Horizon

by Barry Lopez

  This singular group of people, who might once have called what is now the Danakil Desert in Ethiopia home, was clearly a different kind of people. Today they are called behaviorally modern or cognitively modern people to distinguish them from all other humans living at the time. They soon crossed the nearby strait of Bāb al-Mandab, which connects the southern end of the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden, and entered the Saudi Arabian peninsula. From there they migrated north and east, replacing H. neanderthalensis in western Asia and Europe and replacing the descendants of H. erectus in southern Asia; and then populating Australia by crossing the nascent Timor and Arafura Seas that separated, at the time, Sunda (the contiguous landmass of Indonesia) from Sahul (Australia and New Guinea).

  In the millennia to come they would populate Micronesia and then Polynesia, reaching as far across the Pacific in voyaging canoes as the west coast of South America. Having developed extremely effective techniques for hunting large mammals, suitable clothing, and portable shelters, they would move north into Siberia, eventually crossing the Bering land bridge and spreading through the Americas, into the islands of the Caribbean, and as far south as Tierra del Fuego. The trajectory and the speed with which people moved and adapted to nearly every sort of Earthly environment and became enculturated in their places, considering the pace of Homo’s early history in Africa, are staggering.

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  UP UNTIL ABOUT 55,000 years ago the genus Homo represented only a single thread in the elaborate and incomprehensibly large tapestry of biological life. A predator and a scavenger, as well as a species of prey, especially for large cats, he was a highly social primate whose altricial young required an unusual amount of attention during their first two or three formative years. He was in no way the dominant animal in his own range. Wherever he lived, in relatively small, isolated populations it is thought, he competed with other animals for food and also for water when it was scarce. Through long periods of global cooling and warming, he adapted and endured, like other animals.

  A disinterested observer, following the development of H. sapiens from the time he becomes clearly distinct 200,000 or so years ago until the advent of behaviorally modern man, might have marveled at Homo’s use of fire—making it, transporting it, and using it to prepare his food. He might have admired his stone and bone tools, and the way he made use of other materials, like animal skins and wood. Homo might not have seemed any more remarkable to an observer, however, than some of the other animals he lived among in Africa. He possessed no caparison that could compare with the rococo plumage of many birds. He was less intimidating than a rhino, less dangerous than a mamba, less exotic than a giraffe, less nimble than a guenon. He would have stood out primarily as a maker of things, and as the single surviving species of bipedal hominid. Compared with a chimp, he had greater dexterity, and he might have been as persistent a cursorial hunter as an African hunting dog, and have been notable, also, for the things he carried with him from one place to another. In addition to fire and his children, this included his tools, his hunting implements, and perhaps containers of water. He would have drawn an observer’s attention but not commanded it.

  And yet there was something there.

  Homo sapiens’s small, scattered populations might well have seemed of little consequence in the larger tableau of Africa’s savannah wildlife, but a thoughtful observer of anatomically modern man 100,000 years ago would have marked the potential in such things as Homo’s attention to patterns of social order, the nature of his intense curiosity, and the adumbration of a quality no other animal seemed to possess, which one day would be called intelligence, an ability to assemble things—fiber, the passing hours, sounds—into complex patterns that would one day be called weaving, calendars, language, logistics, and art. It would have been an eerie thing to comprehend, as it is eerie for us today to find in the eyes of a chimp the glimmer of something that for a moment seems human, a look that says, “I know.”

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  WHILE I WAS WALKING the semiarid lands around Nakirai, searching for traces of our hominid ancestors with Kamoya and the others, it sometimes occurred to me that I’d unconsciously situated myself in a sort of interstice, a middle ground from which I was peering out. It lay between what creatures like Kamoya and I and the others had evolved from and, looking in the other direction, at what we’d become. The pivot point for me, the place in my mind with such a powerful before and after, lay with that nameless group of people in the Afar region of Ethiopia 55,000 years ago. Without intending to, they separated themselves from the galaxy of African wildlife and emerged as something else, not yet the founders of civilization but no longer truly wild. These were the first creatures to shimmer with intentionality.

  I looked back along a narrowing corridor into a far-off haze that obscured a few species of australopithecines. And then, like a man who stares to his left for a long while and then turns to look to the right, I saw something like a dispersion of fireflies, just a few at first, then swarms, and then the rippling explosion that becomes culture and then high culture in the hands of its inventor, modern man. People are disembarking on the shores of northern Australia; Mousterian Neanderthals are giving way swiftly to full-blown, Magdalenian humans; the first Natufian cities are crystallizing in eastern Anatolia. The Hittites, the Phoenicians, the emperors of the legendary Xia dynasty in China, and the line of the Pharaonic kings in Egypt, the Aztec empire—all bloom. Parisian salons support erudite disquisitions on philosophy, the world wars leave millions dead on five continents, successful heart transplant surgery is performed for the first time, in Cape Town, and all the rest of invention, modification, improvement, and domination carries down to these six middle-aged men in shorts, on foot in the Nakaisieken Desert in Kenya, with their highly evolved theaters of space and time, in which they live and think, in which they contemplate meaning and ultimate meaning.

  We are so small in the desert, and the range of human personalities so great, the different sorts of intelligence extant in the panorama of the many still-distinct human cultures so large, the greater or lesser capacity among individual humans to think clearly or to imagine what isn’t so obvious, the many distinctions between what is real and what isn’t, according to different systems of metaphysics that…the possibilities in all this are so extensive that to gather it all under one name, Homo sapiens, borders on absurdity.

  Walking the desert every day, I feel no compunction about imagining australopithecines or early Homo. No sense of ethics or morality seems to come into play. I feel no stake in whatever they were. They are like objects to me. After that group leaves the Afar region 55,000 years ago, however, I find I cannot think of them as objects. They are more like relatives, like harbingers, people with whom I share a fate.

  The australopithecines send a message forward in time with no ominous note in it, no hidden threat. The message we read from the 1,800 generations of humanity that became historical following, possibly, a slight change in the structure of the human brain, a story about cultural achievement and human brilliance impossible adequately to honor, seems to carry within its heart, in contrast, a warning.

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  SOME NEUROLOGISTS, in an effort to have us more fully appreciate and understand the varieties of mind that can and have emerged from a brain as complex as ours, speak of certain neurological disorders such as Tourette’s syndrome, Parkinsonism, catatonia, and manic depression as “psychological conditions” rather than disorders. What these conditions have in common is unusual perceptions about the rate at which time passes. Those “afflicted” with these conditions perceive the amount of time an event takes to unfold as being either greater or lesser than is the norm for H. sapiens. What this implies is that some minds might be better adapted than others to dealing effectively with those parts of the contemporary social environment that are characterized by rapid rates of expansion and chang
e, like the environment created by information technology. Some minds thrive here; others founder. (Environments created by information technology have a significant impact, according to some, on the rapidly shifting dynamics of human social organization, affecting the way we relate to one another. This in turn helps to shape the expression of certain human emotions and impulses, such as generosity and aggression.)

  In addition to varieties of temporal scale, one assumes that there are “disorders” of spatial scale, such as agoraphobia; and that having one of these “disorders” might conceivably either constrain or improve the opportunities for envisioning a viable human future. Being able to imagine alternative temporal and spatial frameworks in which to implement a more benign human future—being able, even temporarily, to eliminate the sort of tyranny that the press of time or the limits of space can induce, producing despair instead of hope—seems to be a crucial part of conceiving of a future for H. sapiens that is not dystopian.

  In speculating about a human future today, one is compelled to consider the role of natural selection more broadly. In addition to evolving in a physical environment of global climate disruption and unprecedented population growth (unprecedented for a large terrestrial mammal, one that now occupies multiple ecological niches from which thousands of other organisms have been displaced), H. sapiens is now also evolving in response to an increasingly pervasive cultural environment. A question that quickly arises is: To what degree do man’s built environment and his cultural environment exercise a selective pressure on, for example, temporal and spatial “disorders” such as manic depression and agoraphobia; on such mental conditions as autism, narcissistic personality disorder, and psychopathy, all characterized by a lack of empathy; and on the continued existence of such characteristically human behaviors as altruism and aggression?

  Speculation along these lines can easily produce considerations that are chilling. From the point of view of an evolutionary psychologist, it is a relatively straightforward matter to posit that a significant number of human beings do not have the ability to cope readily with the cultural environment their species has created (contributing, many psychologists and psychiatrists believe, to the rapid growth in the general population of anxiety disorders that require pharmaceutical management). Further, even evolutionary biologists now emphasize that by both actively and passively contributing to the ongoing development of an environment that is chemically toxic, and by continuing to devise systems of information exchange that elude the grasp of some portion of the human population, H. sapiens now faces historically unprecedented selective pressures that might strongly influence the evolution of H. sapiens over a relatively short period of time.

  Where humanity will be in one hundred years is no longer solely a question of global warming, the disrupted ecologies of viruses like Ebola, and genetic mutation caused by exposure to synthetic chemicals. In the short term, the percentage of the human population that can cope most successfully with change in the cultural environment (but also, importantly, without pharmaceutical support) might be playing the more critical role.

  A not unwarranted, though perhaps extreme, reference for the consequences of rapid genetic change along the path that led to fully modern man is the relationship between H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis during the millennium or so the two occupied the Middle East together, some 50,000 years ago. Descendants of the small population of H. sapiens that migrated north and east from Bāb al-Mandab five or six hundred centuries ago simply overwhelmed H. neanderthalensis. Despite interbreeding successfully with H. sapiens and perhaps learning from them (and leaving behind a distinct and poignant archeological layer in Europe in the late Middle Paleolithic identified as Châtelperronian), H. neanderthalensis fades to the point of extinction, like an untended fire.

  Five hundred thousand years ago, when H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis began to diverge on the evolutionary path that led to behaviorally modern H. sapiens, they might have continued to look very much alike, for tens of thousands of years. When they came face-to-face in Europe again—and in the Near and Middle East—what made them different was not so much the way they looked but the radically different levels of complexity in their cultures. Their speciation, in other words, was more a matter of different psychologies than different morphologies. For a while—no one is sure for how long—they coexisted in Europe, occupying separate but adjacent territories, until H. neanderthalensis made his last camps, possibly in the vicinity of the Cape of Gibraltar, and then disappeared.

  The difference between what is today the flickering hint of speciation on the horizon for H. sapiens and an event we can look back on, the survival of H. sapiens and the eclipse of H. neanderthalensis, is that with any future divergence in Homo, geography might not play the strong role it traditionally has. Two increasingly different groups of H. sapiens, one with a high degree of technological competence, the other far less able to manage psychologically in this realm, might come to represent distinct populations not because they are separated by geographic space, once a requirement for speciation, but because they are divided by electronic space: they will have ceased to communicate effectively with each other. The psychological space between them might rapidly become too great to bridge, leaving both groups isolated on either side of a chasm, and neither group in a superior position.

  Of course such a scenario might never develop. Viral pandemics, nuclear war, crumbling national infrastructures, economic catastrophe, genetic mutation as a result of exposure to toxic substances—any of this might take Homo in some other direction. It is not possible to say anything definitive here, except perhaps that dramatic change in the near future seems to be in the offing, and if the species is to achieve its aspirations for justice, reduced suffering, and transcendent life, and if it is to prevent the triumph of machinery that it so clearly fears, an unprecedented level of imagination is required.

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  WHATEVER HAPPENED to us in northeastern Africa long ago, it’s important to understand that what set behaviorally modern man apart so dramatically from other populations of H. sapiens, and from Neanderthals, was his ability to recognize and manage various forms of complexity, including social complexity. A widely held view about the enlargement of the frontal lobes in Homo is that they enabled Homo to far surpass earlier hominins in developing and maintaining extensive social relationships, in creating kinship systems that were apparently both stronger and more effective for maintaining feeding and breeding strategies, which ensured the survival of a sufficient number of offspring.

  In short, behaviorally modern man was probably more adept, more capable, and better organized than anatomically modern man, or any other species of Homo he might have encountered.

  A second important point about behaviorally modern man—hereafter referred to simply as Homo sapiens—is that he continued to evolve. As he dispersed into a wide range of climatic environments, an impressive array of phenotypes developed from the human genome. In other words, the genetic material available to H. sapiens provided the foundation for a diverse but not particularly variable group of human forms. Climate, diet, and physical environment exerted selective pressure, and as a result, some groups developed lighter skin, others were taller or had thicker hair shafts or better resistance to specific diseases, developed wet as opposed to dry ear wax, or became adapted to life at higher altitudes. Genetic evidence—geneticists say 2,465 human genes, about 13 percent of the total in the human genome, have been actively shaped by recent evolution in Homo—suggests that man adapted quickly and extensively as the species dispersed and took up life in impressively different habitats—the North American Arctic, the Kalahari Desert, the Amazon rain forest, the islands of Micronesia.

  Two keys to understanding the origins of modern man—the development of language and the emergence of ceremony—present researchers with virtually no durable evidence to contemplate, but it’s widely believed that both d
eveloped, perhaps gradually, over the past 50,000 years. And both point to an increasingly complex social life for H. sapiens. Today, the careful use of language—sincere, thoughtful, respectful—and participation in ceremony still create an atmosphere of powerful social cohesion when human beings come together. And ceremony also functions as an antidote to loneliness.

  World history is full of inspiring charismatic figures—Muhammad, the dissenter Jesus Christ, Jeanne d’Arc, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer, Dorothy Day, José Martí, Martin Luther King Jr., Wangari Maathai—but historians of social change often point out that meaningful social change, the kind of change that improves the conditions in which people live, comes about through the work of many people. A charismatic figure might galvanize change and stand as its historical representative, but human beings are social animals. They take care of one another through continuous social interaction. The popular notion that in bad times heroes show up is an enduring literary device, but it is wiser for a population in difficult straits to effect a means of courteous and respectful social exchange—conversation and ceremony—than to wait for a hero to speak. I emphasize this because I’ve so often been struck by the difference between a society that believes wisdom is part of the fabric of a community, and that it is best represented in the words and actions of particular people (elders), and a society that believes wisdom is only to be found in certain people. The difference for a community would be the difference between choosing to act heroically as a group or waiting for a hero to act.