The Mystery of Human Progress

The dispersal of homo sapiens out of Africa (click to enlarge)

I have been reading lately about the dispersal of homo sapiens "out of Africa," in particular the role moderns humans may have played in the extinction of our "cousins," the Neanderthals. This was the subject of a book entitled The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove the Neanderthals to Extinction, by the anthropologist Pat Shipman. Neanderthals, known as "archaic" humans, had lived in Europe and western Asia for about 200,000 years before the arrival of homo sapiens in Europe. The Neanderthals were not very evolved culturally. Even Elizabeth Kolbert, in The Sixth Extinction, admits that they spent “tens of thousands of years making the same tools over and over again.” I am reminded of Sartre’s play No Exit, in which Hell is being stuck with the same annoying people and going through the same motions for eternity. Maybe Neanderthals simply died out from world weariness.

Oldowan tools, dating to 1.7 million years ago

And now I have come across the book Humans: From the Beginning, by Christopher Seddon. In the first chapter he is considering the different "Homo" manifestations in Africa and their relationship to contemporary homo sapiens. Remains of homo habilis, for instance, do not show a very large cranial capacity; thus, there is doubt that they can be included in the line that led to homo sapiens. Homo habilis is associated with the so-called Oldowan tool industry, "the oldest and most primitive of all stone tool industries, beginning about 2.5 to 2.6 million years ago and persisting for over a million years." These tools are considered the "first generation" of stone tools" –– in other words, the most basic.

What I found of interest here, as in the case of the Neanderthals, was that this Mode 1 tool category persisted for over a million years. In other words, some poor devils –– not ape, not quite man –– never got beyond flaking stone cobbles to produce sharp stone flakes, which were only useful for cutting: animal butchery and, as Seddon writes, breaking open the animal bones to extract bone marrow. They had no tools for killing animals. So, even if homo habilis represented an advance in brain power over other hominids, including apes, one wonders what was the good of such a brain if he was now on the ground and much less advanced in obtaining food as well as in running away from bigger animals.

So, while homo habilis didn't go anywhere, evolutionarily speaking, and Neaderthals died out, what was in the genetic makeup of homo sapiens before they left Africa that they kept evolving, both genetically and behaviorally? Why have human beings progressed, and why are they the only representative of their species? In fact, we are the only species that has progressed, even if the genetic progress peaked about 70,000 years ago. Why do other animals not progress genetically or biologically?

There is a great mystery here.