Hominization
The obstacles inherent in the study of language, knowledge, and belief are compounded by a daunting paucity of evidence - and total lack of written sources - to make the study of their births tremendously difficult.
Much of the evidence for prehistoric humans is extrapolated from observable groups today. When not looking at Western university-student psychology-experiment volunteers, scholars try to approximate the first humans by looking at apes, or children (assuming the cognitive development of an individual parallels that of the species), or hunter-gatherers (a tactic reliable exactly to the extent that hunter-gatherers “have no history”, have not changed over the centuries). The uncertainty of this reconstructed evidence is then compounded as it is interpreted through assumed answers to a variety of philosophical questions: Is language instinctive or learned? Is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis true? Do nonhumans have language? Is the “mind” in the brain? How do symbols work? What is the ultimate goal of the species? Typical results are ingenuous causal chains; one goes from a newly upright posture to hands now free to make tools and gestures, which causes brain asymmetry, which gives us linguistic and cognitive super powers.[212] Unfortunately, scholars may be more confident in our conclusions than they have any right to be. If alien anthropologists came to a post-apocalyptic earth, they could use our own anthropologists' methods to find in a precious artefact such as the “Girls With Guns Calendar 2009” a magical device for promoting fertility (note the enlarged breasts), success in the hunt (note the high-calibre firearms), and measuring time (not so bad a conjecture, but surely missing the calendar's primary appeal).Some recent studies have looked at the meta-history of hominization, to analyze the various ways we have explained this process.
Wiktor Stocz- kowski has demonstrated that almost every scholar's “recipe for making a human being” can be reduced to one of two variations, depending on assumptions about human nature: “Take an ape who could be incited to act only by necessity, remove it from the protective shell of environment A and put it on the grill of a hostile nature for a few million years (environment of period B). If your ape is more orientated towards optimization of profit, surround it with a host of savoury ingredients of Period A in order to obtain the same end result”: the creation of a proper human. Despite apparent advances in anthropology and biology, he argues, the story scholars tell of our species' origins is a rehashing of ideas - assumptions, really - from the ancient Greeks, no later than the fourth century bce.[213] Glynn Isaac points to the function of these accounts (“As replacement material for Genesis... they have allegorical content, and they convey values, ethics and attitudes”), while Misia Landau, looking at the classics in the field, reports that “you see clearly a narrative structure, but they are more than just stories. They conform to the structure of the hero folk tale.”[214] Heroic apes struggle to achieve their destiny: us.Although individual scholars argue with vigour in contradiction to each other, works that take an ecumenical approach can synthesize something like a consensus. Rather than a one-way causal process, they speak of “feedback loops” that allow influences to go either way.[215] A recent emphasis on the importance of sociability now complements an earlier focus on the importance of tools. Thus connecting multiple factors with multiple pathways gives a picture of multiple possibilities and complexities that few could reject. One textbook, for example, includes a chart that causally links an increase in intelligence to better communication, technology, and social skills, which in turn cause rising social complexity (either directly or indirectly via more complex subsistence patterns), which in turn causes an increase in intelligence.[216] Still, religious beliefs are mostly ignored or dismissed as fictions, perhaps playing some role in natural selection, perhaps caused by changes in our ancestors' neurological make-up.
How global are these histories? Typically scholarship focuses on Africa as the place of origin, or avoids grounding its subjects geographically entirely. Of course, all kinds of Euro-centricisms can enter into the more philosophical speculations. One cognitive scientist argues for humans' “ultimate goal” by listing bite-sized plot summaries of the classics of Western literature.[217] At times, as our focus moves beyond and before Europe, the Euro-centric narrow-mindedness we have been seeing broadens into an anthropocentric narrow-mindedness, a kind of human exceptionalism. Humans have distinct language (specifically a lower larynx permitting greater vowel range) and social skills (including manipulation and deceit) that facilitate longer survival and greater reproductive opportunities - suggesting that soap operas and reality television are not the worst of humanity, but its soul.[218] Those prehistorians arguing that thinking cannot occur without language necessarily take other species' inability to communicate with us verbally as indicative of their lack of intelligence, an intellectual assumption that echoes conclusions made about indigenous people at first contact with Europeans and their scholarship. More encouragingly, some scholars assign an important role to the early long-distance migration processes as one important landmark in humans' cognitive development, indicating a flexibility or a capacity for planning so advanced that it must depend on language.[219] More subtly, fundamental to world history is a decentring of the self, a curiosity, and an appreciation of difference, and we see that increasingly in the newest scholarship on hominization. When not tending towards tautology (for example, social products reflect the society that produces them), new theory tends towards diversity, an appreciation of the diversity of data, and an acceptance of a diversity of interpretation.[220]