The Last Two Times the World Warmed-3. Finishing Basic Humans
14,700 years ago the temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere shot up ten times faster than the most terrifying projections of current human-caused global warming. 16-18°Fahrenheit in only fifty years. Then after thousands of years of dropping about 11,600 years ago temperatures spiked again. What were these events like for humans and what does that predict for us?
Is it Getting Warm in Here?
In Part I of this series, we sketched out basic temperature changes during periods scientists call the Bølling–Allerød and the Younger Dryas. Then we bergan to tell the story of our genus, homo, from our grandfather homo erectus who really built the family fortune with language, fire, skilled tools, and migration starting about two million years ago, down to our own species, homo sapiens, who appeared three hundred thousand years ago and gave the world (among other things) the culture archeologists call Natufian.
In Part II of this series, we discussed the importance and severity of those various climate changes.
The climate of the Bølling–Allerød shifted every decade in ways that today take centuries. Again and again weather and vegetation shifted in every person’s lifetime.
Basic Humans
Then we spent the post describing the basic mode of life up until recent times, hunter-gathering or foraging, noting how most of the world’s written culture comes from areas like China, the Near East, and the Mediterranean where the writers had no interaction with hunter-gatherers, so writers lacked critical information about human nature.1
Fire
I talked about fire a little in this series on coal. We can think crudely about economics—and life—as energy. Living things need energy to grow, move, repair, think, and reproduce. Plants get their energy from the sun. Herbivores get their energy from eating plants. Carnivores get their energy from eating herbivores. Our genus relies on tools (like stone axes) so we don’t need to expend as much energy growing claws and lion-like teeth.
Fire is another tool. It helps us stay warm at night, scares away predators, and illuminates caves, but most importantly cooking with fire makes our food much easier to digest. Fire converts dead tree branches into fuel, which converts raw meat into calories, so humans can grow bigger brains than lions and wolves, while needing to sleep only half as much.2
Some scientists claim aspects of our brain development may be even more directly related to fire, the social development of sitting around the fire at dark together where language and music might have helped us communicate. Maybe staring at fires each night even gave our ancestors some of the cognitive benefits of modern practices like meditation.
Certainly, our ancestor’s daily habits of preparing, lighting, prodding, feeding, raking, banking, and extinguishing campfires—that application of our tool-making brains to something as ephemeral as flame—are probably much more the spur to our problem-solving intelligence than the acts of hunting or gathering.3
Credit & Trade
Back in my college days, which at this point feels like the Younger Dryas, economics textbooks told a story that first there was a barter system, then money, and then credit, each an improvement over the last in the facilitation of all-important trade, but in reality these things happened in reverse order.
Most humans have been big game hunters, and as we saw in the last post, a major part of foraging life is dividing up the meat after a kill. Humans use complex seemingly instinctual credit systems to track who owes what to whom—and this varies by relationship and situation. Foragers give out meat in complex calculus of kinship, alliance, and expected reciprocity.
Even today our instincts don’t seem to be what the economists tell us they should be. If you give five bucks to a co-worker you probably expect it to be repaid fairly soon. If you give five bucks to a homeless man you probably don’t expect it to be repaid ever. (In fact, both you and the homeless man are doing a mental dance to figure out how often you’ll give five bucks—every time you see him, every other time, every week, every month, once and only once.) With a spouse money is often not kept track of at all. None of this is markets. It seems to be rooted in our cognitive systems.
Trade also doesn’t follow the economist’s assumptions but here the logic is simpler. Most economic exchange is aimed not at profit but at creating reciprocal obligations. Those matter more for a foraging band’s safety and well-being than maximizing profit. In fact until very recent times almost all humans have sought resilience not efficiency. This is easier to show if we skip ahead a few millennia to a way of life that’s easier to picture. Imagine we’re peasant farmers. Getting the most eggs from me today in exchange for your vat of butter is not as useful as getting a steady supply of eggs—and in the process building an alliance that can mean help in emergencies, marriages for our children, and the joy of being respected in a community. Bands want reliable friendships with other bands more than comparative advantage, so giving gifts is conducted more as a ritual and social-bonding activity than as haggling.4
Forager trade networks are not barter systems. They don’t trade you six obsidian hand axes for twelve white rabbit pelts. They give you obsidian hand axes to prove what great friends they are and hint at how much they’d love some rabbit pelts. Please take these hand axes! We spent many hours on them and it would honor us to know friends like you were using them. You really are great people. Wow, are those white rabbit pelts you have there? They sure look nice. Refusing to give the rabbit pelts after such generosity would look very stingy, and perhaps even make an enemy. On the other hand giving the rabbit pelts would build a friendship that would ensure obsidian in the future. (And friends to visit!) It’s all an elaborate credit system.
Money is a commodity used as a medium of exchange for other commodities. Typically something like shells, animals, or obsidian. Hunter gatherers have been known to use money in situations where exchange gets complicated, but mostly money becomes important when humans take up farming and herding.
Barter systems only happen after a money system breaks down, just as barbarism is not a stage on the way to civilization but a condition when empires fall into decline, such as Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union or America today.
So credit is first, money comes after, and barter systems comes last when money systems break down.
Property, Territoriality, and War
Some animals are extremely territorial. They get highly agitated whenever others of the same species—even other adults of the same family—enter their territory. Other animals don’t care at all. Humans, like most social mammals, are somewhere in between. We have a sense of personal space that varies by culture but always exists in some form, and we have personal belongings—our own tools and clothing. Foraging families have their own huts and would be upset if someone else entered a hut without permission.
But humans also have a sense of collective territory or property. Our group, our village, our language, our way of doing things. Most foragers could not imagine that common spaces or unused spaces could ever be owned anymore than they could imagine their language owned.5 This collective identity is separate from kinship, however. Remember that humans, as we said in Part II, tend to be exogamous, so human communities almost always contain multiple families.6
Warfare for foraging bands tends to have a desultory raid-and-counter-raid quality. As with property the human sense of territory is vague.7 One group has areas where they hunt or fish or gather, and if there is some overlap with another group, they might not even notice, but if another group is using a clearing that our group burned off for hunting, or is mining flint at a quarry near our camp, without being related by kinship or marriage, or forming ties of friendship through gift giving, that is a challenge that requires an answer. If we let it go what’s next? So a group of our men (almost always men) will try to kill some of them, proving that we aren’t to be messed with, and hopefully driving them away.8 Only migration, trading, or intermarriage would bring peace.
Religion
Religion as we live the concept—churches, mosques, synagogues, creeds, scripture, prophecy, metaphysics, and eschatology—doesn’t exist in foraging bands. But what we would call religious beliefs and practices did—and do. Our ancestors probably believed in ghosts, signs, and some sort of life force—imagined as breath, thought, or an essence or identity separate from the body. This could differ from group to group and individual to individual. Homo sapiens at least also practiced rituals, including burying their dead.9
In the last several years there’s been a lot of speculation about “primitive religion.” As European countries scrambled in the late 19th century to rule world-spanning empires, antiquarians and anthropologists at home turned out reams of speculation about the primitive minds of these new colonial subjects. Speculations like Frazier’s The Golden Bough, and esoteric works by the founders of psychology were very popular.10 But it’s hard to separate the observers from the observed.
But what we now call religion does seem to have inspired the first specialized job in human existence. Before there were headmen, war chiefs, or councils of elders, and long before blacksmiths and shepherds, there were probably shamans. Shamans are men or women believed by their communities to have experiences of altered consciousness, often while using drugs. They may engage in healing or ritual practices that allegedly benefit the group. And sometimes they live off by themselves and trade their healing or ritual practices in exchange for gifts or payment, at least when changes in the climate allowed a single human to survive on their own. We have no evidence for or against shamanism among earlier people, but we’ll keep our eyes out as soon as the world warms.
Art
We don’t know anything about singing or poetry before the invention or writing, but with regards to music archaeologists have found a Neanderthal flute carved out of the femur of a cave bear, so even before Homo sapiens humans were annoying one another.
Of course, everyone has seen the beautiful paintings discovered in European caves and elsewhere. Both the flute and the cave paintings, carved bone figures, clay figures, and clay pottery all go back before the last glacial maximum, so humans already had all that stuff before the period we’re talking about.
So we’re finally caught up. We have the basic human summarized.
Instincts and Evolution
The question comes up, how much of foraging behavior—or modern behavior—is instinctual? The answer people give usually is tied up in all sorts of confirmation biases and temperamental assumptions, as people claim this or that behavior, custom, or habit is natural instinct.
Let’s take an example of an actual, bonafide instinct: breathing. A tuba player or a yoga teacher may breathe in ways the rest of us cannot, and we could all possibly learn to breathe better, but basic breathing is truly instinctive. We do it without thinking about it. We do it without having to be taught. Ditto for swallowing, blinking, and peeing. Trembling when we’re scared or cold, looking at people’s eyes, blushing when we’re embarrassed—these are instinctual behaviors. Probably an interest in problem solving, speaking, and some of our physical gestures may be instinctive too.
But mothers caring for children, men fighting other men, children respecting their parents, old people being wise—none of these things are instincts. Note that knapping flint and starting fires—two of our ancestors’ most essential skills—can’t be done instinctively after millions of years, so we should be wary of saying much of anything is instinctive.
Take the gender roles in most foraging groups. It is highly doubtful that women go out with other women to gather food while men go hunt because women have some deep urge to put up with crying babies and tag-along toddlers, nor because women are forced to do it by an oppressive patriarchy. It’s more likely because it’s easier to gather while pregnant or carrying a baby than to hunt while pregnant or carrying a baby.11 So that becomes common for most communities. If we today returned suddenly to live as hunter-gatherings the same pattern would likely emerge as soon as the breast pumps stopped working.
What is instinctive is our ability to learn for others, to solve problems, and to share information. Think how many generations were taught to make tools, light fires, sew, knap flint, skin and butcher animals, cook, and so on. Creating and maintaining those social bonds through communication is the instinct.
One last point before we leave off this week, a point on evolution, at least as understood by a layman such as myself. Homo erectus was the ancestor of Neanderthals, Homo sapiens (us), and various other human species, all extinct except for us, but how we should picture that process is not at all clear.
Popular writers like Yuval Noah Harari often suggest Homo sapiens survived while other branches of humans did not because of mutations that made us smarter. I don’t begrudge smart people assuming that smarts are what matters. (If athletes wrote books on evolution they’d no doubt say Homo sapiens were faster or more agile.) But there’s not a shred of evidence that Homo sapiens started out smarter in any way than other humans. (Neanderthal brains are actually bigger than ours.) The enormous behavioral changes involved in the domestication of plants and animals, the building of towns and cities, writing, kings, armies, and all of that are exclusive to Homo sapiens—so far as we know—but none of that appeared until hundreds of thousands of years after Homo sapiens did.
The same is true for other inventions like spear throwers and bows and arrows, and even more true for art, which was not even exclusive to our species. In fact, none of the big changes in the human story—stone tools, fire, language, etc—can be directly tied to any particular change in physiology. The best candidate is Homo erectus having a hypothetical mutation allowing for making fire, but what would that mutation even be? And isn’t it more likely that migration encouraged fire use rather than vice versa? Why would someone in equatorial Africa sit around a campfire thinking, Hey, I’ll bet there’s a land that’s really cold and this fire stuff would get great for that. Let’s migrate! Since we know modern humans started building cities and growing crops using the same genes they’d possessed for a hundred thousand years of not building cities or growing crops, why do we assume our paleolithic ancestors needed a mutation to use fire other than that’s what we want to believe is true?12
For humans at least there does not seem to be clear evidence of the branching of our evolutionary tree being tied to immediate changes in technology, custom, or social organization. By the way, even if we are here, and the Neanderthal gone, because of some genetic superiority, the evidence from historic times would argue it’s more likely a superior immune system than anything intellectual.
What we do know really changed for humans, however, did not involve human genetics at all. Perhaps the real reason we are living in cities and not Neanderthals, has nothing to do with us, and everything to do with wolves. At some point after the last ice age, as we saw with the Natufians in Part I, some wolves became dogs. And that is really what made humans Humans 2.0.
Next time we’ll meet the first dogs.
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What about India? There were definitely hunter-gatherers in India when writing came into use, and I think there are bands even today, so I wonder how that impacts the subcontinent’s literature. I wish I knew that literature better, or had ten years to study it. Anyone? Is Buddhism seemingly the sanest of the world’s major religions because it came from a place with a broader visible spectrum of human behavior?
Humans may also have slept better and deeper because of how fires kept predators away.
Wolves and lions hunt as well as we do without needing brains as big.
Only strangers haggle. In historical times only when conditions brought humans together as strangers in specific circumstances does haggling emerge.
John Locke’s notion of the right to property comes to mind. For Locke property was something improved by human labor. If you haven’t improved it, you have no right to it.
The multi-family basis of human communities is perhaps evident in how feuds (kin group against kin group) are seen as tragic and socially disruptive while wars (band or tribe against another band or tribe) are often seen as glorious and socially cohesive.
When states form they expend a lot of effort to impose strict boundaries and this becomes adopted by subjects and citizens as learned identity. But note that we won’t need surveys, fences, and sticks to identify boundaries if we had a more intuitive sense of physical territory.
Horticultural and pastoral tribes often fight wars to kidnap women to become wives. We don’t know how much of this was ever done by foraging bands. Horticultural tribes often have more adult males than females because mothers practice selective infanticide. Sons will potentially grow up to be hunters who provide their mothers meat according to the food distribution for large game I alluded to. In the aggregate however selective female infanticide leads to a lack of those sons being able to have wives—a problem increased by polygyny. The answer is raids on other tribes. Foraging bands in contrast have less of a reason for the male-female imbalance, so they probably kidnapped less. In historical times horticultural and pastoral tribes also raided for slaves, and slavery is found in foraging groups in historical times too, but foraging bands in historical times have regular contact with horticultural, pastoral, and agricultural communities, so they may have been influenced by that. There’s reason to be skeptical of slavery in prehistorical foraging societies, not because they were too nice—they certainly weren’t—but because there wouldn’t be anything for slaves to do. Slaves couldn’t be given weapons to go hunting, and foraging bands don’t need extra help gathering, so slaves would just be a mouth to feed. Foragers without nearby non-foragers to trade with would most likely just kill captives.
Some Neanderthals seem to have arranged bones in ways that look like ritual magic too.
By the way it’s not clear that non-hierarchical people, like foragers, can imagine spirits or ghosts in the hierarchies required to think of gods in a civilized sense.
The American William James’ book on religion, The Variety of Religious Experience, had less of the European imperial condescension, but it probably did more to convey to educated people that religion was about mysticism and belief in the supernatural rather than ritual, purity, and obligation.
Women certainly do participate in hunting. Ethnographers have witnessed group hunts in which women, with children in tow, are part of the overall effort, usually herding animals toward nets. Despite modern foragers usually living in deserts and rain forests where there isn’t as much big game. Prehistoric humans often lived in grasslands where there was a lot of big game, and naturally prehistoric humans hunted it, often herding game off cliffs and such, so group efforts involving women (and children) were probably more common. Also our grassland and foothill ancestors, as I discussed in a previous post, had good options for earlier weaning than women in rain forests and deserts.
This is an issue I raised when talking about coal use. We know Londoners did not switch to using coal because wood was too rare or expensive, even though that’s what “common sense” might assume. If the switch had happened in prehistory, there wouldn’t be the evidence to contradict “common sense.”