Download What happened in the origin of human consciousness?

THE ANATOMICAL RECORD (PART B: NEW ANAT.) 276B:19 –26, 2004
FEATURE ARTICLE
What Happened in the Origin of Human
Consciousness?
IAN TATTERSALL*
At some point in its evolutionary history, our species Homo sapiens ceased to be a nonlinguistic, nonsymbolic
organism, living in the world as presented to it by Nature, and instead began to exist in a world that it reconstructs
in its own mind. Most scientists since Darwin have been content to explain this extraordinary transformation in human
consciousness by the operation of natural selection. However, the human fossil and archaeological records indicate
that modern human symbolic consciousness is not the culmination of the long trend that natural selection would
predict. Instead, it shows that major change in the human past has been episodic and rare and that, as far as can be
determined from the archaeological record, the passage from nonsymbolic to symbolic cognition is a recent event as
well as an unprecedented one. So recent, indeed, that it significantly postdates the acquisition of modern human
anatomy as expressed in skeletal structure. It, thus, appears most likely that the biological (neural) capacity
underwriting the radically new behavioral mode arose as an incidental exaptation in the same process that produced
the new skeletal structure of Homo sapiens, but that it lay unexpressed until it was “discovered” by means of a
cultural innovation, plausibly the invention of language. As in the case of the modern anatomical structure, it appears
that the new capacity was initially expressed in Africa and that its various behavioral potentials were sequentially
discovered in a drawn-out process that is continuing today. An “accidental” origin of the human capacity helps
understand why so many human behaviors have proven self-destructive and contradictory, a feature of our species
that reductionist, selection-based scenarios are hard-put to explain. Anat Rec (Part B: New Anat) 276B:19 –26, 2004.
© 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc.
KEY WORDS: human evolution; consciousness; symbolic cognition; exaptation; Neanderthals; intelligence; evolution
INTRODUCTION
There is undoubtedly something special about us humans, Homo sapiens.
We are language-using, symbolically
reasoning beings, whose relationship
to the rest of the living world is, so far
as we know, totally unlike that of any
of the millions of other living species
with whom we share our planet. In
some elusive though all too real way,
Dr. Tattersall is Curator in the Division
of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York
City. A version of this article was originally written for publication in German
in: T. Wabbel, editor. 2004. “Am Anfang
war (k)ein Gott - Über die menschliche
Existenz und andere Absurditäten.”
Dusseldorf: PATMOS Publishers.
*Correspondence to: Ian Tattersall, Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, Central Park
West at 79th Street, New York, NY
10024. E-mail: [email protected]
DOI 10.1002/ar.b.10041
Published online in Wiley InterScience
(www.interscience.wiley.com).
© 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc.
we stand apart from the rest of Nature, seeking to explain it, and worse,
to manipulate and change it. Yet there
can be no doubt that our origins lie
firmly within the natural world. We
are, in other words, directly descended from an ancestor that was
neither linguistic nor rational (or irrational!) in the way in which we are.
We started well on the other side of
the narrow but deep gulf that now
separates us from even the closest of
our living relatives.
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
How could this extraordinary result
have come about? By what remarkable means did our forebears contrive
to cross that almost bottomless gulf?
Most evolutionary biologists today
seem to be content to put their faith in
natural selection as the explanation.
Common wisdom in evolutionary biology tells us that, over the eons all
living creatures, ourselves included,
have been finely honed by selection to
an exquisite fit with their environments: that, in every generation, those
individuals best adapted to prevailing
circumstances have reproduced most
successfully and, thus, have preferentially passed on their favorable heritable characteristics to the next one. To
members of a brainy and egotistical
species, it has been self-evident that
our metabolically expensive large
brains and expansive intelligence are
a Good Thing. And it follows from
this, does it not, that these human
properties must have been consistently favored by natural selection
over the millennia, finally culminating
in the splendidly burnished cognition
we so admire in ourselves today?
Charles Darwin certainly thought
so. To him, the constant pressure of
natural selection over a vast span of
time was the unambiguous explanation for modern human intelligence
(Darwin, 1871). As far as he was concerned, our vaunted modern cognitive
20 THE ANATOMICAL RECORD (PART B: NEW ANAT.)
capacities essentially represent the
culmination of a longstanding trend
in which smarter individuals have
out-reproduced dumber ones. And so
eminently reasonable does this scenario appear that few scientists have
seen fit to question it. Vociferous objections have been heard, of course,
from those with religious preconceptions; but those objections are
grounded in a form of knowledge that
lies entirely outside the purview of science. Within science, and most particularly within reductionist science, it
has been more or less taken for
granted that increasing intelligence
was more or less inevitable once human precursors had taken up such intellectually demanding activities as
stone tool making. Yet the putative
agent of all this, natural selection, is
not a creative force: it cannot be, because it can only promote novelties
that are already in existence. In Nature, form has to precede function, if
only because without form there can
be no function. And natural selection
cannot by itself conjure up anything
new, no matter how advantageous the
possession of a particular novelty
might potentially be. There is no evident reason why human symbolic intelligence should have been an exception to this rule.
Unlike his colleague, Darwin’s coinventor of the notion of evolution by
natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, was evidently perturbed by considerations of this kind. While in all
other ways even more Darwinian than
Darwin himself on the subject of natural selection, Wallace could simply
not see how selection could have
brought about the extraordinary modern human cognitive faculty, with all
of its ramifications of faith, superstition, and insight in addition to its ratiocinative aspects (Tattersall, 1998a).
For Wallace, something other than
natural selection had to be invoked in
the mysterious acquisition of what
Alex Marshack (1985) has termed “the
human capacity.” In Victorian England, the guileless Wallace, too innocent to suspect fraud in others, turned
to Spiritualism for an explanation; today it is necessary for scientists to
look elsewhere.
Where? Well, in Darwin’s and Wallace’s time, the human fossil and archaeological records barely existed.
Now, however, they constitute a fulsome archive of the anatomies and
inferred behaviors of our long-vanished kin, and they provide the obvious point of entry into this question. If
we can understand the patterns of acquisition of notable anatomical and
behavioral novelties among our forebears, perhaps we can begin to hazard
some guesses about how we became
the remarkable creatures that we are.
And maybe we can begin to perceive
whether Homo sapiens is indeed the
burnished result of fine-tuning by natural selection over the eons (and thus
that our evolution was by implication
a more or less linear, directional affair), or whether we are alternatively
the untidy product of an altogether
more haphazard process.
THE HUMAN STORY
As far as is currently known, the hominid lineage separated from the one
In Nature, form has to
precede function, if only
because without form
there can be no
function.
leading to its closest great ape relative
at around 7– 8 million years (myr)
ago, probably in response to climatic
changes in Africa that converted a relatively consistent forest cover throughout the continent into one into which
woodland and grassland increasingly
intruded, fragmenting the forest. The
exact picture of events is cloudy in the
first few million years of hominid existence, but one thing is clear: there are
many ways to be a hominid, and the
ancient hominids were busy exploring
them all as new hominid species with
varying characteristics emerged and
went out to do battle in their own ways
in the unstable ecological theatre. This
set a pattern whereby multiple hominid
species have typically occupied the
world at any one point in time (see Figure 1). By some time over approximately 4 myr ago, however, a fairly
standardized hominid morphology had
emerged. Hominids of this period were
FEATURE ARTICLE
rather short-statured (around three to
four feet tall), with relatively long arms
and short legs and long, somewhat
curved extremities. The pelvis was
widely flaring, but the thorax tapered
upward and the shoulders were narrow.
The result was that, although these
creatures were certainly upright bipeds
when on the ground, they retained
many features that would have facilitated climbing in the trees. This was not
a transitional adaptation, but rather
was a notably stable one that remained
essentially unaltered for a couple of million years, even as new hominid species
entered and departed the evolutionary
stage.
It was presumably in the opening
period of hominid existence that our
precursors acquired a taste for animal
protein. The new woodland environment that our remote ancestors first
exploited, with scattered trees interspersed by grassy spaces, would have
presented both new dangers and new
opportunities to these unusual creatures. When on the ground, these slow
and essentially defenseless primates
were more exposed to large predators
than their arboreal ancestors had
been; and there does exist good evidence that the early hominids were
indeed the prey of both terrestrial and
avian predators (e.g., Brain, 1981;
Berger and Clarke, 1995). At the same
time, though, the hominids would
have had the enhanced opportunity,
at least from time to time, to supplement a largely fruit-based diet not
only with grassland tubers but also
with the remains of dead herbivores.
Some chimpanzee populations are
known to hunt small mammals both
cooperatively and with some regularity (e.g., Goodall, 1986), and there is
no reason to think that ancestral
hominids might not have done the
same. What is more, the hominids
would also have been able to vary
their diet with scavenged remains
with greater regularity (something in
which chimpanzees are not apparently interested; see Stanford, 2003).
What these possibilities actually
meant in the lives of these smallbrained, large-faced creatures is more
difficult to say, however; and there is
no evidence in this early period that
any hominid had cognitive or communicative abilities that exceeded those
of today’s apes. And this, of course, is
Figure 1. One possible scheme of relationships among species assigned to Hominidae, showing the consistent tendency to multiple
branching throughout the family’s history that reflects the ongoing exploration of the multiple ways there are to be hominid. It is evidently
an unusual situation for our species Homo sapiens to be the lone hominid extant. 姝 Ian Tattersall.
22 THE ANATOMICAL RECORD (PART B: NEW ANAT.)
Figure 2. Median sagittal sections of various crania of extant hominoids and fossil hominids.
a: Chimpanzee; b: Sterkfontein 5; c: Bodo; d: Kabwe; e: Petralona; f: Sima de los Huesos Skull
5; g: Guattari; h: extant Homo sapiens. Note particularly the contrast in cranial and facial
form between the Guattari (Homo neanderthalensis) and Homo sapiens crania. From
Bookstein et al. (1999), with permission.
why paleoanthropologists nowadays
increasingly refer to these ancient relatives as “bipedal apes.”
From Bipedal Apes to
H. sapiens
The archaic body form of these bipedal apes notwithstanding, however, it
is somewhere among this early hominid radiation that the first stone tool
maker emerged, establishing a highly
significant pattern that was evidently
common in our evolutionary past: the
arrival of new behavioral or technological innovations has not tended to
coincide with the appearance of new
kinds of hominid (Figure 1). This actually makes considerable sense, for
the only place in which a novelty can
appear is within a species.
At approximately 2.5 myr ago, a hu-
FEATURE ARTICLE
man precursor (whose parents did not
do this) spontaneously began to strike
sharp flakes from small river cobbles:
a feat that no living ape has yet been
induced to replicate, even with intensive coaching. In addition to their
manual skills, the first tool makers
also displayed considerable foresight,
carrying stones of the right kind
around for considerable distances before making them into tools as
needed. Here finally, without doubt,
were creatures that had advanced beyond the ape cognitive level, and
whose new behavior had opened a
huge vista of new possibilities— enabling them, for example, to detach
whole limbs from carcasses and to retreat to safer locations to consume
them. What’s more, these hominids
also used cobbles to pound on limb
bones, cracking them to expose the
nutritious marrow within. Among all
competing hunters and scavengers,
only hyenas had the massive jaw apparatus to be interested in this particular resource and, thus, to be a special
danger to their early hominid competitors at kill sites.
It would be a million years before a
significant advance was made on
those initial small but razor-sharp
flakes that had ushered in humanity’s
technological career. And meanwhile
a wholly new kind of hominid had
appeared. Now usually known as
Homo ergaster, this human precursor
was distinctly different from the more
archaic hominids in having a body
that was generally like our own in
most features. But it still had a smallish brain (up to half as large as our
own, compared with its ancestors’ one
third), and a face that jutted noticeably (e.g., Walker and Leakey, 1993;
Figure 2). Still, it was a radically new
kind of hominid, whose body structure finally emancipated it from the
forest edges and woodlands to which
its forerunners had been confined.
Hard on the heels of achieving this
new body form, hominids had expanded out of Africa and into the farthest reaches of Asia. Yet it was not
until several hundred thousand years
(kyr) after their appearance that these
new-model hominids started to make
a new type of tool. This was the socalled “Acheulean handaxe,” a much
larger implement than the early
flakes, and one carefully formed by
FEATURE ARTICLE
flaking on both sides to a symmetrical tear-drop shape. For the first
time, hominids were making tools to
a “mental template” held in their
minds before manufacture started,
rather than simply going for an attribute: a sharp cutting edge, independent of the actual shape of the
tool. This, too, must have represented a cognitive leap forward; yet
we have no inkling of what difference this made in the wider existences of the tool makers, and it is
pretty certain that, no matter how
like yourself such creatures might
have looked at a distance, if you met
one you would have discovered little
in common intellectually. It is, for
example, highly unlikely that such
creatures spoke, although it’s possible that they had quite sophisticated
vocal/gestural communication (e.g.,
Corballis, 2002).
At 1.5 myr ago, then, and despite
having acquired both an anatomy
(adapted for a striding gait out on
the open savanna) and a behavior
(stone tool making) that clearly had
profound long-term consequences,
hominids were still well integrated
with the rest of nature: despite their
peculiarities, they had certainly not
crossed the bottomless gulf of which
I spoke earlier. Indeed, this crossing
was to be a very much later development. For, over the next million
years or so, successive hominid species merely tended to do what their
forebears had done, if perhaps a little better. By approximately half a
million years ago, though, hominids
were on the scene that had brains up
into the range of modern humans,
although still well below the modern
average. And by not long after this
time, we start to find the earliest evidence of the building of artificial
shelters and of the domestication of
fire in hearths (Klein, 1999). We also
find, miraculously preserved at the
German site of Schoeningen, the
first finely crafted wooden throwing
spears, made of a material that normally fails to be preserved (Thieme,
1997). These javelin-like spears, two
meters and more in length, suggest
that the hunting techniques and
abilities of their makers were a good
bit more sophisticated than one
would have guessed from the stone
tool record alone; for it is only in the
THE ANATOMICAL RECORD (PART B: NEW ANAT.) 23
Figure 3. Comparison of a composite Neanderthal skeleton (left) with that of a Homo
sapiens of similar stature (approximately 5 feet 6 inches; 167 cm). Note the multiple differences throughout the skeleton and particularly in the proportions of the pelvis and rib cage.
Courtesy of Ken Mowbray.
period between approximately 300
and 200 kyr ago that we find a radically new approach to the manufacture of stone tools. This was the socalled “prepared-core” technique, in
which a stone “core” was carefully
shaped with multiple strikes until a
single blow would detach a flake that
needed little modification into a finished tool (e.g., Schick and Toth,
1993). This was a reflection, one
could guess, of yet another cognitive
advance; but what that advance suggested of its possessor’s subjective
experience of the world it is impossible to say. All we can hazard is
that, throughout this period, hominids’ relationship to the world around
them was becoming more complex;
but these advances nonetheless seem
to be signaling a refinement of what
had gone before, rather than a radical departure from earlier ways of
doing business.
24 THE ANATOMICAL RECORD (PART B: NEW ANAT.)
Neanderthals and
Cro-Magnons
Perhaps the most sophisticated practitioners of the prepared-core stone
tool-making technique were the Neanderthals, a group of hominids—Homo
neanderthalensis—who left a remarkable record of themselves in Europe
and western Asia in the period between approximately 200 and 30 kyr
ago. The Neanderthals had brains that
were fully as large as our own but that
were housed in very different-looking
skulls (see Tattersall and Schwartz,
1998, 2000), which were situated atop
bodies that, while basically similar to
ours, were also characteristically different from those of Homo sapiens, as
is made abundantly evident by the
first restoration of a composite Neanderthal skeleton, recently completed
by G.J. Sawyer and Blaine Maley at
the American Museum of Natural History (Figure 3). A recent study (Bailey,
2002) has also emphasized the significant dental differences that separate
Homo neanderthalensis from Homo
sapiens and, indeed, from all other
fossil hominids examined. The last
surviving descendants of an endemic
European radiation of hominids, the
Neanderthals were abruptly replaced
by invading Homo sapiens over the
period between approximately 40 and
30 kyr ago.
The ultimate origin of the invaders,
known as the Cro-Magnons, probably
lay somewhere in the African continent, in the time between approximately 200 and 150 kyr ago. It is well
established that biological novelties
are likely to become fixed only in very
small populations, and it seems very
plausible that the anatomically distinctive Homo sapiens was born out of
an episode during which the ancestral
human population was reduced to
very small numbers, perhaps even in
the low thousands, as a result of environmental stress during the climatic
vagaries of the Ice Ages. This episode
has been most firmly inferred on the
basis of comparative studies of modern human mitochondrial DNA
(mtDNA), which is substantially less
variable among modern humans than
it is, for example, among the far less
numerous and more geographically
restricted modern chimpanzees (Gagneux et al., 1999. Kaessman et al.,
2001). What is more, human mtDNA
variation is greatest today in the African continent, suggesting that diversification has been continuing there
longer than elsewhere in the world
(Cann et al., 1987). The logical conclusion, referred to commonly as the
“Out of Africa” hypothesis, thus places
the origin of all modern humans in
the African continent.
Indeed, mtDNA lineages from other
continents appear to be descended
from lineages that originated in Africa, in which continent the fossil
record also hints that human origins
lie (see Stringer and McKie, 1996).
However, the number of mtDNA sequence differences between Neanderthals and modern humans is significantly higher than the number of
differences among humans—so much
so that the earliest common ancestor
between Neanderthals and Cro-Mag-
There is little reason to
believe that the
Neanderthals possessed
symbolic reasoning
abilities, or articulate
language, as the
Cro-Magnons so
clearly did.
non man would appear to predate
considerably Cro-Magnon’s appearance in Europe and other sites where
the H. neanderthalensis fossil record
exists (Krings et al., 1997). On the basis of this analysis, Neanderthals are
close evolutionary cousins of modern
man at best, and not likely at all to be
our direct evolutionary ancestors
(Paäbo, 1999).
The contrast between the lives of
the Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnons could not be more dramatic
(White, 1989; Tattersall, 1995). Although the Neanderthals made beautiful stone tools, at least occasionally
practiced the simple burial of the
dead, protected disadvantaged members of their society, and managed to
survive in very harsh environmental
conditions, their lives (at least before
contact with the Cro-Magnons) were
FEATURE ARTICLE
bereft of symbolic activities. On the
other hand, the Cro-Magnons established themselves in Europe with the
full panoply of modern behaviors at
their disposal, making implements
out of soft materials such as bone and
antler as well as out of stone. Well
over 30 kyr ago, they were already
painting powerful animal images on
the walls of caves. They made notations (perhaps including lunar calendars) as well as delicate engravings on
bone and stone plaques; and some of
the most elegant carvings ever made
date from this time. The Cro-Magnons
made music on bone flutes with subtle
sound capabilities, and doubtless
sang and danced as well. They buried
their dead in elaborately decorated
clothing, and with a plethora of grave
goods. By soon after 30 kyr ago, eyed
bone needles announce the arrival of
couture, and at the same time, ceramic technology was invented, clay
figurines being baked in simple but
highly effective kilns. The list could go
on and on, but it should already be
evident that the Cro-Magnons were
us, not only in their anatomy but in all
their behavioral complexities as well
(Tattersall, 1998b). They had crossed
the gulf. The same cannot be said for
the Neanderthals, who could best be
described as an improved version of
their forebears. There is little reason
to believe that the Neanderthals possessed symbolic reasoning abilities, or
articulate language, as the Cro-Magnons so clearly did.
THE ARRIVAL OF MODERN
HUMAN COGNITION
Perhaps surprisingly at first thought,
this limitation also apparently applied
to the earliest anatomically modern
Homo sapiens. The fossil record of the
emergence of Homo sapiens is less
than ideal, but it is clear that the earliest members of our species who
were skeletally exactly like us had not
yet traversed the behavioral threshold
whose crossing so dramatically distinguishes us today. This fact is most
clearly illustrated by the Homo sapiens who lived in Israel some 100 kyr
ago. For these people were culturally
indistinguishable from the Neanderthals with whom they somehow partitioned the Levantine environment for
upward of 50 kyr. Modern human be-
FEATURE ARTICLE
haviors came on the scene substantially after the distinctive modern human anatomy.
So what was going on? Recall, as I
have already mentioned, that the only
place a novelty can arise is within a
species. The distinctive modern human anatomy, with its tall, slender
body and its delicate face tucked beneath a high, globular skull, was probably acquired in a small, isolated
hominid population in Africa at some
time over 150 kyr ago. When conditions were right, this population then
expanded to other areas of the Old
World, although obviously this expansion cannot in early phases be attributed to the acquisition of modern human cognition. However, it nonetheless
seems most likely that the developmental reorganization expressed in the new
skeletal structure also involved some
changes in the association areas of the
brain. Exactly what those innovations
were is a matter of debate, made all the
more complicated by the fact that the
human brain is a remarkably plastic
organ capable of “rewiring” itself
both in early development and later
in life, depending on the function
demanded of it. And the brain of the
first anatomical Homo sapiens must
certainly have been “back-compatible,” because if a new cognitive potential was acquired with the new
anatomy, this potential does not appear to have been exploited for many
thousands of years, archaic patterns
of behavior persisting more or less
unchanged for a very long time.
Strange though this might seem, it
actually reflects a general pattern in
evolutionary history. I have already
noted that, in evolution, form must
precede function and that innovation
itself cannot be driven by natural selection. Any novelty has to arise spontaneously as an exaptation, a structure
existing independently of any new
function for which it might later be
co-opted. Only once such a structure
has been established may it assume a
new role in the life of its possessor and
thus become an adaptation to that
function. One of the most famous examples of this phenomenon is the
feathers of birds. These new structures were used for insulation by ancestral birds for millions of years before they eventually made flight
possible.
THE ANATOMICAL RECORD (PART B: NEW ANAT.) 25
Perhaps, then, it is reasonable to
infer that the neural substrate for our
vaunted modern cognition first arose
as a byproduct of the physical reorganization that gave birth to our anatomically distinctive species. This new
substrate then lay fallow for a long
period of time before its potential was
“discovered” by its possessors. How
this discovery was made is anybody’s
guess, although it must have been
through a cultural invention. The
most plausible candidate for such an
invention is language, for this activity
is almost synonymous with the symbolic reasoning that marks us off from
even our closest relatives in nature.
Language involves forming intangible
symbols in the mind, and it allows us
to combine those symbols in new
ways. And it also allows us to pose the
“what if” questions that allow us to
relate to the world around us in new
and unprecedented ways. It is this
It is this leap to symbolic
manipulation in the
mind that most truly
marks us off from other
forms of life on Earth.
leap to symbolic manipulation in the
mind that most truly marks us off
from other forms of life on Earth; and
the ability to do this is evidently something that arose rather abruptly, as a
byproduct of something else, rather
than through a process of gradual
fine-tuning over the generations. Our
intelligence is an emergent quality, the
result of a chance combination of factors, rather than a product of Nature’s
engineering. Yes, as Darwin perceived, our vaunted mental capacities
are indeed the eventual outcome of a
long (and rather untidy) process of
neural accretion over the eons; but, as
Wallace equally saw, this extraordinary acquisition was not— could not
have been— driven by natural selection. Homo sapiens as we know it today is not the outcome of a long and
inexorable process of perfection
through natural selection, much as we
often like to think of ourselves in that
way.
Where did modern human cognition emerge? Almost certainly in Africa, like modern human anatomy.
For it is in this continent that we find
the first glimmerings of “modern” behaviors. From Blombos Cave, near the
continent’s southern tip, comes the
first indisputably symbolic object, a
geometrically engraved ochre plaque
almost 80,000 years old (Henshilwood
et al., 2002). From the same time
range in Africa come the earliest
pierced shells, evidence of (symbolic)
body ornamentation. There is also
early documentation of such typically
human activities as long-distance
trade in valued materials and flintmining (McBrearty and Brooks,
2000). There is nothing in the early
African archaeological record as impressive as that of the Cro-Magnons in
Europe; but this latter record is much
later, and there is no reason to expect
that the multifarious dimensions of
the underlying human capacity
should have been discovered all at
once. Indeed, it is scarcely credible
that they could have been. For the human capacity is a generalized one,
with boundless—and often contradictory—possibilities (Tattersall, 1998b).
In this sense, there must have been a
threshold effect in the acquisition of
fully modern human cognition, just as
there must be in the spread within
populations of genetic innovations
(Schwartz, 1999). Certainly, the archaeological record before 50 – 80 kyr
ago contains isolated, sporadic expressions, such as the 250-kyr-old Berekhat Ram “figurine” from Israel,
that one can—if one wishes—interpret as evidence of symbolic cognition
in some form (see Marshack, 1997).
But are such objects reliable evidence
of a fully formed human sensibility?
No; for even if they do indeed represent stirrings of the human symbolic
capacity, they remain irrelevant to the
greater human condition as long as
they were the products of eccentric
individuals, rather than reflections of
the larger societies in which those individuals lived. And there is no evidence that any early objects of this
kind embodied wider social values.
The long and elaborate process of discovering the human capacity had evi-
26 THE ANATOMICAL RECORD (PART B: NEW ANAT.)
dently begun in Africa by around 80
kyr ago (and possibly well before
that). And the Cro-Magnons, with
their art, music, ornamentation, and
all their other evident cognitive and
social complexities, had very clearly
crossed the critical threshold, however, one might wish to define it. But
the moment of transformation still
eludes us and may well do so almost
indefinitely. For the process of becoming human is ongoing; it is one that is
still unfolding today, as technological
and artistic innovation, highly sporadic before the emergence of the human capacity, becomes routine in
daily human experience.
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