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- [Narrator] We are the paradoxical ape.
Bipedal.
Naked.
Large brain.
Long the master of fire, tools, and language.
But still trying to understand ourselves.
Aware that death is inevitable,
yet filled with optimism.
We grow up slowly.
We hand down knowledge.
We empathize and deceive.
We shape the future from our shared understanding
of the past.
CARTA brings together experts from diverse disciplines
to exchange insights on who we are
and how we got here.
An exploration made possible by the generosity
of humans, like you.
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I wanna thank the organizers for inviting me
and for providing this incredible opportunity
for all of us to be together and to imagine.
It is the human capacity to move between the worlds
of what is and what could be that marks the emergence
of a particular evolutionary context
and history for the genus Homo, us, humans.
I argue that it's the human capacity to imagine,
to be creative, to hope, and to dream,
to infuse the world with meanings
and to cast our inspirations far and wide.
Limited neither by personal experience nor material reality,
it has enabled our lineage, the genus Homo,
to develop a particular niche,
a particular way of being in the world,
where imagination plays a central role.
Humans are very creative,
and we use our imagination to be so.
This has an evolutionary history.
The real challenge to understanding human evolution, then,
is not just the tracing of the bones and stones
of the 2.6 million year history of our genus.
Instead it is understanding those changes
alongside the reality.
There are lineages that went
from the makers of basic stone tools
to the creators of amazing cave art
to the constructors of massive cities
and the dominant force shaping the ecosystem today.
Our lineage's transition from a cluster
of medium-sized, fangless, hornless, clawless,
semi-naked, or fully naked, ape-like things
with a few rocks and some sticks
to a species who invented domestication,
economies, cities, nations, religion, warfare, and peace.
That is the challenge of understanding human evolution.
Now, let me put human in context here
before you think I'm talking only
about human exceptionalism, that is,
we know that there are many other species that use tools,
that have incredibly complex social lives,
that use sound as communication traveling
across incredible distance,
and that have cultural varieties
that actually impact the ways in which their genomes shift.
Here's an example of hunting patterns
across latitudinal variations in orca pods
that has actually had a huge change
in their structure of their genomes.
So gene culture co-evolution doesn't just occur in humans,
it occurs in many organisms.
However, we have studied other complex organisms,
like chimpanzees and whales and orcas,
for a long time, and we know a lot about what they do
and what they don't do.
We know that chimpanzees don't have cash economies,
governments, religious institutions, creeds, or fanatics.
They don't arrest and deport each other,
and they don't create massive economies
of material and social inequality.
They don't change planet wide ecosystems,
build cities, make airplanes,
drive thousands of other species to extinction,
or give CARTA talks.
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But we do.
We are a particular mammal, a particular primate,
and a particular hominoid kind of ape
that is able to look at the world around us
and see it as it is,
imagine entirely new possibilities,
and convert those imaginings into material reality.
We have evolved the most compassionate,
the cruelest, the most creative, and the most destructive
of all life on this planet.
And we demonstrate these abilities often.
How this difference came to be matters.
And it is by delving into humanity's
very distinctive history
that we are able to understand why we are the way we are.
There's incredibly good evidence
that over the last 2 million years,
the members of the genus Homo,
all of those things that have something to do
with our specific ancestry,
underwent significant in their brains, their bodies,
their behavior, and they created a new niche,
a new way of existing, both ecologically and socially
in the world.
This is a human niche
and this niche involves a particular evolution
of something called a human imagination.
Human imagination, I would like to argue,
is as important as the bones and stones
in understanding the processes and patterns
of human evolution.
Alright, here is a summary of a whole bunch
of interesting things that have happened
over the last 2 million years to our lineage.
What I want to point out here,
and I'll provide some specific examples,
is that this is not just about linear,
even though it's a line, linear evolution.
This is about the changing relation between individuals,
between individuals and the material world,
between individuals, the material world,
and their cognitive interpretation of that material world,
and that cycle getting more and more dense.
As we changed,
as we changed the world around us,
as we changed one another,
we began an intricate dance,
which is culminating today,
and hopefully will continue into the future.
So rather than talk about this shifting in crania
or other morphologies,
let's spend a little time with a few
of the pieces of evidence we have
of our evolutionary history that talk
about this incredible dynamic,
this feedback between the material, the social,
the cognitive, and our evolutionary histories.
So we know that significant dietary changes happened
fairly early on in our history,
but those significant dietary changes enabled,
for example, our brains to get much larger
and a variety of other things.
However, we sometimes forget
that those significant dietary changes
are really associated with the use of tools.
Now, I'm gonna show you some tools here.
This is, up here in your upper left corner,
this is an Oldowan tool.
It's about 1.8 million years old.
I'm sure none of you are impressed.
It is a rock with some sharp edges.
But you should be.
Nothing else in the history of this planet,
aside from our lineage,
has ever had the capacity to take a stone,
to look at that stone,
and to imagine something else inside that stone,
to talk another object and work it
on that initial stone to create something anew from inside.
That's fairly impressive.
And we know how difficult some of these processes are.
If you look at the next illustration here,
you will notice that this is actually a reconstruction
of all of the mapping of a stone tool, right?
So what we actually do is you go in
and you get the detritus, the debris,
and you piece it back together.
So you can look at every single strike.
Now, when I say we, I mean the graduate students
that actually did the work, not the professors.
But what you then know is you can see
that the individual stone tool maker,
even for these fairly old stone tools,
here we're getting into the Acheulean stone tool industry,
looking something a bit more like this,
what we can see is that you take it,
you have the platform, you look at it, you strike it,
you've totally, radically altered the whole shape.
You now have to reimagine the entire thing,
hit it in the next place, hit it in the next place,
and when we construct those together,
it is unbelievably difficult.
It takes a student today months to learn
how to be a good stone tool maker.
And that is with video training,
with the rocks already brought to you,
and without any large predators trying to eat you
while you do your work.
We can underestimate how important this was.
Think about what I just said.
Not all stones are equally good for making stone tools.
So, to make stone tools, even the most basic ones,
you have to be able to find decent stones
and replicate that finding.
You have to go back and get them again and again.
Then you have to carry, I don't know how many
of you carry regularly 20 or 30 kilos of stones with you,
but that's a lot of work.
Dispersing that socially is very important.
Then you have to make stone tools
in an environment that is packed with very large things
with large teeth that want to eat you,
and remember, you're very small, naked,
and you've got some rocks and some few sticks.
When you make stone tools, it makes a lot of noise,
so you've got everything stacked against you.
How did our ancestors figure this out?
How did they work through it?
Imagination, collaboration, cooperation,
really focusing in on the social,
but really interestingly, current work,
looking at what it means to make stone tools,
by Dietrich Stout and a number of other groups,
have demonstrated that when you make these stone tools,
certain areas of neuro-biological activity
are accentuated and there's some corollary patterns.
Now, what are these areas,
and frequently these are areas associated
with higher functioning and memory,
with planning and, interestingly enough,
with language.
But wait, don't order yet,
because it's not just the making stones tools
that does these things in your brain,
which probably means they have a deep ancestry
for doing that,
but also if you are watching a stone tool maker,
you mirror some of those functions.
And here is the critical component
of stone tools: it's not about the tools themselves,
it's about the social context
in which they were made and used.
We can debate whether or not
teaching occurred 1.5 million years ago.
What we can't debate is these complex stone tools
were made at 1.5,
one million, five hundred thousand years ago,
that you or I could not make without being instructed.
Was there language?
I don't think so.
But there was a broad bandwidth
of highly dense information transfer
that was social and it was imaginative.
Now around this time period,
and between about 1.5 and a million years ago,
as I pointed out, that niche is constantly
sort of augmenting as more ways
of dealing with the world occur,
that density and those feedbacks continue
to shape our bodies, our lives, our cognition.
We know that by about half a million years ago,
give or take 50 thousand years,
I like to work in big numbers,
we had an incredible capacity to collaborate
in ways that seem to exceed the collaboration
of many other organisms.
We had incredibly complex, cooperative parenting
where males and young were also caring for offspring,
we had a pattern of the whole communities responding
to environmental pressures, not just individuals,
and we had evidence of augmentation and enhancement
in our imaginative capabilities.
For example, and we'll hear more
about this later today, fire.
We heard about it already in the previous talk.
People underestimate fire all the time.
Yes, fire is wonderful because it allows us access
to nutrients that we wouldn't have otherwise
by heating food.
It also allows us to modify stones and wood
to alter their physical structure
so that we can better use them.
But more importantly, as was already mentioned,
fire turns night to day.
Fire releases us from the constraint of the sun.
Fire enables an expansion of the time we have
to be together, to think together, to imagine together.
But it's not just evidence of fire,
which maybe goes back as far as 1.6 million years ago.
We have glimmerings, elements,
but it really isn't until
about four or five hundred thousand years ago,
three hundred thousand years ago,
that we start to see it with increasing regularity.
But it's not just fire, and really,
from my perspective, cool stone tools.
Here's a nearly 300,000 year old clamshell from Java
that, at some point, something in the lineage Homo
picked up, grabbed another object, and doodled on it.
Most people, just like
that early Oldowan stone tool I showed you,
are not impressed by doodles.
But you should be.
Think what it means to doodle.
Think what it means to take an object,
to take another object, and alter the surface
to create a new sensation.
We see this over the last three hundred,
four hundred thousand years.
We see glimmerings earlier,
but it's really over this last three
to four hundred thousand years that we start to see this
with much higher density.
At that same time period, we also have two very interesting,
okay, not very many,
but two very interesting events.
Here at Atapuerca, about 400,000 years ago,
we have a number of bodies found in one place,
a deep pit.
In that deep pit are a couple cave bears
that look like they fell in,
and a bunch of other things
that have been gnawing on the bones,
but nothing else except for, as you can see here,
this beautiful hand ax, about this big.
It's made from a stone that is not local.
And it is gorgeous.
It was carved and thrown in, never used.
What does that mean?
We won't ever know, but I bet it had something to do
with the imagination and the creativity and meaning
for that group of people.
And more recently, about, say, between two hundred thousand
and three hundred thousand years ago,
we have another evidence of possible movement of bodies
into an underground cave.
People debate whether it's burial or not,
I don't wanna get into that debate.
But I do want to point out
that we have glimmerings earlier on,
but all of these things, burials, art, creative imaginings,
incredible manipulation of the world,
all has a deep evolutionary history
and didn't just show up when our species shows up
'cause everything I've just showed you
predates homo sapiens sapiens.
But by the last 30, 50 thousand years or so,
we find clear examples of identity,
clear examples of individuals taking items,
reshaping them to create a completely new reality,
a new imagination, a new way to be in the world,
and it is my, and many other's, arguments
that this new way to be in the world,
these new senses of identity,
this new deployment of imagination,
had a huge impact on those feedback loops
between our ecology, between the materials,
between our bodies, between our cognition,
and between our societies.
So the human niche is, of course,
centrally located and focused.
Our studies of understanding human evolution
has to be about our brain and our DNA
and our morphology and our bodies,
but it also has to be about all of the different ecologies
that humans have spread across the entire planet,
so it's our brains, our bodies, our ecologies,
and, and you already all know this,
our perceptual realities.
The way we see the world,
the way we think about the world,
the way we feel the world is as important
as our bones, our muscles, and our DNA
because part of that system, that feedback,
that complex dynamic that is the human
involves the imagination.
So the human niche includes creativity,
cooperation, and imagination.
Meaning, especially making meaning,
matters as an agent in the processes
of our evolutionary histories.
It is specifically feedback systems between behaviors,
ecologies, cognitive and bodily systems
involved in teaching and learning and meaning making,
communicating, that facilitated a new niche
that had huge impacts.
For example, it set up our brains,
it structured them in a way
that Michael Arbib calls "language ready."
You don't just get language.
It has to evolve, and the cognitive
and neuro biological structures have to be there.
And part of that is this,
we also have communities of shared imagination,
seeing these multiple, iterative events
of meaning making across space and time
shows that communities of humans,
and I'm using the term broadly
because I don't necessarily just mean homo sapiens,
were capable of working together to remake the world
in their, and from their, imagination.
So meaning making, imagination, communication,
creativity and community are central.
And that's my pitch.
However, all of this stuff sounds really positive
and really, really exciting.
I would like to say that our capacity to be
with one another, to share our minds,
to imagine, to think forward as a central part
of our evolutionary niche also brings
with it a few problems.
Imagination made humans exceptional,
but also potentially extremely dangerous.
We have interconnected the world in a way
that nothing on this planet has ever done,
and through that interconnection, we are reshaping
what the world actually looks like.
Here's a global human density map.
This is a better map than most that you look at
because this is the way we're shaping the actual surface
and functioning of the earth.
We have imagined ourselves into a position
where it is in the balance.
Our ecologies, our capacities, our creativities
are nearing, they're bringing us to the point
where decisions have to be made and have to be imagined.
We know today, for example, in the United States,
we have systems of racism, mysogony,
and inequality unknown before.
So we need to understand how our imagination
and creativity has gotten us to this state,
always remembering that, in fact, that imagination
and creativity is the one thing that can get us out of it.
Being together with one another, thinking together,
creating, imagining, seeing the world as the way it is,
imagining other possibilities, and at least trying
to make them happen.
That's what got humans to where we are today.
Thank you.
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