The Rise of Modern Humans

Evo Edu Outreach (2010) 3:399–402 DOI 10.1007/s12052-010-0241-1 ORIGINAL SCIENTIFIC ARTICLE The Rise of Modern Humans Ian Tattersall Published online: 8 July 2010 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010 Abstract Human beings are distinguished most strikingly tionship with Nature. Both of the two most radical and by their unique “symbolic” way of processing information fateful evolutionary innovations in the history of life about the world. Although based on a long evolutionary (symbolic thinking and sedentary lifestyles) were thus history, the modern human cognitive style is not predicted very recent occurrences, well within the short tenure of by that history. It is not the product of a process of H. sapiens. incremental refinement but is instead “emergent,” repre- senting an entirely distinct level of complexity. Physically, Keywords Homo sapiens . Symbolic cognition . Human Homo sapiens is very distinctive, its peculiarities clearly origins . Upper Paleolithic . Middle Stone Age . Human resulting from a significant developmental reorganization uniqueness . Exaptation . Emergence with numerous skeletal ramifications and quite plausibly others as well. It seems reasonable to suppose that the structural underpinnings of symbolic thought were acquired Introduction in this reorganization. Still, the fossil and archaeological records indicate that the first anatomically recognizable This special issue of EEO contains a fascinating series of members of the species predated the first humans who articles that overview the major players and events in behaved in a demonstrably symbolic manner. So while the hominid phylogeny and the major themes running through biological potential for symbolic thinking most likely arose the human evolutionary story, right up to the point when in the morphogenetic event that gave rise to H. sapiens as a our own species Homo sapiens emerged. To conclude the distinctive anatomical entity, this new capacity was evi- sequence, the reader may refer to the article on human dently exaptive, in the sense that it had to await its emergence that I published in this journal last year “discovery” and expression, clearly through a cultural (Tattersall 2009; doi 10.1007/s12052-009-0614x); but for stimulus that was plausibly the invention of language. the sake of both completeness and of currency in this issue, One manifestation of symbolic reasoning is the adoption the principal points of that article are summarized below of technological change in response to environmental and its argument is updated. challenges, in contrast to earlier responses that typically used existing technologies in new ways. As climates changed at the end of the last Ice Age, this new Human Uniqueness technophile proclivity was expressed in a shift toward agriculture and sedentary lifestyles, precipitating a fun- We human beings like to see ourselves and our extraordi- damentally new (and potentially self-destructive) rela- nary attributes as the culmination of a long process of incremental improvement. And indeed it is true that, in the absence of any aspect of the long evolutionary history * I. Tattersall ( ) recounted in the contributions to this special issue, our Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY 10024, USA species would not be the remarkable entity it is today. But e-mail: [email protected] as those contributions also show, evidence is mounting that 400 Evo Edu Outreach (2010) 3:399–402 H. sapiens and its precursors did not simply claw their way of the Levant was ephemeral and that the definitive human steadfastly toward our current eminence. Instead, the exodus giving rise to all extant human populations came transformation of our immediate precursors from a readily later, at around 85 kiloyears ago or less (Harpending and recognizable (if rather unusual) variation on the primate Rogers 2000; Tishkoff et al. 2009; Scheinfeldt et al. 2010). theme, to the altogether unprecedented entity we are now, Comparative molecular analyses suggest that over the was both recent in geological terms and complex in its next 10 kiloyears the descendants of these early emigrants unfolding. moved eastwards along the southern coast of Asia, reaching Modern H. sapiens is an unusual creature in many China by about 75 kiloyears. Australia may have been respects. Most of our many physical peculiarities are in one colonized (necessarily using boats) by about 60 kiloyears way or another associated with our upright posture, a ago. Warming of the climate around 50 kiloyears ago feature with a long and complex history that is elegantly allowed reinvasion of the Levant and the Fertile Crescent summarized by Harcourt-Smith (this volume). Nonetheless, region to its north, and by about 40 kiloyears H. sapiens the acquisition that gives us our strong feeling of being was entering Europe and central Asia. By 25,000 years ago, somehow qualitatively different from the rest of the living northeastern Eurasia had been occupied, all the way to the world lies not among our physical attributes but in our Arctic Circle. Perhaps as early as 20 kiloyears ago, humans unprecedented form of cognition. Uniquely among living had entered the New World via a northern route between forms, we human beings live not entirely in the world as Siberia and Alaska. Indications are that people had reached Nature presents it to us, but substantially in worlds that Chile by almost 15 kiloyears ago, possibly following the we re-create in our heads. We can do this because we are coastline in boats. “symbolic” creatures, meaning that we mentally decom- Perhaps surprisingly (although the observation is in line pose the world around us into a vocabulary of discrete with the earlier pattern of episodic cultural innovation out symbols, which we can combine and recombine in our of phase with the appearance of new species), the stone tool minds to imagine alternate worlds. Significantly, the very assemblages left behind by the earliest anatomical H. first hominids (members of the human zoological family; sapiens are unimpressive at best. The few stone tools an alternative adopted elsewhere in this issue is to call reported from the same sediments as the earlier Ethiopian them hominins, distinguishing them from their closest cranium have been described as “unremarkable” (Klein living cousins, the great apes, only at the subfamily 1999), while those associated with the later one are notably level) who looked physically identical to us do not archaic, consisting of some of the latest recorded African appear to have behaved in this distinctive fashion. hand axes (large, teardrop-shaped bifacial implements that had by that time been made continuously in Africa for almost 1.5 million years), plus some Middle Stone Age Events in Human Emergence elements that were roughly equivalent to the productions of Neanderthals (Clark et al. 2003; Harvati, this volume). The first fossil evidence we have of the highly characteristic Among archaic hominids, and also apparently even among modern cranial anatomy (showing a globular braincase with a the first anatomical H. sapiens, technologies simply did small face retracted beneath its front) comes from Africa, in their job, and successive hominid species adapted old tools the form of a fragmentary skull some 195 kiloyears (thousand to new uses as environments fluctuated. This long-standing years) old (McDougall et al. 2005) from southern Ethiopia. pattern only ever changed once. And this was very recently, More complete is a 160-kiloyear-old cranium, also from when hominids began to cope with new environments by Ethiopia (Clark et al. 2003; White et al. 2003). While neither inventing new technologies. Radical change of this kind is of these specimens is totally “modern” in all respects, both most dramatically evident in the archaeological record left provide evidence that a form substantively resembling by the H. sapiens who arrived in Europe about 40 kiloyears modern H. sapiens was already in existence in Africa in ago and who left an abundant evidence of a restless creative the period following about 200 kiloyears ago. This paleon- spirit that expressed itself in the relentless pursuit of the tological dating is in substantive agreement with molecular new (White 1986, 2003) and in such self-evidently estimates for the origin of H. sapiens based on DNA symbolic activities as the creation of powerful art on the divergence observed among modern human populations walls of caves such as Chauvet, Lascaux, and Altamira. (e.g., Harpending and Rogers 2000; Behar et al. 2008; These, too, were the humans who finally nudged the Campbell and Tishkoff 2008). A typically modern human resident Neanderthals into extinction (see Harvati, this skeleton from the Israeli site of Jebel Qafzeh, dated to volume), and they clearly possessed fully “modern” 93 kiloyears ago, shows that anatomical moderns had spread sensibilities. beyond Africa proper by that time, although both molecular But this European evidence is not the earliest intimation and archaeological observations suggest that this occupation we have of a radically new way of doing business—and, by Evo Edu Outreach (2010) 3:399–402 401 extension, of processing information about the world. The certainly nonsymbolic Homo neanderthalensis (Stringer earliest H. sapiens who invaded Europe evidently arrived et al. 2008). However, one aspect of economic activity at there with their symbolic capacities fully formed. We see no Pinnacle Point (again, sadly in the absence of substantive process of transformation

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