5:  The Descent of Man:  Out of Africa

 

This chapter puts together a picture of the way humans got here.   It focuses on the final steps that took place between 6.7 million years, ago and 50,000 years ago, when the first members of the group called ‘modern humans’ appeared on this planet.  

Our group of beings, meaning our species and subspecies, is ‘homo sapiens sapiens.’

 

Note that the term ‘sapiens’ is repeated
This is not a typo. 
          Until DNA evidence showed otherwise, scientists placed modern humans in a species of our own.  We were ‘homo sapiens.’  DNA evidence has confirmed that there were two other groups of beings in this species.  They bred with our ancestors and had babies that were viable.  The internationally accepted rules of zoological classification require that they be placed in the same species. 
          This means that all three of these groups of beings are ‘homo sapiens.’ 
          There are three subspecies in this species:
         
          1.  Homo sapiens neanderthalis (neanderthals)
          2.  Homo sapiens denisova (denisovans)
          3.  Homo sapiens sapiens (us). 
         
          The term ‘sapiens’ means ‘intelligent ones.’   Homo sapiens are the most intelligent hominids.  Our subspecies, also sapiens, means that we are the most intelligent of all of the different super-intelligent hominids. 

 

Denny

 

I want to take a little aside here to talk about something you may find if you are trying to get more information about this topic on the internet or in research journals.  Earlier, I talked about the perspective this book takes:  I want to look at our past as would an outsider with no vested interests, no need to try to match whatever standards currently pass for political correctness  and no vanity to protect.  That last one is pretty important.

People want to believe that humans are, well, a lot better than the evidence of our past tells us we are.  I kind of want this, and I pride myself on being open minded.  We want to believe that there is a clear and dramatic differences between humans and the beings that used to be called ‘animals’ and now are called ‘lower animals’ (because even the most resistant to change have a very hard time finding arguments to defend the claim that humans are not animals.)   We all kind of want to think there is a hard line between ‘us’ and ‘them.’   (After all, we eat them.  We don’t want to think we are eating beings that are basically in the same category as we are.)   This makes us naturally resistant to the basic premise of evolution.  Evolution says there is no hard line.  It says there is a transition, tiny step by tiny step, codon by codon in a 1 billon character block of genetic code, with each step being indistinguishable from the one before it. 

DNA provides clear evidence that we, modern humans, are in the same species as both neanderthals and denisovans.  Evidence in one particular cave, the Denisova Cave in Sibera, includes DNA of denisovans, neanderthals, ‘modern humans’ and evidence of ‘first generation hybrids of these beings, bones from a 13 year old ‘mixed breed’ girl who anthropologists call ‘Denny’ (technically ‘denisova 11’). 

A great deal of other evidence has shown that we descend from denisovans and neanderthals:  All modern humans yet tested have some DNA from either denisovans, neanderthals, or both.   But people still want to find a way to draw a line.  As long the only evidence is tiny fragments of DNA that could conceivably predate the ‘creation event’ that led ‘our species,’ they can make this claim:  It is still up in the air.  All the facts are not in.  There is a line between us and animals.  We are not animals.  Denny’s DNA provides some pretty convincing evidence that this line does not exist. 

I have spent most of my life in academia and academics prefer a certain kind of evidence:  we like evidence from something called ‘peer reviewed journals.’  To get and keep a job in academia, people must publish articles.  (The old saying goes ‘publish or perish.’)  this doesn’t mean publish articles in a local newspaper.  To count, the articles must be published in an established and reputable peer reviewed journal.  The people who review professors in universities to determine how much to pay them have ratings of all of the journals and give points for publishing in the ones with higher ratings.  This is where I like to find my background information.  It comes from sources that have been subjected to intense criticism and survived. 

Much of the information I got from this source went against the commonly accepted ideas about how existence works.  It isn’t possible to give searchable and verifiable references to the articles themselves because the journals require all authors of the articles to sign over all rights to the article to the journals before publishing.  The journals then charge enormous sums of money to anyone who wants to even read one of these articles.  Even if I could find a way to get the text, most people wouldn’t be convinced, because academics use language that almost seems intended to be confusing, and their proofs are generally mathematical and wouldn’t be comprehensible to any without backgrounds in higher math.

I wanted to find links in the part of the internet that is of interest to and available to ordinary people to back up some of the information I got from other sources, and put together in this book.   This is where I found that the ‘common people’ ideas about how the world works and the academic ideas are very, very different.  One example makes this pretty easy to see.  The vast majority of the articles I read that were written for lay persons (ordinary people without academic credentials) state, with a great air of confidence (but without any references) that that neanderthals and denisovans are both ‘extinct species’ of early humans.  Many of the articles that state this include quotes from articles that clearly show that modern humans have both neanderthal and denisovan ancestry.

This fact contradicts the claim that ‘they are extinct.’  If your great grandfather is dead, and you are still alive, it is not possible for your grandfather’s species to be extinct.  It still exists in you.  Neanderthals are not extinct.  We are them and they are us.  Denisovans are not extinct.  We are them and they are us. 

I want to let you know why this is important:  Shortly, we will look at evidence that shows that some members of the pan genus, our evolutionary ancestors, clearly had and still have (among those that survive in the wild) societies that work very much like modern human societies.  Their species is divided into groups called ‘troops’ that are a kind of tribal units.  Each troop has a territory.  The territory is surrounded by borders.  The members of the troop organize patrols of these borders.  If the individuals on border patrol detect violations of their borders, they send one of the border patrol agents back to the home base where other members of the troop are waiting, while others attack the ones who patrol their borders.  When reinforcements arrive, they fight in brutal battles that often result in death.  From time to time, these battles over borders grow to such severity that analysts who watch them call them ‘wars.’  They look just like human wars. 

We do the same thing.  Why?   It doesn’t seem that anyone has sat down and determined that this was a good idea, that the people of the world (at some point) voted on it and agreed it was the way to organize our societies.  These systems must have come to exist some other way.

This is why understanding and accepting evolution is important:  If we can understand it and accept it, we can follow the line of events and see how the societies of the ancient apes of Africa evolved into the societies we have now. 

We will see that there are very clear reasons that apes lived this way:  Evolutionary forces required them to do it.  But there is no real need for beings that are capable of higher intellect to live this way.  (They were fighting over feeding territory.  We have trucks that can move food anywhere; we have no real need to be the absolute masters of agricultural land to eat.) 

However, if we accept that we evolved from them, and the societies we inherited evolved from the societies they passed down to their descendants, we can see why we do many of the things we do that are otherwise pretty much impossible to explain.  We aren’t really forming into countries and building nuclear bombs to defend the borders to land that God gave to our ancestors in some land grant 4,000 years ago.  (You can find various land grants to important people in all three religions described in Genesis starting Chapter 10 in the Christian version and in the same general position relative to other scriptures in the holy books of Judaism and Islam.  People have been using religion to get people to turn into animals so they will kill with wild abandon for at least 4,000 years.  If you read today’s news, you will the leaders use these same arguments today.)  

Why do we do this?  In the next few chapters, I will show that there is a very smooth and clear transition that we can follow, step by step, from the early systems of the ancient apes to, well, yesterday’s conflicts.  It is all understandable.  But it is only understandable if you are willing to accept that the transition took place.  In other words, if you can allow yourself to believe that there was no magic event where some being said some words or a spark from lighting changed a being that was still an ape into an entirely different being that you would recognize as a human. 

This is where perspective matters.  Scientists and analysts from another world, with no vanity to protect and no embarrassment about what they might be implying if they accepted the evidence, would not hesitate to accept the evidence.  It tells us that there was a smooth and orderly transition that took place over a period of more than six million years that started with apes and ended with you and me.  There was no hard line anywhere in this transition. 

There is an old saying ‘don’t beat a dead horse.’   It means don’t keep going on a topic after you are sure that the people listening already accept the things you say.  I know it seems I am beating a dead horse here, but I have a reason for this.  Most of us accept evolution on one level and will argue it until the end of time against a religious person.  But there is still a part of us, I think all of us, that don’t want to really accept.  I think that this is one of the main reasons that we are in the mess we are now in.  There is information we can use to help us move to a better world.  But we just don’t want to accept, at least not fully. 

So, I want to ask you a favor.  Please be open minded when you read the passages that follow in the next few chapters.  I think you will be torn between two different emotions that push you to reject it.  The first will be the feeling that it is demeaning to think of humans as simply apes that happen to be able to speak in complex ways and have the brain connections needed to design and build nuclear bombs. 

You will feel, on the one hand, that I am insulting not just you, but all of the great people who lived in the past and did incredible things.  They have some sort of special quality that sets them apart from apes.  They are not in the same category and there has to be some point where a magic event took place.  

On the other hand, you will feel insulted and patronized about the continual attempts to reinforce the message above.  You get it.  It is insulting to keep beating the dead horse.  I want you to know that I feel very deeply about what I am trying to do.  I am not trying to insult anyone.  Try to see if you can muster the same perspective I have.  You are not you, a human on this little blue world with a need to make a living, pay taxes, and support an insane system.  You are an outsider, with the ability to look at these beings as they really are, not as they think they are.  From this perspective, you will see that there really are solutions to the problems that you would think do not have solutions if you get too close to them.

 

Where are we From?

 

Let’s start by setting the scene: 

Our closest evolutionary ancestors, the chimps and bonobos, lived in tropical Africa between 6.7 million years ago and today.  This is where our ancestors are from and therefore where we are from.  It is our ancient homeland. 

The illustration below is a satellite image of Africa.  It is essentially a photograph, showing what you would see if you were on a satellite about 2,500 miles over Africa on a clear day. 

 

 

There are several important details I would like to ask you to take note of: 

First, the central part of the image is deep green in color.  This tell us several things.  First, it tells us that this area gets a lot of rain.  The horizontal line at the center of this green area is the equator. 

This is the half way point between the north pole and south pole.  It is the place where the sun beats down on the earth every single day of the year with the same ferocity.  The sun has more energy here than anywhere else on earth because it is shining from directly above, not at an angle. 

Most of the surface of the earth around the equator is ocean.  When the sun hits the ocean, the energy of the sunlight causes water to evaporate.  Giant clouds billow up from the equatorial ocean every day.  The clouds want to stay around the equator:  the air currents that blow clouds to the north and south in areas far from the equator don’t exist in this central location.  The clouds contain millions of tons of water in the form of vapor.  They circle the globe.  If they hit mountains, they would rise and cool, causing their moisture to fall as rain.  But there are no mountains for more than 10,000 miles to the east of Africa or more than 5,000 miles to the west.  The clouds accumulate and get thicker and thicker. 

Eventually, this ring of equatorial clouds hits the mountains of Africa. 

The highest mountain range in equatorial Africa is called the Rwenzoris.  When the moist air hits the Rwenzoris, it has to rise.  The higher it goes, the colder it gets.  At a certain point, it is too cold for the moisture to remain in vapor form.  It condenses into rain.  It rains in these mountains nearly every day.  With rich soil, abundant rain, and plentiful sun, plants grow better here than they do just about anyplace on earth.  As a result, this is one of the most densely vegetated on earth. 

If you look closely at the picture, you will see many of different shades of green.  Each represents an different vegetative area. 

Most of the green area is thick jungle.  In many places it is so thick that, if you travel to the ‘canopy’ (and you can do on canopy walk tours), you can’t even see the ground. 

Note that if you go just a short distance from the equator, about 12 degrees to the north, the green disappears entirely.  All you can see is tan, the color of the immense sand dunes of the Sahara desert.  The change in the south is less dramatic, but you can still easily see that the land to the south is not as green as that along the equator and there are many brown patches indicating barren desert. 

Note that the green zone is isolated from any possible rout from equatorial Africa to what we may call the ‘rest of the world by a massive desert, the Sahara, which is the hottest and driest part of the world and, even today, is roadless and generally impassable.  If you left the green zone in Sudan, and tried to travel to the north across the desert, you would have to go more than 4,000 miles, to Tunis, to find another habitable place.  To the east and west are oceans.  The to the south isn’t connected with the rest of the world. 

There is one way, however, to get from the green zone to the rest of the world that takes you along a habitable route:  If you look closely at the photo, you will see a tiny ribbon of green that snakes through the desert to the north.  (It is tiny because we are looking at it from 7,500 miles away in this image).  This ribbon of green is the Nile River. 

A group of beings that lived in the green zone and wanted to go to the rest of the world (for any reason at all) would probably have no real chance of getting out unless they could find the Nile and follow it. 

We will see shortly that this is a very important fact because, if we understand it, we can understand a great many of the mysteries of human evolution, including the mystery of how the first sapient beings learned how to use fire and how this dramatic change altered the evolving beings in ways that basically forced them down the paths that they later took, and that we are still on today. 

The story of descent of man starts in the green zone, where our ancient ancestors evolved. 

 

The Pan genus

 

The genus ‘pan’ has two surviving members: 

 

1.  Pan troglodyte (chimpanzees or chimps),

2.  Pan panicus (bonobos, nicknamed ‘hippie apes’)

 

When scientists began studying these animals in the 1960s, thought they were looking at two entirely different species.  Different species must have different names, so they gave them the different names listed above.  (The genus is ‘pan’ in both cases.  One has a species name ‘troglodyte’ and the other has a species name ‘panicus.’) 

DNA evidence has shown scientists that this classification was wrong.  These two kinds of animals had almost identical DNA.  They lived differently and were anatomically different.  But their DNA was virtually identical.  Some suspected they might be members of the same species.  To test this, they put chimps and bonobos together in the same zoo enclosure.  (These two different animals have entirely different habitats and don’t come into contact in the wild.  But once humans capture them, we can put them wherever we want.)  

When they were put together, they had sex and babies. 

Under standard zoological classification rules, if two animals can reproduce and have viable offspring, they are the same species.  So, chimps and bonobos are actually the same species.  Scientists haven’t had a chance to give this a single species name yet, but eventually they will have the same species name. 

Why where researchers so sure they were different species? 

This is actually an important issue for the analysis here, so I want to go over it.  The basic reason is that these different groups of animals live entirely differently and have entirely different arrangements of existence or ‘societies.’ 

These two different groups choose different geographical areas in their living spaces.  Chimpanzees (pan troglodytes) only live in rich and highly productive areas that have what Jane Goodall called ‘monopolizable patches’ of land.  (Goodall was the first researcher to try to study these animals in the wild.  Her findings were highly controversial when she first published them, because they made chimps appear to be far closer to humans than zoologists thought they would be.  But her findings have since been verified by many others.  She posts most of her results on her website https://janegoodall.org.)  

Chimpanzees live stationary lives, staying in a very tiny area from birth to death.  (She says they are ‘homebodies.’)   The areas where they live are so rich and productive that they never have to leave:  there is ripe fruit available for them to simply grab any time of year. 

Goodall’s term ‘monopolizable patches’ areas refers to the fact that specific groups of chimpanzees (called ‘troops’) can monopolize these areas using techniques that are practical for them.  They monopolize these areas by creating borders around them, building paths along these borders, and patrolling the paths on a regular basis.  They use aggression and intimidation to make sure outsiders (members of their species that are not part of their troop) don’t approach too close to the borders.  If outsiders do approach the borders, they use violence against them and either drive them away or kill them. 

Using these techniques, the chimpanzees monopolize the resources in these patches of land.  Chimpanzees are extremely aggressive, possessive, violent, and highly territorial.  They form into tightly knit troops that are fanatically loyal.  They have almost constant conflict with outsiders.  These conflicts often escalate to the point where researchers use the word ‘wars’ to describe them.  Death in these wars is one of the leading causes of mortality in chimpanzee societies. 

Bonobos (pan panicus) live entirely differently.  They don’t seem interested in the highly productive areas where chimps want to live.  (Perhaps they have learned from experience that they will have to fight very aggressively, with a high likelihood of death, if they want to live on the land that is most productive.  Perhaps some evolutionary force tells them they are more likely to survive if they simply shun these areas and move to areas that the chimps don’t want.  They can live there without fighting, killing, and risking death daily.  We will look at the details below.)  

The bonobos live in land that doesn’t produce enough to be monopolizable.  This means they can’t stay in the same place and live in the same ‘homes’ (nests) every night.  They have to migrate, at least part of the year.  This makes it impossible for them to monopolize any area (pick it out, build borders around it, and then use violence to prevent outsiders from sharing the land). 

Chimpanzees are fanatically territorial.  If outsiders cross their borders, they will kill them and tear the dead bodies to pieces to leave as messages to those who may try the same thing. 

Bonobos are not territorial at all. 

They travel from place to place, moving from one food source to another as seasons change. 

Chips are fiercely loyal.  They form into very tight groups called ‘troops.’  The members of these troops act collectively to protect the interests of their troops.  They are clearly willing to kill for the benefit of their troops.  They are also clearly willing to die for their troops.  They will often give their lives to make sure that outsiders get the message:  the land inside their borders belongs to their troop.  They have monopoly rights to it.  No member of their species that is not a member of their troop can expect to get away with trying to benefit from the existence of this land. 

Bonobos don’t even form into groups.  I will quote some research below that  shows that they intermingle to such an extent it isn’t even really possible to classify them as members of groups at all.  They are a bunch of individuals who get along with all members of their species.  They travel a lot and socialize with others wherever they go. 

Chimps and bonobos are the same species.  This species made its appearance 6.7 million years ago.  Then it split into two groups that lived two entirely different ways

What could cause a split like this?

This actually isn’t very hard to explain.  Chimps and bonobos live in entirely different environmental conditions.  Animals must adapt to their environments.  If they don’t, nature destroys them.  We will see that the two environmental conditions call for entirely different behavioral patterns.  In one area, aggression and violence are necessary:  groups that don’t act this way will not be able to live there.  The animals that wound up going to these areas and living there adapted in ways that led to the chimp societies described above. 

In other areas, aggression and violence are disadvantages:  animals that live this way will not be able to survive under these environmental conditions.  Only those that adapt to be tolerant, generous, empathetic, and non territorial can live there.  The animals that moved to these areas were, at first, identical to chimps.  But over time, they adapted to the realities of their environment to form the bonobo societies discussed above.  After millions of years of separation and adoption, they began to look a little different.  But genetically, they are virtually identical. 

Later, when we got to the early stages of human evolution, we will see that early humans lived in different environmental conditions also. 

Some early members of the homo sapiens sapiens (modern humans) lived in the vast and nearly empty tundras and steppes of Siberia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Nepal, and Tibet.  (Many still live there.)   They adapted to their environment and came to have societies that operated a very particular way.  Others lived in crowded ‘city states’ with massive walls that separated them from the outside world.  These people adapted to their environment also.  This adaptation led to entirely different societies than the ones that evolved in remote areas. 

In today’s world, people raised with different ‘ways of life’ or ‘societies’ don’t see eye to eye on many matters.  This leads to conflicts.  Many of these conflicts have been quite serious.  I shouldn’t really use the past tense here, because they aren’t over:  the conflicts are ongoing, and you can read about the latest in today’s news.  These conflicts have great potential to escalate into wars that may destroy the world.  If we want to understand these things, we need to understand the way the different cultures or societies of the world evolve. 

The two members of the pan genus are our closet evolutionary ancestors that still exist.  We have some closer ancestors.  Homo erectus, for example, homo habilis, homo sapiens neanderthalis and homo sapiens denisovan are all closer to modern humans than pans.  But we cant study their cultures or societies because none of these closer relatives are with us in the world today.  If we want to study the way the societies and behavioral patterns of modern humans came to be as they are, and want to try to ‘turn back time’ and study the behaviors of our ancestors, the best we can do is look at these two members of the pan genus. 

 

Our Aggressive and Territorial Ancestors, the Chimpanzees

 

The quote below is from an article on the website of the Institute of Human Origins, a division of Arizona State University:

 

When male chimpanzees of the world’s largest known troop patrol the boundaries of their territory in Ngogo, Uganda, they walk silently in single file

Normally chimps are noisy creatures, but on patrol they’re hard-wired.  They sniff the ground and stop to listen for sounds.  Their cortisol and testosterone levels are jacked 25 percent higher than normal.  Chances of contacting neighboring enemies are high: 30 percent

Ten percent of patrols result in violent fights where they hold victims down and bite, hit, kick and stomp them to death.  The result?  A large, safe territory rich with food, longer lives, and new females brought into the group

Territorial boundary patrolling by chimpanzees is one of the most dramatic forms of collective action in mammals.  A new study led by an Arizona State University researcher shows how working together benefits the group, regardless of whether individual chimps patrolled or not

The team — led by Assistant Professor Kevin Langergraber of ASU’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change and the Institute of Human Origins — examined 20 years of data on who participated in patrols in a 200-member-strong Ngogo community of chimpanzees in Kibale National Park, Uganda.  The study was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Chimpanzees are one of the few mammals in which inter-group warfare is a major source of mortality.  Chimps in large groups have been reported to kill most or all of the males in smaller groups over periods of months or years, acquiring territory in the process.  Territorial expansion can lead to the acquisition of females who bear multiple infants.  It also increases the amount of food available to females in the winning group, increasing their fertility

Chimpanzees are highly intelligent, but they aren’t capable of what’s called “collective intentionality,” which allows humans to have mutual understanding and agreement on social conventions and norms.  “They undoubtedly have expectations about how others will behave and, presumably, about how they should behave in particular circumstances, but these expectations presumably are on an individual basis,” Watts said.  “They don’t have collectively established and agreed-on social norms.”

Humans can join together in thousands to send men into space or fight global wars or build skyscrapers.  Chimpanzees don’t have anywhere near that level of cooperation

“But this tendency of humans to cooperate in large groups and with unrelated individuals must have started somewhere,” Watts said.  “The Ngogo group is very large (about 200 individuals), and the males in it are only slightly more related to one another than to the males in the groups with which they are competing.’

“Perhaps the mechanisms that allow collective action in such circumstances among chimpanzees served as building blocks for the subsequent evolution of even more sophisticated mechanisms later in human evolution.”

 

Jane Goodall, the most widely noted analyst of members of the pan species, notes that chimpanzees live in ‘monopolizable patches.’  The picture below is a satellite view of central Africa with the Gombe National Park marked.  This area is very close to the equator, which means it has no winter or summer.  The days are the same length all year long.  The park is right on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, and has a network of clear blue rivers and towering waterfalls that lead from the mountains to the lake and from the lake to the  Nile and other drainage rivers.  Fruit hangs everywhere and is available for passers by to grab.  Each day, enough fruit ripens in each of these ‘monopolizable patches’ (to us Goodall’s term) to support the troop that lives there. 

When I look at the pictures, I am reminded of the biblical story of the Garden of Eden.  They are in paradise.  All they have to do to remain there is patrol the borders and kill any who try to cross. 

 

Hippie Apes  (Bonobos)

 

Not all parts of  the world are as productive as this. 

Members of their pan genus can still live in other areas:  they produce plenty of food.  But most areas don’t produce enough to allow them to live in a tiny area and never leave it their entire lives.  The pans that live in the unproductive areas simply can’t stay in these areas all year long.  They have to leave.  When they are gone, they won’t be able to prevent outsiders from moving in and taking the places where they lived. 

To see why it is impossible for them to live the same way s the chimps, let’s consider a few numbers from Goodall’s research.  One troop she follows has an average of about 200 members, of which about 50 are adults and the other 150 are juveniles.  They live on and defend an area that is about 2,000 acres (8 km²) in size.  The border (perimeter) of this area is about 7.5 miles long.  It takes the chimps about 4-5 hours to compete a circuit, if they don’t encounter any problems that delay them.  If necessary (if threats are abundant) they can do a patrol every day and will still have enough time to go home and have a good meal before they bed down for the  night. 

But the lands where the chimps live is some of the richest natural land on earth.  The chimps are basically living like the first humans lived in the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden.  Other surrounding land is still very, very rich, compared to most of the earth’s surface.  But it  produces less, per acre, than the best patches.  Let’s consider what might happen if the land was only about 1/4^th as productive. 

Their 200 members would now need four times the land to provide their food.  This means they would need 8,000 acres or 16 km².  The border is now 30 miles long.  It would take 16-20 hours to finish a patrol.  In the tropics, the days are always within a few minutes of 12 hours long.  This means they wouldn’t be able to do even one compete circuit in a day.  It would take them at least two days.  During the time they are patrolling, they focus only on looking for the enemy and preparing for a fight.  They don’t eat or rest or bathe.  Even if they patrolled all the time they were awake, they wouldn’t be able to defend a parcel that was large enough to support them:  they couldn’t be everywhere; enemies that wanted their land could simply move in and take possession, as soon as the patrol passed.  By the time they got back to that area, it wouldn’t be their land anymore

That doesn’t mean that pans can’t live in these areas.  It just means that, if they want to live in other areas, they have to find some other way to organize themselves. 

The following quote is also from a research study sponsored by the Institute of Human Origins.  It describes these other pans: 

 

Humans display a capacity for tolerance and cooperation among social groups that is rare in the animal kingdom, our long history of war and political strife notwithstanding.  But how did we get that way?

Scientists believe bonobos might serve as an evolutionary model.  The endangered primates share 99 percent of their DNA with humans and have a reputation for generally being peace-loving and sexually active—researchers jokingly refer to them “hippie apes.” And interactions between their social groups are thought to be much less hostile than among their more violent cousins, the chimpanzees

Some, however, have challenged this because of a lack of detailed data on how these groups work and how they separate themselves.  A new study led by Harvard primatologists Liran Samuni and Martin Surbeck on the social structure of bonobos may begin to fill in some of the blanks

The research, published in PNAS, shows that four neighboring groups of bonobos they studied at the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve in the Democratic Republic of Congo maintained exclusive and stable social and spatial borders between them, showing they are indeed part of distinct social groups that interact regularly and peacefully with each other

“It was a very necessary first step,” said Samuni, a postdoctoral fellow in Harvard’s Pan Lab and the paper’s lead author.  “Now that we know that despite the fact that they spend so much time together, [neighboring] bonobo populations still have these distinct groups, we can really examine the bonobo model as something that is potentially the building block or the state upon which us humans evolved our way of more complex, multilevel societies and cooperation that extends beyond borders.”

Bonobos have been far less studied than chimps due to political instability and logistical challenges to setting up research sites in the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the only place where the primates are found.  In addition, studying relationships among and between Bonobo groups has been further complicated by the fact that subgroups appear to intermingle with some frequency

“There aren’t really behavioral indications that allow us to distinguish this is group A, this is group B when they meet,” Samuni said.  “They behave the same way they behave with their own group members.  People are basically asking us, how do we know these are two different groups?  Maybe instead of those being two different groups, these groups are just one very large group made up of individuals that just don’t spend all their time together [as we see with chimpanzee neighborhoods].”

 

Different Societies in the Same Species

 

Chimps and bonobos are in the same genus, the Pan genus.  They are also in the same species.  The information that showed they are the same species came, originally, from DNA analysis.  After this analysis showed they appeared to be the same species, scientists put them in the same enclosure and they bred and had viable offspring.  They are the same species.

Over the more than 6 million years the pan organized their ways of life in entirely different ways in different areas.  In the rich areas, they organized into troops and fought over territory.  Nature required this:  the land produced enough to be monopolizable; since it could be monopolized, it had to be monopolized:  If the pans that lived in the area didn’t monopolize it, a neighboring troop that was organized for conflict would remove them (in the same way that the ‘whites’ removed the ‘Indians’ so they could monopolize the territory that, given their technology, they were able to monopolize.)  

New members born into the troops in these monopolizable areas would be raised with the realities of territorial sovereignty societies.  It would be all they knew; as far as they were considered, it was the way the members of  their species all lived.  They would have borders that were patrolled.  When mothers were traveling through the forests with their children, they would make it clear that the border areas were dangerous.  (People in general, and children especially, learn many things through empathy as a result of something called ‘mirror neurons.’  If a child sees her mother is terrified when approaching an area, the child will learn this is a dangerous area.)  When young males get close to adolescence, their instincts would push them find a position in the social hierarchy of the adult males.  The adult males organize for patrols of borders and war parties to deal with problems that border agents have identified.  (There is no rational analysis behind this, of course:  Pans don’t have the brain components needed for logical analysis.  But their instincts drive them to do it.) 

Pans born into other areas will be raised in entirely different conditions and grow to accept entirely different realities.  They don’t have ‘troops’ to speak of (as the quote above indicates) but they do have social groups.  Children stay with their mothers and their mothers have peers they work with to meet their needs.  (Bonobos tend to share meals; individuals will collect different foods and they put them together and eat together.)  These social groups feed in areas that have food until the food is scarce, then they move to other areas.  They encounter a lot more individuals that are not in their social group than chimps.  (Most chimps will never encounter individuals who are not in their troops, unless to kill them in conflict.)   Over the generations, previous generations found ways to make their situation worked.  The intense hatred and fear that dominates the chimps would not work for them.  They are better off if they can find a way to get along.  Children will see that their mothers and other members of their social group go to great lengths to get along with outsiders.  This are the only social rules they will learn and, generally, the only social behaviors they will ever witness.  As far as they are concerned, it is the only way their species lives. 

They have entirely different ‘types of societies.’  Part of the difference is due to the different evolutionary forces that operate in different areas. But another part is their background and training.  Put these things together and you can get generation after generation of animals that live and act entirely different in different areas. 

This is an important observation.  We will see that humans also have had different ‘types of societies’ over the period we have been on this world.  Although there are a lot of variants, the types generally fall into two different categories: 

Some of the places where early humans evolved were incredibly productive.  They produced so much that the people there could surround an area by borders and live within the borders, never leaving their entire lives.  These lands are ‘worth fighting over,’ using this term in the economic sense.  This basically means that these parts of the world produce enough wealth that they can support the producers (imagine this as ‘farmers’ for simplicity), with enough left over after paying the producers to support militaries and groups that control militaries (governments, which are often enormous organizations).  

Other areas can support human life.  Humans can live almost anywhere.  In some places, at certain times of the year, the land can support enormous numbers of people. 

 

I spent a lot of time growing up in Montana.  Everything that grows there comes up within a few days in the spring and grows like crazy, with full sun all day and plentiful moisture.  Before the conquest, this plant life attracted millions of migratory buffalo.  The ‘Indians’ followed the buffalo and lived on these plains in the hundreds of thousands for a  few months.  (The last such gathering recorded was in 1876.  It was interrupted by Custer who came, with a small group of troops, to remove the ‘Indians.’  This was one of the few cases where the ‘Indians’ fought back against the conquerors.)  Then, when the grass was gone, the buffalo left and, as the food was no longer there, the ‘Indians’ left too.

 

At other times, it can’t support anyone at all.  People can live in these areas, but they can’t live the same way they live in rich areas.  People have to be flexible and willing to travel to meet their needs at different times of the year.  In these areas, entirely different cultures evolved.  People are social animals and formed into social groups.  But these groups were not like the ‘troops’ of chimps or the ‘city states’ (small ‘countries’) of the territorial descendants of the chimps.  They were traveling groups, probably very similar to the ‘Indians’ of the plains of pre-conquest America.  They lived in tents that were actually fairly comfortable.  The tents would be set up in organized camps and they would have organized ways of life.  Children raised in these communities would learn there were certain behaviors that helped them get the things they wanted.  They would learn what they could do and what they couldn’t do.  The traveling bands would often meet with other bands.  In many cases, the bands considered themselves to be the same ‘tribe’ with a common spoken language.  When bands from the same tribe met, they would interact socially.  Then, they would travel on.  If bands met other bands from other tribes, they would normally try to find some way to get along.  (It is always best to get along if you can; humans get a lot more through cooperation than through conflict.)  Normally, they would find ways to do this. 

You can find numerous references to this in books written by people from natural law societies in the Americas, like the Autobiography of Black Hawk, Plenty Coups of the Crow and many others.  The book American Indian Autobiography deals with the literature in general with general descriptions and lists of ‘as-told-to’ autobiographical accounts and references to help you find originals if you are interested in this topic.  I find it fascinating and always prefer to read about people’s lives in their own words from their perspective.  (It is hard to really understand a person reading books written by people who were raised to think that the being they are describing is not really a human, but a ‘primitive savage’ who they are trying to wipe out.)  

Did these people have ‘societies?’ 

The American Heritage Dictionary defines the term this way:

 

societies /sə-sī′ĭ-tē/

Plural form of society

noun

The totality of people regarded as forming a community of interdependent individuals.

"working for the benefit of society."

A group of people broadly distinguished from other groups by mutual interests, participation in characteristic relationships, shared institutions, and a common culture.

"rural society; literary society."

An organization or association of persons engaged in a common profession, activity, or interest.

"a folklore society; a society of bird watchers."

 

These people had societies by definition:  whenever any beings live together in organized ways, they have societies.  But their societies operated entirely differently than the societies that existed in richer areas at the same time.   

For most of human history, these two kinds of societies coexisted on the same planet.  Some groups of people lived in cities surrounded by walls and defended by armies.  But only a few areas produced enough to support these ‘city states.’  Most of the people of the world lived in the other kind of society.  As time passed, both kinds of societies evolved. 

 

The Principle of Cultural Evolution

 

Evolution works through many different mechanisms. 

A lot of people want to oversimplify Darwin’s work and claim that he simply describes one process, the one he calls ‘natural selection.’  (Often called ‘survival of the fittest.’)  Actually, Darwin described many different mechanisms that can cause change.  The full title is ‘Descent of man and Selection in relation to Sex.’  This book focuses more on sexual selection, which Darwin feels is more important than natural selection in higher primates. 

Nature doesn’t always select the ‘fittest’ individuals for survival. 

Often, groups compete for territory. 

Groups that work well together will have advantages over groups that don’t work well together. 

The easiest way to see this is to look at animals that live together in large colonies that act as a single unit, called ‘eusocial’ animals.  Bees provide a good illustration of this principle.  Bees form into hives with different castes, each of which performs a different tasks.  Working together, they create a healthy hive.  The better they work together, the healthier the hive.  Drone bees live only a few days.  During this time, they devote their life to gathering food for the hive.  When they have finished their useful lives, they submit to death inside the hive, where their bodies become food for others. 

Evolution isn’t going to select the smartest drones for survival.  Smart drones will realize they can live longer if they simply don’t do the things their instincts program them to want to do and that their queens punish them for not doing.   Evolution will select the group that works best to meet the needs of the hive.   The drones have to be good slaves for the colony to compete with other colonies.  If a colony evolves either genetic or cultural programming techniques that turn drones into better slaves, that colony will prosper.  This is true even if the individual drones are not nearly as smart or strong as drones in a another colony. 

Just as individuals in different environmental conditions evolve differently, different cultures evolve differently.   Let’s start with the way societies in monopolizable areas evolve:

 

Cultural evolution in ‘Monopolizable’ Areas

 

Chimps compete for territory using brutal and savage methods.  They kill others and tear them apart.  If a group has genes or social programming or any other factor that makes them better at doing this than other groups, the better group will have advantages in wars over land. 

Chimpanzees inhabit ‘patches of land with monopolizable supplies of ripe fruit.’ 

Imagine that a group of passive, tolerant, and sharing simians find an area like this which happens to be unclaimed.  It is like the garden of Eden to them:  they can stay in the same place, sleep in nests that they can work hard to make nice, and basically go from tree to tree and pick food that is hanging above them.  This area is clearly very desirable. 

Now imagine that another group comes along that is still very tolerant, but exhibits slightly more aggressive expressions on their faces and in their posture.  This second group is a tiny bit less non-confrontational than the first.  (In other words, they won’t back down from a fight quite as easily.)  They show their displeasure at the group that is already there. 

The members of this other group doesn’t want to leave.  But they are not as willing to accept a confrontation, so they move on. 

Eventually, a displaced group of chimps, or a particularly aggressive neighboring group that wants their land, will attack.  There will be war.  The troop that is best at war not always win.  But it will always have an advantage.  Aggression, violence, brutality, loyalty, all bring advantages.  Empathetic, compassion, generosity, kindness, tolerance, and patience all bring disadvantages.  Evolution will slowly alter the societies of the pans that live in these areas. 

Evolution is patient.  An objective observer (say an outsider watching these ancient animals without interfering) would see the societies of these pans evolving in ways that make them more and more violent, aggressive, and territorial over time. 

 

Evolution in Less-Productive Areas

 

In other areas, the aggressiveness and violence may not be advantages at all, but disadvantages.  Imagine a group of members of the pan genus that live in an area that only produces a fourth as much ripe fruit than ‘garden-of-Eden’ area described above.  The troop would need four times as much land as a troop in the ‘garden of Eden’ area.  A troop with 50 adults and 100 juveniles could live in about 2,000 acres in the better land.  They would need 8,000 acres to support themselves in this less desirable land.  This would make it impractical for them to patrol the border and protect it all the time. 

A border around this area (if they made one) would be 30 miles long.  It would take 16-20 hours to do a single a patrol.  They wouldn’t be able to do even one compete circuit in a day.  Even if they patrolled 24 hours a day, they wouldn’t be able to keep out intruders.  They couldn’t be everywhere.  Outsiders could move into whatever area was away from their border in large numbers.  When the border patrol agents for the troop that was trying to hold the and arrived, they could kill them. 

The members of the pan species could live in these areas.  But the wouldn’t be able to live the same way they lived in the richer areas.  There is food.  There just isn’t enough available all the time to keep them alive if they stay in the same tiny area all the time.  They will have to migrate, at least occasionally, to other areas.  They will have to be willing to share the land in some sort of orderly way.  They will have to accept that other members of  their species that were not members of their groups would come and spend time with them.  They would have to find some way to get along with these outsiders.  They would have to be tolerant.  They would have to be peaceful and willing to share the land. 

Evolution would work to reinforce the opposite behaviors realities as it did for the group in the ‘garden-of-Eden’ areas.  Individuals that were competitive, confrontational, violent, aggressive, and spent all their time fighting wouldn’t have as much energy left for mating and raising their young as others, who refrained from these wasteful behaviors.  Like humans, these apes (members of the pan genus) are cooperative social animals.  We can’t meet all our own needs ourselves.  We work with other members of our species that can do things better than we can.  Individuals that are mean, obnoxious, argumentative, contentious, and confrontational would not be as likely to have good relations with others as those that are tolerant and cooperative.  We would expect the process of evolution to work more on an individual level in these areas, giving preference to individuals that are good at forming social alliances and working well with others. 

 

Why Does this matter?

 

We can all see the wars going on all around us.  Wars require weapons.  Weapons—modern ones at least—require industry.  Industry requires fuel and lots and lots of resources.  More weapons and a larger industrial complex means more success in war and more raw materials means more weapons and more industry.  We are destroying the world around us to get weapons to destroy each other.

Why? 

Some say it is because of something they call ‘human nature.’ 

They say it is in our nature to divide the world into ‘countries’ with borders and rape the land to get materials to make weapons to defend these countries.  We are, by nature, highly territorial, highly possessive, dangerous, violent, destructive, and animalistic beings. 

We can’t change human nature:  it was determined by the will of the creator (for those who are religious) or the realities of evolution (for those who are not religious).  Whatever determined our ‘nature’ happened in the past.  Since we can’t go back in time, we can’t change it.  It is fixed.  If the reason we have destructive societies is our ‘nature’ we are doomed and there is nothing we can do to prevent our extinction. 

If we were the only species that had societies that operated this way, this argument might make sense.  Human nature, people seem to want to believe, is unique.  We are special, created in some sort of blessed act or circumstances.  (Even people who aren’t religious seem to want to believe this.)  We are not animals.  We are better than them.  Whatever reasons are behind our actions, they are unique to us. 

What if we could trace a continuous line between the animals that came before us and ourselves?   What if there is a chain of DNA links that changes, one tiny mutation at a time, to take our bodies, our minds, our mental wiring, and even our societies, along a path that leads from ‘them’ to ‘us?’  What if we don’t think of evolution as one of many different things that we need to work into our beliefs system (the systems that we learned from our human ancestors), but a scientific truth that can’t be mixed with beliefs? 

What if it really what happened?

If that is the case, we aren’t on the verge of extinction because of human nature at all.  The human part of our nature, the logical and intelligent side, is telling us that this is an insane way to live.  We do these things because of our animal nature.  We are doing it because we have inherited instincts that tell us to do it.  (We interpret these instincts as ‘feelings,’ another word for ‘emotions.’)  

We live this way because our intellects aren’t strong enough to overpower our instincts (feelings) with logic. 

We are fighting ourselves. 

And we are losing

 

 

But the same evidence that explains how we got into this mess can help us understand how we can get out of it.  The basic forces that operate on us, and push us to act as we do, come from adaptation to environmental realities. 

The environmental realities of the earth have changed dramatically in the last few hundred years.  We know that it is possible for the societies of a species to adapt and change.  Given current technology, the territorial model that we inherited from chimps isn’t suitable.  We will see that the passive and totally non-territorial approach of bonobos isn’t perfect either.  But we don’t have to choose between living as chimps or living as bonobos. 

We are humans.  We have capabilities no members of the pan genus has.  We can create truly human societies.  We can use science, logic, and reason to design societies that operate according to principles that are capable of moving our race toward a better future. 

If we can accept the basic principles of evolution, including the idea of cultural evolution we can take charge of the realties of our existence.  We can ways to work with other members of our species to design a sane society that meets the needs of the entire human race.  Then, we can use our understanding of the factors that cause societies to change (which we can learn by studying evolution) to cause the societies we inherited to change into sane and sound societies. 

The information in this chapter is designed to do more than present some information about a part of the history of the human race that few people give any real thought to.  It is designed to help build understanding that can help us understand what we can do that will put us onto a path to a better future. 

 

Lucy

 

Evolution is a ‘trial and error’ process.  Nature ‘tries’ different things.  Genes change and different animals exist at the same time.   They compete (either as groups or individuals).  If both can find a niche in nature, they can both survive.  If both try to fill the same niche, and it can only hold one species, one will eventually survive and the other will perish. 

We would expect to find a large number of examples of what we may call ‘failed trials.’  An animal species evolves and lasts for some length of time.  Eventually, changing environmental conditions or another species that is more capable wipe it out.  We find artifacts.  We can’t always fit them into a model of links in a chain.  This appears to be the case for one important and widely publicized archeological find.  Research is underway and, eventually, the remains classified as ‘Lucy’ may be fit into a model that shows it is a link in the chain.   But it may also be one of the branches of the tree that didn’t make it. 

In 1974, a group of archeologists discovered a nearly-compete skeleton of a female hominid that looked like something between a human and a chimpanzee.  The researchers thought this was a major find and celebrated that night with drinks and music.  One of the researchers had a tape of Beatles songs that included ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.’  He proposed that they name the female ‘Lucy’ and the name stuck.  Lucy’s bones were in a place with unusually dry conditions that preserved them for a very long time.  Eventually, they were dated to 3.2 million years BP (before the present). 

Lucy is not a member of the genus ‘pan’ (the genus of the pan genus). 

She is not a member of the genus ‘homo’ either (this is the genus of modern humans). 

She appears to be between these two genera. 

There is no controversy about her existence.  She did exist.  Her remains are now on display at the Naturmuseum Senckenberg, a museum in Frankfurt Germany.  The picture below shows the exhibit. 

 

 

There is a lot of controversy about her position in evolutionary tree.  Some claim that she is on the same branch as we are, between the pan genus and homo genus.  Others claim that she is on a branch of her own, that happens to have sprouted between the pans and homos, but she is at the end of this branch and not our ancestor. 

We have reason to believe that Lucy’s people were far more intelligent than any members of the pan genus.  Close to the place where she was found, researchers have found stone tools that had signs of having been manufactured (with marks showing they were shaped) and bones with marks that indicated the animals they came from had been cut up with the stone tools.  The evidence has been dated to 3.4 million years ago, 200,000 years before Lucy’s time. 

The tools are far more complex than any tools ever used by chimps or bonobos.  The ability to make these tools seems to require the ability to think through a project in advance, work out the steps in design, engineer the parts, and then do the manufacturing. 

It seems to require something we call ‘intention.’  Beings that made these tools almost certainly had the ability to think in ways that we generally associate with higher intellect. 

Many aspects of evolution are controversial.  Was Lucy a link in the chain that led to humans?  Is she your great x 128,000 grandmother? 

Perhaps. 

But perhaps not. 

I propose that it isn’t necessary to answer this question at this time.  It is interesting.  But not necessary.    We don’t need to know very detail of the evolutionary process in order to understand how our societies came to work as they do today.  Perhaps, at some point in the future, people will find that there is a genus between the pan genus and the homo genus that can be proven to be links and had a key role in the transition between the two genera.  If this is shown to be the case (and experts don’t seem willing to commit to this), we can factor it into our analysis.  However, at this point, the consensus view is that she is not a link and I want to proceed with the assumption that she is not. 

 

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