{"id":17393,"date":"2015-04-12T13:58:38","date_gmt":"2015-04-12T20:58:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/?p=17393"},"modified":"2015-04-12T13:59:39","modified_gmt":"2015-04-12T20:59:39","slug":"the-dawn-of-culture-book-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/the-dawn-of-culture-book-review\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dawn of Human Culture — Book Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Dawn of Human Culture:\u00a0 A Bold New Theory on what sparked the “Big Bang” of Human Consciousness<\/em><\/strong>.\u00a0 By Richard G.\u00a0 Klein and Blake Edgar.\u00a0 New York:\u00a0 John Wiley & Sons.\u00a0 2002.<\/p>\n

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This is the best overview of the archeological perspective on human evolution that I have seen.\u00a0 I have not seen them all, but I have followed developments in this field for at least forty years.\u00a0 Reading about the different fossils and different archeological finds and different human ancestors in isolation can be confusing.\u00a0 It is hard to tell the relationships between one ancient ancestor and another.\u00a0 It is hard to keep the chronology in mind.\u00a0 It is not clear what came from what or how and when developments took place.\u00a0 This book straightens a lot of that out.\u00a0 It is a clearly written, readable, interesting, well organized presentation, well illustrated with many drawings, charts, and maps that powerfully enhance the text.<\/p>\n

The dawn of culture doesn’t really break until the last chapter.\u00a0 Most of the book is just setting the stage for the dawn of culture.\u00a0 But that is very OK, because it underlines how long it took to get to the place where what we think of as human culture could appear, and it emphasizes through most of human evolution there was no “culture” as we think of it.\u00a0 People have been making tools out of stone for about 2.5 million years, but if culture means representing ideas to one’s fellow creatures, thinking beyond day to day survival, that did not exist until very recently, say about 50,000 years ago.<\/p>\n

It appears to have been a quantum behavioral and psychological leap.\u00a0 There was no gradual evolution toward “culture.”\u00a0 It seems to have exploded with modern humans after about 50-60,000 years ago, and within a relatively short time spread to the far corners of the earth.\u00a0 This seems to call out for an explanation since the ways of life, technology, economy, social organization, and relationship to the natural world remained relatively stable in human ancestor populations for eons prior.\u00a0 Human anatomy has been stable for about 200,000 years.\u00a0 Brian Sykes tells us that all living humans can be traced to a single woman living in East Africa about 150,000, years ago, and all non-African modern humans can be traced through another East African woman about 50,000 years later.\u00a0 (Sykes, 2001, pp. 276-78)\u00a0 So modern humans, homo sapiens sapiens<\/em>, have been established as a species for at least 150,000 years.\u00a0 But culture did not appear until about 100,000 years into that span.\u00a0 What took so long?\u00a0 And when it did appear, it came in a flood.\u00a0 It was around that time that modern humans began to migrate out of Africa and displace all of the proto-human ancestor populations like the Neanderthals, homo erectus, and perhaps others in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia.\u00a0 Technology dramatically changed.\u00a0 Stone tools developed much greater variety and sophistication.\u00a0 Beads and jewelry appeared.\u00a0 The first sculptures and figurines were made.\u00a0 Cave painters began painting magnificent murals on the walls of caves starting at least 32,000 years ago.\u00a0 What was the spark that lit this fire?<\/p>\n

Klein and Edgar think it had to do with a genetic mutation that altered brain function and\/or anatomy.\u00a0 They cite a 2001 paper by Lai, et al.\u00a0 (Lai, et al, 2001) that claims to have discovered a gene that plays a role in language development.\u00a0 Were such a gene to be missing or mutated in non-human hominids, it could explain why humans have spoken languages and non-human hominids didn’t.\u00a0 If that were a gene that mutated in a small human population 50,000 or so years ago and allowed people to develop spoken languages, it could have been the point at which modern humans leaped into the Late Stone Age.\u00a0\u00a0 The problem with it is that it is putting a lot on one gene.\u00a0 This kind of theory is going to be hard to validate from fossils.\u00a0 The human brain reached nearly its full size by 600,000 years ago.\u00a0 The Neanderthals actually had larger brains that we do.\u00a0 So size isn’t everything.\u00a0 Klein and Edgar think that a genetic modification altered the organization of the brain that allowed for the development of spoken languages.\u00a0 Spoken languages are considered to be closely linked to the development of “culture.”\u00a0 Spoken languages powerfully change social relations between people, facilitate organization, enable human beings to develop ideas, modify behaviors, make corrections, improve things, “advance.”\u00a0 The Neanderthals lived in Europe and the Middle East for at least 200,000 years.\u00a0 But their technology and way of life did not change very much over that vast time period.\u00a0 Once modern humans set the cultural snowball rolling it has been growing and accelerating at an increasing pace ever since, to the point where we now completely dominate the globe and are on the verge of destroying it, ourselves, and everything else.\u00a0 Human intelligence and human culture may turn out to be a failed evolutionary experiment.<\/p>\n

I don’t have an opinion on what sparked the advent of human culture.\u00a0 Klein and Edgar’s hypothesis is speculative.\u00a0 It could have some plausibility, but the arguments are inconclusive.\u00a0 The real value of this book, aside from wrestling with the issue of how human culture originated, is its clear, comprehensive, well organized, well illustrated exposition of the evolution of the human species from the fossil record, how that record was assembled, and the issues and controversies that accompanied its growth.\u00a0 This book makes it all much more comprehensible than anything else I have seen to date.<\/p>\n

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Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Lai, Cecelia S. L.; Fisher, Simon E.; Hurst, Jane A.; Vargha-Khadem, Faraneh; Monaco, Anthony P. (2001)\u00a0 A forkhead-domain gene is mutated in a severe speech and language disorder.\u00a0 Nature<\/em> 413: 519-23.<\/p>\n

Sykes, Brian (2001)\u00a0 The Seven Daughters of Eve:\u00a0 The Science that Reveals our Genetic Ancestry<\/em>.\u00a0 New York & London:\u00a0 W.W. Norton.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Dawn of Human Culture:\u00a0 A Bold New Theory on what sparked the “Big Bang” of Human Consciousness.\u00a0 By Richard G.\u00a0 Klein and Blake Edgar.\u00a0 New York:\u00a0 John Wiley &…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":124,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"yasr_overall_rating":0,"yasr_post_is_review":"","yasr_auto_insert_disabled":"","yasr_review_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[837],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-17393","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-joe-cillo"},"yasr_visitor_votes":{"stars_attributes":{"read_only":true,"span_bottom":"