Artificial Ape Man: How Technology Created Humans [Evolution]

Archaeologist and anthropologist Timothy Taylor explains how an extended-vanished artefact explains human evolution and ended in ” survival of the weakest.”

You begin your book The unreal Ape by claiming that Darwin was wrong. In what way?

Darwin is one of my heroes, but I think he was wrong in seeing human evolution as a result same processes that account for other evolution within the biological world – especially in relation to the dimensions of our cranium.

Darwin had to position large cranial size right down to sexual selection, arguing that ladies found brainy men sexy. But biomechanical factors make this untenable. I call this the smart biped paradox: after you are an upright ape, all natural selection pressures must be in favour of retaining a small cranium. That’s because walking upright means having a narrower pelvis, capping babies’ head size, and a shorter digestive tract, making it harder to support big, energy-hungry brains. Clearly our big brains did evolve, but I suspect Darwin had the incorrect mechanism. I suspect it was technology. We were never fully biological entities. We are and always were artificial apes.

So you say that technology came before humans?

The archaeological record shows chipped stone tool technologies ahead of 2.5 million years ago. That’s the smoking gun. The oldest fossil specimen of the genus Homo is at most 2.2 million years old. That’s a niche of more than 300,000 years – more than the complete length of time that Homo sapiens has been in the world. This implies that earlier hominins called australopithecines were answerable for the stone tools.

Is it possible that we just don’t have a genus Homo fossil, but they truly were around?

Some researchers are holding out for an earlier specimen of genus Homo. I’m seeking to free us to think that we had stone tools first and that those tools created a major portion of our intelligence. The tools caused the genus Homo to emerge.

How can we know the chipped stones were used as tools?

If you wanted to kill something or to defend yourself, you don’t want a chipped stone tool – you may just pick up a rock and throw it. With chipped stone, something else is happening, something called ” entailment” : using some thing to make another. You’re using some object to chip the stone into a specific shape with the intention of using it for something else. There’s an operational chain – one tool entails another.

What were these tools used for?

Upright female hominins walking the savannah had a real problem: their babies couldn’t cling to them the best way a chimp baby could cling to its mother. Carrying an infant would were the best drain on energy for a hominin female – higher than lactation. So what did they do? I suspect they discovered tips on how to carry their newborns using a loop of animal tissue. Evidence of the slings hasn’t survived, but inside the same way that we infer lungs and organs from the bones of fossils that survive, it really is from the stone tools that we will infer the bits that don’t last: things created from sinew, wood, leather and grasses.

How did the slings shape our evolution?

Once you’ve got slings to carry babies, you’ve got broken a tumbler ceiling – it doesn’t matter whether the newborn is helpless for a day, a month or a year. You’ll have ever more helpless young and that, as far as I will see, is how encephalisation happened within the genus Homo. We used technology to turn ourselves into kangaroos. Our youngsters are born an increasing number of underdeveloped because they’re able to continue to develop outside the womb – they become one other-uterine fetus inside the sling. This implies their heads can continue to grow after birth, solving the smart biped paradox. In that sense technology comes before the ascent to Homo. Our brain expansion only really took off half a million years after the first stone tools. And they continued to develop within an increasingly technological environment.

You write inside the book that this resulted in a ” survival of the weakest” . What does this mean?

Technology allows us to acquire biological deficits: we lost our sharp fingernails because we had cutting tools, we lost our heavy jaw musculature because of stone tools. These changes reduced our basic aggression, increased manual dexterity and made ladies and men more similar. Biological deficits continue today. As an illustration, modern human eyesight is on average worse than that of humans 10,000 years ago.

Unlike other animals, we don’t adapt to environments – we adapt environments to us. We just passed some extent where more people in the world live in cities than not. We are extended through our technology. We now know that Neanderthals were symbolic thinkers, probably made art, had exquisite tools and greater brains. Does that mean they were smarter?

Evidence shows that during the last 30,000 years there has been an overall decrease in brain size and the fashion appears continuing. That’s because we will outsource our intelligence. I don’t have to remember as much as a Neanderthal because I actually have a computer. I don’t need this type of dangerous and dear-to-maintain biology to any extent further. i’d argue that humans are going to continue to get less biologically intelligent.

If you said to me, one can either have your toes bring to an end or all of your library destroyed, without chance of ever accessing those works again, I’d say ” take my toes” – because I will be able to more easily make amends for that loss. Needless to say, you can get into a grisly argument over how much of my biology I’d quit before I’d say, ” OK, take the Goethe!”

Is human technology really any different from, say, a bird’s nest, a spider’s web or a beaver’s dam?

Some biologists argue that human culture and technology is just an extension of biological behaviours and in that sense humans are like hermit crabs or spiders. That’s a concept referred to as ” niche adaptation” . I see human technology as different as a result of the notion of entailment. a few philosophers and social anthropologists have argued that the world of artifice has its own logic – an concept that traces back to Kant’s idea of the autonomy of the classy realm. Philosophy, art history and paleoanthropology ought to all come together for us to comprehend who we are.

The point is, the world of synthetic things – it truly is, technology – has yet another generative pattern than the Darwinian pattern of descent with modification. People prefer to argue for you to apply Darwinian selection to, say, industrial design. That led Richard Dawkins to propose and Susan Blackmore to develop the ” meme” idea – cultural analogues of genes which might be not biological but they’re still replicators and follow the elemental logic of biological evolution.

I would argue that memes simply don’t make sense. And this is because that once you study a synthetic object like a chair, as an example, there isn’t a central rule that defines it. There is not any approach to draw a undeniable philosophical boundary and say, listed here are the characteristics which can be both necessary and sufficient to define a chair. The chair’s meaning is linguistic and symbolic - a chair is a chair because we intend for it to be a chair and we use it in a specific way. Artificial objects are defined in relation to intention and entailment – and that makes artificial things very different from biological things.

People like Ray Kurzweil speak about an impending singularity, when technology will advance at this kind of rapid pace that it’ll become intelligent and the realm turns into qualitatively different. Do you compromise?

I am sympathetic to Kurzweil’s idea because he is saying that intelligence is becoming technological and I’m saying, that’s how it’s been from the start. That’s what it really is to be human. And in that sense, there’s nothing scary in his vision of synthetic intelligence. I don’t see any sign of intentionality in machine intelligence now. I’m not saying it is going to never happen, but I feel it’s a whole lot further away than Kurzweil says.

Will computers eventually manage to develop their own computers which might be even smarter than them, creating a sudden acceleration that leaves the biological behind and leaves us as a type of pond scum while the robots take over? That scenario implies a sharp division between humans and our technology, and I don’t think this type of division exists. Humans are artificial apes – we are biology plus technology. We are the first creatures to exist in that nexus, not purely Darwinian entities. Kurzweil says that the technological realm can’t be reduced to the biological, so there we agree.

At the top of the book, you note that there isn’t a ” back to nature” method to climate change. Does that mean our species was doomed from the start?

The point is, we were never fully biological entities, so there isn’t any ” nature” to move back to, for us. Wait, you may ask, what about people that ” live in nature” , people like the Aborigines in Tasmania? Truly, the Tasmanians used technology to conform and survive and they’d have done that for maybe another 40,000 years. The difficulty is that their form of technology - non-entailed – isn’t really the best way humans will survive inside the final scenario. Ultimately we need major progress – because even without climate change, the sun is eventually going to blow up.

Now, you can think that’s a ridiculously long time away, but that’s the sort of ridiculous timescale palaeoanthropologists think of. I look back 4 million years and notice our emergence and our evolution and then I look forward 4 million years because those are the timescales I’m used to. And ultimately, humans will go extinct if we will’t get off this planet. The simplest way out, ultimately, is up. The Tasmanians didn’t have the type of technology that might lead them there, but we do.

Timothy Taylor is an archaeologist and anthropologist at the University of Bradford, UK. His book The synthetic Ape: How technology changed the course of human evolution is published by Palgrave Macmillan this month.

(Image: Becca Wright)

New Scientist reports, explores and interprets the consequences of human endeavour set within the context of society and culture, providing comprehensive coverage of science and technology news.

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This post is tagged: ape, artificial, evolution, humans, Technology