The Origin of Humankind Read Free Page A

ancient, a considerable distance was inserted between us and the rest of nature. For those with a conviction that Homo sapiens is a fundamentally different kind of creature, this viewpoint offered comfort.
    Such a conviction was common among scientists in Darwin’s time, and well into this century, too. For instance, the nineteenth-century English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace—who also invented the theory of natural selection, independently of Darwin—balked at applying the theory to those aspects of humanity we most value. He considered humans too intelligent, too refined, too sophisticated to have been the product of mere natural selection. Primitive hunter-gatherers would have had no biological need for these qualities, he reasoned, and so they could not have arisen by natural selection. Supernatural intervention, he felt, must have occurred to make humans so special. Wallace’s lack of conviction in the power of natural selection greatly upset Darwin.
    The Scottish paleontologist Robert Broom, whose pioneering work in South Africa in the 1930s and 1940s helped establish Africa as the cradle of mankind, also expressed strong views on human distinctiveness. He believed that Homo sapiens was the ultimate product of evolution and that the rest of nature had been shaped for its comfort. Like Wallace, Broom looked to supernatural forces in the origin of our species.
    Scientists such as Wallace and Broom were struggling with conflicting forces, one intellectual, the other emotional. They accepted the fact that Homo sapiens derived ultimately from nature through the process of evolution, but their belief in the essential spirituality, or transcendent essence, of humanity led them to construct explanations for evolution which maintained human distinctiveness. The evolutionary “package” embodied in Darwin’s 1871 description of human origins offered such a rationalization. Although Darwin did not invoke supernatural intervention, his evolutionary scenario made humans distinct from mere apes right from the beginning.
    Darwin’s argument remained influential until a little more than a decade ago, and was effectively responsible for a major dispute over when humans first appeared. I will describe the incident briefly, because it illustrates the seductiveness of Darwin’s linked-evolution hypothesis. It also marks the end of its sway over anthropological thinking.
    In 1961, Elwyn Simons, then at Yale University, published a landmark scientific paper in which he announced that a small apelike creature named Ramapithecus was the first known hominid species. The only fossil remains of Ramapithecus known at the time were parts of an upper jaw that had been found by a young Yale researcher, G. Edward Lewis, in India in 1932. Simons saw that the cheek teeth (the premolars and molars) were somewhat humanlike, in that they were flat rather than pointed, as ape teeth are. And he saw that the canines were shorter and blunter than those of apes. Simons also asserted that the reconstruction of the incomplete upper jaw would show it to be humanlike in shape—that is, an arch, broadening slightly toward the rear, and not a “U” shape, as in modern apes.
    At this time, David Pilbeam, a British anthropologist from Cambridge University, joined Simons at Yale, and together they described these supposedly humanlike anatomical features of the Ramapithecus jaw. They went further than anatomy, however, and suggested, on the strength of the jaw fragments alone, that Ramapithecus walked upright on two feet, hunted, and lived in a complex social environment. Their reasoning was like Darwin’s: the presence of one putative hominid feature (tooth shape) implied the existence of the rest. Thus, what was thought to be the very first hominid species came to be viewed as a cultural animal—that is, as a primitive version of modern humans rather than as an acultural ape.
    The sediments from which the original Ramapithecus fossils were recovered