Unbound

How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

Richard L. Currier

• Publisher: Arcade
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781628727524
• eBook ISBN: 9781628725469
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: Social Sciences

Like Guns, Germs, and Steel, a work of breathtaking sweep and originality that reinterprets the human story. Although we usually think of technology as something unique to modern times, our ancestors began to create the first technologies millions of years ago in the form of prehistoric tools and weapons. Over time, eight key technologies gradually freed us from the limitations of our animal origins.The fabrication of weapons, the mastery of fire, and the technologies of clothing and shelter radically restructured the human body, enabling us to walk upright, shed our body hair, and migrate out of tropical Africa. Symbolic communication transformed human evolution from a slow biological process into a fast cultural process. The invention of agriculture revolutionized the relationship between humanity and the environment, and the technologies of interaction led to the birth of civilization. Precision machinery spawned the industrial revolution and the rise of nation-states; and in the next metamorphosis, digital technologies may well unite all of humanity for the benefit of future generations.Synthesizing the findings of primatology, paleontology, archeology, history, and anthropology, Richard Currier reinterprets and retells the modern narrative of human evolution that began with the discovery of Lucy and other Australopithecus fossils. But the same forces that allowed us to integrate technology into every aspect of our daily lives have also brought us to the brink of planetary catastrophe. Unbound explains both how we got here and how human society must be transformed again to achieve a sustainable future. Technology: "The deliberate modification of any natural object or substance with forethought to achieve a specific end or to serve a specific purpose."

CHAPTER 1

THE PRIMATE BASELINE

Tools, Traditions, Motherhood, Warfare, and the Homeland

“We must . . . acknowledge . . . that man, with all his noble qualities . . . still bears in his frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.”

—CHARLES DARWIN, The Descent of Man

When Charles Darwin first advanced the idea that the human species had evolved from an ape-like ancestor, he was greeted with howls of indignation from the clergy, the public, and many of the learned scholars of his time. In spite of all the obvious similarities between the human body and the bodies of monkeys and apes, Darwin was portrayed as a heretic whose theories contradicted not only the biblical story of creation but also the widely held belief that the human species was far too unique to have sprung from such a “lowly origin” (see Figure 1.1). By the time of his death, however, Darwin’s views on evolution had become widely accepted, and since his time, the evolutionary connection between humans and prehistoric apes has been demonstrated by paleontologists and geneticists with a thoroughness and precision that Darwin himself could never have imagined.

Human beings may be related to apes and monkeys in the sense that we share a common ancestry, but humans are unique in ways that unequivocally separate us, not only from primates, but also from all other forms of life. Most of this book explores the technology-driven changes that gradually transformed us into much more than just another animal species. But in order to make sense out of the strange complexities of human society and culture, we have to begin by understanding the primate baseline—the anatomy and behavior of monkeys and apes. These were the genetic starting points, the natural raw materials, out of which the unique anatomy and behavior of human beings evolved. By understanding the nature of these evolutionary building blocks, we can more fully appreciate how far we have come—and how far we have yet to go.

The stamp of our primate ancestry is obvious in every aspect of human anatomy. The human hand evolved from the need to grasp the branches of trees with a powerful, secure grip. The human shoulder, which allows the arm to rotate into a fully vertical position, evolved from the need to hang by the arms from overhead branches. The human foot, beautifully adapted to walking and running on two legs over the open ground, was originally a grasping “hand” designed for climbing trees.

Apart from its comparatively small mouth and high forehead, the human face is a typical primate face. It is hairless around the eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, with prominent eyebrows.1 The nose is short, because the sense of smell is not important for survival in the trees. And both eyes face forward for binocular vision, because this type of vision enables primates to judge distances in three-dimensional space and is thus vital for moving quickly and easily through the trees.

Even the human voice evolved from the ancient primate need to communicate with friends, relatives, or rivals who may be hidden in the dense tropical foliage. In fact, all primates are vocal, and most species make a variety of sounds, each with its own special meaning. The gibbons of Southeast Asia even invent their own songs, which they sing in the forest every day before dawn. And while our bodies are no longer capable of climbing trees to dizzying heights with the ease of apes and monkeys, we still find a singular pleasure in being perched in high places with commanding views.

In addition to providing us with the basic features of our distinctive human physical characteristics, the influence of our primate ancestry can be clearly seen in many basic elements of human behavior. Like most primates, we are a social, group-living species. We mature slowly and remain dependent on our mothers for the first several years of our lives, and we form intense bonds with our mothers, siblings, and mates that often last for our entire lives. We organize ourselves into social hierarchies, and within these hierarchies we compete with our siblings, classmates, and coworkers who are similar in rank to ourselves. At the same time, we defer to our parents, teachers, and bosses who outrank us, and we expect deference from our children, students, and employees whom we outrank.

Even the much-vaunted human ability to create and pass on distinctive cultures exists in a rudimentary form among many other higher animals, including whales, elephants, and even prairie dogs. Modern field studies by primatologists have established beyond question that monkey and ape societies are also capable of creating and maintaining the basic building blocks of culture, in which customs and traditions are invented by individuals, passed to other members of the group through imitation and practice, and handed down to succeeding generations from parents to offspring. Lastly, the use of tools and weapons, once considered the defining difference between humans and all other animals, has been identified unequivocally as part of the normal behavior of our closest genetic relative, the common chimpanzee.

Group Solidarity and the Homeland

Primates are highly social animals, and for the most part they spend their days in the companionship of other members of their group, sharing a common territory or home range from which other groups are excluded. While a group of primates willingly shares its homeland with its own members, it will aggressively drive away other members of its own species who belong to groups from other territories, and it will defend its own territory against neighboring groups—just as we do now and the hunter-gatherers did before us (see Figure 1.2).

For every primate group there is a “we” and a “they”—the insiders who belong to one’s own group and live in one’s own territory versus the outsiders who belong to other groups and live in alien territories. And every primate group defends its homeland against rival groups with noisy, hostile, and sometimes violent confrontations that often take place at the borders where adjacent territories meet. The members of two different groups of monkeys or apes scream at each other, make threatening gestures, break branches, throw things, and generally attempt to intimidate the other side.

Primates also distinguish between two fundamentally different types of ownership: communal property and personal property. The territory and natural resources of a group’s homeland—including sleeping trees, fruit trees, honeycombs, birds’ nests, drinking places, and so on—are generally considered to be the communal property of the group as a whole, and any member of the group has a right to use them. But when a particular piece of fruit is picked, a tasty insect is captured, or a nest of branches is constructed in a sleeping tree, that nest or morsel of food becomes the property of the individual who gathered or built it—and it is rarely shared with others.

Human societies all recognize these two types of property in the personal possessions that belong only to individuals versus the public territory shared by all members of the community (which in our society includes streets, roads, parks, and other public spaces). To these, humans have added a third type of property, the family possessions (especially food and dwellings) that are shared by the members of the family but not by the society as a whole.

Primate groups vary in size from a handful to 150 or more individuals. This size range is exactly the same as that found among the nomadic bands of human hunters and gatherers studied by anthropologists. The smallest primate groups consist of little more than a mother and her offspring, but most primate species live in larger groups that include adults, juveniles, and infants of both sexes. Some groups are little more than harems, in which several females live with a single dominant alpha male. This pattern is typical of gorillas, langurs, howler monkeys, and baboons.2 Still other species, such as rhesus monkeys and chimpanzees, live in groups with multiple males and females. These species typically have strong and lasting bonds with their mothers, but their sexual relationships are, from our human point of view, promiscuous—very casual and neither permanent nor exclusive.

Almost all primate groups consist of a complex web of relationships that binds the members of the group together with four distinct types of social bonds that are also fundamental building blocks in all human societies. These are: 1) the maternal relationship between mother and offspring; 2) the social hierarchies that bind individuals together in relationships of dominance and submission; 3) the friendships and alliances that can form between any two individuals; and 4) the sexual relationships that are formed and maintained between adult males and females.

Primate Motherhood

The maternal bond tends to be stronger and more intense among mammals than other animals simply due to the physical and emotional attachments formed during the weeks, months, or years that every female mammal spends nursing her young. And because primates are specially adapted to living in the trees, the maternal bond is more powerful and lasting among them than it is among any other group of mammals. Almost alone among the many species of placental mammals, primate mothers must physically carry their offspring with them, wherever they go, throughout the first months or years of life.

The reasons for this extraordinary maternal burden are easily identified. Since primates are adapted for a life in the trees—and since they must be constantly on the move to search for seasonal tree-borne foods—primates cannot construct permanent nests or burrows. This means that—unlike burrowing animals such as mice, rabbits, or foxes—they cannot hide their young from danger until they are old enough to be on their own. Moreover, a single stumble or fall from the treetops could easily be fatal to the immature primate.

It requires literally years of development before a young ape or monkey can safely travel through the treetops on its own, and until then it is dependent on its mother to provide safe transport from place to place. This is very different from terrestrial animals, whose young can harmlessly stumble and fall over and over as they learn to walk and run. For these reasons, the intensity, duration, and life-or-death significance of intimate physical contact between the primate mother and her offspring dwarfs that of any other higher animal.

In infancy, a monkey or ape will cling to the fur on its mother’s body with all four limbs, riding upside down under her belly almost continuously during the first few weeks or months of life. As it grows larger and stronger, the baby primate will begin to move about cautiously on its own, but it rushes back to its mother at the first sign of danger. As it passes out of infancy, the juvenile ape or monkey gradually makes the transition from riding upside-down on its mother’s belly to riding right-side-up on her back or shoulders—and this will continue for months or even years before it is old enough to give up this constant need for maternal contact.

The bond that develops between the primate offspring and its mother during these initial months and years of intimate physical contact typically lasts for life (see Figure 1.3). It is not surprising, therefore, that the maternal bond is central in the social life of all species of primates, while the paternal bond varies, depending on the species, from great importance to complete irrelevance.

The already powerful maternal bond typical of all primates became even more intense as four-legged, tree-dwelling primates evolved into two-legged, ground-dwelling humans. Human offspring mature more slowly than those of any other primate, and the period of maternal dependence is correspondingly longer. In the societies of monkeys and apes, adult females gain status and prestige in the group when their offspring are born. Likewise, the unique burdens and responsibilities of motherhood are recognized, valued, and celebrated in every human society by a wealth of cultural traditions that honor the special, life-long relationship between the human mother and her children. Humans are, however, unique in the strong bonds that typically develop between fathers and their offspring, a revolutionary development among group-living primates.

Primate Sexual Relationships

Stable sexual bonds and exclusive sexual relationships, including cooperation between males and females in the rearing of their offspring, appeared long ago in the history of life on Earth. Such relationships can be found among animals as primitive as fish, and they are nearly universal among birds, some of whom, such as geese, mate for life. Among mammals, however, sexual relationships are often neither stable nor exclusive, and they tend to vary greatly in character and importance from one species to another.

Sexual relationships among goats and sheep, for example, are usually limited to a few brief acts of copulation. The alpha males in these species, who have exclusive sexual rights over their herd of females, are far too busy mating and defending their rights to help any of their dozens of mates with the task of rearing their offspring. This is a typical pattern among animals that live in herds, such as the grazing herbivores.

At the other end of this continuum, the titi monkeys of South America form monogamous, often exclusive sexual relationships, and pairs of titi monkeys are rarely out of each other’s sight. When at rest, mated titis often sit next to each other with their tails intertwined, and they often seem to be more disturbed by expressions of distress from their mates than by expressions of distress from their offspring. It is notable that among titis, both sexes participate actively in caring for the young. In fact, after the first three months of infancy, the male titi may carry the offspring as much as 90 percent of the time. On the surface, this seems to parallel a pattern common to many human societies, but unlike the titi, different human societies vary tremendously in their attitudes toward the care of the young by males.

The various species of apes and monkeys exhibit many different patterns of sexual relationships, and not surprisingly the sexual relationships typical of humans are very different from those of any monkey or ape. Yet for all their differences, human sexual relationships contain many of the elements found in the typical relationships of the non-human primates, including the tendency of both humans and other primate males to compete for access to sexually active females. But among the most important differences between humans and all other primates is that women are the only female primates capable of being sexually active more or less continuously from puberty to old age.

When female monkeys and apes ovulate, they go into heat—technically the state of estrus—for approximately five to seven days about once each month, and females are sexually active only during these relatively brief estrus periods when they are ovulating and fertile. Estrus in most primates is characterized by a sudden and intense appetite for sex, accompanied by a conspicuous swelling of the female genitalia. But when estrus subsides, sexual relations cease until ovulation occurs again.

Among all non-human primates, females who are immature, pregnant, nursing, or have become infertile with age do not ovulate, do not experience estrus periods, and with rare exceptions do not engage in sexual intercourse at these times. Although different primate species vary greatly in the age of sexual maturation, in the frequency and duration of estrus, and in the intensity of sexual interactions, all non-human primate species—and indeed all higher animals—exhibit some version of this ancient sexual pattern.

The only exception to this rule occurs among the bonobo, or pygmy chimpanzee, in which many kinds of sexual play and genital stimulation take place daily between individuals of the same and opposite sexes and even among individuals of very different ages. But most of this sexual behavior does not include actual intercourse and seems to have little or no connection to either procreation or to forming bonds between males and females. Instead, sexual behavior among bonobos seems to function as a means of resolving conflict and reducing tension between individuals.

It is notable that of all the primates, the bonobo, by far the most sexually active of all primates (followed closely by the common chimpanzee), is generally considered to be most closely related to humans genetically. Bonobos have extremely long estrus periods (thirty days, versus approximately five to seven days for most primates), and estrus among bonobos occurs about once every forty-five days, leading to considerably more opportunities for sexual intercourse than is typical for other non-human primates. Even the hypersexual bonobos, however, do not continue having sexual intercourse during pregnancy, during nursing, or after menopause, as most humans do.

It is also noteworthy that neither bonobos nor common chimpanzees are sexually possessive or sexually exclusive. This is a striking contrast with humans, who are intensely competitive over sexual partnerships and who tend to be extremely possessive toward their mates. The significance of this radical departure from typical primate behavior will be explored in detail in the next chapter.

While intermittent sexual relations governed by the hormonal cycles of ovulation and estrus are universal among apes and monkeys, the patterns of mating and sexual bonding among the various primate species vary greatly between one species and another.

Monogamy, the most common form of sexual bonding among humans, is nonexistent among 97 percent of all mammalian species and is rare among apes and monkeys. Among the orangutans of Southeast Asia, a single adult male will establish a sexual relationship with two or more adult females who live apart from each other. Each female orangutan and her immature offspring typically live by themselves in the rainforest, where they are visited periodically by the adult male that fathered these offspring. At other times, this same adult male may also visit his other mates and their offspring living in nearby areas.

The gibbons and the closely related siamangs of Southeast Asia also live in isolated nuclear families, where male gibbons play an active role in caring for the offspring. The Southeast Asian rainforest is characterized by widely dispersed food sources, and this is thought to be the reason for the lack of large groups in this habitat. Groups this small, essentially consisting of a single nuclear family, however, tend to be rare in the primate world.

Two other types of sexual bonding among primates are much more common than the nuclear family group. The first is the harem system, in which a single dominant or alpha male has exclusive sexual rights over a specific group of females. The second is the multi-male, multi-female system, in which sexual relationships are transitory and sexual behavior is generally consid...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Primate Baseline: Tools, Traditions, Motherhood, Warfare, and the Homeland
• 2 The Technology of Spears and Digging Sticks: Upright Posture and Bipedal Locomotion
• 3 The Technology of Fire: Cooking, Nakedness, and Staying Up Late
• 4 The Technologies of Clothing and Shelter: Hats, Huts, Togas, and Tents
• 5 The Technology of Symbolic Communication: Music, Art, Language, and Ethnicity
• 6 The Technology of Agriculture: Permanent Villages and the Accumulation of Wealth
• 7 The Technologies of Interaction: Ships, Writing, the Wheel, and the Birth of Civilization
• 8 The Technology of Precision Machinery: Clocks, Engines, and Industrial Society
• 9 The Technology of Digital Information: The World Wide Web of Human Interaction
• 10 Our World at the Brink: Is Humanity Drifting Toward a Planetary Catastrophe?
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Photo Insert