Is there any lesson that extinct hominin species can teach us?
The species Homo erectus started to walk Earth about two million years ago. It persisted over a rather large geography until 400,000 years ago, and then began to die out with the exception, according to those who specialize in such matters, of a group that survived on Java, particularly at a site called Ngandong. There Homo erectus survived until sometime between 117,000 and 108,000 years ago. What knocked them out of the contest for dominance of our planet? Climate change, according to those who specialize in such matters. Java was grassland upon their arrival 1.6 million years ago, but gradually changed 130,000 years ago to tropical rainforest. The species that arose on African wide-open plains didn’t adapt, at least according to those who specialize in such matters.*
Of course, we can speculate that those who specialize might be wrong. As island-dwelling hominins, the last members of Homo erectus could have been wiped out by some disease or tsunami, especially in a region known for its violent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Those natural phenomena are not exclusive to our times. But let’s go with climate change. Already decimated as a species over their almost two-million-year run on the planet, that last known group on Java didn’t stand much of a chance, even if climate change had not affected their environment. And unlike our species, Homo erectus was only slowly mobile, its emigration from Africa was not enhanced by trains, planes, ships, and automobiles, and its emigration from Java might have been blocked by rising seas during an interglacial period that appears to have coincided with their final period of demise.
Their competition for space on Earth was great. Homo heidelbergensis, rudolfensis, habilis, floresiensis, neanderthalensis, and sapiens all lived more or less contemporaneously, though some died out in the early history of erectus and others arose while they flourished or during their decline. Maybe some other hominin group, in addition to climate change, contributed to erectus’ demise—such is the apparent innate violent nature of all hominin species.
If we think of our own short reign as the dominant hominin species that began less than 350,000 years ago, we realize we haven’t as a species lived more than about a fifth or maybe even as little as an eighth (depending on our date of origin) of the time erectus occupied the planet. But unlike erectus on Java, we haven’t been wiped out by climate change. We’ve survived in almost every climate, flourishing almost everywhere, save until modern times on Antarctica and the peaks of the highest mountains, both during glacial advances and interglacial warm periods. The Inuit have done all right in the cold North, haven’t they? And the Nepalese and Tibetans have survived in high altitudes. Australian aboriginals and Tierra del Fuegians also demonstrated our robust survivability in the face of challenging ecologies.
Think now of the period during which those who specialize in such matters say that Java’s last surviving members of Homo erectus died out: 117,000 to 108,000 years ago. That’s a range of nine millennia. Sumer dates to about six millennia ago. The Pyramid of Djoser dates to about 4.5 millennia ago. As the “civilized” hominin species, we haven’t been around very long compared just to the period of erectus’ slow demise on Java. Nine thousand years. And that’s for a species ill equipped, supposedly, to handle climate change on a single island.
Unless we blow ourselves up in some nuclear holocaust, we have a long way to go before we meet the fates of the other hominin species. Sure, you or your descendants might have to consider migrating northward or southward, eastward or westward, depending upon the particular effects of changing climates, changing governments, or changing volcanic activity. Maybe the wheat and corn belts will move into Canada. Maybe northern geographies will become fruit-growing regions—Siberian peaches, anyone? Adaptation will not have to be immediate in either case. You can probably think of staying put, even if you live in a coastal city. But just as climate change occurred on Java from 130,000 years ago to 100,000 years ago, so climates will change everywhere as they always have. We’ll probably adapt better than most species, just as those who drank wine before the Little Ice Age turned to beer with colder weather that prohibited grapes from growing.
There’s really no lesson that the other hominin species can teach us. As far as we can tell, their weaknesses were built in, and one of those was a lack of a penchant for invention, technology and insight. Sure, caves and rock shelters protected them from predators and elements, and they knew enough to enter and claim them as their own. But in all those many millennia, did no one among them, no individual erectus, ever think to plant a seed or build a stone house simply by stacking rocks? (“What the heck are we supposed to do with all these rocks lying around?”) Sure, they had survival skills. Their presence over hundreds of thousands of years attests to survivability. But it was survivability of the same order; few or no innovations. Look around right now. If you see one thing that defines us, it’s innovation. Granted, it took us a long time to exceed the innovations of the ancients: Some elixirs, stone buildings, aquifers, primitive clocks, trebuchets, and ochre art in Blombos Cave…. From the time of Galileo to the present, however, we’ve been about innovating: Medicines, machines, purified water supplies for enormous populations, rockets, and computer graphics….
That we are related to our cousin species is evident from our genetics, shapes, behaviors, if not our technology. We’ve seen enough of human competition and can guess enough about cousin species’ and primates’ competition to know that a shortage of any commodity or perceived necessity drives groups into panic mode and mob activity. Primitive savagery? Look at people pressing to get into a store on Black Friday. Look what happens to the shelves in grocery stores when a large snowstorm is about to hit—even when everyone actually knows that snow melts and plows clear it, usually before the food runs out.
Is there a behavioral similarity between us and those extinct cousin species like Homo erectus? Did the last members of erectus panic because they had fewer and fewer resources on an island, maybe foreshadowing the fate of the Rapa Nui on Easter Island? Apparently, erectus experienced its version of a “snowstorm” in the gradual change to tropical rainforests? The growth those forests on Java after 130,000 years ago would not have resulted in shortages of food, just in shortages of food on which erectus depended for sustenance in the absence of innovation and adaptation. Surrounded by foods of all kinds in a rainforest, erectus seems to have had no culinary experts to say, “Hey, have you tasted this? It’s actually delicious, especially when I mix it with these grubs.”
It isn’t that technology has made us better in a moral sense that will prevent our collapse. It hasn’t. As much as technology has allowed many to survive in the most extreme environments mammals can enter, it has also allowed the most depraved of us to kill one another in greater numbers than any of our predecessors, sapiens or other. If we did inherit something from our cousin species, it was the willingness to harm our own kind as well as other kinds. We share with those cousins the moral utilitarianism that groups us by various needs. If it behooves those in a city to get along peacefully, they are peaceful; it is a morality of usefulness though it can be enhanced by a morality of empathy and inculcation. I know, this sounds pessimistic in the sense of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a novel centered on man’s innate inhumanity. Of course, we know evil because we also know good. Maybe there is an inner Buddha or Christ in everyone, even in those individuals crowding to get past others to grab sale items on Black Friday or to get the best seats at a rock concert. Maybe those who attended gladiatorial fights and those who now attend UFC cage fighting are not entirely driven by bloodlust and vicarious blood-letting. But that we do find “entertainment” in brutality bespeaks a self-destructive nature and an unwise sapiens. In other words, regardless of our apparent better survivability than Homo erectus, we can envision our species’ end in a cage-match writ large in fission and fusion reactions we unleash upon ourselves.
Okay, we might bomb ourselves out of existence, leaving no hominins to take our places. The others are gone, erectus having left our world about 100 millennia ago and neanderthalensis having left it 30 or 40 millennia ago. And all our other primate cousins, such as the chimps and great apes, though they seem to share some emotions and communication skills, are probably destined to live as all those cousin hominin species did for hundreds of thousands to millions of years: A life without innovation and technology and a life with utilitarian morality driven by territoriality and basic needs. There will probably be no “La Planète des singes” as
Pierre Boulle imagined. Our current cousins are a rather dull lot by comparison with us sapiens.
Strangely, if no other hominin species has the wherewithal to develop archaeological skills, upon our demise, we will leave a largely unconscious Earth, and definitely a mostly un-self-conscious Earth. Our Ngandongs will have no excavations for the sake of discovery: Discovery for discovery’s sake doesn’t seem to be the motto of other organisms even though dogs, cats, and chimps seem to “curiously” examine something with which they have no previous experience. Those who inherit Earth from us will do no digging with a purpose other than to find tubers and grubs.
* https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/fossils-some-last-homo-erectus-hint-end-long-lived-species-180973816/
The species Homo erectus started to walk Earth about two million years ago. It persisted over a rather large geography until 400,000 years ago, and then began to die out with the exception, according to those who specialize in such matters, of a group that survived on Java, particularly at a site called Ngandong. There Homo erectus survived until sometime between 117,000 and 108,000 years ago. What knocked them out of the contest for dominance of our planet? Climate change, according to those who specialize in such matters. Java was grassland upon their arrival 1.6 million years ago, but gradually changed 130,000 years ago to tropical rainforest. The species that arose on African wide-open plains didn’t adapt, at least according to those who specialize in such matters.*
Of course, we can speculate that those who specialize might be wrong. As island-dwelling hominins, the last members of Homo erectus could have been wiped out by some disease or tsunami, especially in a region known for its violent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Those natural phenomena are not exclusive to our times. But let’s go with climate change. Already decimated as a species over their almost two-million-year run on the planet, that last known group on Java didn’t stand much of a chance, even if climate change had not affected their environment. And unlike our species, Homo erectus was only slowly mobile, its emigration from Africa was not enhanced by trains, planes, ships, and automobiles, and its emigration from Java might have been blocked by rising seas during an interglacial period that appears to have coincided with their final period of demise.
Their competition for space on Earth was great. Homo heidelbergensis, rudolfensis, habilis, floresiensis, neanderthalensis, and sapiens all lived more or less contemporaneously, though some died out in the early history of erectus and others arose while they flourished or during their decline. Maybe some other hominin group, in addition to climate change, contributed to erectus’ demise—such is the apparent innate violent nature of all hominin species.
If we think of our own short reign as the dominant hominin species that began less than 350,000 years ago, we realize we haven’t as a species lived more than about a fifth or maybe even as little as an eighth (depending on our date of origin) of the time erectus occupied the planet. But unlike erectus on Java, we haven’t been wiped out by climate change. We’ve survived in almost every climate, flourishing almost everywhere, save until modern times on Antarctica and the peaks of the highest mountains, both during glacial advances and interglacial warm periods. The Inuit have done all right in the cold North, haven’t they? And the Nepalese and Tibetans have survived in high altitudes. Australian aboriginals and Tierra del Fuegians also demonstrated our robust survivability in the face of challenging ecologies.
Think now of the period during which those who specialize in such matters say that Java’s last surviving members of Homo erectus died out: 117,000 to 108,000 years ago. That’s a range of nine millennia. Sumer dates to about six millennia ago. The Pyramid of Djoser dates to about 4.5 millennia ago. As the “civilized” hominin species, we haven’t been around very long compared just to the period of erectus’ slow demise on Java. Nine thousand years. And that’s for a species ill equipped, supposedly, to handle climate change on a single island.
Unless we blow ourselves up in some nuclear holocaust, we have a long way to go before we meet the fates of the other hominin species. Sure, you or your descendants might have to consider migrating northward or southward, eastward or westward, depending upon the particular effects of changing climates, changing governments, or changing volcanic activity. Maybe the wheat and corn belts will move into Canada. Maybe northern geographies will become fruit-growing regions—Siberian peaches, anyone? Adaptation will not have to be immediate in either case. You can probably think of staying put, even if you live in a coastal city. But just as climate change occurred on Java from 130,000 years ago to 100,000 years ago, so climates will change everywhere as they always have. We’ll probably adapt better than most species, just as those who drank wine before the Little Ice Age turned to beer with colder weather that prohibited grapes from growing.
There’s really no lesson that the other hominin species can teach us. As far as we can tell, their weaknesses were built in, and one of those was a lack of a penchant for invention, technology and insight. Sure, caves and rock shelters protected them from predators and elements, and they knew enough to enter and claim them as their own. But in all those many millennia, did no one among them, no individual erectus, ever think to plant a seed or build a stone house simply by stacking rocks? (“What the heck are we supposed to do with all these rocks lying around?”) Sure, they had survival skills. Their presence over hundreds of thousands of years attests to survivability. But it was survivability of the same order; few or no innovations. Look around right now. If you see one thing that defines us, it’s innovation. Granted, it took us a long time to exceed the innovations of the ancients: Some elixirs, stone buildings, aquifers, primitive clocks, trebuchets, and ochre art in Blombos Cave…. From the time of Galileo to the present, however, we’ve been about innovating: Medicines, machines, purified water supplies for enormous populations, rockets, and computer graphics….
That we are related to our cousin species is evident from our genetics, shapes, behaviors, if not our technology. We’ve seen enough of human competition and can guess enough about cousin species’ and primates’ competition to know that a shortage of any commodity or perceived necessity drives groups into panic mode and mob activity. Primitive savagery? Look at people pressing to get into a store on Black Friday. Look what happens to the shelves in grocery stores when a large snowstorm is about to hit—even when everyone actually knows that snow melts and plows clear it, usually before the food runs out.
Is there a behavioral similarity between us and those extinct cousin species like Homo erectus? Did the last members of erectus panic because they had fewer and fewer resources on an island, maybe foreshadowing the fate of the Rapa Nui on Easter Island? Apparently, erectus experienced its version of a “snowstorm” in the gradual change to tropical rainforests? The growth those forests on Java after 130,000 years ago would not have resulted in shortages of food, just in shortages of food on which erectus depended for sustenance in the absence of innovation and adaptation. Surrounded by foods of all kinds in a rainforest, erectus seems to have had no culinary experts to say, “Hey, have you tasted this? It’s actually delicious, especially when I mix it with these grubs.”
It isn’t that technology has made us better in a moral sense that will prevent our collapse. It hasn’t. As much as technology has allowed many to survive in the most extreme environments mammals can enter, it has also allowed the most depraved of us to kill one another in greater numbers than any of our predecessors, sapiens or other. If we did inherit something from our cousin species, it was the willingness to harm our own kind as well as other kinds. We share with those cousins the moral utilitarianism that groups us by various needs. If it behooves those in a city to get along peacefully, they are peaceful; it is a morality of usefulness though it can be enhanced by a morality of empathy and inculcation. I know, this sounds pessimistic in the sense of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a novel centered on man’s innate inhumanity. Of course, we know evil because we also know good. Maybe there is an inner Buddha or Christ in everyone, even in those individuals crowding to get past others to grab sale items on Black Friday or to get the best seats at a rock concert. Maybe those who attended gladiatorial fights and those who now attend UFC cage fighting are not entirely driven by bloodlust and vicarious blood-letting. But that we do find “entertainment” in brutality bespeaks a self-destructive nature and an unwise sapiens. In other words, regardless of our apparent better survivability than Homo erectus, we can envision our species’ end in a cage-match writ large in fission and fusion reactions we unleash upon ourselves.
Okay, we might bomb ourselves out of existence, leaving no hominins to take our places. The others are gone, erectus having left our world about 100 millennia ago and neanderthalensis having left it 30 or 40 millennia ago. And all our other primate cousins, such as the chimps and great apes, though they seem to share some emotions and communication skills, are probably destined to live as all those cousin hominin species did for hundreds of thousands to millions of years: A life without innovation and technology and a life with utilitarian morality driven by territoriality and basic needs. There will probably be no “La Planète des singes” as
Pierre Boulle imagined. Our current cousins are a rather dull lot by comparison with us sapiens.
Strangely, if no other hominin species has the wherewithal to develop archaeological skills, upon our demise, we will leave a largely unconscious Earth, and definitely a mostly un-self-conscious Earth. Our Ngandongs will have no excavations for the sake of discovery: Discovery for discovery’s sake doesn’t seem to be the motto of other organisms even though dogs, cats, and chimps seem to “curiously” examine something with which they have no previous experience. Those who inherit Earth from us will do no digging with a purpose other than to find tubers and grubs.
* https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/fossils-some-last-homo-erectus-hint-end-long-lived-species-180973816/
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