Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
galitarian (Sarich) to discover the more recent split—more on that in a
moment.
Much of that consensus—equating hominid and humanity—has been
broken in the past couple of decades, and here I want to explore how
and why that came to pass. It has partly to do, of course, with Jane
Goodall's celebration of nonhuman tool use and, to a lesser extent, the
rise of “pop ethology,” evolutionary psychology, and sociobiology—all
of which champion the animal in humans—but there are several other
key transitions that warrant an accounting. I want to focus on three of
these transformations, or “crises,” all of which have given force to the
idea that humanness may be a relatively recent phenomenon:
1. Archaeology, and the crisis in interpretation of the oldest tools—
specifically, the Oldowan and Acheulean assemblages of the Lower
Paleolithic, the oldest tools to have epochal names attached and to count
as evidence of hominid or human “culture.” (Chimpanzee cultural tra-
ditions can be treated only ahistorically, since there is almost no “archae-
ological” evidence of chimpanzee tool use, though Frédéric Joulian has
recently found stone anvils being used by chimps for at least two hundred
years and we should, in theory, be able to find these going back millions
of years.)
6
The key question here is whether Oldowan and Acheulean
artifacts can be considered evidence of cultural “traditions” in any inter-
esting sense. An argument can be made that they cannot, or at least
cannot in the conventional Boasian sense, given their apparent stability
and uniformity over vast stretches of time and space. Oldowan tools
persist for roughly a million years in Africa (from 2.5 to 1.5 M.Y.A.), and
Acheulean tools last even longer, from about 1.5 to .2 M.Y.A. The asser-
tion has been made that one reason these tools are so stable is that their
users were not transmitting knowledge of their use by means of abstract
symbols (language), and that some other mechanism must account for
their endurance. One possible implication is that their inventors were
not yet human in some significant sense (for example, not linguistic
creatures); some kind of nonlinguistic transmission might have been
involved—such as imitation, the way Japanese macaques copied Imo the
inventive one, who sorted grain from sand by tossing them both into the
water (grain floats).
7
Independent invention is also a possibility, and
could help explain the constancy of the design over time and space, if,
