Human Evolution

An Introduction for the Behavioural Sciences

Graham Richards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367259914
• eBook ISBN: 9781000063660
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1987, Human Evolution looks at theories of the evolution of human behaviour (contemporary at the time of publication). The book reviews competing theories of psychological and social evolution and provides a detailed historical introduction to the subject. A key theoretical concern which emerges in the book includes the psychological significance of the human evolution issue itself. The period of human evolution covered ranges from the demise of the Miocene hominoids, to the emergence of 'civilization'. Topics covered include: functions of 'origin myths', history of the study of human evolution, methods and data-bases, theories of the nature of 'hominisation', origins of bipedalism, language and tool-use, theories of social evolution, theories of cave art and the spread of Homo sapiens to America and Australia.

CHAPTER 1

The nature of the problem

We want to be free. We need an identity. Current controversies over the nature (if any) of our species derive much of their energy from the tension between these two psychological imperatives. The former directs us to emphasise the present as a continuing choice-point, to which we bring nothing but our consciousness of what we have learned from our personal experience of the world. Liberation involves raising to consciousness as much as possible of our past, and learning as much as possible of the factors affecting us in the present, in a process somewhat cumbersomely but accurately labelled by the German philosopher K. O. Apel (1977) ‘critically emancipatory self-reflection’. The need for identity compels us to label ourselves, to classify and constrain ourselves as essentially belonging to groups which transcend our personal selves, groups of which we are representatives; our sex, nationality, class, ethnicity, occupation, religion, clan, or even our generation. Being free, however, forces us to strive to transcend these labels and accept only a logically prior identity as ‘human’. While the quest for identity obviously involves a quest for origins, in a sense we can also only be free if we have established for ourselves our ‘true identity’. (It is to the enduring credit of the 1960s anti-psychiatrists such as Laing and Cooper that they drew attention to the crucial importance of honesty in this respect for the future mental well-being of the child.) Both imperatives thus send us in search of our origin, and it is only in finding it that the apparent contradiction between them can be resolved and explained.

Jungian writers such as Neumann (1954) and von Franz (1972) were surely correct in seeing that the question of origins fused both psychological and cosmological levels. We cannot be free in the cosmos until we know where we belong in it, and it seems clear that the answer to this must lie in finding how the cosmos itself created us, what kind of parentage it gave us. (The perennial resilience of astrology testifies to precisely this.) As Neumann argues, the origins of consciousness and the universe are of necessity indistinguishable in creation myths;

Mythological accounts of the beginning must invariably begin with the outside world, for world and psyche are still one. There is as yet no reflecting, self-conscious ego that could refer anything to itself, that is, reflect. Not only is the psyche open to the world, it is still identical with and undifferentiated from the world; it knows itself as world and in the world and experiences its own becoming as a world-becoming, its own images as the starry heavens, and its own contents as the world-creating gods. (1954, p. 6)

While this sort of language and approach is uncongenial to most contemporary psychologists, it provides the only perspective yet offered from which constructively to grapple with such material as the following;

(Marduk has just slain the primordial hag Tiamat.) He turned back to where Tiamat lay bound, he straddled the legs and smashed her skull (for the mace was merciless), he severed the arteries and the blood streamed down the north wind to the unknown ends of the world.

When the gods saw this they laughed out loud, and they sent him presents. They sent him their thankful tributes.

The lord rested; he gazed at the huge body, pondering how to use it, what to create from the dead carcass. He split it apart like a cockle-shell; with the upper half he constructed the arc of the sky, he pulled down the bar and set a watch on the waters, so they should never escape.

He crossed the sky to survey the infinite distance; he stationed himself … over the old abyss which he now surveyed, measuring out and marking in.

He stretched the immensity of the firmament, he made Esharra, the Great Palace, to be its earthly image, and Anu and Enlil and Ea had each their right stations. (from ‘The Babylonian Creation’ in Sandars (1971), pp. 91–2)

This marks the beginning of a section in which Marduk constructs the present universe from the hag’s corpse (if we bear in mind that it was the Babylonians who ultimately set the scientific programme in motion, there is something peculiarly disturbing in this, a distant adumbration of Death in Nature (Merchant, 1983)). Freudian matricidal frenzy, birth trauma and cosmological theorising are inextricably fused.

Thus the question of origins has exerted an almost universal and perennial fascination, and been an ever-present cultural pre-occupation. But the functions of origin myths are not restricted to the psychological. They serve, sociologically, to legitimate the status quo, to justify – or at any rate explain – the current ordering of society, and the right to rulership of its rulers. This is so whether the rulers are seen as genealogically descended from the founding gods or whether their eminence is itself proof of their evolutionary fitness; whether social institutions are those ordained by the Creator (like the church) or the ancestral founders of the current order (like the writers of the US constitution). Even where accounts of origins are not deliberately tailored to bolstering the present establishment, they nevertheless account for the present in some way, locating it in the cosmological scheme of things, e.g. Hinduism’s account of us as living in the Kali Yuga, the last and worst in the current four-yuga cycle (Zimmer, 1972) or contemporary popular science images of us as possibly being at some phase in planetary evolution where matter becomes self-conscious as a prelude to joining the cosmic community.

John R. Durant (1981), in addressing this issue of the mythological character of theories of human evolution, points out how the ‘beast in man’ myth, in particular, has been carried over from Christianity into, first, Darwin’s own model of human descent, and then into the twentieth century in Freud, Dart, Ardrey and Lorenz. In each case the moral is drawn that we have inherited a bloodthirsty savage dark side to our character, legacy of our species’ distant ancestral past. More recently alternative interpretations more congenial to the liberal temperament have provided myths to oppose this, in which emphasis is shifted to co-operation or the role of women. The reader will encounter images of both kinds, and more, recurring throughout the following pages. By and large I endorse Durant’s perception of the problem, his own remedy for which is given in the following passage:

It seems to me that when people of many different political persuasions are all engaged in mythologising the theory of human evolution, the only way out of the resulting confusion is a determination to stop playing this particular game. Scientific studies of human origins are best undertaken without the subjective pressures and distortions which are introduced by the desire to see one’s personal view of life confirmed in the testimony of the rocks; and political issues are best discussed without the pressing need to prove one’s point of view by reference to the social life of baboons, or whatever. As things stand at the present time, we are in urgent need of the demythologisation of science. (1981, p. 437. Italics in original)

But is this not to abandon the field prematurely? We are up to the hilt in myth-making whether we wish it or not. As I will be arguing in Chapter 5, we cannot leave ideology out of the picture as one might be able to do in investigating electronics. Even at the motivational level, the drive behind those researching human evolution has not infrequently been broadly ideological in character. To anticipate some of the later discussion, one’s entire perspective on human evolution is conditioned by whether or not one sees the present condition of the species as pathological. The researcher’s ideological or political appraisal of the present defines what it is that the study of human evolution is, in the final analysis, explaining. Try to do without this and you will find it hard to draw any interesting conclusions at all. One cannot escape myth-making by fiat. And just for once I feel that the old excuse ‘if we don’t do it someone else will’ has a certain validity.

Psychologists approaching human evolution are thus placed in a dilemma, for their interest in it is of two different kinds. Firstly we are interested, in the straight scientific sense, in the evolution of the species to which the majority of our studies are directed. The use we make of this knowledge will vary according to theoretical taste, but few would feel it to be entirely irrelevant to their task of understanding modern humans. We might also feel that Psychology could assist those disciplines such as Palaeoanthropology, directly concerned with studying human evolution. In short there is a conventional professional interest in a subject closely related to, or even overlapping with, our own. But secondly we cannot relinquish the reflexive role; an awareness of the psychological aspects, both individual and social, of origin myths must necessarily alert us in a special way to the effects of these on accounts of human evolution. We become aware of how contemporary issues of great psychological profundity, such as the nature of the relationship between the sexes, can be played out in the arena of theorising about the evolution of human social life and sexual behaviour. We become aware too of how the scientific study of human evolution is counterposed in contemporary culture to other accounts of origins of more archaic kinds, and how these derive their power perhaps from addressing more directly the psychological needs mentioned earlier, be they fundamentalist Creationism or God-was-an-astronaut in character.

The fact of the matter is that our species is, or believes itself to be, in crisis. But where do the origins of this crisis lie? What is its real nature? In such a climate the pressure is on to construct myths of origin which can structure the present, a task for which received myths are inadequate, myths which can endow the seeming chaos, actual or impending, with meaning. But there is a parallel pressure genuinely to diagnose the nature of the crisis in a rational fashion, and this too involves the exploration of origins, at least as part of the story. It is the difference between Danniken and the Leakeys. As a psychologist, I am concerned with the latter, not the former – or, more correctly, I am only concerned with the former insofar as it bears upon the latter. But I am also mindful that the difference between the two is in practice marginal, more so than Durant appreciates, that both are hoping to achieve similar ends, of structuring and giving meaning. The inevitable embroilment of the study of human evolution with myth is recognised by some current authorities (e.g. Isaac, 1983), and one long eminent palaeontologist has concluded

I now believe that what we say about human evolution, what we pick as essential human attributes, and how we trace their development often tell us as much about paleoanthropologists and the times in which they live than about the course of evolutionary events. We are emphatically not the new theologians, but I will close with an appropriately theological quote from the Talmud:

We do not see things as they are

We see things as we are.

(Pilbeam, 1980, p. 283)

The book that follows is addressed primarily to those studying Psychology and other behavioural sciences. It is not a textbook on physical anthropology or on evolutionary theory as such, though these matters often concern us. It is an attempt at surveying, with a bias towards what would interest such a readership, the current state of knowledge regarding human evolution, and particularly its behavioural aspects. But I have also tried to sustain an awareness of the second, reflexive, angle of interest; the study of human evolution as a psychological phenomenon in its own right, an activity carrying much of the weight hitherto loaded on creation myths and accounts of ancestral origins. Perhaps ancestor-worship is after all our ‘natural’ religion, and the study of human evolution but its current persona.

Some sections of the book are more opinionated than is customary or seemly for textbooks, which are supposed to exhibit ‘benevolent eclecticism’ (Maddi, 1976), on the grounds that one need not go anywhere since all directions are equally interesting. Some of this opinionatedness stems from the psychological implausibility and conceptual incoherence of the views prevalent in a field (e.g. the discussion of ‘Altruism’ in Chapter 5). On other occasions it has seemed to me necessary to make my own views on a topic explicit, though I have not done so extensively or indulged in special pleading on their behalf.

The ‘reflexive’ perspective lies behind the fairly lengthy historical chapter, for the vicissitudes of the study of human evolution illustrate many facets of its psychological character as a branch of scientific inquiry.

Writers on human evolution are of course haunted by the ever-present possibility of a dramatic find turning up the week before publication and rendering their efforts obsolete at birth. While this text was being written there have been at least two major finds in East Africa, one an extremely early Sivapithecus fossil and the other a nearly complete skeleton of a Homo erectus youth whose mature height would have been around 6 foot. They do not seem immediately to affect the behavioural evolution picture, although the H.erectus stature is unexpectedly tall. A third find from north eastern Russia is a different matter. Artefacts here appear to date from two million years ago yet are far in advance of anything of that date from Africa. Furthermore, as near-Arctic conditions prevailed in the region then, as now, it implies a level of cultural adaptation (clothes, fire, etc.) not usually believed to have been achieved until the last 100,000 years or so. A full evaluation of this data by international scholars is a long way off (as is the site!). It waits therefore in the wings of the present account, threatening to make a dramatic entry which would require complete revision of the behavioural evolution timetable. But its fate might, by contrast, be that of the Sunnyvale skeleton and Hesperopithecus instead (see below, pp. 57, 72).

In writing on human evolution for psychologists I am not to be understood as espousing a sociobiological or other biologically ‘reductionist’ view of human behaviour (my own tentative theoretical position is outlined in the course of Chapter 5). The intention is rather to provide broad pictures of both current scientific understanding of human evolution and the actual study of human evolution itself. Psychology and kindred disciplines cannot afford to ignore the evolutionary picture, while conversely the study of human evolution is in great need of input from Psychology. One aspect of this work then is to prepare students of Psychology for engagement in the required interdisciplinary two-way traffic. If it is considered to have made a contribution to the topic itself, that is a bonus.

CHAPTER 2

Linnaeus to the Leakeys

Introduction

A full history of the study of human evolution has yet to be published.¹ An outline of it is nevertheless essential for several reasons. Firstly, it will help the reader appreciate the difficulties which have had to be overcome in establishing the evolutionary perspective. Secondly, it enables us to see how sociohistorical factors and psychological needs of the sort just discussed can affect the scientific exploration of the topic. Thirdly, it reveals something of the central disciplines concerned raising matters of potential interest to anyone concerned with the psychological aspects of conceptual and theoretical change in the history of science. In any case, it would surely be paradoxical for the student of human evolution to ignore the evolution of its study!

This chapter falls into three principal sections: A The rise of the evolutionary perspective; B The great confusion; C Finding the ‘missing links’. These represent the period up to 1872, the period 1873 to 1913, and the period 1914 to 1960 respectively. The period since 1960 is considered as the ‘rearward portion of the present’. Like all such segmentations of the historical continuum this is largely artificial, but its rationale is as follows: the first period culminates in Darwin’s two works on human evolution, The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface to 2019 re-issue
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 The nature of the problem
• Chapter 2 Linnaeus to the Leakeys
• Chapter 3 Methods and data-bases
• Chapter 4 Brains and sex, meat and reason
• Chapter 5 Genes and culture, kindness and speech
• Chapter 6 From Erectus to Sapiens
• Appendix A Principal pre-Modern hominid fossils
• Appendix B Development of the hominid jaw
• Appendix C Hominid genealogy – seventy-two possibilities
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index