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Re: Adaptive Niche of Archaic Humans
Norman Sides (nas@crl.com)
15 Jun 1995 23:57:18 -0700
In article <60.1744.7295.0N1E6DE9@canrem.com>,
J. Moore <j#d#.moore@canrem.com> wrote:
>Na> >be indisputably *us* (*Homo sapiens sapiens*) *only* gathered and
>Na> >hunted. So I don't see how you'd test this idea that earlier types
>Na> >were incapable of activities that even later types didn't pick up for
>Na> >tens of thousands of years. Mind you, it seems likely, but how would
>Na> >you tell?
>
>Na> Admittedly it's tough to test the abilities of people no longer extant,
>Na> but isn't a hundred thousand year long stone tool tradition, with
>Na> minimal innovation and only moderate regional variation, evidence in
>Na> itself that archaics were inherently less creative than modern humans? I
>Na> think an argument could be made that paleolithic moderns and more recent
>Na> traditional peoples went about the business of hunting and gathering in
>Na> a much more flexible and innovative way than did H. erectus and archaic
>Na> H. sapiens.
>
>I would agree that this is definitely true for more recent and modern
>traditional peoples, and very probably true for early H.s.s. (and
>probably Neandertals as well), but that isn't quite the question you
>seemed to be asking. That was a two-pronged question (and a good one,
>I think) of "were they incapable of doing more than G&H?" and "was their
>cultural life as stagnant as their surviving tool kit would indicate?"
>
>Na> effective ways. We can't know for certain that archaics lacked the
>Na> ability to develop new tools and the customs that go with them, but it
>Na> seems they never did.
>[numerous good examples of modern G&Hers and their methods deleted]
>
>There are a number of things that material culture, tools, artifacts,
>and bones, can't tell us, not to mention a number of potential and even
>likely tools and artifacts that might not survive. In the realm of
>likely tools, most anything made of wood might be either hard to find or
>hard to identify from that early, and this could include digging sticks,
>as just one example, which might have been developed and elaborated to
>suit local plants and small animals without leaving a trace. Other
>possibilities, perhaps less likely, would be skins, and bark and other
>plant materials, used as containers or even clothing. There could have
>been some dramatic and clever things going on in that field -- or there
>could be none, or next to none. Same goes for innovative cooking and
>food preparation, a potentially useful or even critical set of
>innovations for survival in new areas with unknown food sources.
>Another related area would be lore about foods, and the ability to make
>connections about new things from old ("hey, that looks like ___, and
>___ was [tasty/poisonous/kept us alive even though it tasted like dog
>doo]"). Point is, we wouldn't know from the surviving tool kits.
>
>In the realm of things that these things might not tell us, there's a
>huge potential realm of increasingly sophisticated communication and
>thought that would be at best difficult to spot at a range of several
>hundred thousand years. What were they thinking about the weather, the
>seasons, the stars? Maybe no more than "it's cold!", but maybe a lot
>more. How would we spot that? Why would we expect it to show up in
>stone or bone tools? Perhaps in living conditions? It may be an
>unanswerable question, or it may be that we don't know how to
>investigate it. And it may be that, if we did know how to accurately
>investigate it, we'd find that nothing much was going on in those areas
>of human experience at the time.
>
>Na> No doubt archaics possessed considerable abilities to deal with varying
>Na> conditions (they did, after all, become the earth's most widely
>Na> distributed land mammal), but they were everywhere superseded by peoples
>Na> of modern type. If a basic difference in adaptive abilities did exist,
>Na> wouldn't this be evidence that a speciation event had occurred?
>Na> Norman Sides (nas@crl.com)
>
>It's generally conceded that the diff between erectus and H.s.s. is a
>species diff, and archaic sapiens seems to be a pretty classic
>transitional. So I agree with your statement.
>
>The only real quibbles I'd have with your above statement
>are of the semantic and/or [methodological?] nature, but they don't
>change what seems to be your intended meaning. Those would be that
>"adaptive abilities" sounds too much like it's talking about an ability
>to physically adapt, given the subject matter and the connotation of
>"adaptive" in evolution; and the same sort of problem with the commonly
>used "event" as carrying, in most peoples' minds, the connotation of a
>specific "thing" or "instant" when the change happened. These are
>quibbles, as I mentioned, but of course this sort of thing has plagued
>talk of evolution ever since Charles Darwin had to go on and on about
>the slow nature of evolution (in contrast to creation's instantaneous
>timing) when he obviously also thought it sometimes took place rather
>quickly in geological time. Maybe no one else has these same quibbles,
>but I just wanted to mention them, as I think it's always good if we can
>fine-tune our language on the subject to make it less subject, whenever
>possible, to potential misinterpretation. With human evolution this is
>especially difficult because of the general appeal of the subject to a
>wide audience.
>
>Jim Moore (j#d#.moore@canrem.com)
>
> * Q-Blue 1.0 *
Newsgroups: sci.anthropology.paleo
Subject: Re: Adaptive Niche of Archaic Humans
References: <3rfirn$1lb@crl.crl.com> <60.1744.7295.0N1E6DE9@canrem.com>
Sender: Norman Sides (nas@crl.com)
Distribution: world
Organization: CRL
In article <60.1744.7295.0N1E6DE9@canrem.com>,
J. Moore <j#d#.moore@canrem.com> wrote:
>probably Neandertals as well), but that isn't quite the question you
>seemed to be asking. That was a two-pronged question (and a good one,
>I think) of "were they incapable of doing more than G&H?" and "was their
>cultural life as stagnant as their surviving tool kit would indicate?"
Perhaps we could turn this question around a bit and ask why *should*
archaic humans have possessed any abilities to do anything else but G&H.
Why should their cultural life have been anything but stagnant? Well, if
they had been more innovative, maybe they could have developed
agriculture, built up food surpuses to provide for craftspeople, scribes,
soldiers, priests and kings. Maybe they could have built cities and had
iindustrial and information revolutions. Maybe they could have journeyed
into space. But this won't work because evolution dosn't anticipate
future needs and conditions unlike any that have occurred in the past.
How could natural selection favor abilities and behavioral dispositions
enabling people to create social systems of a complexity and diversity
far greater than any that their G&H ancestors needed to cope with
conditions they actually encountered? Why didn't evolution just maintain
the G&H status-quo? Or why didn't it simply produce some more effective
type of G&Hers?
>There are a number of things that material culture, tools, artifacts,
>and bones, can't tell us, not to mention a number of potential and even
>likely tools and artifacts that might not survive. In the realm of
>likely tools, most anything made of wood might be either hard to find or
>hard to identify from that early, and this could include digging sticks,
>as just one example, which might have been developed and elaborated to
>suit local plants and small animals without leaving a trace. Other
>possibilities, perhaps less likely, would be skins, and bark and other
>plant materials, used as containers or even clothing. There could have
>been some dramatic and clever things going on in that field -- or there
>could be none, or next to none. Same goes for innovative cooking and
>food preparation, a potentially useful or even critical set of
>innovations for survival in new areas with unknown food sources.
>Another related area would be lore about foods, and the ability to make
>connections about new things from old ("hey, that looks like ___, and
>___ was [tasty/poisonous/kept us alive even though it tasted like dog
>doo]"). Point is, we wouldn't know from the surviving tool kits.
True enough. And I would agree that archaics, and probably even
Australopithecenes, *did* fabricate and use wooden tools such asdiffing
sticks. No doubt also the European Neandertals wore fur clothing laced
together with hide strips or pounded sinew (otherwise they would have
gotten pretty damn ocld!). I'm not trying to claim they were stupid or
completely unabel to inoovate. I do think, however, that a considerable
body of evidence supports the idea that they were restricted to a
particular adaptive niche (or a cluster of related niches?). In this they
were like all the creatures before them. It's the moderns, not the
archaics, who are anomolous in this respect.
>In the realm of things that these things might not tell us, there's a
>huge potential realm of increasingly sophisticated communication and
>thought that would be at best difficult to spot at a range of several
>hundred thousand years. What were they thinking about the weather, the
>seasons, the stars? Maybe no more than "it's cold!", but maybe a lot
>more. How would we spot that? Why would we expect it to show up in
>stone or bone tools? Perhaps in living conditions? It may be an
>unanswerable question, or it may be that we don't know how to
>investigate it. And it may be that, if we did know how to accurately
>investigate it, we'd find that nothing much was going on in those areas
>of human experience at the time.
You quite reaonibly ask how we can have any knowledge of perishable and
nonmaterial aspects of long vanished archaic cultures. I don't really
know how to answer, but let me counter with a question of my own. I agree
that archaics may have thought about better ways to make baskets and
digging impliments, or to prepare foods. But did they think about
painting figures of animals, imaginary creatures, people and gods
on cliff faces and the ceilings of caves? We have no evidence that
archaics produced representational art, but plenty of evidence from
Australia, Africa, Europe and the Americas that at least some paleolithic
moderns did so. Not every individual member of species Homo
sapiens sapiens is an artist or musician, but *every* society of
modern humans produces artistic and musical traditions (though these
traditions can vary greatly from group to another). The fact that archaics
apparently did not create art means that their cultures, and at least
some aspects of their thoughts and motivations differed in basic ways
form those of peoples living now. Perhaps the Neandertals and other
archaics were too busy with the serious business of survival to waste
time onunessential artistic activities, but it was they who disappeared
while Homo sapiens sapiens went on to become the planet's dominant species.
Na> No doubt archaics possessed condiderale abilities to deal with varying
Na> conditions (they did, after all, become the earth's most widely
Na> distributed land mammal), but they were everywhere superseded by peoples
Na> of modern type. If a basic difference in adaptive abilities did exist,
Na> wouldn't this be evidence that a speciation event had occurred?
>It's generally conceded that the diff between erectus and H.s.s. is a
>species diff, and archaic sapiens seems to be a pretty classic
>transitional. So I agree with your statement.
The question remains, though, as to the exact nature of the species
differences. H. sapiens. sapiens seems highly anomolous in ways
that H. erectus, and even archaic sapiens, were not. We are the first
species whose members seem able, without undergoing any sort of
biological change, to abandon the niche they were born to and set
themselves up in a whole new way of life. The fact is that, about 10,000
years ago some Gatheres and hunters in the Near East abanddoned their
tradtional way of life, settled into stable agricultural communities and
set off this whole civilization thing. They perhaps weren't all that
great at it, and their predicessors haven't proven so either, but we've
done better, or at least gotten farther down the road, than one might
expect of creatures whose evolutionary past simply prepared them to be
G&Hers. How could people just abandon a niche that had figured in their
evolution? Sure, culture figured in it, but simply invoking the idea of
of culture doesn't account for the evolution of our abilities to
create our extraordinarily complex, yet highly structured and cohesive
cultural systems.
>The only real quibbles
I'd have with your above statement
>are of the semantic and/or [methodological?] nature, but they don't
>change what seems to be your intended meaning. Those would be that
>"adaptive abilities" sounds too much like it's talking about an ability
>to physically adapt, given the subject matter and the connotation of
>"adaptive" in evolution; and the same sort of problem with the commonly
>used "event" as carrying, in most peoples' minds, the connotation of a
>specific "thing" or "instant" when the change happened. These are
>quibbles, as I mentioned, but of course this sort of thing has plagued
>talk of evolution ever since Charles Darwin had to go on and on about
>the slow nature of evolution (in contrast to creation's instantaneous
>timing) when he obviously also thought it sometimes took place rather
>quickly in geological time. Maybe no one else has these same quibbles,
>but I just wanted to mention them, as I think it's always good if we can
>fine-tune our language on the subject to make it less subject, whenever
>possible, to potential misinterpretation. With human evolution this is
>especially difficult because of the general appeal of the subject to a
>wide audience.
>
>Jim Moore (j#d#.moore@canrem.com)
>
> * Q-Blue 1.0 *
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