How a hobbit is rewriting the history of the human raceThe discovery of the bones of tiny primitive people on an Indonesian island six years ago stunned scientists. Now, further research suggests that the little apemen, not Homo erectus, were the first to leave Africa and colonise other parts of the world, reports Robin McKie
It remains one of the greatest human fossil discoveries of all time. The bones of a race of tiny primitive people, who used stone tools to hunt pony-sized elephants and battle huge Komodo dragons, were discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2004.

The team of Australian researchers had been working in a vast limestone cavern, called Liang Bua, in one of the island’s remotest areas, when one scientist ran his trowel against a piece of bone. Carefully the group began scraping away the brown clay in which pieces of a tiny skull, and a little lower jaw, were embedded.

This was not any old skull, they quickly realised. Although small, it had special characteristics. In particular, it had adult teeth. “This was no child, but a tiny adult; in fact, one of the smallest adult hominids ever found in the fossil record,” says Mike Morwood, of Australia’s University of Wollongong and a leader of the original Flores expedition team.

The pieces of bone were carefully wrapped in newspaper, packed in cardboard boxes and then cradled on the laps of scientists on their journey, by ferry and plane, back to Jakarta. Then the pieces of skull, as well as bones from other skeletons found in Liang Bua, were put together.

The end result caused consternation. These remains came from a species that turned out to be only three feet tall and had the brain the size of an orange. Yet it used quite sophisticated stone tools. And that was a real puzzle. How on earth could such individuals have made complex implements and survived for aeons on this remote part of the Malay archipelago?

Some simply dismissed the bones as the remains of deformed modern humans with diseases that had caused them to shrink: to them, they were just pathological oddities, it was alleged. Most researchers disagreed, however. The hobbits were the descendants of a race of far larger, ancient humans who had thrived around a million years ago. These people, known as Homo erectus, had become stranded on the island and then had shrunk in an evolutionary response to the island’s limited resources.

That is odd enough. However, new evidence suggests the little folk of Flores may be even stranger in origin. According to a growing number of scientists, Homo floresiensis is probably a direct descendant of some of the first apemen to evolve on the African savannah three million years ago. These primitive hominids somehow travelled half a world from their probable birthplace in the Rift Valley to make their homes among the orangutans, giant turtles and rare birds of Indonesia before eventually reaching Flores.

It sounds improbable but the basic physical similarity between the two species is striking. Consider Lucy, the 3.2 million-year-old member of Australopithecus afarensis. She had a very small brain, primitive wrists, feet and teeth and was only one metre tall, but was still declared “the grandmother of humanity” after her discovery in Ethiopia in 1974. Crucially, analysis of Lucy’s skeleton shows it has great similarities with the bones of H. floresiensis, although her species died out millions of years ago while the hobbits hung on in Flores until about 17,000 years ago. This latter figure is staggeringly close in terms of recent human evolution and indicates that long after the Neanderthals, our closest evolutionary relatives, had disappeared from the face of the Earth around 35,000 years ago, these tiny, distant relatives of Homo sapiens were still living on remote Flores.

The crucial point about this interpretation is that it explains why the Flores people had such minuscule proportions. They didn’t shrink but were small from the start – because they came from a very ancient lineage of little apemen. They acquired no diseased deformities, nor did they evolve a smaller stature over time. They were, in essence, an anthropological relic and Flores was an evolutionary time capsule. In research that provides further support for this idea, scientists have recently dated some stone tools on Flores as being around 1.1 million years old, far older than had been previously supposed.

The possibility that a very primitive member of the genus Homo left Africa, roughly two million years ago, and that a descendant population persisted until only several thousand years ago, is one of the more provocative hypotheses to have emerged in anthropology during the past few years,” David Strait of the University of Albany told Scientific American recently. This view is backed by Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, London. “We are still grappling with what this discovery has done for our thinking and our conventional scenarios.”

In addition, Mike Morwood says he has now uncovered stone tools on nearby Sulawesi. These could be almost two million years old, he believes, which suggests the whole region was populated by very ancient humans for a startlingly long part of human prehistory. “This is going to put the cat among the pigeons,” Morwood says.

However, it is the hobbits’ similarity to ancient African apemen that provides the most compelling evidence for their ancient origins. In the Journal of Human Evolution, a team led by Debbie Argue of the Australian National University, recently reported that analysis of H. floresiensis shows they most closely resemble apelike human ancestors that first appeared around 2.3 million years ago in Africa. In other words, their stock may be not quite as old as Lucy’s but probably comes from a hominid, known as Homo habilis, that appeared on the evolutionary scene not long after Lucy’s species disappeared. Homo habilis’s features now seem to match, most closely, those of H. floresiensis.

Consider those hobbit feet, for example. The skeleton unearthed on Flores had a foot that was 20cm in length. This produces a ratio of 70 per cent when compared with the length of the hobbit’s thigh bone. By contrast, men and women today have foot-to-thigh bone ratios of 55 per cent. The little folk of Flores had singularly short legs and long, flapper feet, very similar to those of African apemen, even though limbs like these would have made their long march from Africa to Flores a painful business.

Similarly, the hands of H. floresiensis were more like apes than those of evolved humans, their wrists possessing trapezoid bones that would have made the delicate art of stone tool-making very difficult. Their teeth show primitive traits while their brains were little bigger than those of chimpanzees, though CT scans of skull interiors suggest they may have had cognitive skills not possessed by apes.

Nevertheless, this little apeman, with poor physique, a chimp-sized brain and only a limited ability to make tools, now appears to have left Africa, travelled thousands of miles and somehow colonised part, if not all, of south-east Asia two million years ago.

Scientists had previously assumed only a far more advanced human ancestor, such as Homo erectus, was capable of undertaking that task and only managed to do so about a million years ago when our predecessors had evolved powerful physiques, a good gait and the beginnings of intellect. Without these, we would have got nowhere, it was implied.

Then along came little H. floresiensis which, quite simply, has “no business being there,” says Morwood. And you can see what he means. Apart from the sheer improbability of a jumped-up ape travelling from Africa to Indonesia, there is the particular puzzle of how it got to Flores.

Primitive hominids were almost certainly incapable of sailing. So how did it arrive on the island in the first place? It is a puzzle, although Stringer believes the region’s intense tectonic activity is significant. “After the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, people were found far out at sea clinging to rafts of vegetation. Things like that could have happened regularly in the past and people could have been swept out to sea and washed ashore on Flores. Alternatively, there could have been short-lived connections between now separate islands.”

Thus, ancient African apemen travelled half the world, made homes across Indonesia and, in one case, were washed out to sea to end up colonising a remote island that was already populated with pygmy elephants, called stegadons, and giant Komodo dragons, which are still found on the island. It is a truly fantastic tale, worthy of Rider Haggard, and it has turned the study of human evolution on its head.

And then there is the report that dates the stone tools found on Flores as being 1.1 million years old. “That is utterly remarkable on its own,” adds Morwood. “Until we found these dates, the longest period of island isolation that we knew about occurred on Tasmania where the aboriginal people were cut off from mainland Australia 11,000 years ago. We thought that was an amazing length of time. But now we have found an island where early humans were cut off from the rest of evolution for more than a million years.” In addition, there are those completed digs carried out by Morwood which suggest that some type of human being was making stone implements up to two million years ago.

A crucial aspect to this remarkable story is the region’s geography, Morwood believes. The ocean currents and the remoteness of Flores make the island difficult to get to, so once a species does get there, it will remain well protected on it, he argues. “Flores seems to protect species that are long past their use-by dates. There were those pygmy elephants, and the Komodo dragon, for example. And now we have Homo floresiensis. It may be that only a few animals get there but when they do arrive they tend to survive for a long time, which has been science’s good fortune.”

That is putting it mildly. Had not the original Australian team, led by Morwood, uncovered those hobbit remains in 2004, the story of humanity’s African exodus would have been considered a fairly simple affair.

According to this version of events, Homo erectus evolved from apemen predecessors, such as Australopithecus africanus, in Africa and then headed off around the Old World more than a million years ago, armed with a great physique and a modest intellect. These allowed it to settle across Africa, Asia and Europe. This diaspora was then followed by a second wave of humans – our own species, Homo sapiens – which emerged from Africa 100,000 years ago and took over the planet, replacing all pockets of its predecessors it encountered.

Now a far more complex picture is emerging. Ancient apemen, who might have been thought to lack the nous for global conquest, appear to have done the trick almost a million years earlier. One of the major tenets of human evolution, the story of our world conquest, is now urgently in need of revision.

As to the fate of H. floresiensis, that is unclear. The species disappears abruptly from the archaeological record 17,000 years ago. But why? They had apparently survived quite happily on the island for more than a million years. So what did for them in the end?

There are two competing answers. The first suggests that the species, after all the good fortune that had helped it endure the vicissitudes of life in the Malay Archipelago, ran out of luck. “There is a thick layer of ash in the Liang Bua cave above the most recent hobbit remains,” says Stringer. “We now know this was caused by a major volcanic eruption which occurred about 17,000 years ago. So it may be that they were just unlucky with the local geology.” According to this vision, the little folk of Flores were wiped out by choking plumes of volcanic ash or died of starvation on an island denuded of vegetation.

It would have been a pretty terrible way to go. Yet neither Stringer nor Morwood is convinced that was what happened, despite the tight link between dates of eruptions on the island and the disappearance of the species from the fossil record. Instead, they suspect a very different agent: the bloody hand of modern humans. “Look at our track record,” says Morwood. When Homo sapiens entered Europe 40,000 years ago, on its route out of Africa, they would have encountered the continent’s original inhabitants, the Neanderthals. Within a few millenniums, the Neanderthals had been rendered extinct.

Stringer agrees. Homo sapiens left Africa about 100,000 years ago and by the time hobbits became extinct on Flores, modern humans were all over south-east Asia. “I cannot see Homo floresiensis keeping modern humans off the island. There must have been encounters between them and us. It is wonderful to speculate what might have happened when they met up, but I suspect that those moderns used up the resources that the hobbit needed to survive.”

Robin McKie is the science editor of the Observer

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Zinn was an unabashed political radical, but much of the appeal of his work stemmed from something conceptual: He took a story that generations of American schoolchildren had had drilled into them and he turned it on its head. Rather than the Founding Fathers or politicians and generals, he saw the nation’s fed-up farmers, rebellious slaves, women’s libbers, labor leaders, and other agitators as our national heroes. By taking history outside the halls where treaties are signed and bills debated and instead writing the story from the streets, he cast a new light on

a familiar narrative, exposing elements – about the costs of the country’s expansion, the mixed motives of its founders, and the role of its suppressed dissenters – that the traditional narrative had left in shadow.

Zinn was not the first to upend the traditional historical narrative in this way; his bottom-up vision of history drew heavily on the work of previous generations of revisionist historians. What Zinn did in his “People’s History” was stitch that work together into an overarching narrative and give it a polemical edge.

Yet Zinn’s work remains a testament to the power of vantage point, an example of how coming at a familiar set of historical facts from a different angle can completely change what we know about them. And today, historians of all stripes are applying that lesson in new and fascinating ways. These scholars are not the heirs of Zinn, politically or intellectually, but their work shares his conviction that we can and should see the past anew.

Environmental historians, for example, are looking not just at society but its interaction with the natural world, exploring the ways that man has altered and been altered by it. Proponents of so-called neurohistory are looking at the human brain, arguing that it is not solely the product of evolution, but of culture and technological advances – of history, in other words, rather than just biology. Other historians are rearranging the boundaries their colleagues use to partition the past into useful categories, creating fields like “Pacific history” that focus on the ways that navigable bodies of water have linked and shaped societies as much as national borders have. Still others are using the tools of science to answer longstanding historical questions – melding history, archeology, and sciences ranging from genetics to computer programming to climatology into a sprawling new field called “archeoscience.”

These new approaches are being used to look at different eras and different places, from the Roman Empire to 20th-century California. And the historians developing them are harvesting a collection of surprising insights about the past. They’re finding that climate had a cataclysmic effect on the early modern world, that since the middle of the 20th century the United States has been shaped far more by the East Asian nations on the far side of the Pacific than by our longtime European allies, and that the Dark Ages may not have begun as abruptly as previously thought. In the process, these scholars are expanding the definition of history itself.

“The past is a whole, it’s a three-dimensional object that we’re looking at from different windows, and you see different facets depending on what window you’re looking from,” says Michael McCormick, a Harvard historian and champion of archeoscience.

Pacific History
There are plenty of things that live in the ocean, but people are not among them. It would therefore seem to be of little interest to historians. But ocean-based history is, in fact, a burgeoning field. During the millennia that predated the invention of the railroad – much less the car and the airplane – marine transport was often more reliable than going overland, and so human societies were united more than they were divided by bodies of water.

The first historian to study this dynamic was Fernand Braudel, who in the decades around World War II chronicled the dynamics of the interconnected peoples around the Mediterranean Sea. Since the 1990s, the field of Atlantic history – which is concerned with the web of trade and cultural influence that connect the Americas, Europe, and Africa through the ocean between them – has been growing in prominence, championed largely by the Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn. A few scholars have even begun to lay the foundations for Indian Ocean studies.

The newest branch, though – and in some ways the most ambitious – is Pacific history. Led by Bruce Cumings, a historian at the University of Chicago specializing in Korea, these scholars argue that despite the enormity of the Pacific Ocean and the wide diversity of nations around it – from the United States to Japan to Indonesia to Russia to China – there is much to be learned by treating the world’s largest ocean as the gravitational center of a coherent whole.

Cumings’s book “Dominion from Sea to Sea,” published in November, is a history of the United States that takes the Pacific perspective, focusing not only on the nation’s drive westward toward the Pacific, but on how the American relationship with Japan, China, and Korea shaped our history: China provided much of the labor for the railroads that tied the country together, the Korean War helped spawn the military-industrial complex, and engineers and programmers from East Asian nations fueled our tech booms.

Cumings argues that the international relationships that run through the Pacific have long been underplayed by historians, even as those ties grew in importance throughout the 20th century. Indeed, taking the Pacific view, he argues, allows us to see all the ways that China and the United States are more alike than we may assume. For all the seeming foreignness of China to Americans, Cumings argues, the two nations see themselves in similar ways: Both have had world-influencing revolutions; both have strong principles of civilian rather than military rule and, despite China’s communist leadership, long histories of petty capitalism. Both are ethnically diverse nations suspicious of class differences.

In a sense, there’s something ironic about launching the field of Pacific history with a book about the United States, since we’re a relative latecomer to the ocean. “If you look at the Pacific, for millennia everything’s happening in East Asia,” Cumings says. “Then all of a sudden, there’s enormous development on the right side, the North American side.

“It now makes it possible to talk about the Pacific as a whole. It’s a vast sea of human exchange, on what will be the grandest scale in world history,” he argues.

Archeoscience
The work of the historian is to read, whether it’s letters or ledgers or ships’ logs or rice-paper scrolls. History begins when our ancestors started writing. But much that has happened since wasn’t written down. To fill in those blank spots, and to enrich the written records that we do have, scholars have started to team up with experts in other, more technical fields.

For example, Harvard’s McCormick, a medieval historian, has worked with a biologist and archeologist to analyze soil from the ruins of a Roman town in France. A layer of dark dirt just above the ruins was long thought to be evidence that cities like it were burned to the ground by barbarians and abandoned. But McCormick and his colleagues found that the soil actually seems to be the remnants of wood and thatch – evidence that the city was immediately rebuilt, just without the stone that the original had been made of. Discoveries like these are forcing historians to rethink their understanding of the beginning of the Dark Ages as an utter rupture with the Roman imperial past – rather than a complete collapse into disorder something more gradual seems to have occurred, where old social structures endured for awhile.

Historians are also drawing on work by geneticists to better understand phenomena as disparate as the conquest of England by medieval Anglo-Saxons and the African slave trade. McCormick is using pattern-recognition software to settle long-running disputes over the authorship of important medieval texts, and using a chemical analysis of trace elements on coins to map out trade routes through the Holy Roman Empire.

“The texts tell us stuff that we can’t see in the dirt, and the dirt tells us stuff that we can’t see in the text. Sometimes they tell us different things,” McCormick says. “And fitting them together is a real challenge and also enormously exciting.”

Environmental History
With the growth of environmentalism as a political movement in the 1960s and 1970s, the natural world also began to find its way into scholarship. The realization of all the ways that modern man was shaping nature, intentionally and unintentionally, drove historians to look at the ways earlier societies had changed their environments as well.

Among the pioneers of the field was William Cronon of the University of Wisconsin. His best-known work focused on the ways that different attitudes about land ownership between Native Americans and European settlers altered the New England landscape, and on how 19th-century Chicago, as it grew up into one of the nation’s great cities and trading hubs, reshaped the vast fertile plains around it – reshaping, as well, American attitudes about food and farming.

A newer strain of environmental history, however, is looking at the ways that the environment itself can guide the course of history, in sometimes unexpected ways. In this reading, the environment becomes not only the object of human cultivation or despoliation, but an actor itself. A prime example is the work of Geoffrey Parker at Ohio State University. Parker’s forthcoming book focuses on the period between 1635 and 1665, three of the most tumultuous decades that the world has known: Europe, China, and the Mughal and Ottoman empires were engulfed in war; Ming China collapsed under a Manchu invasion; the Polish commonwealth, then the largest state in Europe, fell apart; and massive rebellions broke out throughout Russia, France, and the Spanish and British empires. Historians call the decades of the mid-17th century the General Crisis – and they have long wondered what might explain this global outbreak of violence and unrest.

Parker’s provocative thesis is that the link, essentially, was the weather. Winters from China to North America to Europe were some of the coldest in history, and growing seasons in normally clement parts of the world were disrupted in some places by drought and in others by torrential rains. The Nile River fell to some of the lowest levels ever recorded, and growing glaciers engulfed entire towns in the Alps.

All of this sudden climatic change was deeply destabilizing. Societies faced with collapses in their food stocks invaded neighbors with more fertile lands – this is essentially what drove the Manchu invasion of Ming China, Parker argues. Desperate farmers and out-of-work farm laborers revolted throughout Europe. Parker argues that even the English Civil War was exacerbated by the freakish cold, as Charles I’s subjects, especially in Ireland, were primed for rebellion by poor harvests and the threat of starvation.

In an earlier work, Parker quoted Voltaire to make his larger point: “Three things exercise a constant influence over the minds of men: climate, government and religion.” Historians neglect the first of these, Parker argues, at their peril.

Neurohistory
It’s one thing to study the history of thought: to trace the spread of Confucianism through East Asia or parse the intellectual evolution through which American colonists went from loyal subjects to revolutionaries. It’s another thing to study the history of the brain. To most historians, the brain has about as much to do with history as our kidneys. The brain, they assume, is part of the biological hardware that evolution left us with. And while the brain may still be evolving, it’s changing at a rate far outside the scope of what historians deal with. There’s a lot that separates a Visigoth from an Incan priest from us, but the assumption is that we’re working with identical mental equipment.

But in the 2008 book “On Deep History and the Brain,” Harvard historian Daniel Lord Smail set out to launch the field of neurohistory. His point is that living in a particular place at a particular time shapes the brain in profound ways – a medieval friar and a Mongol warrior would have very different impulses when faced with a threat or an insult.

“Our brains are not like living fossils in the modern world,” he says. “The brain is yet another kind of human institution that evolves according to the cultural inputs that are made in it.”

Smail’s own work has focused on the ways that people throughout history have set out to alter their brains – and the ways they have worried about others doing it for them. He looks at drugs like alcohol and caffeine, but also mood-altering innovations like religion, opera, shopping, and pornography. He points out that in 17th- and 18th-century Europe, all sorts of behaviors – from theater-going to novel-reading to political revolution – were described as addictions and disorders of the brain.

Smail’s interest in the brain grows out of another of the innovations he’d like to see catch on: his conception of “deep history” – applying the insights of traditional history to the long stretch of time after homo sapiens evolved but before the rise of civilization. As we learn more and more about that time period, he argues, historians can begin to make comparisons across eons, tracing the connections between, for example, prehistoric rituals to commemorate the dead, the medieval relic trade, and the way modern currencies make ubiquitous the images of a nation’s deceased cultural and political heroes.

“A deep history is not just the old stuff,” he says, “it’s the whole conversation from as far back as we care to go to the present.”

New material and a fourth edition of World History and the Eonic Effect are on the way, so a remake of the various websites is in order.

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” wrote Thomas Paine in “Common Sense,” the revolutionary pamphlet published in January 1776. Ronald Reagan quoted those words on July 17, 1980, when he addressed the Republican National Convention and accepted his party’s presidential nomination. Reagan led a coalition of corporate oligarchs, imperial crusaders and Christian fundamentalists to power, and to this day Reaganism remains the official gospel of the old guard in the Republican Party. The republican and social democratic ideals of Paine are long lost to many modern partisan Republicans and Democrats, but many memorable phrases of Paine still fill the mouths of career politicians.

When the Iraq war, a broken health care system and a plunging economy gave the Democratic Party a political advantage, Barack Obama raised hopes and promised change. When Obama gave his inaugural address on Jan. 20, 2009, he too quoted Paine, this time from the first of 13 articles collected in “The American Crisis”—an article Gen. Washington ordered read to his troops before crossing the Delaware River on Christmas 1776 to fight the Hessian mercenaries of King George III: “Let it be told to the future world … that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive … that the city and country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it.” Reagan and Obama each lifted some good lines from Paine for their own rhetorical purposes; but each likewise cared more for stagecraft than for the original script.

Thomas Paine was born Jan. 29, 1737, in Thetford, England, and died on June 8, 1809, in Greenwich Village, New York. He was an active participant in the American and French revolutions, and once said to George Washington, “a share in two revolutions is living to some purpose.” Through his writings he also left a lasting legacy in the British working-class movement. During his life, his books and pamphlets became instant best-sellers, since he was a pioneer in addressing a wide public in plain language. He is, in fact, sometimes described as a “pamphleteer,” and it is true that even his books are written in the style of pamphlets writ large. This is entirely to his credit. In 1943, Orwell wrote a short piece titled “Pamphlet Literature,” and claimed “that the pamphlet ought to be the literary form of an age like our own. We live in a time when political passions run high, channels of free expression are dwindling, and organized lying exists on a scale never before known. For plugging the holes in history the pamphlet is the ideal form.” In the age of Murdoch and Berlusconi, the traditional print and broadcast media often serve as megaphones of phony populism. Nor does organized lying cease to exist simply because the Internet carries a cacophony of voices. In this sense, “plugging the holes in history” is still the aim of political writers, and Paine is still good for morale and instruction.

In the United States, Paine wrote “Common Sense” and “The American Crisis,” rallying citizens to support independence, and then literally rallying the troops for battle. When Paine went back to England to promote his own design for a bridge, history had a bigger design for him. He had become acquainted with Edmund Burke, who argued in the British Parliament that lenience would preserve the loyalty of the colonists, and who finally added his qualified support to the American Revolution. In a famous speech Burke gave in the House of Commons on March 22, 1775, he said, “In this character of the Americans a love of freedom is the predominating feature. … This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English colonies, probably, than in any other people of the earth.”

So long as Burke and Paine had that much common ground, Paine was even glad to visit Burke at his country home. But in 1789 the French Revolution broke out, and by the next year Burke was making deeply conservative arguments for hereditary rule and property in his book “Reflections on the Revolution in France.” The leading British radicals and republicans, whom Paine knew well, waged a literary war against Burke. William Godwin wrote his “Inquiry Concerning Political Justice,” and Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her “Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” But once again, the runaway best-seller proved to be the first part of Thomas Paine’s “The Rights of Man,” published in 1791 and dedicated to George Washington. Paine defended the French Revolution, and renewed his attacks against monarchy and all hereditary privilege. Arguing pointedly against Burke, Paine wrote:

“Do materialists really think that language just ‘evolved’, like finches’ beaks …?” – AN Wilson, ‘Why I believe again’ New Statesman April 6 2009

“We are annoying to the leopard because our ancestor stole fire from theirs” – South Amerindian story

What kind of animal are humans? To the crude materialist we are, according to taste, chiefly animal; bundles of needs, habits and reactions; savage or simple. To the spiritual believer, animal matter required something extra, something originally separate, to become human. Is human culture then just another kind of animal behaviour? What does it mean to trace humanity’s development from nature to society? What is the ‘missing link’ between natural history and anthropology? If animals communicate, and they do, is there anything special about human language?

Darwin’s dog
In the Descent of man, Charles Darwin argues that many capacities of human beings have their origin in the basic abilities of animals – to communicate, to feel affection for one’s young, entailing self-sacrifice, and to appraise the immediate environment.

He takes as an example something close to home: “My dog, a full-grown and very sensible animal, was lying on the lawn during a hot and still day; but at a little distance a slight breeze occasionally moved an open parasol, which would have been wholly disregarded by the dog, had anyone stood near it. As it was, every time that the parasol slightly moved, the dog growled fiercely and barked.” No doubt, the dog was confused, understanding that the movement, as Darwin puts it, “indicated the presence of some strange living agent”. The dog had learnt that the movement was linked to a presence, perhaps a member of Darwin’s family, the sound being similar to a woman’s crinoline skirts. Yet the cause of the noise was invisible.

Darwin adds that this presumption of invisible life may be the animal source of ancient people’s belief in spiritual agencies: that is, attributing agitation in the world to a human-like presence with “the same passions, the same love of vengeance or simplest form of justice, and the same affections they themselves experienced”.1

The human then starts with the same capabilities as other animals. Frederick Engels, in his classic Origin of the family, sketches out human development in terms of the freeing of hands. At one time, certain apes began walking upright, so freeing their hands to grasp – not only in gathering food, but also in the use of tools. Human groups fished, then hunted, following rivers then stalking prey. Another stage produced the bow and arrow and the beginnings in some areas of settlement.²

In the century since Engels wrote, conjecture about these developments has been greatly refined and the role of sexuality and language acknowledged as part of the process.

Between 4.5 million and 2 million years ago, evidence has been found in Africa of small-brained apes walking upright. These are assumed to have come down from the trees permanently, perhaps in response to climate change and a search for food. Their teeth were stronger, useful for chewing tougher foods, such as meat. These apes were classified as Australopithecines. During the Pleistocene period – one million years ago – they became homo erectus, early human. These primates from the Middle Pleistocene had skulls that were like a narrow dishpan turned upside down, while a later branch – homo sapiens – had skulls like an inverted bowl. Remains of this round-headed creature have been found in Java, China, east and north Africa. Another branch of hominids found from this period are the Neanderthals, who later died out (see below).

From the late Lower Pleistocene, simple tools are found with animal bones. These were sticks shaped to dig up roots and stalk small game animals. They had been cut by sharpened flint pieces, which were later tied to the sticks and became hand axes. Spears appear later that can bring down a horse, ox or deer. Similar tools though have been found that were not worn away by use. These could be sacred objects. Meanwhile, the skulls found near them indicate a brain of modern size. Dated 100,000 to 60,000 years ago, these skulls are found among evidence of practices such as the burying of the dead and the building of boats.

Hunting large animals with spears implies teamwork, while the use of sacred symbolic objects indicates myth-making, the passing on of knowledge. Somehow, the upright ape had developed the custom of working in groups, using tools and passing on an understanding of the world.

How had this change occurred?

Sex and sociability
Most species reproduce enough offspring to ensure survival of their genes because the male is alerted as to when the female is ovulating and ready to conceive. Chimps and baboons, for example, have an obvious reddening of the sexual parts.

Like other primates, our animal ancestors could have lived either in promiscuous groups or in subgroups or ‘harems’ controlled by a dominant male. The ape ancestor of humans was probably clear about when the female was ovulating. It has recently been suggested, however, that at some point a female must have been born that had the signs of ovulation concealed. Mating with these females, males in promiscuous groups could not be sure which offspring were theirs. One effect of this would be to stop the usual practice of primates, which is to kill off the children of other males.

Concealed ovulation may have meant in effect that offspring belonged to everyone. Such ambiguity of parenting might make for closer groups all round – more sharing of food and more affection and solidarity between adults and children. These more sociable groups would have had a survival advantage. Flexible female mating might also have encouraged both females and male to copulate just for pleasure, mutual pleasure. The appearance then of mutual sexual pleasure and promiscuous parenting could be the source of human solidarity.3 Force would not have achieved the bonding necessary. Whatever practices of male dominance, incest taboos or monogamy conventions followed, in the beginning was sexual communism.

Intelligence agent
These sociable creatures began to develop something else: transmittable intelligence or language. In Prehistory of the mind, Steven Mithen allies the physical and social growth of early humans with the kind of intelligence he speculates developed at different times.4 The perceptiveness of post-erectus homo sapiens was in many ways indistinguishable from animals. As with other mammals, they were familiar with the appreciation of climate and danger. To this was added an expertise in hand tools like stone-cutting implements. For communication, it is likely that these early humans used a simple set of sounds, like animals, to give commands or warnings – ‘keep away’, ‘fruit here’, ‘large prey ahead’.

Animals use communication for many purposes: marking territory, warning adversaries, courtship. In his work on primate groups, anthropologist Robin Dunbar focuses on the purpose for apes of one particular form of physical communication.5 While living in groups, apes convey information to and about each other by grooming – picking out fleas and lice from each other’s bodies. Whom one chooses to give this attention to, for how long and whom you let watch – these function as social messages, affirming relationships, as well as getting rid of dirt.

Dunbar reckons that any one primate spends 30% of their time grooming others. It is his proposition that, as group size increased, and relationships grew more complicated, spoken language developed as a supplement to physical interaction. Even simple ‘chattering’ speech communicates better and faster to others than massage: conveying liking, mood and defining a common enemy or rival.

In close-knit groups, the best at such grooming would be those sensitive to the moods of others, communicating when required, appealing to emotional states, sensing ‘bad moods’. Those who could infer ‘social knowledge’ about other minds and their intentions, as well as defining who to dislike and exclude, could have acquired an evolutionary advantage. ‘Reading’ and defining others may even have made some individuals leaders.

Furthermore, following Dunbar, it is Mithen’s contention that it was this rudimentary language, these particular sounds – words – that began to act as a ‘vehicle’ for mixing the different intelligences, technical and environmental, acquired in the life of the group. Once created, these names for interpersonal concepts – like/dislike, hostile/friendly – became transferable to other relations in the rest of the physical world. The sky, like a person, is treated as readable: signs of ‘discontent’ in the sky are not only comprehensible as climatic changes, but as a ‘bad mood’ or hostile other, contributing to a ‘cosmic analysis’ of a human-like presence that inhabits the sky.

This may have been followed by rituals to placate the sky, a sort of cosmic grooming – rituals which then bond members of the society together. These ‘modern humans’ can feel that little bit more confident with the world and each other – ‘knowledgeable’ – by using their special sounds that are applicable to the state of persons and applying them to the state of things. But why were these sounds transferable in this way? How, in other words, did they work as symbols?

Standing for something else
Charles Peirce defined a symbol or sign, which could be a word, a sentence or a picture, as something that stands in the comprehension of somebody for something else in some respect or capacity 6 The words ‘dog’ or ‘bitch’ can thus equally stand for a canine. Peirce called the thing that stands for something, the representamen and what it stands for, the object or ground – its idea. The way it is understood in the mind of another was the interpretant – when you say ‘cheese’, you may be thinking Cheddar, while I may take it as Brie.

A representamen can be of three kinds. It can be an ‘icon’: that is, it resembles its object in some way – a cartoon or a photograph can both be a portrait. A sign can also be an ‘index’, physically connected with its object – no smoke without fire. Lastly, it can be a ‘conventional’ symbol, only understood within the interpreting mind as part of a particular code – ‘dog’ is part of English, while ‘un chien’ is French: they are part of different codes. Visual signs can belong to different codes, according to context: on the beach, a red flag may signal danger; on a demonstration, solidarity. Once you have a material representamen or sign, you have something that can be detached, transferred, applied.

It is with this power of detachability that language goes from being rudimentary communication to developed creation, to metaphor, where a word for one thing can stand for another. With this the sociable ape begins to construct what anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss called “the science of the concrete”7 – a perception of the world as being similar to the human being.

In this ‘science’, understanding of interpersonal relations, of intentions and actions, is applied to the events of the natural world. Like Darwin’s dog, we intuit an invisible presence. The cosmos is felt to be inhabited by something similar to people – spirits, the supernatural, gods – whose actions explain the world. For instance: why are leopards fierce towards humans? Because, says one South Amerindian tribe, they are annoyed at us. Our ancestor, the first human, was once the servant of the leopard, tending the fire that belonged to the beast. One day the ancestor stole the fire and ran off to start human society. There has been an understandable antagonism ever since.

Not only words, but also their combination in a sentence, suggest the action of people on others and the world. Noam Chomsky in his work on linguistics argues that causation and ‘embeddedness’ form the deep structure, the generative grammar,8 of all sentences. Though word order may differ in different societies, these ways of connecting noun and verb are universal: ‘We are annoying to the leopard because our ancestor stole fire from theirs’; ‘The Big Bang sent out various elements which became the universe and created water and hence life on this planet’; ‘Chimp 1 made chimp 2 feel friendly enough to allow them to go food-gathering together’.

According to Chomsky, 8 awareness of these ways of formulating things is a deep part of our memory – hard-wired in our brains, as it were – just as the skills of grasping are an inherent possibility of our hands. With the casual and connective relations in sentences, narrative becomes a tool for mapping the world. So began art and science: the fabrication of models to understand things. A general intelligence appears – first as superstitious knowledge, but still a cosmic analysis nevertheless, not just gestures between bodies.

Synthesis
This is a qualitative change, and, if you like, the missing link. However, it is no snapshot. Between 100,000 and 40,000 years ago, homo sapiens sapiens appears. With a detachable material manifestation – signs – their understanding of personal motivation is applied to things: the concept of annoyance applied to the leopard, the concept of anger to the sky. These were then embedded in narratives resulting in a universe filled with cause and motivation.

Lévi-Strauss comments that this form of thinking is mythical, but just as logical as later science, given the appreciation of other people and the behaviour of other parts of the cosmos. Relating to the spirits in things; placating them with ceremonies; imitating them in pictures and dances; contacting them in trances and intoxications; constructing narratives that explain and categorise – all rely on the characterisation of the world gained through analogy between things and people. Not only is the modern human born in Africa, but culture itself comes out of African animism. Once these ‘models’ of the universe begin to be made, humans then have the opportunity to differentiate between true and false. So begins belief, science, criticism.

This new technology of signs proved decisive. In the area now known as Europe, the most recent hypothesis about why Neanderthals declined and humans flourished is due to this difference.9 Between 35,000 and 24,000 years ago, the former were outbred by humans because humans maintained supportive cultural bonds connecting groups over a vast area, as evidenced by widely found artefacts like sculptures of lion-headed men and basic musical instruments. The Neanderthals may have had comparable tools and even hardier physiques, but the humans had a better form of solidarity, through words, art and music: ‘religion’ (from re + ligare: to bind).

If you want to celebrate our ancestors’ distinctive survival skills: beyond any knife or bowl, look to one of those chunky female statuettes, often called Venuses or earth goddesses, with their divine rolls of fat, carried from Asia into Europe as the Neanderthals became extinct. Humans survived, through drought and ice age, because they sang to the fat lady.

In summary then, one branch of primates due to natural conditions evolved an upright posture and efficient hands, which promoted improved tool use. At one point, these animals become promiscuous in childbearing, which encouraged teamwork. On the basis of these differences, the species homo, the sociable ape, acquired various techniques and knowledges, which were then combined in a general intelligence embedded in language. This communication by transferable symbols, starting from a rudimentary level, attained concepts of causation and connection – generative grammar – by making analogies between interpersonal understanding and natural events. Homo sapiens became a maker not only of things, but also of symbols: homo fabricator.

As Darwin commented, “If it be maintained that certain powers such as self-consciousness, abstraction, etc are peculiar to man, it may well be that these are the incidental results of other highly advanced intellectual facilities: and these again are the result of the continued use of a highly developed language.”10

Design issues
If we are just animals, then constructive change is an idle dream. Apes do not discuss what a good life is: they just live (often by force); apes do not discuss how one should treat apes. If we are mainly spirits, then maybe the superior spirits – the pure spirits, rather than us – should decide what the good society is, which is probably something that exists only where they live, in a realm that has no connection with the matter of which we are made.

The different philosophies and legends thrown up by class history show that fabrications need not be true, and benefit everyone, to be effective. Their hold on the minds of homo fabricator has been described as ‘fetishism’, similar to the worship of a fetish, a doll containing a spirit. “In that world,” Marx comments, “the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relations both with one another and the human race.” He applies this not only to early belief, but also to acceptance of the political and social present: “So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands.”11 We still take too many human creations, from economic relationships to constitutions, written and unwritten, for living necessities.

Yet the inadequate constructions of yesterday always exist on sufferance. The sociable ape’s urge to fabricate, to redesign, is still with us, if only as a survival skill. The growing interest in self-determination and justice heard in many forms today prevents any easy deference to the established. Many more people too are questioning the unforeseen effects, social and ecological, of our inventions. It remains to be seen whether this expanded awareness can go all the way to a full diagnosis of the problem rather than rest satisfied with treatment of symptoms.

Of course, there is a fear of ‘redesign’. We have the utopias of the 20th century, whether ‘communist’ or ‘free market’, to discomfort us. This is part of the caution about our constructions: that they may backfire on us. However, though we may no longer aspire to be gods, neither are we cattle. We may not ask people to be perfect, but we do ask them to be accountable. We must continue then to evaluate mistakes and test new proposals, asking the right questions, and construct a greater space for the very process of evaluation itself, all over the world. Criticism is sacred.

Why should the adventure of the fabricating ape be over? We have made our bed and we can change it.

Notes
C Darwin The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex (1871), part 1, chapter 2.
F Engels The origin of the family, private property and the state (1884).
J Diamond Why is sex fun? The evolution of human sexuality London 1997.
S Mithen The prehistory of mind London 1996.
RIM Dunbar, ‘Co-evolution of neocortical size, group size and language in humans’ Behavioural and Brain Sciences No16, 1993.
CS Peirce Peirce on signs: writings on semiotic (1991).
C Lévi-Strauss The savage mind 1966.
N Chomsky Language and problems of knowledge: the Managua lectures (1988).
BBC2 The incredible human journey May 24 2009.
C Darwin op cit p105.
K Marx Capital Vol 1, chapter 1, section 4, London 1954, p77

However, what both Weber’s analysis of disenchantment and counter-claims as to the importance of contemporary re-enchantment often share is a tendency to make an easy association between religion and enchantment on the one hand and secular rationalism/scientific atheism and disenchantment on the other. In fact there is a long history of occasions when very modernist secular events seemed highly enchanted to many of those participating in them. Wordsworth’s response to the French Revolution, containing a reference to “reason” as the “prime enchantress” of the earth, being but one famous example. Likewise, organised religion can often be experienced as profoundly disenchanting, as the work of generations of writers, from James Joyce to Jeanette Winterson testifies.

For those debating the role of faith in public life, this sense that life is either more or less enchanted or wonderful with or without religion becomes something of a political resource to be fought over and used as a weapon against one’s opponents. And this sense of enchantment feeds into wider claims about the ways in which it is possible to find meaning or value in worlds that often look devoid of any moral compass, be it the world of free-market globalisation championed by the believer Tony Blair, or the world of the selfish gene as described by the atheist Richard Dawkins.

For Blair, the launch of his Faith Foundation marks not only an effort to encourage interfaith dialogue, but a conscious attempt to alter the political culture by, “restoring religious faith to its rightful place, as the guide to our world and its future”. In Blair’s “Faith and Globalisation” lecture of last year, he argued that faith is “integral” to society, “giving the use of reason a purpose and society a soul, and human beings a sense of the divine”. The two aspects seem to be linked in Blair’s mind. Recapturing the “sense of the divine” given by faith is intimately linked to its role in giving reason a purpose. Reason by itself, contra the young Wordsworth, cannot enchant or provide its own sense of purpose, without the gift of faith that makes life “more than just a sparrow’s flight through a lighted hall from one darkness to another”. For Weber, a key element of scientific rationality’s tendency to disenchant the modern world is that it is “meaningless” because it cannot answer the “only question important for us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?”

Those who see themselves as defending science and rationalism against a tidal wave of religious superstition, whether they have read Weber or not, are keenly aware that a sense that, as Weber puts it, scientists, “with their bony hands seek to grasp the blood-and-sap of true life without ever catching up with it”, is one of the most powerful weapons to be used against them. Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, for example, begins and ends with passages which outline how much more wonderful and alive the universe appears when viewed through scientific eyes. He approvingly quotes Bertrand Russell’s claim that, “even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver … in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own”. Far from science disenchanting the world, for the rationalists it is faith, that by casting a veil of fairy stories in front of our eyes, keeps us from appreciating the true majesty and wonder of the universe that we live in. Dawkins knows that to simply disenchant is not an attractive position, so he has to establish science as a rival and superior enchantment to that of faith, hence his references to the “soul shaking” power of “sacred” science to “open the mind and satisfy the psyche”.

Such rhetorical tussles over enchantment play an important part in ongoing political battles over the place of faith in our daily lives. When the post-Downing Street Blair, who is now free to “do God” tells us that, “a faithless world is not one in which we would want ourselves and our children to live”, it is hard not to think back to policies that he championed in government to encourage a greater role for faith in state education. For Dawkins, such indoctrination of youth into faith is “a grievous wrong” to be opposed. Yet both are aware that the power of their position to inspire the human spirit is central to winning the argument.

Proponents of the role of faith in public life have perhaps mistakenly assumed that they would have a monopoly over a sense of enchantment, yet the popularity of books such as Dawkins suggests that they might have a fight on their hands retaining it in coming years.

Until the late 1600s, Zoroaster was generally dated to about the sixth century BCE, which coincided with both the “Traditional date” (see details below) and historiographic accounts (Ammianus Marcellinus xxiii.6.32, fourth c. CE). However, already at the time (late nineteenth century), the issue was far from settled, with James Darmesteter pleading for a later date (c. 100 BCE) and others pleading for dates as early as 6000 BCE.[e]

The “Traditional date” originates in the period immediately following Alexander’s conquest of the Achaemenid Empire in 330 BCE. The Seleucid kings who gained power following Alexander’s death instituted an “Age of Alexander” as the new calendrical epoch. This did not appeal to the Zoroastrian priesthood who then attempted to establish an “Age of Zoroaster.” To do so, they needed to establish when Zoroaster had lived, which they accomplished by counting back the length of successive generations[6] until they concluded that Zoroaster must have lived “258 years before Alexander.” This estimate then re-appeared in the ninth- to twelfth-century texts of Zoroastrian tradition,[c] which in turn gave the date doctrinal legitimacy. In the early part of the twentieth century, this remained the accepted date (subject to the uncertainties of the ‘Age of Alexander’[d]) for a number of reputable scholars, among them Hasan Taqizadeh, a recognized authority on the various Iranian calendars and hence became the date cited by Henning and others.

By the late nineteenth century, scholars such as Bartholomea and Christensen noted problems with the “Traditional date,” namely in the linguistic difficulties that it presented. Since the Old Avestan language of Gathas (that are attributed to the prophet himself) is still very close to the Sanskrit of the Rigveda, it seemed implausible that the Gathas and Rigveda could be more than a few centuries apart, suggesting a date for the oldest surviving portions of the Avesta of roughly the 11th to 10th century BCE.

This 11th/10th century BCE date is now widely accepted among Iranists, who in recent decades found that the social customs described in the Gāthās roughly coincides with what is known of other pre-historical peoples of that period. Supported by this historical evidence, the “Traditional date” can be conclusively ruled out, and the discreditation can to some extent be supported by the texts themselves: The Gathas describe a society of bipartite (priests and herdsmen/farmers) nomadic pastoralists with tribal structures organized at most as small kingdoms. This contrasts sharply with the view of Zoroaster having lived in an empire, at which time society is attested to have had a tripartite structure (nobility/soldiers, priests, and farmers).

Although a slightly earlier date (a century or two) has been proposed on the grounds that the texts do not reflect the migration onto the Iranian Plateau, it is also possible that Zoroaster lived in one of the rural societies that remained where they were.

[edit] Place

Zoroaster; portrayed here in a popular Parsi Zoroastrian depiction. This iconographic tradition can be traced to the eighteenth century.Yasna 9 & 17 cite the Ditya River in Airyanem Vaējah (Middle Persian Ērān Wēj) as Zoroaster’s home and the scene of his first appearance. Nowhere in the Avesta (both Old and Younger portions) is there a mention of the Achaemenids or of any West Iranian tribes such as the Medes, Persians, or even Parthians.

However, in Yasna 59.18, the zaraθuštrotema, or supreme head of the Zoroastrian priesthood, is said to reside in ‘Ragha’. In the ninth to twelfth century Middle Persian texts of Zoroastrian tradition, this ‘Ragha’ – along with many other places – appear as locations in Western Iran. While Medea does not figure at all in the Avesta (the westernmost location noted in scripture is Arachosia), the Būndahišn, or “Primordial Creation,” (20.32 and 24.15) puts Ragha in Medea (medieval Rai). However, in Avestan, Ragha is simply a toponym meaning “plain, hillside.”[7].

Apart from these indications in Middle Persian sources which are open to interpretations, there are a number of other sources. The Greek and Latin sources are divided on the birth place of Zarathustra. There are many Greek accounts of Zarathustra, referred usually as Persian or Perso-Median Zoroaster. Moreover they have the suggestion that there has been more than one Zoroaster.[8] On the other hand in post-Islamic sources Shahrastani (1086-1153) an Iranian writer originally from Shahristān, present-day Turkmenistan, proposed that Zoroaster’s father was from Atropatene (also in Medea) and his mother was from Rai. Coming from a reputed scholar of religions, this was a serious blow for the various regions who all claimed that Zoroaster originated from their homelands, some of which then decided that Zoroaster must then have then been buried in their regions or composed his Gathas there or preached there.[9][10] Also Arabic sources of the same period and the same region of historical Persia consider Azerbaijan as the birth place of Zarathustra.[11]

By the late twentieth century the consensus amont some scholars had settled on an origin in Eastern Iran and/or Central Asia (to include present-day Afghanistan): Gnoli proposed Sistan (though in a much wider scope than the present-day province) as the homeland of Zoroastrianism; Frye voted for Bactria and Chorasmia;[12] Khlopin suggests the Tedzen Delta in present-day Turkmenistan.[13] Sarianidi considered the BMAC region as “the native land of the Zoroastrians and, probably, of Zoroaster himself.”[14] Boyce includes the steppes of the former Soviet republics.[15] The medieval “from Media” hypothesis is no longer taken seriously, and Zaehner has even suggested that this was a Magi-mediated issue to garner legitimacy, but this has been likewise rejected by Gershevitch and others.

The 2005 Encyclopedia Iranica article on the history of Zoroastrianism summarizes the issue with “while there is general agreement that he did not live in western Iran, attempts to locate him in specific regions of eastern Iran, including Central Asia, remain tentative.”[16]