The Origins of Human Society
- From: "Spanish Paranoia" <laparanoia@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2007 13:11:07 -0500 (EST)
"Every educated person since Darwin has labelled himself an
'evolutionist'. But a real evolutionist must apply the idea of
evolution to his own forms of thinking. Elementary logic, founded in
the period when the idea of evolution did not yet exist, is evidently
insufficient for the analysis of evolutionary processes. Hegel's
logic is the logic of evolution. Only one must not forget that the
concept of 'evolution' itself has been completely corrupted and
emasculated by university professors and liberal writers to mean
peaceful 'progress'. Whoever has come to understand that evolution
proceeds through the struggle of antagonistic forces; that a slow
accumulation of changes at a certain moment explodes the old shell and
brings about a catastrophe, revolution; whoever has learned finally to
apply the general laws of evolution to thinking itself, he is a
dialectician, as distinguished from vulgar evolutionists"
Leon Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism
Until the 1980s, ideas about human origins were for the most part
gradualist. It was believed that a recognisably human lifestyle began
emerging some two to three million years ago, in a drawn-out
evolutionary process linked with the establishment of bipedalism and
tool-making. According to this way of thinking, speech co-evolved with
the making of simple stone tools, becoming increasingly complex as
technology evolved. Art, ritual, the organisation of kinship and other
aspects of culture became more complex in the same gradualistic,
piecemeal way.
Such gradualism, although still defended, has recently become a
minority position. It is nowadays widely acknowledged that those
archaeologists who excavated early hominid sites in Olduvai Gorge,
Tanzania, and saw the beginnings of "home bases", "language" and "a
sexual division of labour" among these bipedal toolmakers were
projecting assumptions and stereotypes derived from modern culture onto
the distant past.
Over the past two decades, there has been a revolution in archaeology
and palaeontology, leading to the view that the earliest tool-makers,
while more intelligent than apes, were involved in essentially
primate-style social and reproductive relationships. Admittedly, humans
were co-operatively hunting large game animals by at least 500,000
years ago. But archaeologists have found no evidence for art, ritual or
other "symbolic" behaviour at such early dates. Most archaeologists are
now agreed that even large-brained humans such as the Neanderthals were
not leading a recognisably human or "hunter-gatherer" lifestyle. The
dominant view is that anatomically modern humans emerged in Africa
around 130,000 years ago and then, some 60,000 years later, rather
suddenly spread across the world in an explosive process known as the
"human revolution". It was during the earliest stages of this
revolutionary process that symbolic art, ritual and language emerged.
by Chris Knight
http://dreamflesh.com/essays/societyorigins/
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