As we have noted, humans are on a path of substituting technology for parts of their bodies and brains. Eventually the
human will manage to obsolete herself.
Timothy Taylor is an archaeologist and anthropologist at the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom. In his book,
The Artificial Ape, he describes how this process started millions of years ago before homo sapiens sapiens evolved.
So you are saying that technology came before humans?
The archaeological record shows chipped stone tool technologies earlier than 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 gap of more than 300,000
years--more than the total length of time that Homo sapiens has been on the planet. This suggests that earlier hominins
called australopithecines were responsible for the stone tools.
What were these tools used for?
Upright female hominins walking the savannah had a real problem:
their babies couldn't cling to them the way a chimp baby could cling to its mother. Carrying an infant would have been the
highest drain on energy for a hominin female--higher than lactation. So what did they do? I believe they figured out how to
carry their newborns using a loop of animal viscera. Evidence of the slings hasn't survived, but in the same way that we
infer lungs and organs from the bones of fossils that survive, it is from the stone tools that we can infer the bits that don't
last: things made from sinew, wood, leather and grasses.
How did the slings shape our evolution?
Once you have slings to carry babies, you have broken a glass ceiling--it doesn't matter whether the infant is helpless for
a day, a month or a year. You can have ever more helpless young and that, as far as I can see, is how encephalisation
took place in the genus Homo. We used technology to turn ourselves into kangaroos. Our children are born more and
more underdeveloped because they can continue to develop outside the womb--they become an extra-uterine fetus in
the sling. This means 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.
You write in the book that this led to a "survival of the weakest".
What does this mean?
Technology allows us to accumulate biological deficits: we lost our sharp fingernails because we had cutting tools, we
lost our heavy jaw musculature thanks to stone tools. These changes reduced our basic aggression, increased manual
dexterity and made males and females more similar. Biological deficits continue today. For example, modern human
eyesight is on average worse than that of humans 10,000 years ago.
Over the last 30,000 years there has been an overall decrease in brain size and the trend seems to be continuing. That's
because we can outsource our intelligence. I don't need to remember as much as a Neanderthal because I have a
computer. I don't need such a dangerous and expensive-to-maintain biology any more. I would argue that humans are
going to continue to get less biologically intelligent.
donbot
human will manage to obsolete herself.
Timothy Taylor is an archaeologist and anthropologist at the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom. In his book,
The Artificial Ape, he describes how this process started millions of years ago before homo sapiens sapiens evolved.
So you are saying that technology came before humans?
The archaeological record shows chipped stone tool technologies earlier than 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 gap of more than 300,000
years--more than the total length of time that Homo sapiens has been on the planet. This suggests that earlier hominins
called australopithecines were responsible for the stone tools.
What were these tools used for?
Upright female hominins walking the savannah had a real problem:
their babies couldn't cling to them the way a chimp baby could cling to its mother. Carrying an infant would have been the
highest drain on energy for a hominin female--higher than lactation. So what did they do? I believe they figured out how to
carry their newborns using a loop of animal viscera. Evidence of the slings hasn't survived, but in the same way that we
infer lungs and organs from the bones of fossils that survive, it is from the stone tools that we can infer the bits that don't
last: things made from sinew, wood, leather and grasses.
How did the slings shape our evolution?
Once you have slings to carry babies, you have broken a glass ceiling--it doesn't matter whether the infant is helpless for
a day, a month or a year. You can have ever more helpless young and that, as far as I can see, is how encephalisation
took place in the genus Homo. We used technology to turn ourselves into kangaroos. Our children are born more and
more underdeveloped because they can continue to develop outside the womb--they become an extra-uterine fetus in
the sling. This means 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.
You write in the book that this led to a "survival of the weakest".
What does this mean?
Technology allows us to accumulate biological deficits: we lost our sharp fingernails because we had cutting tools, we
lost our heavy jaw musculature thanks to stone tools. These changes reduced our basic aggression, increased manual
dexterity and made males and females more similar. Biological deficits continue today. For example, modern human
eyesight is on average worse than that of humans 10,000 years ago.
Over the last 30,000 years there has been an overall decrease in brain size and the trend seems to be continuing. That's
because we can outsource our intelligence. I don't need to remember as much as a Neanderthal because I have a
computer. I don't need such a dangerous and expensive-to-maintain biology any more. I would argue that humans are
going to continue to get less biologically intelligent.
donbot
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