Descent of Man, Pt. II
Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade, chapters 4 & 5
I am going to keep my promise to keep my initial summary of these chapters very short in the hope that contributors to this discussion, more learned in evolutionary theory than I, will share much of the burden. The story Wade wishes to tell in these chapters is how humanity developed in Africa and how, some 50,000 years ago, our ancestors made their way out of Africa and spread across the face of the earth.
Chapter IV: Eden
Wade bases his genetic argument on research done on the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA, "the only two parts of the human genome that escape th shuffling of genetic material between generations." The Y chromosome is carried by all men, and mitochondrial DNA by all humans. Mutations in the Y chromosome make it possible to divide men into groups. Since the form M168 occurs mostly in Africa, and since it is tentatively dated to 44,000 years ago, that gives a date before which the Exodus should have taken place. Parallel work on the click languages of Africa, which some linguists assign to a single family, tends to confirm the hypothesis. It seems a reasonable, though hardly a conclusive argument.
The San (people like the present Bushmen of the Kalahari) are, along with Pygmies and some other groups that have disappeared, perhaps the most primitive human ethnic groups, and Wade is hardly the first to suggest that they are closer to the human aboriginal population than any other group. Anthropologists have, however, pointed out that even conservative human groups are not entirely static, and it is possible that the San have degenerated.
Wade discusses Donald Brown's concept of Universal People, an analogy with Chomsky's (always Chomsky) Universal Grammar. This is really just a different way of talking about quasi-universal characteristics of human society, a subject pioneered in modern times by George Murdoch. In other words, the mother-child bond, male dominance, reciprocity and barter, belief in the supernatural and the practice of some kind of religion. There is a long line of studies, including my own The Politics of Human Nature, and Wade does not seem to realize that the recent works he is citing are hardly path-breaking. One older piece of information is that observation that the San typically work 40 hours a week or less to provide for necessities, make tools, etc.
He quite properly dismisses Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's characterization of the !kung san as "harmless," but he readily accepts the other erroneous term, egalitarian. While it is true that there is not much status to be had in a nomadic group of hunter-gatherers, men still dominate over women, adults over the immature, and parents over children. Since there is no need, at their primitive level of existence, for organized social structures, and since any family is free to wander off whenever it feels like it--fission being the normal way of resolving tensions--the !kung have nothing in the way of hierarchy. But, in a society based on the family, the father possesses considerable authority. In other words, one might just as well say that the !kung represent in embryonic form the patriarchal authority that develops into kingship and the state, just as they also represent most social institutions in embryonic form.
Chapter V: Exodus
Roughly 50,000 years ago, so his story goes, a small group of humans left Africa, perhaps in one wave, and made their way to India and eventually, as they split up, to Australia and Europe. They were not the first hominids to leave Africa, and they encounter opposition, particularly from the stocky, barrel-chested Neanderthals who live in Europe. Neanderthals had a large enough brain, but their behavior was not much advanced from their ape-like ancestors. Boys being boys, the groups may have interbred, but the Neanderthals' mitochondrial DNA, if it has been properly recovered and interpreted, is quite different from the modern humans'. The assumption is--and it can be no more than that--the superior toolkit, weaponry, and organization of the moderns wiped out their primitive competitors.
When a species spreads around the globe, the groups at extreme distances from each other develop distinctive traits. The classic case is the coloration of the herring gull, which goes from white to gray to black. The human extremes are perhaps the Australian aboriginals (and their New Guinea cousins) and European man. The aboriginals' culture was still paleolithic when Europeans arrived some 45,000 years later, while in Europe, cave paintings show a remarkable artistic sense very early on. Wade accepts the genetic explanation that an allele of the microcephalin gene developed about 37,000 years ago. This allele occurs in about 70% of individuals in Europe and East Asia, but it is rare (25%) in Africa. There are other genes associated with cultural development and intelligence, and Wade seems to be suggesting here--though he admits he is playing with fire--that the differences between, say, the Bushmen of the Kalahari and the ancient Sumerians is rooted in a genetically based difference of intelligence.
Chapter VI: Stasis
Wade wonders why it took 35,000 years, from the time he defeated the Neanderthals, for man to settle down and form permanent settlements. The scene is Europe, the best studied habitat of paleolithic man. Archaeologists define a series of periods.
The Aurignacian, from 45,000 to 28,000 years ago, was a period of pugnacious weapon-users who also decorated the Chauvet cave in France.
The Gravettian, from 28,000 to 21,000, is defined by a new set of stone tools, the invention of the bow, and by crude female figurines with overdeveloped breasts and buttocks suggestive of a fertility cult.
The Solutrean, 21,00 to 16,500 years ago, came after the "Last Glacial Maximum," which must have made global warming a welcome change. Some long thin tools, it is suggested, might have been made for ceremonial purposes.
The Magdalenian, 18,000-11,00 years ago, developed a lighter toolkit and continued to paint caves.
Obviously some of these cultures overlap in different parts of Europe, and archaeologists, on the basis of a few shards, weapon fragment, and paintings, have not explained the transition from one to another. Wade cites geneticists, however, who have looked at the distribution of sublineages of mitochondrial DNA. Comparing clusters found in Europe and the Middle East, they found that 11 clusters containing 40 lineages account for three fourths of the present European population. They could deduce, they believe, that 87% of Europeans are descended from ancestors "who arrived before the end of the Pleistocene ice age." The other 13%, it is believed, represent the later arrivals who brought a higher culture with them and led the move to the Neolithic Age. Since Basques have a higher percentage of older clusters, their region is assumed to have been the source of recolonization as the glaciers retreated. Thus, in this account, most modern Europeans are descended from palaeolithic inhabitants and not from the later Middle Eastern immigrants, as had been previously believed. This also implies that the ascent of Europeans to Neolithic culture was not the direct result of a genetic/ethnic shift but of cultural transmission.
As a sidelight, he takes up the taming of the wolf-dog, which may have taken place about 15,000 years ago in Siberia, about the time man was settling down and would have found these rare night-barking wolves useful. A lot of work on this has been done in recent years and it has made the popular media in the past few months. Some small percentage of wolves is able to get along with man and must have, more or less, domesticated themselves. These same creatures, domesticated dogs and tamable wolves, can apparently read human intentions better even than chimpanzees.
People from roughly Siberia also colonized the Americas, but I do not know what to make of the tissue of arguments to prove either the date or the waves (1) in which they came. I simply do not think that anything like proof can be established with such slippery variables. I am also less than enthusiastic about the attempts to trace the development of Mongoloid and Caucasoid races, in this chapter and elsewhere, on the basis of skin-pigmentation adaption to sunlight, absorbtion of Vitamin D and Folic acid. If the nature of modern science is bound up with testing hypotheses, I'd like to see, for example, some evidence that people with black skin have high rates of birth defects, miscarriage, etc., when they move to Scandinavia or Canada. Perhaps I am missing something.
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Questions and Comments:
1. The San (people like the present Bushmen of the Kalahari) are, along with Pygmies and some other groups that have disappeared, perhaps the most primitive human ethnic groups
How does Wade define “primitive”? Technologically? Culturally?
Many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea, I read The American Spectator , instead of Chroniclely. I am now about to borrow shamelessly a poorly remembered witticism of R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., as he discussed the abortion issue and the supposed untermenschlich character of the fetus, and rescript it: In my judgement, a man who can’t type with all 10 fingers and who isn’t “computer literate”; who has no taste for the so-called “Tridentine Mass”, for Rilke’s Duineser Elegien, for Mozart’s so-called “Grand Partita ”, for Cuban cigars, and for Italian Primitivo wine; and who is so gauche in his manners as to pop paper bags around people with heart problems – is“primitive”. Doubtless many Cultural Marxists – for all their public poesy about “multiculturalism” and “diversity” – in the quiet of their libraries would agree with me.
2. Neanderthals had a large enough brain, but their behavior was not much advanced from their ape-like ancestors. Boys being boys, the groups may have interbred, but the Neanderthals’ mitochondrial DNA, if it has been properly recovered and interpreted, is quite different from the modern humans’. The assumption is–and it can be no more than that–the superior toolkit, weaponry, and organization of the moderns wiped out their primitive competitors.
27 years ago a physical anthropologist told me that one can still find the “classic” (i.e., "European") Neanderthal features in Western Europe, with the unbroken eyebrow bone and even the “bun” on the back of skull. He himself found many such types driving taxis in Paris. All suggesting interbreeding. True?
I can’t vouch for this myself. I do know that the best living specimen of the old Roman features that I ever saw – with the square jaw, the big nose, all so very different from the rest of the Italians –, himself the splitting image of the likenesses that we have of Caesar (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Gaius_Julius_Caesar.jpg: top row, 2nd from left) (or at least the ones that aren’t idealized), was a taxi driver who once drove me from the Pantheon to Santa Agnese Fuori le Mura.
My anthropologist teacher added: Going back further than Neanderthals, the first human tools that we have, stone scrapers, require enough intelligence to look at the stone and image the scraper in it – no mean effort!
Did Neanderthals bury their dead? Use fire?
3. The aboriginals’ culture was still paleolithic when Europeans arrived some 45,000 years later, while in Europe, cave paintings show a remarkable artistic sense very early on.
Is the boomerang – hardly a “primitive” tool – paleolithic? Maybe it is. And the same physical anthropologist told me that however “simple” the Australian Aborigine might seem with respect to technology, his family relations are vastly more complex than modern Europeans. He said that in Aborigine culture the male who has charge over offspring is the mother’s eldest brother, and that 1st and 2nd “cousin” are different words. Even the ancient Romans had a more complex family order, e.g. avus instead of something like “pater magnus” for “grandfather”.
With respect to these three points, I may indeed be misinformed. My anthropologist was, alas, a “flaming liberal”.
"How does Wade define 'primitive'? Technologically? Culturally? "
It is a good question. I always thought the word "primitive" was strictly forbidden in anthropology, where the fear of being labeled "ethnocentric" is so intense, that one is forced to purport from word go, that all cultures are equal. Therefore there is probably some context (perhaps simple chronology -- that these people have changed, in EVERY category, less than other cultures, over the course of history) in which his use of the word can be construed as relative, and thus not unacceptable in academia. Otherwise we are witnessing a cosmic singularity : a politically incorrect anthropologist.
It's increasingly clear that human evolution did not cease 50,000 years ago. A good example is lactose tolerance, allowing adults to digest milk, which arose with the domestication of cattle at a time-horizon of only a few thousand years. Another is the metabolic changes among those who live at extremely high altitudes, as in the Andes and the Himalayas.
There is no reason to think that such evolution has not also occurred with respect to cognitive capacity and social disposition as well.
The place to be cautious is in drawing policy conclusions from these hypotheses and data.
Lactose intolerance, my Physical Anthropology teacher told me, is a question of diet. Occidentals as a rule don’t have it because they keep eating and drinking milk products long after weaning. Most folk in the world don’t. Ever heard of Chinese cheese? Americans keep drinking milk even as adults, something I’ve never seen elsewhere; and for that reason American athletes find themselves ridiculed in the canteen of the Olympics by souls ignorant of American ways.
The same with falling arches. Most folks’ arches fall at 20 years of age; Occidentals’ don’t because of their shoes, this malady setting in around 60.
Some things may be inherited. By rumor, Africans are said to more likely suffer sickle cell anemia, Orientals bad eyesight, and Celts alcoholism.
As for folks up in the Blue, I’m totally uninformed, and thank Herr Grumpy for enlightening me.
Not having the book in front of me, I cannot say whether or not Wade or I introduced the word primitive into the conversation, but his argument leaves no doubt as to his meaning. I, too, found it strange and had previously made the point that anthropologists are very wary of such an approach. According to the geneticists cited by Wade, there is no evidence in the current human gene pool, at least none so far detected, of specifically Neanderthal genes, but if such people accounted for only a small fraction of the European population I am not so sure that there would still be a Neanderthal footprint.
E.E. Evans-Pritchard, though not much given to French-style speculation, once wrote a little book taking up Lucien Lévy-Bruhl's once famous then rejected theory of primitive mentality. (Primitives cannot make ordinary distinctions of subject/object, image and reality, shadow and thing, etc.) Evans-Pritchard suggested that anthropologists had been as hasty in rejecting the theory as L-B had been rash in proposing it. He argued, partly on the basis of his own long-term and patient study of the Nuer, that L-B was not far off base in his characterization except that he missed the obvious fact that primitives are very practical and have no trouble in practice distinguishing between what they see in a dream and what they see while they are awake. Nonetheless, in some circumstances they frequently refuse to make such distinctions. Hence, for example, the story I heard from a physician who had given a wife some medicine for her sick husband to take. She immediately took a dose herself on the grounds that they were the same person.
E-P also pointed out that only a small fraction of people in civilized societies were much more advanced than the primitives--hence Bob Tyrell's Menkenesque remark about people ignorant of Mozart and Rilke (though, to be frank, I could as likely imagine Tyrell performing brain surgery as reading Rilke. European big-brained apes have been coasting off the Greeks for a very long time, and yet most people I meet cannot open their mouths without showing their ignorance of the most basic logical principles, i.e., non-contradiction. Most of us, including scientists when they step outside their field, are pre-Parmenidean.
My personal hunch is that our barbarian ancestors--Celts, Slavs, Germans--needed Greeks and then Romans to teach them a civilization they could never have developed by themselves. It took about 1000 years to create a substantial class of civilized Europeans who promptly rejected first Christianity and then Greek and Latin and are galloping headlong back to their beloved barbary. Nietzsche, though usually hysterical in his hatred of the Catholic Church, says somewhere that Luther gave the Germans the chance they needed to reject the Mediterranean civilization and to back to their native savagery.
I don't entirely believe any of this, but I am not alone in noticing that if the 19th century rejected Christ and his Church, as indeed the elite class did, then the 20th can be characterized by the rejection of Latin as the basis of education. Most members of the last educated generation died out some decades ago. I do not say that all civilizations depend on Latin and Greek, only that ours does. And we speakers of degenerate English are in particularly desperate straits because our language, unlike, say German, Italian, and Russian, has virtually no formal grammar except what had been borrowed from Latin (hence the ruinous efforts of Chomsky et co.). At least a German has to think a little about cases, moods, tenses, and an educated Italian has access to a language almost as formally complex as Latin (4 tenses of the subjunctive used according to Latin rules), while we speak the language of Tarzan.
I know what you all are thinking, that I made up Raymond Cuttill as a fictional character to satirize the men's rights movement. Next you will be thinking that Mr. Cuttill (or is it Cattell) is spoofing us. Alas, there is no need to make these creatures up, and they are completely without humour. I am sure Mr. Cuttill and his legions of exploited men were not skirth-chasters in their youth. I know I was. If the poor fellow would like to learn something about maleness, I recommend my own The Politics of Human Nature. He might learn a fact or two about sex differences.
A quick word of thanks for rejuvenating the booklog. I've really enjoyed going through the Wade (a book I never even would have heard about on my own) and reading your commentaries (as well as the others') on it. Among many other things, you've presented a very helpful method for approaching these sorts of "pop-scientistic" books.
And I simply can't thank you enough for re-introducing Dryden! I hope the others have been going back to him, too. I've just about finished Marriage-a-la-Mode, and hope to add a couple comments/observations on that play plus All For Love and Shakespeare's A&C over the next couple days. So you may want to keep your eye on that thread as well.
Are you still willing to do some Jane Austen in the near future? If so, I'd like to vote for either Mansfield Park or Sense and Sensibility. But any Austen would be great...
I'll check back on Dryden. You might send the webmaster an email alert to be sent to me when you post something there. I just reread Sense and Sensibiilty and rediscovered how much harsher she is in that novel than in Pride and Prejudice. The moony sister is absolutely intolerable.
To RC: Let us get this straight. You entered into the middle of a conversation about a book, a conversation that has already included about 100 contributions. Rather than comment on the book or the argument, you attempt to distract the conversation by imposing some politically correct standard for how one may, on one's own website and presumably in one's own magazine or in the privacy of one's bedroom, talk about male female differences, a subject, by the way, on which you display in your offhand remarks appalling ignorance, and then you wish to complain. This complaint is even better than your first posting, and it reveals what I have said for years, that the so-called mens movement--which should be called the genetically male persons movement--is trying to complete the feminists' campaign to turn men into capons.
Poor Mr. Cuttill, I cannot devote the next few hours to introducing you to the topic of sexual dimorphism, though even Wade's not very good book, could be a start. Don't bother to read my book, but it will give you some of the important bibliography down to the end of the 1980's or if you want something simpler, start with Steve Goldberg's Inevitability of Patriarchy.
You mean, you broke into a conversation without checking up on what it was about, thought someone named Steve Jones had something to do with it, presumed to impose your Orthodoxy on people of whom you know nothing, harp on an old man's clumsy typing, and then expect to be asked to tea and given a lecture on scientific subjects you think you have a right to speak about without doing any work. Oh, I forgot, you then attribute imaginary positions to people so that you can knock them down.
I suggested Goldberg as a starting point for someone who apparently needs to begin with the ABC's of sexual dimorphism--hardly an arcane phrase and something you might, if you have the slightest interest in the topic, take the trouble to look up. The fact that women in some societies may inherit power from their male relatives does not fundamentally alter the basic structure of the societies. Hatshepsut--a rather poor ruler, by the way-- is said to have worn a beard on public occasions and Elizabeth I was rumored (probably falsely) to shave. The reason for such stories is obvious: The expectation that a ruler would be a man. Most English queens (the Stuarts, for example) other than Elizabeth I have exercised power through powerful male advisors and through husbands.
It is not that no woman anywhere has ever held power, but that men and women are programmed differently, in the womb and again at puberty, by genes and genetically determined hormones which affect size, strength, and brain development. Men are far more subject to the libido dominandi, while women are more attached to hearth and home, as their circumstances until very recently made necessary. Males and females also have different sexual strategies, except in societies whose decadence has doomed to extinction, such as in modern Europe and the US, where women abort some of their children, surrender others to daycare, and, in general, do not provide children to replace their parents and maintain the population. In Britain and the US, it is Third World immigrants who have the babies. How much more do you need?
Any number of books on sexual differences, many written by feminist scientists, will document these generalizations. But if scientific research is "arcane," then I cannot imagine on what basis you would presume to draw conclusions that even to the peasant mind much seem counter-factual and absurd. This is all I have to say on this matter until you undertake a course of reading that will give you the right to entertain (much less express) an opinion in a forum such as this.
Excuse me: "must seem counter-factual". These poor old arthritic fingers that cannot type 50 words a minute without making mistakes, such as misspelling skirt-chaser.
I'll try to post brief notes on another chapter later today and then must go to Louisiana to give lectures on Pope Pius IX.
It's a wonderful world out there in bla-bla land, but this is a conversation and not Hyde Park where any crank with a megaphone may annoy passersby.
The Steve Jones cited above is not the Sex Pistols member, as you all may be thinking, but a geneticist and pop-science TV presenter in the UK, a somewhat less controversial Richard Dawkins-- or is that Roger Daltrey, who also has views on biology.