Let's Talk About Us and Them

Last night I watched the last of the series The Human Spark on the PBS website. Lots of brain imagery and stuff like that. It was fascinating. The technology available today allows people to look at the ways the human brain works in ways unimaginable just a short time ago. Watching this series as well as an earlier series called Becoming Human, it was interesting to me to see how thinking in the field of evolutionary anthropology has itself evolved since I was in grad school in the mid 1990s. Being a sociocultural anthropologist, I was never fully immersed in the evolutionary side of things, but I still hold a fascination about how we got to the point where we started to develop culture and in the ways culture helps us both develop in positive ways as well as limits us in very detrimental ways. In terms of what makes us human, there has always been a huge emphasis on the brain—especially the size of our brains--and now with the developments in genetics, brain imaging and new fossil finds the theories and insights about how we got to be us are being refined and adapted to the new evidence. And it is now possible to test theories and get a better sense of how things actually work. It was interesting to me that there is much more work being done on how culture impacts the brain and how it gave us the adaptive advantage. I am biased, of course, but I think this is true—culture has an impact in ways that people usually don't think about. There is language, of course, and other symbolic thinking. But they are also now coming around to the idea that the fact that we have always lived in social groups gave us an evolutionary advantage. Language developed in a social context. I have read books in the past about the evolution of language and I always wondered how the people that were arguing for purely biological language capacity could overlook what seemed to me to be the obvious. Having the physical apparatus to create the sounds for language is important, but it's certainly nowhere near enough for actual meaningful language. You have to have a system of symbols, because that is what language is. The sounds don't mean much unless they have a symbolic meaning attached. And in order to have an agreed upon system of symbols, you have to have a group that can communicate within itself. It's of no use to talk if no one is listening or getting any meaning from the noises you're making. So clearly, the physical possibility of language is meaningless unless there is a social group in which meaning can develop. And so it is nice to see that social groups are gaining more attention in terms of evolutionary adaptation. Not just in terms of language, either. With the new studies they are doing, they can learn a great deal about how preverbal children respond in various situations and make inferences about what this may mean for the rest of us. There is increasing evidence—as if we needed it—that we really are connected. We need each other. We will rise up or fall together. In a very fundamental way, we will either continue to develop ourselves in a positive direction or we will destroy each other. The social systems that we developed in our evolutionary past served as an advantage when it came to survival—by forming groups and institutions our human ancestors were in a better position to adapt and survive. But now those very groups are being used to draw clear lines between groups in ways that are not so helpful. There has always been us and them. But now we have the means to try to destroy them—whomever they may be. This is dangerous. This is not adaptive. This will lead to the destruction of us and them, not just them. There has always been us and them. There always will be to some degree. But we have these incredible human brains that are more amazing than anything else that seems to exist at this time on the planet. Surely we can use them in ways that will allow us to still be us and to allow them to be them without feeling like “them” is a dangerous group that must be eliminated. Can we not look a little bit beyond us and them to realize that on a very basic level we are all us. We are all human beings. We can separate ourselves into manageable groups and have all of the little pockets of “us” we want while at the same time knowing that there are many, many groups of “them” out there who want basically the same things we do. In the end, at a very fundamental level, it's only us. That's all we've got.

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Adaptation

Last night I watched the first episode in the Human Spark series in which Alan Alda goes in search of the things that make us human. I am so grateful for the fact that I can watch this stuff online at pbs.org, since I don't own a TV. Last night's show was about how and why we survived and continued to evolve as a species while the Neandertals did not. There is general agreement (at the moment, anyway!) that we shared a common ancestor and that there was a wave of migration out of Africa and eventually into Europe—the hominids that migrated evolved into Neandertals. Some of the same type of hominids stayed in Africa and evolved differently, based on conditions on the ground there. At some point they began to migrate and ended up sharing territory with Neandertals. But they were very different. And apparently, they were able to adapt much better to changing circumstances. It seems clear based on the archaeological evidence that these hominids had symbolic behavior as a part of their toolkit. Neandertals may not have—there is some evidence regarding ritual burial practices that is now in some dispute, so the picture is a bit muddy at the moment. What is clear, though, is that Neandertals were well adapted—the species did survive for 200,000 years, after all—but they were kind of one-trick ponies. Their tools show no evidence of change throughout this time period and analysis of the bone, that allows scientists to discover what they ate by looking at where the protein came from (animal, fish, plants) indicates that they ate exclusively meat. They were living in an area with abundant marine resources, but they didn't bother exploiting them because they had large mammals. They kept on as they always had, living in small groups and widely scattered over a large land area. And then our human ancestors arrived with a more adaptive way of being in the world, language, other kinds of symbolic behavior, and seemingly a wider vision of what was possible. This was the beginning of the end for the Neandertals who were unable to adapt in the ways that would have been necessary for them to continue to survive in a different kind of world. It seems to me that there is a lesson here for our own times—as individuals and societies. Things change. The ability to adapt to that change is crucial to our survival. This is why all of those people who want to move us backward into some fantasy world that exists only in their own minds will fail. People who wax poetic about how the country is being ruined and the America they grew up in is gone should wake up. Of course, since it is middle-aged white men who seem to be saying this a lot lately, I can understand. The world was probably a lot less complicated for them when they could move about unfettered by the pesky requirements of civil rights and respect and equality for those who were not white males. But for the rest of us, we can be thankful that that country is gone. Good riddance. These guys should really learn to find a way to adapt in this new world instead of crying for the old one. That's not to say there was nothing good about the “good old days.” But successful adaptation does not mean throwing everything away and starting over. It means looking at how things could be done better. If something works, you keep it. If it doesn't, you figure out what will.

I found myself feeling kind of sad as I watched the show. I began thinking about what it would have been like to be a Neandertal and seeing these new creatures appear in your world. If they lived in small groups and “people” began dying off and not being replaced, they would have seen their little groups get smaller and smaller. I know their brains worked differently than ours do. We don't know what their emotional life was like. They are sequencing the DNA and the first indications are that we share a great deal—not a surprise as we share DNA with a great many creatures that are very different from us. So I know that we can't really put ourselves in their shoes. The few genetic differences that there are were apparently great enough to cause major differences in behavior. Still, I found myself wondering what it would have been like to be the last Neandertal.

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