From fire to flight: Key milestones in human evolution

(If anyone thinks writing about evolution in a diplomacy blog is far-fetched, I’ll point to Robert Sapolsky’s article ‘A Natural History of Peace’)

We’ll never know for sure, but on the path to humankind’s current preponderance in the world, we took two unique steps: first, we learned to cook, then, we learned to throw at a distance.

Cooking: Fueling the brain for evolution

Cooking food over fire allowed our bodies to shorten the gut, freeing energy from digestion for cogitation. This was crucial, as walking upright demands significant analytical and coordinating brain power to avoid falling flat on our faces. In learning to walk upright, seeing replaced smelling as our primary way of interacting with our surroundings. Imaging the world in three dimensions is also brain-intensive, as there are far more visual inputs than smells to process, and smell offers limited spatial positioning, relying mainly on non-directional intensity.

Throwing: A purposeful action

Secondly, we learned to throw at a distance or target (see Throwing Fire by Alfred W. Crosby). A well-placed stone killed Goliath, and many animals before that. Yes, I know, we’d started making tools before we threw them, but tools in a way are not as startling as throwing. For when we learned to throw effectively at a target, we changed the tool’s purpose, not its shape. Possibly for the first time, we understood that we could have a goal and we could work toward it at a distance. We had to imagine acting at a distance. At the same time, we moved from adaptive to purposeful action: instead of mere adaptation and improvement, we had a target which we could only hit or miss. To be effective, a boomerang has to return to the one who launched it, not fall somewhere in the bush. And a javelin is worse than useless if it scares, rather than scores.

No other animal ‘throws’, though a few ‘drop’ objects, and of course quite a few ‘squirt’, which is something in between. Maybe the odd ape pelts, but throwing? Our ‘willing at a distance’ sure must have startled animals used to the safety of distance. Whether we startled large herbivores and carnivores into extinction will be debated for a few years yet, until our reading of DNA will allow us better to understand the process of their extinction. We did have a hand in it for sure.

Once we learned to throw, we got better and better at it. We designed tools to throw tools: the atlatl, then the bow & arrow. The bow probably came later, for it had to combine string/strip with wood, and it also required intimation of the physics of the bow. The next step forward was to combine fire and the throw: the gun and the rocket. We got quite skillful; we managed throws around the solar system and beyond.

We were not content with this result, though it was quite impressive. The conceptual step forward was to move from ‘one-thrower-one-target’ to ‘one-thrower-many-targets’ – what an improvement in effectiveness! We did it first by brawn (bombs); WWI was the first time when the new capacity of one individual hitting many targets in succession was acted out on a large scale. It was the war that enthroned the machine gun.

Communication: Bridging time and space

Communication, on the other hand, took a different and distinct path: it tried to breach the distance of time first, not space. Myths are information systems for transmission to future generations – albeit difficult for us to understand because today we have lost the context as well as the knowledge systems in which the information lay embedded (see When They Severed Earth from Sky by Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul T. Barber) . The ‘song-lines’ of Indigenous peoples of Australia (see Songline on Wikipedia) are possibly the most extensive such oral word/image system – it allowed them to thrive in a featureless continent with an inhospitable climate.

Memory served as the tool for both diachronic and metachronic transmission, albeit with significant limitations. Writing stabilised content, but ‘spreading’ it among contemporaries remained cumbersome until the invention of print. For the first time, communication leapfrogged weapons in ‘effectiveness’: with print, ‘the one’ could easily target ‘the many’ – though the process was still rather sequential.

When fire and communication figuratively joined forces, the link to material support was broken. With the advent of electric power, ‘one-on-many’ communication simultaneously replaced ‘one-on-one’ – giving rise to radio and TV. The next leap was to ‘many-on-many’, as the internet arrived to stay. The internet now enables the instant spreading of ideas across great distances (though much of it is social chat – but that’s another story rooted in our apish origins).

Jus in bello (the attempt to define and regulate the conduct of individuals, nations, and other agents in war to mitigate its worst effects) seeks to bring some order to the concept of ‘throwing at a distance’. Without such rules, if any weapon could come from any angle, war would become entirely unpredictable and purely destructive. The history of rules about ‘throwing’ is both honourable and perverse. As soon as humankind adopts rules, it adapts them, often exploiting them for partisan advantage. Over time, limits turn into functions: the strong gain a double advantage by setting the rules to suit their strengths and being best equipped to use those rules to their advantage. Meanwhile, the weak will either break the rules or circumvent them with innovative tactics, leading to yet another round of rule-setting.

We can expect equivalent developments to occur in the field of communication, as the current struggle over governance of the internet shows. With a twist: political and economic interests work at cross-purposes here. The political aim of ‘freedom of communication’ tends to conflict with the economic aim of the creator to retain control over his message, so as to extract a rent (by definition, a one-on-many situation is a monopolistic one; see The Rent by Gordon Tullock).

Unlike ‘throwing’, which remains bound to materiality, communication has transcended physical constraints, achieving a ‘virtual’ nature. A fitting metaphor for this transformation is the chain reaction of radioactive material and its associated energy release: without nuclear moderators, the reaction risks become explosive. Similarly, the political energy and economic rents derived from liberating communication from material limitations are immense, but they can also disrupt the social fabric. Virtual communication holds the potential to spread like an ‘epidemic’.

Such ‘epidemics’ may pose significant social dangers, as they substitute the judgment of the few for that of the many and replace deliberative processes with imitative or emulative, and often impulsive, reactions. For alternative explanations of the underlying processes, see The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki). Manias and panics ensue – we may call them ‘bubbles’. Recent examples are the Cultural Revolution or Kampuchea under Pol Pot. Writing in a different (and hopeful) vein, Richard Sennett argued: ‘I think it is possible from an enquiry into how people now feel authority, fraternity, solitude, and ritual to derive ideas of a more political and visionary sort’ (see Authority by Richard Sennett).

Instant communication risks foreshortening the time it takes to work through the implications of the communicated content. Our brains think both fast and slow, and instant communication unduly favours the ‘fast’ and unconscious and reflexive side of our brain (see Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman). The core issue, then, is moderation of the process – not the content. Moderating the process – enriching it through deliberation and dialogic discourse, as well as verification of the effects at the local level – is likely to nudge the outcome toward ‘the mainstream’, and away from extremes. Moderation in this sense need not be equated with censorship, though authority often does so.

I know this is the tallest of orders. We feel omnipotent when we overcome both the constraints of time and space. We had better learn, though, unless we end up like the Apprentice Sorcerer.

The post was first published on DeepDip.

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