Customer Reviews

Man As The Prayer: The Origin and Nature of Humankind

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Lee's book, "Man As The Prayer", offers interesting speculations into the origins of humankind. He explains the importance of rain and horses in the evolution of humans as signs that the annual mating season (he believes that males and females lived separately for much of their evolution) of these hominoids was near. He further tells about how these signs became incorporated into the prayers of the males who were hopeful to meet with females. Therefore, he interprets what most archaeologists term "Acheulean hand axes" as stone raindrops made to supplement their prayers. He also says that the European cave paintings of horses (among other animals) depict the males' prayers for horses to come because the females traveled with horses in search of food and water. Although reproduction is obviously important to the survival of a species, I personally believe that ancient hominoid lives were more difficult Lee interprets them. Why wouldn't males use tools to hunt (which would be beneficial considering their decreasing body and canine size) instead of to attract females? This explanation (and others that Lee's book contradicts)seems much more plausible to me.

Lee's book is an interesting and impressive story with sufficient documentation for the points that have evidence to back them up. He also shows knowledge of modern non-human primates, which can be used to infer characteristics of ancient hominoids. However, for much of the information in the book, there is no evidence. It seems that Lee has used some sparse archaeological evidence to make inferrences that should not be made from that little evidence. Much about how ancient hominoids lived cannot be suggested by fossil evidence, and many of Lee's speculations cannot be proven by studies of non-human primates (such as the use of flowers and the beginnings of language being based on mating).

"Man As The Prayer" is an interesting book that contradicts many of the suggestions about ancient hominoid lives. It offers a refreshing view on human evolution; however, there is not much evidence to back up Lee's speculations.

How and why did humans evolve differently from baboons and chimpanzees from our common ancestor?

The common nature of evolutionary science is to establish a hypothesis, and then develop a methodology to test it. Generally, the brilliance is on the testing side. Daring hypotheses are few and far between. In this interesting book, Mr. Yup Lee develops daring hypothesis after daring hypothesis and stops short of formulating the tests. I have graded the book for the intelligence of its hypotheses, and not graded it down for lack of tests.

Having recently read a great deal of Dr. Jane Goodall's popular works about chimpanzees, I feel just barely adequate to consider Mr. Lee's work. This book is very thoroughly footnoted though, so you can use the references to locate many scientific sources if you want to learn more. That will be valuable to those who lack formal training in this area, but find the subject interesting.

One reason I like daring hypotheses is because they stimulate my imagination. Mr. Lee is an extremely imaginative thinker on human evolution.

He uses three primary methods to come up with his ideas. First, he imagines the circumstances that could have led to creating isolated populations that could have evolved in genetically independent paths (like happens on isolated islands, such as in the Galapagos) for humans, baboons, and chimpanzees. I thought this was a valid approach and his conclusions seemed quite plausible.

Second, he looks for common word roots around the world to detect connections between ancient populations. This was very interesting, and raised my sensitivity to patterns that I, too, had noticed in the past. I was not always as comfortable with these conclusions as Mr. Lee is. Maybe I'm just dense, but I could come up with many alternative conclusions from the ones presented here that seemed just as plausible or more plausible.

Third, he considers the differences among baboons, chimpanzees and humans in terms of how these serve a biological purpose and tries to develop a set of circumstances that would have let these differences prosper. I thought that his arguments in this regard about the different degrees of obviousness about females being fertile was well done and a useful extension of my understanding of evolutionary biology.

The most imaginative part of the book is that he connects the obvious dots of human evolution in new ways to form a different chronology, and a different cause and effect cycle. He sees that tool making, art, and spirituality probably evolved out of mating rituals rather than as a focus of hunting. In fact, he argues (and persuasively) that mating is more central to human evolution than is usually appreciated. Certainly, this perspective is an accurate view of chimpanzees, our closest genetic relative. Why should it not be very true of humans also? I suspect it is only our tendency to glorify our species as being different and better than other species that causes us to underestimate the mating instinct's role in our progress.

My own reaction was that I found it rather nice that mating could have so many positive benefits (at least potentially in this scenario).

I do hope that some who read this book will have the knowledge and skill to develop tests to check these ideas, help better hypotheses see the light of day, and increase our rate of learning about human evolution.

I suspect that this way of thinking would be helpful in solving current human problems as well. For example, how did environmental factors contribute to creating the problem? What does the language we use about the problem reveal about our conceptions of the issue? How did the current situation evolve our of basic human instincts?

Be open to new ideas by conceptually connecting the dots in new ways, and seeing if they make sense! Then test your ideas in practical ways.

In the three years I have been reviewing there are occasions when I get a chance to go outside the normal channels and find something that peaks my interest and the book Man as prayer is one of those times.

Lee takes the reader on a journey through man's origins in a spiritual way that makes the reading both fascinating and enjoyable. The book is very well written and easy to read and follow along, there wasn't any real lag to the book.

I was treated to the growth of man and the origins of how spirituality became the foundation of everyone. The author is able to convey ideas that are convincing and his arguments are well documented.

The book stays away from the "meaning of life" premise and delves deep in the mind and sole of spiritual awareness. You need to have a very open mind in order to truly understand what the author is trying to explain.

There are no slow parts to the book and after reading this you may have a whole new outlook on things.

Yup Lee's narrative text provides both a thought provoking and boldly speculative volume concerned with the `origin and nature of mankind'. The approach is refreshing in both style and content, daring to speculate with the use of `imaginary portraits' and dramatic scenarios, each together with accompanying stage direction notes. Though both welcome and provocative, these are the kinds of possibly misleading interpretations so often utilised by designers of polular hominid archaeo-museum pieces and large, attractive, story-display diorama. In this sense, the book repeatedly offers a number of at first exiting, new, and often intuitively appealing interpretations of the findings to be found in the extant literature, but it consistently fails to offer any new data in support of the novel speculations made. One should not take this as reason to be dismissive, however; as it was not so very long ago (as one might remember) that similar scorn was heaped upon Immanuel Velikovsky (in the 1960-70s, see e.g., `Worlds in Collision') in the days when theories of continental drift and plate tectonics were still considered heretical to many readers.

Offering little discussion of the recent literature concerned with the field of `cognitive archeology' (see S. Mithen et al.,) Yup Lee not only boldly speculates on the use of changing landscape and reinterprets the use of ancient artifacts, he explicitly rejects much of accepted lore with regards many of the more orthodox (tho' admittedly controversial) early hominid evolutionary theories. Although primary sources are not always given, Yup Lee is careful to offer references for the claims of others and does not ignore many of the `standard' theories, especially in his discussions of gross morphology and comparative anatomy. However, Yup Lee's frequent claims for `filling in the gaps' and having `solved the "missing link"-type' questions are less convincing without the provision of some new data.

Moving through the book cover to cover, one comes to believe quite early on that Yup Lee has found (at least) perhaps his own place in Nature, if not convincingly so for the various Hominid groups as a whole. The human lineage diversion stories told are charming in their telling, but for me, their dependence upon linguistic aetiology leaves it wonting of better evidence. I did, however, like the portrayal of the development of bipedalism, and the dispersion of the arboreal species to more challenging habitats, though the advent of chimpanzee colonies (as described) was less convincing. In his discussion of the relevance of concealed oestrus. I feel that Yup Lee does not go far enough, yet in other expositions, he travels way beyond the data available. As for proto hominid's equestrian fancies - I would like to believe the `imaginary portrait' story narrative as presented, but again, ask for clearer evidence before I will so do. I agree that it is easy to greet one's Chinese mother-in-law (ma) as being a horse (ma) if the inflection is not correct, but these associations remain largely arbitrary and somewhat language specific, with plenty other candidate correlates remaining available for the rival theorist (e.g., a lost opportunity might have been taken here to include the French language homonyms: cheval = horse; cheveux = hair to lasting effect !].

Overall, however, this is a book that should remain on the shelf for us to occasionally look back to for its claims and ideas. As with Velikovsky and tectonics, the role of the Rift Valley development and the courses of its waterways in hominid evolution may yet contain the evidence that Yup Lee's speculations will require before he is to be more widely acclaimed. And even then, not only as the writer of enchanting `just-so' stories, but, and.if he is correct, as someone who provoked a significant shift in our understanding of the Nature of Man.

This is a curious book of speculations on how humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas got to be the way they are, beginning at the time of the last common ancestor some five million years ago. Lee's imaginings range from the plausible to the fanciful to the fantastic. The one thing all these imaginings have in common, however, is that they cannot be supported in any scientific way, nor is it possible to formulate some kind of statement about them that might have predictive value. To his credit, Lee does not try. He postulates and then moves on from there. For example, he states that our australopithecine ancestors wore red flowers in their hair to attract mates. This is entirely plausible; certainly it cannot be disproven, and indeed some day may well be established in a scientific sense. Lee goes on from there to state that these advertisements of sexual receptivity were necessary to replace the signal provided by the red swellings of estrus that our ancestors had lost (thus "red" flowers). Whether our ancestors, like some modern primates, ever had red swellings or an estrus period is of course debatable. Lee also thinks that our early ancestors at one time separated into exclusive male and female living groups, the females following the migrations of the extinct three-toed horses while forming a symbiotic relationship with them, grooming them in exchange for finding water holes and the shortest route between food patches (p. 122). Curiously, Lee does not think that the australopithecine females preyed on the horses for their flesh. (Perhaps Lee believes that the australopithecine females were exclusively vegetarians.)

Lee also engages in some interesting etymology. He states (p. 17) that "all of the spoken languages across the world have originated from the same source." He gives the example of the Korean and Chinese words "Han" referring to a people or tribe and the English and German words "hand" and "Hand." He sees them as cognates. He also gives the example of vagina secretions as the source of the word "secret" (p. 33). My dictionary gives another etymology, but actually I like Lee's idea! However he follows this with "...a secretary is reasoned to be a person who deals with such secrets. In this sense, what a modern-day secretary [he's thinking of a secretary of state as well as the more modest variety] deals with routinely are changed forms of the odor and taste of the vaginal secretion of an ovulating female." On page 34 he adds, "The odor of an ovulating female was something like an order to follow...By analogy, a modern-day secretary is an ovulating female. She has secrets in her hands. She is in control of important information...For this reason, the concept of order (a command) has derived directly from that of odor."

Maybe Lee is right (!), but I would like to point out that language evolves at a rate that is noticeable in hundreds of years, while primate evolution takes place at rate that is discernable (at best) in tens of thousands of years. This is a huge difference. The language spoken by the tribe that came out of Africa a hundred thousand years ago (if indeed that is what happened) is not only unknown and unknowable, but would not have any etymological relationship to modern languages.

On page 111, Lee writes that "the role of rain in human evolution should be understood properly because it played a pivotal role. [Paragraph break] As the year came to be divided into dry and wet seasons...male and female members of the last common ancestor stock were forced to live separately during the dry season. That was the beginning of the hominids." He adds that until the "recent past" male and females lived apart except for the "annual mating season" signaled by the coming of the rains. When the rainy season disappeared as the climate got drier, Lee continues, "hominids experienced difficulties in locating their mates" (p. 112). "...[M]ale hominids felt increasingly frustrated and helpless and had no choice but to pray for their wishes."

Thus Lee has both the thesis and the title for his opus, which might be less ambiguously worded, "Man as the One Who Prays"; but probably Lee intended the ambiguity, although from my point of view, a truer statement might be, "Man as the One Who Preys." But then, that's another story.

Anyway, I think Lee has a fine imagination and has clearly worked hard to present his ideas to the public. His considerable knowledge of primate evolution is in evidence, and the sources he references are excellent. Nonetheless this is mostly a work of imagination. Perhaps Lee should write a novel of the prehistory in the tradition of William Golding's The Inheritors. He concludes his book with the intriguing words, "We humans are the products of prayers, and so is our culture."