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Becoming Human: How Evolution Made Us BECOMING HUMAN: HOW EVOLUTION MADE US Greg Downey BECOMING HUMAN: HOW EVOLUTION MADE US Greg Downey Published by Enculture Press Smashwords edition Copyright 2013 Greg Downey Published by Enculture Press, Australia PO Box 40, Berry, NSW 2535, Australia ISBN: 978-1-925082-01-2 Smashwords edition First edition 2013 Smashwords Edition, License Notes Thank you for downloading this free ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to Smashwords.com to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support. Table of Contents Open2Study Acknowledgments Preface Chapter 1: Traces Chapter 2: Darwin Chapter 3: Sex Chapter 4: Brains Photo credits Glossary About the Author Enculture Press ~~~~~~~~ This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/. For more information on Creative Commons licenses, visit CreativeCommons.org. Please contact Greg Downey for information on licensing: [email protected] This ebook is distributed free through the support of Smashwords, Open Universities Australia and Enculture Press. The text and resources accompany the Open2Study class, ‘Becoming Human: Anthropology.’ Open2Study Free online study for everyone! The Becoming Human: How Evolution Made UseBook is an ideal companion to the free online subject Becoming Human: Anthropology - presented by Greg Downey and offered by Open2Study. In Becoming Human: Anthropology, you can explore how evolution works and how variation arises. Find out why, of all the orders of life, primates produced us. How did apes start to look like us, walk on two feet and grow big brains that over the past 200,000 years have figured out where we came from? This subject will give you some thought- provoking answers. Open2Study is brought to you by Open Universities Australia. Open2Study brings you the best in online education with our four week introductory subjects. There’s something for everyone, whether you want to explore a subject that’s always fascinated you, or get some new job skills to impress your boss! Here’s why thousands of students have chosen Open2Study: — Learn from top instructors who represent leading universities, TAFEs and businesses. — Fit flexible online study around your schedule. — Study the fun way, with great quality videos, short quizzes and active discussion forums. — Choose from a range of subject areas, with even more subjects being added all the time. — No need to spend a thing – everything you need is provided. All Open2Study subjects are completely free, and enrolment is open to anyone anywhere in the world. Follow your curiosity and learn something new at https://www.open2study.com For more information on Open2Study and how you can enroll, free of charge, for the course, ‘Becoming Human,’ visit our website: https://www.open2study.com/subjects/becoming-human-anthropology Acknowledgments Becoming Human started off as a kind of dare. Well, more than one dare. In a conference on the future of teaching, I dared my employer, Macquarie University, to embrace open education more fully. I warned that open exchange of teaching materials and online learning was inevitable. My Associate Dean for Learning and Teaching, Prof. Sherman Young, and Macquarie University’s Provost, Prof. Judyth Sachs, dared me to back up my high-sounding call through our partnership with Open Universities Australia. In April, 2013, we launched Macquarie University’s first ‘MOOC’, a ‘massive online open classroom.’ This book was prepared to give the students an opportunity to read more closely and to find additional resources and links on the topics covered in that course, ‘Becoming Human: Anthropology.’ I have to thank those who have helped at every step. Robert Parker, at Macquarie University, for pitching in all over the place, from conceptualising the course to struggling to reduce thirteen-weeks-worth of material down to six — and then to four — to helping with the creation of the simulator and managing shooting in Melbourne In Melbourne, Greg Bird did a masterful job, with tight time constraints, of tracking down an immense variety of images to illustrate the lecture-videos and for this book. You can see his work on many pages. He also gave some great feedback on educational design issues. Thanks to everyone at Macquarie University who made this possible, especially Sherman Young and Judyth Sachs. Open Universities Australia has been excellent support Thanks to the crew at Smart Sparrow who produced the simulator that is used in ‘Becoming Human.’ That project had a very steep learning curve, and with David Schönstein especially, that part of the project would never have gotten off the ground. The video production team at Open University Australia in Melbourne was great. Thanks to Asanka, Jessica, Evan, Roberto, Jason, Kate, and the entire crew that made the whole production a really high-energy good time in spite of the fact that we were slowly baking in a small studio together. A special debt of gratitude to my wife, Tonia Gray, and my daughter, Mikhaela. Preface When colleagues find out I teach human evolution at Macquarie University and Open Universities Australia, they often ask me, ‘Why?’ Sure, it’s a fascinating topic, but it’s one that I was not trained to teach. Like many anthropology students in the United States, I took archaeology classes and studied human evolution when I was doing my bachelor’s degree. Two of the many standout classes that I took at the University of Virginia were ‘Human Origins’ by Jeffrey Hantman and an intense seminar on Mayan archaeology. But I was trained as a cultural anthropologist in graduate school, prepared to make sense of living people’s cultures, to pick up new languages, to live with a group who has a very different way of understanding the world and — over time — make sense of their perspective. In some places, committing to a career in cultural anthropology can mean putting aside evolutionary research and theory because they can often seem only distant causes of contemporary social life. Teaching human evolution, about bones and biology, brains and genitalia, would seem to be a stretch, even for someone who didn’t know the field. To someone who does know anthropology, to my fellow anthropologists, the jump from cultural to biological anthropology can seem even greater. When I took my PhD back at the very end of the 1990s, biological and cultural anthropologists were often convinced that their greatest adversaries were in the other camp: cultural theorists had to argue that culture overcame or transcended biology, biological researchers that culture was just a superficial veneer on a universal biological reality. From this point of view, for a cultural anthropologist to teach human evolution was a bit of betrayal. ‘Do you talk about genetics?’ some of my cultural colleagues would ask. Fortunately, that tension has changed. In the past decade or two, integrative approaches that bring together evolution and social causes, nature and nurture, are in ascendance as the research problems we face — illness, cognitive abilities, differences between men and women — make a mockery of trying to divide up the facets of what make us human. I’m not alone in trying to bridge the gap these days between biological and cultural approaches to the study of human nature. Anthropologists these days realize that we are not really arguing most with each other: we are arguing primarily with people who pay no attention to human diversity, with commentators who refuse to recognize the importance of evolution, with overly simple explanations for human institutions that we know to be complicated. But most importantly, anthropologists are arguing with people who think they know how evolution works or think they know about ‘human nature,’ but don’t really have a grasp of the fascinating research results that our field has found over more than a century. Often, I will read an article in the popular press where a science writer has been talking to some other researcher who thinks he or she knows about human evolution or human diversity (but really mostly does work in a laboratory or by surveying university students). And the article will make proclamations about ‘our species, throughout its history,’ or ‘Humans are all this way because evolution makes us this way,’ and I know that the evidence — the hard, cold bones in the ground, or the abundant ethnographic record that comes from studying peoples all over the planet — doesn’t support what they’re saying. So that’s why I teach human evolution, and why I’ve written this book. To me, you simply cannot understand how humans are today, right now, all around us, if you do not understand evolution. However, if you understand evolution badly (including listening to what some quite famous commentators say about it), a little knowledge can be almost as misleading as none at all. And what I read in the newspapers makes me feel like a lot of people out there who think they understand evolution have just a little bit of knowledge and don’t even realize it. The closer you get to the scientists, the more interesting the research is, and the less it boils down to a simple story. The point is not that ‘everything is complicated’ or that a particular scientist or evolutionary theorist is ‘dead wrong.’ Often, partial truths can become serious distortions if over-applied; theories that are enormously helpful in clarifying how we see the world can become constraints on our ability to see all the evidence if we cling to them too tightly, as if they are sacred texts.
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