Human Revolution

= anthropoligical concept and hypothesis by Chris Knight

Discussion

Chris Knight:

"The chief value of the study of human origins is that it nails the myth that ‘no revolution can ever change human nature’. It shows, on the contrary, that everything distinctively human about our nature – our ability to speak, to see ourselves as others see us, to aspire to act on moral principle – has come to prevail in our species thanks precisely to the greatest revolution in history, ‘the revolution which worked’.

Palaeolithic archaeologist Paul Mellars (pictured left at Blombos Cave, South Africa) argues that distinctively human language, mind and society emerged during a revolution – ‘the human revolution’ – accomplished by our ancestors somewhere between 70,000 and 200,000 ago.

Ian Watts is the ochre specialist at Blombos Cave, South Africa, ian-watts2where much of our earliest evidence for symbolic culture has recently been found. Ian (right) was the first archaeologist to point out that ‘the human revolution’ – formerly associated with the European Upper Palaeolithic and attributed to a chance genetic mutation – was in fact the culmination of a Middle Stone Age process of natural and sexual selection associated with the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa [C. Knight, C. Power & I. Watts, The human symbolic revolution. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 5/1 (1995): 75-114].

The Darwinian component of what seemed at the time Ian’s highly controversial theory is today known as the Female Cosmetic Coalitions model chris-henshilwood-camilla-power1and was developed by Camilla Power (pictured left with Chris Henshilwood in Blombos Cave) while she was researching under the supervision of Leslie Aiello at University College London. Thanks largely to the work of Chris Henshilwood and his team, the ochre crayons, shell ornaments and other cosmetic items found at Middle Stone Age sites such as Blombos are today widely accepted as evidence for some of the world’s earliest symbolic traditions. The Female Cosmetic Coalitions model is currently the only attempt to explain these findings on a Darwinian basis. A point in its favour is that it accurately predicted the archaeological discoveries before they were made [C. Power, 'Sexual selection models of the emergence of symbolic communication: why they should be reversed', in R. Botha & C. Knight (eds), The Cradle of Language (2009), Oxford University Press, pp. 257-280].

But what does it mean to speak of a ‘revolution’ so far back in our evolutionary past, long before history began? The challenges are immense and are exhaustively discussed in Rethinking the Human Revolution, edited by Paul Mellars, Katie Boyle, Ofer Bar-Yosef and Chris Stringer (McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2007) and more recently in The Cradle of Language, edited by Rudolf Botha and Chris Knight (Oxford University Press, 2009).

For an introduction to my own current thinking, see my ‘Language and revolutionary consciousness’ [chapter 7 in Alison Wray's edited volume The Transition to Language (Oxford University Press, 2002)], ‘Honest fakes and language origins’ [in C. Whitehead, (ed), The Origin of Consciousness in the Social World, Imprint Academic, 2008, pp. 236-248] and ‘Language, ochre and the rule of law’ (the final chapter in The Cradle of Language volume).

In fairness I should add that by no means all archaeologists believe in the human revolution. One frequently cited dissenting contribution was entitled ‘The revolution that wasn’t’ (Sally McBrearty and Alison Brooks, Journal of Human Evolution 39, 453-563, 2000). As if that wasn’t enough, a more recent update of the same argument defiantly proclaims ‘Down with the revolution’ (chapter 12 in Mellars et al., Rethinking the Human Revolution).

As a Marxist, it seems to me natural to expect slow, quantitative change to culminate from time to time in revolutionary breakthrough. Yet in itself, of course, that’s no reason to accept the scientific validity of this concept in this particular case. While much remains uncertain, there are surely no a priori grounds for restricting the concept of revolution to recent historical times. Archaeologists investigating the origins of farming routinely speak of the ‘Neolithic revolution’. major-transitionsAn event of this kind need not be telescoped into a brief period: what matters is that gradual evolution culminates in revolutionary change. Scientists agree that on a geological timescale, the emergence of language-using Homo sapiens qualifies as a ‘punctuation event’ or ‘major transition’ in the history of life on earth. The classic text here is The Major Transitions in Evolution by John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary (W. H. Freeman, 1995).

Alison Brooks is an eminent archaeologist well-known for her opposition to the theory that there was a ‘human revolution’. She has very effectively poured scorn on the naive idea of a cognitive mutation responsible for telescoping the emergence of language and symbolic behaviour into a single dramatic moment. The African archaeological record, she points out, suggests a much more gradual process of behavioural and cognitive change. At the ‘Cradle of Language’ conference held in Stellenbosch in 2006, I asked Alison whether the two opposed camps – for and against the whole idea of a ‘human revolution’ – might settle on a compromise. Setting aside the idea of a sudden mutation, would she agree that on a geological timescale, the emergence of language-using Homo sapiens was a revolutionary event? ‘On that timescale’, Alison replied without hesitation, ‘yes’." (http://www.chrisknight.co.uk/the-human-revolution/)