The Problem with Homo Sapiens
Bac Lieu, Vietnam, April 6th, 2015
Salaroche


I frankly don’t think any living human being can properly conceive the idea of time when contemplating the course of events across a few millennia, particularly when looking back into the BC annals, which are supposed to contain the darkest and longest periods of history. Just trying to conceptualize in a clear way how our ancestors may have walked upon this planet between 2 and 3 million years ago, span of time when the human genus was already on its way, is a nearly impossible task for the great majority of us.

Even if you were the most profound Cosmogonist or Paleontologist in the world, if you were to answer “yes” to the question of whether you can picture with any clarity in your mind a span of time as long as 1 million years I would most seriously doubt it. We can roughly imagine how life must have been in Europe or the Middle East a few hundred or even a few thousand years ago because of the writings, paintings, sculptures and buildings left to us from those eras, but a span of time as wide as 1, 2, or 3 million years is way too long to even speculate whether there were any thoughts as we know them going on in our ancestors’ minds.

Sure, starting with the imagery Stanley Kubrick gave us in 1968 in his film 2001 A Space Odyssey and continuing with other movies and books that have come out ever since, we can all get a widely acceptable mental picture of how our Hominid ancestors may have lived, but the bottom line is we will never be able to figure out what was going on in those guys’ minds as they roamed around their primitive landscapes with survival instincts as their only motivation to go forward.

And the picture keeps changing. By the end of January of this year there were once again some revealing paleontological discoverings in the Afar region of Ethiopia. This time the unearthed remains, called the Ledi-Geraru Jawbone, belonged to a Homo Habilis barely 200,000 years younger than that famous Australopithecus Afarensis called “Lucy”, who is supposed to have walked this Earth around 3 million years ago, thereby being presumed to be the oldest humanoid anyone has any record of.

But not even such presumption has remained unchallenged. Very recently they have come up with the theory that “Little Foot”, the remains of another Hominid found in some South African caves in the early 1990s, is actually older than Lucy by about half a million years. They formulated this theory by measuring the age of the aluminum and the beryllium found around Little Foot’s remains. But the fact that Little Foot is older than Lucy is not the main point in that news. The highpoint is the fact that Little Foot walked upon grounds a full continent away from those that Lucy walked upon, thereby signaling that Homo Sapiens’ origins may be much more diverse than we may have thought in the past.

Human Beings have really come a long way as far as our physical appearance, living conditions, social norms, and capabilities to think are concerned. If paleontologists are right, it has taken us well over 3 million years to get to the historical point in which we presently are. This is telling us that evolutionary processes take their time when it comes to making it clear and evident that behavioral paradigms have shifted forward.

For example, while Humanoids had been living for 3 million years in nomadic hunter-gatherer societies, it was only around 80,000 years ago that the different tribes started to specialize in the kind of game they preferred to hunt. And it took them over 60,000 years more to give up their nomadic lifestyle and finally come to live in sedentary agricultural societies. This means that for almost 3 million years there were no traceable marks of any paradigm shift in human conduct. That’s a considerable chunk of time, long enough for none of us to be able to imagine it.

The Neolithic Revolution that took place around 12,000 years ago was the point in time where our ancestors finally managed to settle down in the different areas of the world thereby starting to shape their societies and living environments in ways that eventually led us to inhabit metropolises like New York, Paris, London, Beijing, and others. In other words, Homo Sapiens evolved in the past 12,000 years much faster and much more significantly than it did over the previous 3 million years. That’s quite a revolutionary leap in terms of the relative short amount of time it took to come about.

So here we are in the middle of the second decade of the 21st century, looking back in time trying to elucidate our origins while enjoying technological advances and standards of living that may have been utterly unimaginable to the great majority of our ancestors barely one hundred years ago, and yet we are still uneasy about our future, our property, and our children, to the point of needing all kinds of insurance policies and police intervention to protect them and ourselves from all the kinds of injuries and misfortunes we may be exposed to, most of them threats emanating from our own human brethren.

Thievery, embezzlement, fraud, rape, lies, hatred, racism, intolerance of all kinds, torture, massacres, political oppression, all of those moral vices are quite active today within the spectrum of human behavior. Whatever evolutionary processes our ancestors may have undergone, none of it has yet led us to live in harmonious societies where respect to the mutual human condition we all share is the internalized law of the land. In fact, most of the social vices that presently plague our societies seem to have sprung into existence as humans evolved into the “social” beings that we’re presently supposed to be, which is to say that the more sophisticated our societies have become the more insidious human transgressions have become as well.

Little Foot et al may have engendered in Southern Africa a whole host of tribes across time just as much as Lucy, Ledi-Geraru and their coevals may have done 3,250 miles (5,230 kms) up that continent, but the behavior their present descendants display doesn’t differ much across societies when it comes to the abuses and harm we as a species continue to inflict upon each other, regardless of our ethnicity and our geographical place of origin.  

There is today as much racism in Mexico, Guatemala and Peru against their Indian populations as there is against blacks and other minorities in the US, against Pakistanis in England, and Maghrebins in France. There is discrimination against gays and lesbians in the most modern of societies, there is rape in India, the US, and many other countries, there are mass murders in France as much as in Norway and the US, there are thieves and killers in most imaginable countries, there is corruption everywhere, there is intolerance of all kinds across the globe, and there is political oppression in a few of the major nations too.

Human kind is in trouble everywhere we look, in some countries much more than in some others, but societal problems are not the sole preserve of one nation or another, but of our species as a whole. The instinct to oppress masses of people exists today among Han elites in China against the Uygurs and the Tibetans, it exists among Myanmar elites against the Rohingya and the Kachin, it exists among Malay elites against ethnic Indians, it exists among American white supremacists against blacks, it exists among the Sunny ruling minorities against the Shiite majorities in Bahrain, and it exists among Russian elites against the Chechen people.

The human species is definitely in trouble and such pervasive social discord emanates from the simple fact that there is no acceptable universal pattern or measure of conduct by which human individuals may govern themselves. Civilized societies have laws, but a good majority of individuals abide by them only because of the punishment they expose themselves to if they don’t. Take all police force out of the streets of New York or Los Angeles and in a couple of weeks those two cities may have already fallen into total chaos, with looting, rape, and killings running rampant.

Human societies are civilized only to the extent that the rule of law can be enforced upon them. Eliminate the legitimacy of the state and its monopoly on the use of force and the social contract disappears, thereby unleashing pandemonium. Give any group of individuals carte blanche on their actions and quite likely a few weeks down the line they will have crossed the boundaries between civilization and barbarism. And if you doubt the latter statement just Google the terms Nazism, Mao’s Communism, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, or Stalin’s Totalitarianism and you’ll see what I mean.

Many species have their own innate patterns of behavior that they abide by and that they instinctively follow, but not us humans. All human conduct draws from the same pool of potentiality which is innate in human nature, but the range of behavior intrinsic in that potential is quite wide and the possibilities for combinations thereof are myriad. This is telling us we are nothing but a constant possibility that hardly ever crystalizes into one solid static entity, which in turn defines us as mere living riddles that not even ourselves can ever conclusively solve, for quite often not even ourselves understand why we do some of the things we do.

The problem with Homo Sapiens, therefore, is that, regardless of the millions of years of evolution each of us may carry in our DNA, no experience our species may have undergone has taught us to accept in an unequivocal manner that, in spite of the superficial characteristics that may apparently distinguish us from one another, we are all but imperfect samples of the same Human archetype and in all truth not much different from each other.  

Little Foot, Lucy, and Ledi-Geraru obviously didn’t even have the capacity to imagine what they were getting us into when they multiplied compelled only by their sheer natural instinct to preserve the species, but our case is a different one. The Human Race has evolved in the past 300 years much faster than it ever did before and along with that evolution have come much more sophisticated patterns of thinking, perception and expression, to the point where we now know what we are getting our descendants into and many of us are looking into ways to make that legacy as fair and promising as possible, even as there is still no global consensus over such knowledge either.

No doubt our species still continues to toil in daily matters not always conducive for the better understanding between us all, but often quite to the contrary. No doubt there is still no clear consensual world-wide vision as to the path we all should follow, but at least we are all undeniably aware that our present condition is today much better than it was ever before, so that we now know we have created something of real value which is worth protecting. And that in itself is an endeavor worth undertaking.

To our own benefit, the law of unintended consequences has made it that technological advances have, for the most part and particularly over the past four or five decades, lead us to expose ourselves to each other in degrees that have brought to the surface the extent of ground our species still needs to cover before we turn on the behavioral paradigm shift that will mark the next step in our eons-old evolutionary journey.

Ultimately, therefore, the problem with Homo Sapiens may not be anything hopeless or futile, for in searching to solve the living riddle that we all are, in trying to pinpoint what our specific possibility for being may be, we may end up unveiling the unquestionable source of our existence, which turns out to be the ultimate essence of our being, that unique, inextinguishable universal identity that we all share and that each of us carries deep within ourselves.

Salaroche