Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
of northern Europe were hunting at a level of sophistication equivalent to
that seen among the San hunters of the present time. The pre-Neanderthals
must have been able to conmunicate with each other in the same way as pres-
ent-day hunters do—it is otherwise dii cult to imagine how they could have
killed big fast animals like horses, butchered them, and carried the pieces of
their kills substantial distances to a central gathering place.
The myth of human uniqueness
Thieme's fi nd suggests that some of our relatives were cleverer than we give
them credit for, even though they may have diverged from us more than a
million years ago. It is further evidence against the deep-rooted notion that
modern humans have somehow taken a special evolutionary road that sets
us apart from other living things.
Darwin fi rmly rejected the view that humans are special and outside the
laws that govern evolution. He insisted that humans have been shaped by
the same evolutionary processes that have acted on all other organisms. He
emphasized that natural selection, especially sexual selection, must have
acted on heritable variation that was present in populations of our ances-
tors. Even though we are clearly dif erent from other animals, we evolved by
quite conventional means.
Darwin's contemporary Alfred Russel Wallace had independently reached
conclusions similar to Darwin's about the ability of natural selection to shape
the natural world. The idea came to him in 1858 during a bout of fever, when
he was on the island of Ternate in the East Indies. After he recovered he hast-
ily dashed of a short paper, and mailed it to Darwin for criticism. It was the
arrival of Wallace's manuscript that fi nally jolted Darwin into protecting his
priority by publishing an abstract of his long-projected multivolume
magnum
opus
about natural selection. The abstract was the
Origin of Species
.
But Wallace, unlike the pragmatic Darwin, had an intense interest in
spirituality and the nature of the human soul. He took a view dif erent from
Darwin's about the evolutionary story of our species, insisting that there had
to be something unique about our evolution.
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