The Science of Discworld II - The Globe tsod-2

by Terry Pratchett

  Meanwhile, in Africa, another new lineage had arisen about 120,000 years ago, and spread; we call it ancient Homo sapiens, and it led to us. Its brain was even bigger, and in caves on the coast of South Africa it -we -had begun to make better tools, and to make primitive paintings on rocks and cave walls. Our population exploded, and we migrated. We reached Australia just over

  60,000 years ago, and Europe about 50,000 years ago.

  In Europe there had been a moderately robust Homo, the Neanderthal Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, a subspecies. Some anthropologists consider us to be a sister subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens or, loosely speaking, 'Seriously wise man'. Wow. The Neanderthals' stone tools were well developed for various functions, but these particular hominids seem not to have been progressive. Their culture hardly changed over tens of thousands of years. But they seem to have had some kind of spiritual impulse, for they buried their dead with ceremony -or, at least, with flowers.

  Our more gracile ancestors, the Cro-Magnon people, lived at the same time as the last of the Neanderthals, and there are many theories about what happened when the two subspecies interacted. Basically, we survived and the Neanderthals didn't ...

  Why? Was it because we bashed them on the head more effectively than they bashed us? Did we outbreed them? Inbreed them? Squeeze them out into the 'edge country'? Crush them with superior extelligence? We'll put our own theory forward later in the book.

  We don't subscribe to the 'rational' story of human evolution and development, the story that has named us so pretentiously Homo sapiens sapiens. Briefly, that story focuses on the nerve cells in our brains, and says that our brains got bigger and bigger until finally we evolved Albert Einstein. They did, and we did, and Albert was indeed pretty bright, but nonetheless the thrust of that story is nonsense, because it doesn't discuss why, or even how, our brains got bigger. It's like describing a cathedral by saying 'You start with a low wall of stones and as time passes you add more stones so that it gets higher and higher'. There's a lot more to a cathedral than that, as its builders would attest.

  What actually happened is much more interesting, and you can see it going on all around you today. Let's look at it from the elf's viewpoint. We don't programme our children rationally, as we might set up a computer. Instead, we pour into their minds loads of irrational junk about sly foxes, wise owls, heroes and princes, magicians and genies, gods and demons, and bears that get stuck in rabbit-holes; we frighten them half to death with tales of terror, and they come to enjoy the fear. We beat them (not very much in the last few decades, but for thousands of years before that, for sure). We embed the teaching messages in long sagas, in priestly injunctions, and invented histories full of dramatic lessons; in children's stories that teach them by indirection.

  Stand near a children's playground, and watch (these days, check with the local police station first, and in any case be sure to wear protective clothing). Peter and Iona Opie did just that, many years ago, and collected children's songs and games, some of them thousands of years old.

  Culture passes through the whirlpool that is the child community without needing adults for its transmission: you will all remember Eeny-Meeny-Miny-Mo, or some other counting-out ritual.

  There is a children's subculture that propagates itself without adult intervention, censorship, or indeed knowledge.

  The Opies later collected, and began to explain to adults, the original nursery stories like Cinderella and Rumpelstiltskin. In late medieval times, Cinderella's slipper had been a fur one, not glass. And that was a euphemism, because (at least in the German version) the girls gave the prince their 'fur slipper' to try on ... The story came to us through the French, and in that language

  'verre' can either be 'glass' or 'fur'. The Grimm brothers went for the hygienic alternative, saving parents the danger of embarrassing explanations.

  Rumpelstiltskin was an interestingly sexual parable, too, a tale to programme the idea that female masturbation leads to sterility. Remember the tale? The miller's daughter, put in the barn to 'spin straw into gold', virginally sits on a little stick that becomes a little man ... The denouement has the little man, when his name is finally identified, jumping in to 'plug' the lady very intimately, and the assembled soldiers can't pull him out. In the modern bowdlerised version, this survives vestigially as the little man pushing his foot through the floor and not being able to pull it out, a total non sequitur. So none of those concerned, king, miller or queen, can procreate (the stolen first child has been killed by the soldiers), and it all ends in tears. If you doubt this interpretation, enjoy the indirection: 'What is his name? What is his name?' recurs in the story. What is his name? What is a stilt with a rumpled skin? Whoops. The name has an equivalent derivation in many languages, too. (In Discworld, Nanny Ogg claimed to have written a children's story called

  'the Little Man Who Grew Too Big', but, then, Mrs Ogg always believed that a double entendre can mean only one thing.)

  Why do we like stories? Why are their messages embedded so deeply in the human psyche?

  Our brains have evolved to understand the world through patterns. These may be visual patterns, such as the tiger's stripes, or aural ones, like the howl of the coyote. Or smells. Or tastes. Or narratives. Stories are little mental models of the world, sequences of ideas strung like beads on a necklace. Each bead leads inexorably to the next bead; we know that the second little pig is going to get the chop: the world would not be working properly if it didn't.

  We deal not just in patterns, but also in meta-patterns. Patterns of patterns. We watch archer-fish shooting down insects with jets of water, we enjoy the elephant using its nose to acquire doughnuts from zoo visitors (less these days, alas); we delight in the flight of house-martins

  (there are fewer swallows to enjoy now) and the songs of garden-birds. We admire the weaver birds' nests, the silk moths' cocoons, the cheetahs' speed. All these things are characteristic of the creatures concerned. And what is characteristic of us? Stories. So, by the same token, we enjoy the stories of people. We are the storytelling chimpanzee, and we appreciate the meta-pattern involved in that.

  When we became more social, collecting into groups of a hundred or more, probably with agriculture, more stories appeared in our extelligence, to guide us. We had to have rules for behaviour, ways to deal with the infirm and the handicapped, ways to divert violence. In early and present-day tribal societies, everything that is not forbidden is mandatory. Stories point to difficult situations, like the Good Samaritan story in the New Testament; the Prodigal Son, too, is instructive by indirection, like Rumpelstiltskin. To drive that home, here is a tale from the Nigerian Hausa tribe, Blind Man's Lantern.

  A young man is coming home late from seeing his girlfriend in the next village; it is very dark under a starry sky and the path back to his own village is not easy to follow. He sees a lantern bobbing towards him, but when it gets closer he sees that it is carried by the Blind Man of his own village.

  'Hey, Blind Man,' he says. 'You whose darkness is no darker than your noonday! What do you carry a lantern for?'

  'It is not for my need I carry this lantern,' says the Blind Man. 'It is to keep off you fools with eyes!'

  We, as a species, don't only specialise in storytelling. Just as with the other specialities above, our species has a few more oddities. Probably the most odd characteristic that our elvish observer would note is our obsessive regard for children. We not only care for our own children, which is entirely to be expected biologically, but for other people's children, too; indeed for other humankind's children (we often find foreign-looking children more attractive than our own); indeed for the children of all land vertebrate species. We coo over lambs, fawns, newly hatched turtles, even tadpoles!

  Our sibling species, chimpanzees, are far more realistic. They too prefer baby animals. They prefer them for food, being more tender. (Humans also have a liking for lamb, calf, piglet, duckling ... We can coo over them and eat them.) After the kind of warfa
re now well documented between chimpanzee groups, the victors will kill and eat the young of the vanquished.

  Male lions will kill the young of prides they take over, and eating the corpses is not unusual.

  Many mammalian females will eat their young if both are starving, and will frequently 'reprocess'

  the first litter in this manner anyway.

  No, it's very clear that we are the odd men out. Odd Men indeed. We do have mental circuits to delight in, and protect, our own babies, so that the later Mickey Mouse converged on the outline of a three-year-old toddler, as did E.T. It is no wonder that so many people paid his phone bill.

  But we also go daft about cuddly juveniles of far too many other kinds. Biologically, this is very odd.

  A by-product of our finding other species' babies so attractive has clearly been the domestication of dogs, cats, goats, horses, elephants, hawks, chickens, cattle ... These symbioses have given immense pleasure to billions of people, and to their animals, and have contributed greatly to our nutrition. Those who feel that we have exploited the animals unfairly should consider the alternatives for the animals, in the wild, where nearly all of them are eaten alive as babies, without even the benefit of a quick death.

  Agriculture can perhaps be attributed to our other propensity, storytelling: the seed becoming the plant has served as an image for so many new words and thoughts, metaphors, new understandings of nature. And the wealth generated by agriculture permitted people to afford princes and philosophers, peasants[36] and popes. The cultural capital has grown as we have passed our knowledge on to succeeding generations. But it's more comfortable to enjoy that culture if there are a couple of warehouses full of barley for beer, wheat in the fields and cows in the meadows.

  We have very recently made the whole business of symbiosis with plants and animals much more technical -those controversial 'genetically modified organisms' -and we have lost a lot by taking our animal helpers out of the system, especially dogs and horses, and replacing them with machinery.

  We could not have predicted what the animal and plant symbioses did for us, for our extelligence, and we don't know what losing them will do. Events like that explode on us as the bicycle ride that is extelligence careers down this long technical hill, and can have totally unexpected effects.

  Yes, the Ford Model T made motoring affordable to many more people -but a socially much more important change was that it gave privacy in comfort for the first time, so that a large proportion of the next generation was sired on the upholstery of the car's back seat. Similarly, the dog coming in as a symbiont meant that we could hunt more successfully. Then, as a guard dog, it meant that private farms could be protected, and there was help with rounding up the animals and keeping away predators, including human ones. Lapdogs probably affected our sexual courtesies, particularly in eighteenth-century France, and dog and cat shows have stirred our upper-middle classes with, in modern England, the lower aristocracy.

  Think for a moment about what we've done to dogs and cats. More than horses and cows, they grow up in our families. We play with them, like we play with our own children, and the play often involves our own children. As with our own children, this interaction begets minds in our pets. Even human children don't do much good on the mind front if they don't play. And Jack found, and showed Ian, that even invertebrates, bright invertebrates like mantis shrimps, can acquire minds if they're involved in play activities. We described in Figments of Reality how this happens. Let's just note here that we have uplifted[37] our symbionts into the world of mind. Dogs worry about things, much more than wolves do. So dogs have at least some sense of themselves as a creature that lives in time, with some kind of awareness that it has a future as well as a present. Mind is catching.

  Usually we think of the domestication of the dog as a selection process driven by human intentions. The process may have started accidentally, perhaps with a tribe bringing up a wolf pup that the kids had brought into the cave, but at a relatively early stage it became a deliberate training programme. Proto-dogs were selected for obedience to their master and for useful skills such as hunting. As time passed, obedience evolved into devotion, and the modern dog arrived on the scene.

  However, there is an attractive alternative theory: the dogs selected us. It was the dogs that trained the humans. In this scenario, humans that were willing to allow wolf pups into the cave, and had the ability to train them, were rewarded by the dogs, for example by a willingness to assist in the hunt. Those humans that performed best at these tasks found it easier to acquire new pups and train new generations. The selection on the human side would have been cultural rather than genetic, because there hasn't been enough time for genetic influences to make a lot of difference directly. However, there may well have been selection on the genetic level for having enough intelligence to appreciate how useful a trained wolf could be, or having the generalised teaching skills, such as persistence, to carry out successful training. At any rate, the tribe as a whole benefited from those few individuals who could train proto-dogs, so that the selective pressure in favour of generalised dog-training genes must have been slight.

  This isn't one of those either-or choices: we are not obliged to accept one theory to the exclusion of the other. And this is a point we should make very firmly, for this and many other theories: things happen, all over the place and apparently in some confusion, and afterwards mankind goes and chops it all up into 'stories'. We need to do it like that that, but occasionally we should stand back and realise what it is we are doing.

  In the case of the dogs, there is in all likelihood a fair amount of truth in both theories, and what happened was a complicit co-evolution of dogs and people. As dogs became more obedient and easier to train, people became more willing to train them; as people became more willing to consider possessing a dog, the dogs became more adept at playing along and making themselves useful.

  The situation is, perhaps, more clear-cut with cats. Here it was very much a case of the cats being in the driving-seat. Rudyard Kipling's Just-So Story of 'The Cat That Walks By Itself' is too naive an acceptance of the impression that cats set out to give - that they do things their own way and merely tolerate those people who play along -but in most cases you can't train a cat. Very few cats are willing to perform tricks, whereas many dogs visibly enjoy performing for human pleasure. To the ancient Egyptians, cats were tiny gods on Earth, personified in the cat-goddess Bastet. Bastet was originally worshipped around Bubastis, in the Nile delta, and she had a lion's head; later, this transmuted (transmogrified?) into a cat's head. Bastet-worship then spread to Memphis, where she became conflated with Sakhmet, a local lion-headed goddess. Bastet was a generalised goddess of things that were especially important to women, such as fertility and safe childbirth. Cats were also worshipped, as godling avatars of Bastet -and they were often mummified because of their religious significance. There was a sort of dog-god, the jackal- headed Anubis, but the difference was that he had a substantial 'hands-on' job: he was the god of embalming, and his role was to assist (or impede) the passage of the dead through the underworld. Anubis judged whether the dead were worthy of the afterlife. The only duties that the cat-godlings had were to allow humans to worship them.

  Nothing new there, then.

  Even today, cats assiduously give the impression of being independent; they seldom come when called, and are liable to depart at a moment's notice for reasons that are never very clear. All cat- owners know, however, that this impression is superficial: their cats need attention, and know it.

  But this need shows up indirectly. For example. Ian's cat 'Ms Garfield' usually comes out to the front of the house to greet the arrival of the family car, but her pleasure at the car's appearance is heavily disguised as a strident harangue: 'Where the bloody hell have you lot been?' After absences on holiday or overseas, family members find that whenever they are in the garden, the cat coincidentally is in the same part of the garden -but either asleep or apparently just pa
ssing through. It looks as though house-cats are slowly losing the domestication battle, but putting up a strong fight. Feral cats are another matter, and real working cats like farm cats are often genuinely independent. These days, though, many farm cats are treated much like house-cats. At any rate, there are some good research projects still to be carried out on the co-evolution of ancient humans and their livestock and pets.

  In another instance of this co-evolution, the horse made chivalry a possible culture (hence the name, of course: compare the French cheval') and enabled the Mongols to achieve one of the largest, best-controlled empires in human history. Under the Khans it was said that a virgin could walk unmolested from Seville to Hang Chou. Only in the twentieth century was that again achievable, with luck and possibly a harder search for the virgin. The Spanish took horses to America, where humans had killed off several equine species some 13,000 years before[38], and changed the lives of all the North American Indian tribes -and the cowboys, of course. And, a little later, Hollywood.

  The horse did wonders for the genetics of humans, too. Just as they say that the invention of the bicycle saved East Anglia from an incest implosion, so the people that had come out of Africa were only a tiny part of early Homo sapiens's genetic diversity. All recent studies of the DNA

  genetics of human populations agree that the genetic diversity outside Africa is only a tiny fraction of the diversity that is still found on that continent. Those who left, to go as far as Australia or China, to Western Europe or via the high Arctic to America, are less diverse in total than many small indigenous African peoples. With the arrival of the horse, it became possible for traders to carry goods - and gene alleles - for very long distances, very effectively. So the out-of- Africa humans have inherited a relatively small part of the African gene-pool: they are genetically impoverished, but well stirred.