We enter the fog and let ourselves be accompanied by two special guides. Ian Tattersall and Francesco D’Errico. Paleoanthropologists, whose fame goes beyond the discipline. Authors of excavations, studies, articles, books. Specialists and at the same time skilled disseminators. They discussed, in the same room, but at different times, on a topic that intrigues even those who are very far from their research and indifferent to the passion that drives them. Everything condenses into the persuasive question: how did we become human, in the sense we give to the term today? And, therefore, in cascade: how did our cognition arise? And how about language?
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Congress
This is the territory, crossed by vast areas of darkness, into which they entered for an hour each, as special guests of the National Congress of the Italian Anthropological Association, in Turin. They recounted their travels in places and time, among the clues left by ancestral brains and minds. It is no coincidence that the title of the event was “Essere Umani”, in which the last letter of “Essere” was an interweaving of “e” and “i”, while the figures of a woman and a monkey stared at everything , we don’t know how convinced or how perplexed.
However, those who are impatient and want to jump to conclusions will be left dumbfounded, just as the woman-ape couple seems to suggest.
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There is no certainty capable of reassuring us. If anything, a cloud of contradictory evidence and a dust from which theories unravel. Tattersall and D’Errico cannot help but, in the diversity of their visions, evoke what they call “scenarios”. They admit that the paths of explanations are open works. For the first we became “human” almost suddenly, for the second a long process of “trial and error”, between unexpected successes and disastrous failures.
Of the very distant past, between 300 thousand and 70 thousand years ago, when our Sapiens species appeared in Africa and then began the colonization of the planet and the conquest (with the elimination of any competitor), little is known, despite a boom of discoveries, archaeological and biological, between artefacts and DNA, without forgetting the contributions of neuroscience which probe emotions and thoughts.
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The immensely creative “naked monkeys”.
“We are fully integrated into the tree of life, however unlikely human creatures are,” reflects Tattersall, former curator at the Museum of Natural History in New York and professor emeritus, immediately highlighting the contrasts and paradoxes that have led us to the condition of humans . “We think symbolically and imagine the world: no other living being behaves like this.” Naked monkeys (as Desmond Morris defined us) and yet immensely creative. An unbalanced status, for which “there are only two possibilities: a gradual one and a brutal one”.
Tattersall keeps the audience on their toes, with a bird’s eye view of the technologies of hominids, from Australopithecines to Neanderthals: a surprising repertoire of objects and tools, which, however, seems to lack that extra that only Sapiens know how to forge .
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In a South African site, 77 thousand years ago, the first symbolic language
It finally happens around 77 thousand years ago, in the South African site of Blombos, and only then: symbolic thought manifests itself with overbearing clarity. Geometric signs on carefully prepared pebbles and worked shells. It is the intellectual take-off, in a crescendo that will materialize in statuettes and paintings on the surfaces of European caves.
We are struck head-on by what Tattersall calls “an appetite for change.” This inextricable set of hi-tech, art, looks and messages is an explosion that follows a series of biological mutations. From the skeleton to the brain. Metamorphoses that were just waiting to be fully exploited. And then it becomes clear that Tattersall has chosen the second option: it is a sudden transformation that has made us human.
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Symbolic thought and language emerged at the same time, hybridizing into each other. “The algorithm of our ancestors, the one that used force, has given way to a more sophisticated one.” And he adds, somewhat enigmatically: “All cognitive rules have changed, triggered by something that was not programmed by evolution.” A spark that has become a work in progress and that overflows into the present: “We often court crazy ideas, yet in our imperfection we stand out for our ability to make choices”.
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Other discoveries in Morocco, Israel, Europe and Asia
If there was a spark, however, “we don’t have biological or genetic evidence”, replies D’Errico, research director of the French CNRS and professor at the University of Bergen. Blombos Cave is just an isolated point in space and time. Before and after, there is much evidence of the ability to produce refined objects and exhibit representations, on shells or rock walls.
The points, i.e. the sites, multiply at the rate of new discoveries. In Morocco, in Israel, in Europe, in Asia. Here appears a geography of abstract thought which – he claims – “is an asynchronous emergence”. It is a multidimensional network of creativity, in precarious balance between times and places, and, therefore, of cognition and symbolism. Objects and styles not only typical of the Sapiens, but also of their Neanderthal “cousins”, and which seem to follow the rhythms of an ocean, between waves, tsunamis and calms: they come to light, sometimes they expand and sometimes they disappear. And they reappear elsewhere. As happens with ocher pigments, with multiple uses: as signs of social status and forerunners of protective creams.
Asynchronism – for D’Errico – means many things: a mass of heterogeneous finds which, however, present intriguing common traits, dispersed along zigzagging trajectories. The common “driver” – the engine – “is more related to culture than natural selection.”
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And so, the disagreement with Tattersall finds, surprisingly, a point of contact: whether it is an event within a tribe, a meeting-clash between different groups, an environmental or climate emergency or, again, a reorganization of neuronal circuits, innovation (another way to indicate the exquisitely human ability to go further) could have to do with a process which, going beyond classical Darwinian laws, presents itself as bizarre and anything but predictable process (also asynchronous), which has become known by the exotic name of “exaptation”.
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The exactness, on which D’Errico and Tattersall cannot help but reflect, is a fascinating tool with which to place the biology and culture of the Sapiens in a stormy relationship, giving the latter a powerful chance to exploit the former, almost without his knowledge. A classic case of “exaptation” is that of feathers and quills: developed by dinosaurs for reasons, perhaps, of sexual appeal or regulation of body temperature, they will be exploited by birds to launch themselves into the adventure of flight. For our species, however, it would be the opportunity to activate “dormant” genes and neurons, under the pressure of some still unknown emergency, becoming “human” in all respects: extroverted, hyperactive, imaginative.
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The sounds that children love so much
D’Errico focuses on an astonishing invention, which dates back 40 thousand years ago, in China, and which in Europe dates back to just 26 thousand years ago: the needles and pins with which clothes were sewn to counteract the cold of the last glaciation.
Tattersall, on the other hand, evokes the sirens of language, which blossomed, perhaps, to deal with a social or climatic calamity: “It must have been children who invented it, associating sounds and objects and repeating that sort of game. Adults don’t know how to be so radical …”.
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