional screaming increased. Other men jumped up and made the defense line, with imitated stones at hand. Then the ‘buffalo’ slunk off, and the screaming became jubilation. And calm returned in the group. But the nice performance stayed in everybody’s mind, and after several quiet minutes some women jumped up again and repeated the performance. And again, and again, until everybody wrapped himself in his hide to go to sleep. Evening after evening they did ‘the buffalo’ over and over, until a new event was subject of a new performance.

Generations after generations similar nightly performances became ever more sophisticated, and the gestured communication too. Sophistication means that the gestured ‘words’ underwent standardizing and shortening. Because when the beginning of a gestured ‘word’ is already understood, you don’t need to finish the whole gesture. In a group of women gossiping by sign language and cries, each woman wants to contribute her share. (Why women? Hunting men make no noise. But gathering women chatter and laugh: noise chases serpents away.)

Expressing such emotional thoughts the person used her/his whole body (just like bonobos do today) with accompanying cries. The others responded with imitating gestures and cries, and many of them jumped up and joined the communicating person. And when communicating very emotional items, the whole group was dancing and crying, over and over. From generation to generation, this behavior became ever more ritualized, controlled and refined.

When we say ‘ritualizing’, we mean, as neatly formulated in Wikipedia, “behavior that is formally organized into repeatable patterns, the basic function of which is to facilitate interactions between individuals, between an individual and his deity, or between an individual and himself across a span of time.” Ritual synchronizes the activity of participants, a phenomenon that contributes to group cohesion – which can also contribute to survival. Some scholars also suggest that human ritual behavior reduces anxiety. It makes me think of the ‘war dances’ of the Yanomamö^[2] , as preparation of a raid. A more modern example may be the ritual drilling of recruits in the barracks.

They began dancing and singing around the campfire. In my view, dancing and singing cannot be separated here, which why we may call it dancing/singing.

1. We can pass a fruit tree without noticing the chimpanzee group we were looking for, as it sits silently in the canopy. On the other hand, a group of bonobos will be heard from a far distance, screeching like a mob of barking dogs. See Frans de Waal’s book Bonobo (1997) and Craig Stanford’s book Significant Others (NY 2001)
   ↑
2. Napoleon Chagnon Yanomamö. The Fierce People (New York, 1983)
   ↑

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Next the singing. Our ancestors were like bonobos, so much more expressive than chimpanzees, who are more silent. Just like their dancing was gradually ritualized, the accompanying cries and calls underwent ritualizing in the evening-after-evening performances. Over the generations, this gradually led to better neurological voice control. The more meaning and information one can convey by voice, the more impressive and effective the resulting performance will be.

I will get back to this combination of dancing and singing later, in the context of the origin of our religious feelings.

The post 1.8 Why dancing/singing? appeared first on HUMANOSOPHY.

[Traditionally H. erectus is always imagined as a male. So we were glad to find a reconstruction of a female H. erectus on the blog-site “Kay Nou = Our House”. Thanks, Kay Nou. Her digging stick was nice; but she missed her hide bag. So we gave her one.
Unlike in this picture, she was never alone on the savanna, nor elsewhere. Gathering women never gathered allone, not even today, Kay Nou.

Finds from an earlier period, in the archaeological site Dmanisi (1,7 million years ago) and Flores (descendants of Java hominids from 1,6 million years ago) show a more primitive hominid, with a more primitive toolbox.

So many paleos today believe that it was an earlier hominid, H. habilis or H. rudolfensis that spread Out of Africa into the Far East, developing to H. erectus.

A later erectus group returned to Africa as ancestors of the Turkana population. For the humanosopher, this theory of a much earlier Out of Africa migration corroborates the early use of fire, because moving out of the tropics requires fire-use.

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