William Irwin Thompson on Hominization

Discussion

William Irwin Thompson:

"In the great story of how we came to be human, the opposable thumb and the mouth are central characters. Because the forest canopy thinned out in the glacial cold snap, the early hominids had to stand to peer out over the tall grass before they scurried to safety in the next clump of trees. To hold her infant securely as she dashed for cover, the hominid mother could not knuckle walk on all fours but had to stand and make a run for it on her lower limbs.

The dominant males could scurry away on all fours, but the poor mother, burdened with her infant, had to stumble into something new. And because of the primal bond between infant and mother, the terrified infant -would not forget the image of its mother, upright and running on two feet. It also would not forget the babbling song of its mother while nursing. So to the female of the species, we should credit our bipedal gait and language. The "hominization" ofthe primates should really be called the feminization of the primates, because it is never the dominant male hierarchies that introduce innovations that upset the system; if knuckle walking was good enough for the old boys, it will be good enough for them. It is also unlikely that hunters were noisy on the prowl, so the chatter that serves to bond the group together is probably a female innovation.

Language is about community and not simply communication; once again, McLuhan was right: "The medium is the message."

So one can see how seductively easy it is to make up these 'just so stories' about how we came to be human. It really doesn't matter whether we settle on the aquatic ape story of Elaine Morgan and Alastair Hardy, in which upright posture, loss of body hair, salt tears, full breasts, and instinctive infant swimming are brought forth in selective response to the shift from the dried out savanna to the seashore; or settle on Leakey and Lewin's Field and Stream stories about man the hunter whose big brain w^as brought about by clever killing and the high energy diet of meat. These are good stories that tell us as much about the storyteller as about any extinct hominid. Here, for example, is what Leakey and Lewin write on the origins of language: "A mouth that is adapted to help procure food, to carry objects and threaten or exert aggression is not likely to be able to make complex sounds."

The dominant notion is that one has to have the great opposable thumb and a mouth that is free to articulate sounds. But what about dolphins? They have a big brain. They, like us, have abandoned estrus and are open to sexuality at all times. They don't have an opposable thumb, but they have communication. It just doesn't make the easy sense that the paleoanthropologists claim, and sometimes even they realize that when they honestly confront the inherent darkness of the subject they have to admit that they do not know what caused the chimps to stay chimps and the hominids to change. As Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey admit: "The only thing we have not discussed up to this point was the biggest enigma of all: How did it all get started? What pushed those ancestral legs up on their hind legs and gave them, some of them, an opportunity to evolve into humans. That question is basically the entire 1 n story of hominization."

For Johanson and Edey the story is, not surprisingly, one of a great technological leap:

- How do we account for Homo erectus' sudden jump from Homo habilis? Was it actually all that sudden? Why was it made? Was it a matter of a quick evolutionary spurt taken in tandem with the development of a new and better tool culture? If so, where and why did the new culture start? Then, an even more interesting question: why did that culture — and the man who made it —stagnate for another million years? Homo erectus, it is fairly clear, evolved practically not at all during that immense time. Then, suddenly, humanity took another spurt. About two hundred thousand years ago there occurred a second technological leap, and out of it rose Homo sapiens.

When one reads the narratives of Leakey and Lewin, Johanson and Edey, one is conned into belief by magical invocations of "technological leaps." Scientific narratives are composed of technological metaphors that seek to convince us that they are "real" and up-to-date. Johanson and Edey speak of technological leaps, and Leakey and Lewin talk about brain circuitry, just as Freud, in his day, spoke of repression, as if the mind were a steam engine. Freud used steam engines, and Lewin uses computers; for one, the mind is a locomotive engine of heat and compressed steam, and for the other, an electronic information-processing computer. These dominant metaphors are literally dominating and force us into the submission of belief in the doctrinal narratives of big science. We submit to the technology of explanation because the explanation is technological."

(Source: Coming Into Being)