Race? by Ian Tattersall & Rob DeSalle

Author:Ian Tattersall & Rob DeSalle [Tattersall, Ian & DeSalle, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781603444774
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 3. This diagram shows the distributions in time of the various generally recognized species of the family Hominidae over the past seven million years or so and some potential links between them. The primary message here is the strong signal of species diversity at virtually all points on this time chart—except today. © Ian Tattersall.

This is not to demean the australopiths in any way; apes are cognitively very complex beings, and hardly a month passes in which primatologists do not discover that they perform yet another behavior that we had thought was unique to us. Yet apes clearly do not process information about the world around them in quite the way we do, and based on his keen observations of ape behavior the cognitive scientist Daniel Povinelli hazarded not long ago that if we were to board a time machine in search of early hominids we would debark to find “intelligent, thinking creatures who deftly attend to and learn about the regularities that unfold in the world around them. But . . . do not reason about unobservable things: they have no ideas about the ‘mind,’ no notion of ‘causation.’”

Hominids of the general australopith kind flourished widely in Africa between about 4 and 1.4 million years ago, branching out into a wide variety of species, some of which had quite distinctive morphologies. Again, as with the very earliest hominids, these creatures were displaying a tendency to diversify in different places, a proclivity that has been the hallmark of our family ever since. There is nothing surprising about this; indeed, it is typically what happens in evolution when a significant structural innovation opens up new ecological possibilities to members of an established group. The process even has a name: “adaptive radiation.” So it was with the first bipeds, but although the emergence of the australopiths clearly represented a vital step in our direction, it is clearly misleading to view them as somehow “transitional” between their arboreal ancestors and us. For theirs was a stable and successful body form (and presumably general life way) that continued to serve them well for millions of years, even as a succession of australopith species stepped on to, and exited, the evolutionary stage.

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