Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

by Richard L. Currier

Humans are, however, unique in the strong bonds that typically develop between fathers and their offspring, a revolutionary development among group-living primates.

Monogamy, the most common form of sexual bonding among humans, is nonexistent among 97 percent of all mammalian species and is rare among apes and monkeys.

Hominids are the only animal species in which the males are predators, the females are foragers, and both sexes regularly share the different foods they obtain.

Although the megafauna were hunted relentlessly by the Neandertals, they continued to flourish side by side with the Neandertals for tens of thousands of years. Yet when anatomically modern humans appeared on the scene, the megafauna seem to have been hunted to extinction in the space of a few thousand years.

Seventy-five thousand years ago, the Neandertals had become well established in western Europe, and they flourished there for at least thirty-five thousand years. But a few thousand years after the arrival of anatomically modern humans, the Neandertals had completely disappeared. Unlike the anatomically modern humans, the Neandertals left behind little evidence of symbolic communication and no evidence at all of distinct cultural traditions or ethnic identities. In spite of their superior physical strength, the small bands of individual Neandertals would have been no match for an organized fighting force composed of hundreds or even thousands of assembled Châtelperronians or Aurignacians.

It is therefore no accident that, when the Neandertals were replaced by modern humans who possessed cultures rich in symbolic communication—and who had, through the shared symbolism of language and the oral tradition, access to vastly more information about how to live—the human population of Europe multiplied within a few thousand years until it was ten times the size that it had been during the age of the Neandertals.

But biological evolution has its limitations. First of all, it is exceedingly slow. It took millions of years for our prehistoric ancestors to develop full upright posture and true bipedal locomotion, and well over a million years for the hominid brain to reach its present immense size. In the process of biological evolution, new and more beneficial genetic information can be transmitted only from a parent to its biological offspring. This means that many generations are required before a beneficial gene can spread throughout a breeding population. And before it can succeed, the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the first individual who possessed this new genetic material must consistently outcompete—and eventually outnumber—the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the other members of the group.

But cultural evolution has none of these limitations. A new kind of behavior may originate with a single individual and be rapidly transmitted to other individuals through learning and imitation. If this new behavior helps the individual to adapt more successfully to his or her environment, it can spread easily throughout an entire social group within the space of a single generation.

Finally, cultural innovations rarely originate as random events. Unlike genetic mutations, the changes in behavior that drive cultural evolution are usually purposeful and deliberate, and for that reason they are much more likely to be beneficial and adaptive than the mutations that drive biological evolution.

With the emergence of tribal cultures—a milestone made possible by the advent of shared symbolic communication in its many forms—humanity embarked upon a path of fusing into ever larger societies and social groups. And in each step along the way—in the agricultural village, the urban city-state, and the industrial nation-state—the size of the human group expanded exponentially.

When the human social group, which for millions of years had consisted of no more than a few dozen individuals, freed itself from its primate inheritance and expanded into tribes of thousands, a process of fusion began that has culminated in the formation of vast nation-states consisting of millions of individuals and claiming dominion over the earth’s entire land surface. Whether our species is capable of a final act of fusion—in which all living people achieve a shared identity as members of a single global culture and civilization—is a question that will determine the future not only of our own species but also of most forms of life on Earth. This is, in fact, the question that lies at the heart of this book.

It is surely one of the great paradoxes of human history that the evolution of modern life, with all of its safety, security, comfort, and diversions, has been plagued by an epidemic of eating disorders, heart disease, insomnia, drug addiction, neurosis, psychosis, and pathological discontent that is unprecedented in the history of the human species.

There is a lot here that needs to be understood if we are to get past or current crisis as a species.