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[lethargic_man]

Some thoughts on Out of Eden by Stephen Oppenheimer, which I read following ewx's review of it (quod vide for a brief overview).

One of the things I was looking forward to finding out on reading the book was how Oppenheimer argued against Jared Diamond's thesis, in Guns, Germs and Steel, that the Great Leap Forward in modern human technologies in Europe 40 kyears ago derived from the invention of speech. Oppenheimer's arguments against this were so cogent it made it seem strange I ever fell for Diamond's thesis in the first place. Of course speech did not arise out of nothing! Whilst it is true that mankind's inventions happened when they did because the idea only occurred to people then, this cannot be applied to speech. Speech is not just an abstract idea; it is also reliant on biological prerequisites, in the shape of the larynx and the tongue, and these would not evolve in the direction of speech without some selection for them in the form of use of speech.

This fits in both with the concept that Dawkins calls exaption, and which I was taught at school under the name adaptation by adoption; and also with Noam Chomsky's thesis, expounded in Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct, that language ability is hardwired in the human brain -- first language ability arises and is selected for memetically; then the ability to do it becomes hardwired and selected for genetically. (Oppenheimer mentions an alternative hypothesis, that language ability was hardwired in the first place, and it was this that drove the evolution of the tongue and larynx.)

Nevertheless, the book does not answer the biggest question Diamond raises, which is the cultural flowering of the Upper Palaeolithic. Oppenheimer goes to great lengths to impress upon us that our view of this is Eurocentric, and both the ancestors of the Cro-Magnons and the Neanderthals had most of the cultural abilities the Cro-Magnons had. Nevertheless, this does not answer Diamond's main question: Given that whenever modern humans and Neanderthals had come into contact between 90 and 60 kyears ago, neither had outcompeted the other, why when Cro-Magnons entered Europe 30 kyears ago, did they so outcompete Neanderthals that within 10 kyears there were no Neanderthals left? There must have been something that gave Cro-Magnons a really quite considerable edge over their ancestors; and if it was not speech, then what was it?

A similar question arises with regard to the pre-Clovis settlement of the Americas. I'm happy to buy the argument that the palaeoanthropological mainstream blinded itself to the evidence -- scant, in much of North America, because of the glaciers destroying much of it -- of pre-Clovis human presence in the Americas, but how does that explain the extinction of much of the megafauna at the time the Clovis peoples spread across the Americas? The conventional answer is that the megafauna could not cope with the warming of the world as the Ice Age happened, but (again as Diamond points out), these animals had survived many previous interglacials and interstadials over the preceding couple of million years; why should this one be different? If it was not the Clovis peoples who exterminated them, what did; and if it was, how come the pre-Clovis Americans did not hunt them down to extinction as the Clovis peoples did?

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On a slightly different topic, reading books like this really drive home how much competition for resources is the ultimate cause of war. If we look at the history of Europe or the Middle East over the last two to four thousand years, you see a succession of peoples invading other people's territories, and cities having to have defensive walls and other fortifications. If you had asked me several years ago I would have assumed that this pattern continued backwards through time to the year dot.

However, reading J.P. Mallory's In Search of the Indo-Europeans, the pattern which kept emerging (IIRC; it's a while since I read the book) was one of continuous cultural development of the pre-Indo-European inhabitants of Europe back to the Neolithic or even Mesolithic, interrupted by a cultural discontinuity when Indo-European peoples invaded. This picture is corroborated in the Middle East by Georges Roux's Ancient Iraq, where the Sumerian civilisation appears to have developed without any discontinuities from the local culture going back to the sixth millennium BCE or beyond. (Which I find interesting from a linguistic point of view, given that Sumerian is thought to be related to Hungarian, an Ural-Altaic language. (The book didn't mention this.)) Yet if you look at this region over the following three thousand years, you'll see successive invasions of the Elamites, Amorites, Kassites, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Medes, Persians, Macedonians and Romans.

One possible reason for this phenomenon is suggested to me by the experience of the Balkans. During the fourth millennium BCE the Balkans retreated into a dark age -- the abandonment of tell sites which had flourished for several millennia, bringing the total number of sites down from 600-700 down to only several dozen, the displacement of previous cultures in almost every direction; movement to marginal locations, such as islands and caves, or easily fortified hilltop sites, and a general reduction in the major Eneolithic (= chalcolithic (Copper Age), as far as I can work out) technologies of both fine ceramic manufacture and copper metallurgy.

Mallory argues against this being the work of invading Indo-Europeans:

After two millennia of agricultural settlement [...] the distance between settlements [...] was clearly diminishing as population increased. In Romania, for example, we find Early Neolithic Linear Ware sites spaced at intervals averaging 23 to 24 kilometres, while later Pre-Cucuteni sites are only 6 to 7 kilometres apart, and during the Cucuteni period itself they are only 3 to 4 kilometres apart. Defensive architecture [...] appear[s] by the fifth millennium.

The picture painted here is of a society growing beyond the capacity of the land which hosted it, and of conflicts arising out of competition for resources, conflicts which went on to destroy the society.

Population growth, being exponential, approximates to a lag phase followed by a log phase. It seems to me that the last few thousand years, then, have constituted the log phase of population growth in Europe, and the previous time since the end of the Ice Age and extended lag phase. (Consider in this respect also how two thousand years ago Britain was largely forested; it's been the following two thousand years, not the previous two thousand, that have created the manmade landscape it has today.)

I found it interesting, then, how Oppenheimer talks about the human diaspora from Africa spreading to all four corners of Eurasia, but then (according to the genetic evidence) people pretty much stayed where they were for the following twenty thousand years, until the last glacial maximum (LGM) 18 kyears ago. People would spread out if there was room for them to spread out, but would not want to encroach onto neighbours' territory, once they had got to the stage where they had neighbours. If this is the case, then for twenty thousand years before the LGM, and several thousand more years, people got along with each other: there was no war. Of course, I'm not claiming this was a golden age of peace; Diamond makes clear in Guns, Germs and Steel, citing the example of Papua New Guinea in the twentieth century, that such primitive societies are xenophobic in the extreme, and will readily kill anyone from the neighbouring tribe who sets foot on their territory. Nevertheless, this is a far cry from the mass invasions of later history, and the multitudinous deaths that these involved.

The other corrollary of this is what happened at the LGM, when much of the world became uninhabitable to humans. Oppenheimer talks about people "hunkering down" in refuge areas, such as Iberia, southern France, Italy, the Balkans and the Ukraine, but surely these areas could not have supported the entire population of Europe in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. (Likewise the refuge areas in Central Asia and North America, and to a lesser extent, the areas in Southeast Asia to which people from Northern and Central Asia fled (the lesser extent being because the dropping of sea-level created more new land than the glaciers and polar deserts took away).)

Would this have been the time of the first real wars -- wars both vicious, as they were for survival, and worldwide? Or is this portrait the result of foreshortening due to the extreme distance; would it actually have been the case that it took hundreds of years for people to have been concentrated together like this, during which time the population fell off naturally down to the new carrying capacity of Europe?

Either way, there is a grim lesson for us all in there, I think. As the resources of the world start to run out, we're going to have to learn to make do with them more efficiently, or we'll have some really quite horrible wars on the way. And also, whilst the carrying capacity of the world is a function of its technology, I do feel we have already exceeded the carrying capacity of a dynamically changing world; we survive only because it is currently static on the timescale that we perceive it. But if the current interglacial comes to an end, we don't really have any backup plan in place. People argue about whether global warming is a manmade phenomenon or not, but really, I feel it's irrelevant.

If you take the longer view (by which I include that of thousands, or even hundreds of years, not just that going to back to the LGM and beyond), the climate of this planet is not stable at all, just metastable, and if we wish to survive, we're going to have to learn the technologies to stabilise it whether global warming is manmade or not.

Sorry; I didn't expect to get into an eco-rant there. :-S

Comments

there was no war

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Perhaps there was simply not enough organization for people to move around in large numbers: invading the next valley along (or whatever) might look, in DNA evidence, much like peaceful intermarriage.

Marshaling large numbers of people to invade another territory involves (at least) politics to get them all doing the same thing; some way of keeping them fed - for "living off the land" to work with for large group in a small region probably implies agriculture along the way and at the destination, or bringing your herds with you (consider the success of the nomads from the Huns to the Mongols). You also need some kind of expectation of benefit from the invasion among the leaders (and everyone else, if your politics isn't powerful enough); which probably means that at least one of the invader or victim has to travel...