Customer Reviews

Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I enjoyed this book very much, not being a professional anthropologist. I understand the criticism that it may be elementary it its approach; however, there is an audience of intelligent people who need to be introduced to the subject in this way. I have been seeking such a work on human origins for several years. Many of them start well but soon soar into the stratosphere of technical overkill and lose me. For those who have a professional's understanding of the field, I am sure you can locate more in depth resources. For the rest of us, I highly reccomend this book. It is an up to date summary and a pretty good yarn as well.

Coming from a man with Tattersall's qualifications, this book springs real surprises on the reader. Viewing the human evolutionary process in reverse, he begins with Paleolithic age art and retains a strongly European oriented view thoughout the book. Presented an image of "superior" European founders of our cultural heritage, it's almost impossible to shed the WASP image he conjures in the reader. While it's convenient to replace "Homo sapiens" with the [hopefully] less cumbersome "Cro-Magnon", Tattersall leaves us in no doubt that either label remains limited to the European scene.

Confirming this narrow view in the first chapter, he offers the astonishing statement that "art, as such, is a concept invented by Western civilization." This proposal might be forgiven as an editing oversight, if the remainder of the book didn't sustain it. Conceding Australian Aborigine art as "curious", he fails to note it predates his beloved French gallery by ten millennia. Coming from a Curator of Anthropology, it's an astonishing submission.

Broadening our view, readers are cautioned to spend time on Chapter 3, "Evolution for What?" A review of various renderings of Darwin's evolution by natural selection, the aim of the chapter is to disabuse readers of the idea that evolution has a purpose. However, there's a subtle agenda. Not hidden, subtle. He gives us the background of Darwin's thinking in developing the thesis, following that with 20th Century investigators possessing the tools of genetics. Assembling scholars from the mid-twentieth century, he builds what he labels the "Evolutionary Synthesis" which generally supported the idea of gradual change in species. Based on genetics, the Synthesis challenged patterns exhibited by the fossil record. A new challenge arose, this time against the Synthesis, in the form of the Eldredge-Gould idea of punctuated equilibrium, or "evolution by jerks."

Tattersall abandons any remaining objectivity at this point to defend his chum Eldredge against critics. While granting absolution to Eldredge and Gould's "inevitable" overstatement of their case, he condemns George Williams and Richard Dawkins for their focus on genetic adaptation as the centrepiece of evolution's process. Labelling Dawkins a "reductionist" in proposing the gene drives evolution, he claims that such ideas are "always attractive to the human mind". Tattersall contends Dawkins' viewpoint "eliminates anything larger than the individual gene as an actor in the evolutionary process". Like most of Dawkins' critics, Tattersall deftly ignores Dawkins' repeated reminder that "the individual gene" works in concert with its fellows and its host organism within the broader environment. Although an interesting review of the evolutionary scenarios, this chapter is almost a non-sequitur to the remainder of the book.

In a bizarre turn for an anthropologist, Tattersall blithely discounts the scope of studies in primate--human behaviour patterns. Having declared art an artefact of Western Civilization, he ignores the many examples of art by animals other than human. Elephants, chimpanzees and others have produced art that fooled even the critics, but Tattersall ignores its existence. Overlooking physical disparities between humans and other primates, he disparages claims that chimpanzees can develop even rudimentary language skills. In short, based on language, art and cognitive abilities, humans are simply too unique to be grouped with our primate cousins.

Finally, Tattersall traces the hominid exodus from Africa. A single sentence acknowledges early hominids in eastern Asia. From that he gives extended attention to emigration into Europe. Contending with Neanderthal populations which preceded them, the Cro-Magnon directly overcame Neanderthal. How was this feat accomplished by a creature with a smaller brain than that of its adversary? He gives early hominid tool-makers enhanced cognitive skills instead of learning by sheer opportunism. In line with Eldredge's "evolutionary jerks," this grants these "Cro-Magnon" a sudden intellectual growth spurt leading to tool production, a questionable assumption. Once established, this process increased Homo sapiens' intellect giving them dominance over their larger but "dumber" fellows. Neanderthals at best were imitative, lacking originality and inventiveness.

In a novel proposal for establishment of human communities, Tattersall suggests they're based on the human birth canal. Unlike other primates, the canal's position makes births difficult enough to require assistance. Gatherings of midwives led to interdependent communities of individuals. Contributing language skills enlarged the capacity of these communities to form more cohesive establishments - the village. Language is also granted the primary role for Cro-Magnon's elimination of Neanderthal - communication is a key military element. Conquest allowed the leisure for artistic skills to follow.

While this book is offers many assertions departing from consensus paleoanthropology, perhaps it's that very aberration that gives it value. While the mainstream path of evolution clearly refutes the idea of punctuated equilibrium, there's no disputing the course of human evolution is abrupt and unique. No other species has achieved the intelligence level of Homo sapiens nor, as Tattersall reminds us, has any species established global occupation. This book is a valuable read for the novelty of many its assertions. It should not, therefore, be read and comprehended in isolation. Other studies on evolution's course and humanity's place on it should join this book on your shelves.

Many books on human evolution cite authority after authority and end up confusing the reader without developing a consistent point of view. Not this one. The author has clear and consistent view of the human past -- and future -- and articulates it in lively language. From his considerations of the differences that separate Homo sapiens from their nearest living relatives, the apes, to his account of how those differences were acquired, this is the most thoughtful treatment of the subject yet available. This book is for everyone who takes an interest in how humans got to be the way they are.

Tattersall gives us primitive social history, a bounded evolutionary history and a most surprising - and distressing - anatomical history of these expensive organs we carry about in our skulls. Expensive because they consume over 20% of our calories whether we use them or not. Given the state of civilization it may be no surprise we burn hardly more calories when thinking than asleep.

The goal here is to find why humans are different. Chimps make tools, dolphins have the largest brain-to-body-mass ratio of any species on earth, Neanderthal ceremonially buried their dead, gorillas can be taught sign language, baboons engage in deception, attributing states of mind to others, predicting their behavior. Jane Goodall even witnessed bands of chimps make coordinated war on each other not so unlike the way humans did, once accumulations from the agriculture revolution gave us something serious to kill for. But others have not painted cave walls in southwest Europe (20000ya), wrote sonnets or split atoms. As far as we know, a dramatic difference is rule based, abstract language. Arbitrary sounds associated to objects (the sound "house" only means "house" to those who speak English) or more intangibly, to symbolic references - mathematics, metaphysics, democracy. The order of these arbitrary sounds convey their own meaning. "Man paints house." "House paints man." Hence the rules - grammar - such that listeners using the same code understand correctly the intended message. Without the rules and vocabulary, a foreign tongue, if you've ever heard one, sounds like one continuous modulated word.

Throughout we wonder if we are really better off now than in the harsh, survivalist past. Through success of intelligence in controlling the environment our ancestors could have never imagined to what ends we would carry this emergent property of stellar byproducts structured in the form of brains. This control also allowed for an art explosion - according to Tattersall an element of existence central to ancient man. While the system we've created makes art alien and impractical - or worse, creates "modern art" - the past allowed our ancestors to explore this innately human characteristic. Gould's punctuated equilibrium seems to apply here to human innovation as readily as it does to speciation - periods of abrupt development followed by periods of stasis.

Of utmost importance is Tattersall's note on climate's affect on the human trajectory. The coordination of climate change and human creative behavior may seem obvious - if it's suddenly colder, invent a coat. But we find, for example, that cave painting peaked with the last glacial maxima. Did selective pressures, including the loss of once available prey animals, expand the perception of art as magic over animals imaged? That is, did a natural ice age select for accelerating abstractions such as religion - the calling of powers to calm a changing world? (Given Neanderthal burials, the ice age was far from the first such hypothetical natural selection of behaviors.) Interestingly these paintings are composed of fewer large predators over time. Were the painters simply reporting the numbers - animals eliminated by climate change or human success in the competition game?

An excellent section on brain anatomy clarifies our biggest problem. The combination of onion-like layering and expansion of existent features to make up those layers, resulting in the untidy evolution of our brains built over early versions all the way back to common mammal, even reptilian-like ancestors. The sad news is that structure implies behavior. Our higher thought centers are mediated by sections in charge of our lowest functions - feeding, fighting, fleeing, sex. Is this why males so frequently compromise themselves for females against better judgments, rationalizing irrational acts, only to suffer their actions after hormones fade? Males of many species die in that contest. That fabulous machine in our skulls is also a mess and far from an ideal design. It makes us warlike, compassionate, lawyers, artists. We're stuck with it and as Tattersall tells it, this, contrary to modern historians, is why history repeats itself .

The first chapter describing Ice Age man got me hooked. Tattersall describes remains from 30,000 years ago in Sungir, Russia bedecked in garments decorated with thousands of ivory beads. And these humans were just like us physically. They had art, religion and a social structure.

Tattersall then goes on to discuss our precursors, the australopiths, Homo heidelbergensis and Homo habilis. This part is less interesting to me because I feel farther removed from them than I do from those people in Sungir. Indeed that is the point of this book. How did we become who we are? How did we acquire those characteristics (an appreciation of art, spirituality, social stratification) which makes us identify with those cave painters and bead-makers from so long ago?

Ian Tattersall is a middle-of-the-road writer whose main fault is his failure to capture the public's imagination as Richard Leakey and Donald Johanson so skillfully accomplished. No doubt his book is geared for the beginner layman audience, with interesting and up-to-date facts, but for any individual who has prior experience concerning this topic, the book may prove a bit boring. If you're looking for a somewhat more in-depth and informative book, don't miss Tattersall's The Fossil Trail: How We Know What we Think We Know About Human Evolution. It has some very good pictures with good descriptions.

This was a well written book, but at the same time I feel it didn't go deep enough or far enough into detail. It has good points and ideas all the way through and I would recommend this as a good read to anyone but particularly the casual reader or new comer to the world of anthropology.

Ian Tattersall knows his stuff. At times, there is too much explanation. If you want to read a nice, narrative account of how humans emerged from apes, there is a chapter in "The Bible According to Einstein" that tells the story wonderfully. In 20 pages, one learns 80% of what is in Tattersall's book.

How long have we waited for such a comprehensive and detailed account of our evolutionary history, at last given by one of the world's leading authorities in the field of paleoanthropology. Ian Tattersall has dared to render a fascinating narrative, abandoning hundreds of tedious scientific references in favor of a fluent, yet personal account of how our "Becoming Human" may have progressed throughout history. The author leads the reader through a wealth of information available from fossil records. Starting with 20th century scientists, like Tattersall himself, who study and admire, yet puzzle over paleolithic cave art, Tattersall then trails backwards to our very earliest human ancestors to develope a cohesive explanation of how evolving hominids with their increasing brain capacities have finally, albeit almost certainly accidentally, given rise to who we are today. A fine work indeed, and a must-read for all those curious enough to seek answers as to the origins and evolutionary processes that lead to "our old familiar - and potentially dangerous - selves."

"Becoming Human" is an engrossing consistent account of human biological history, that you read as it were a novel. You are left with no unanswered questions. This book is a must-read for everybody who wants to learn the basics on human evolution. For those interested also in the pre-human stages of evolutionary history, I would recommend Robert Jastrow's "Red Giants and White Dwarfs" and "Until The Sun Dies", which end where "becoming Human" begins.