“The Ascent of Man” (1973) was a BBC series, Jacob Bronowski’s take on the history of science and invention. I saw it in the 1980s on the cable channel of the City College of New York. I would love to see it again. In the meantime I will have to make do with the book, which I picked up the other day for two dollars at a used book sale. I will do a chapter a week:
Man is part animal, part angel. To call him just an animal or just an ape would be a misleading understatement. Unlike other animals, man has an imagination. He can imagine the future and create it:
Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.
The gazelles for all their beauty and grace can never leave the grasslands of Africa. Should the grasslands ever disappear one day, they will disappear along with it. They are custom-made for a particular place. Man is not. Man got his start in those very same grasslands but has spread across the world, even to the cold and ice of the far north.
Among the multitude of animals which scamper, fly, burrow and swim around us, man is the only one who is not locked into his environment. His imagination, his reason, his emotional subtlety and toughness, make it possible for him not to accept the environment but to change it.
Men in the far north have white skin, not black. But it was not white skin that allowed them to live there: it was fire. Man has spread over the earth too quickly for difference of race to matter much. Even more to the point, man is able to make up for his physical shortcomings faster than nature can. Instead of growing fur like a bear, for example, he makes clothes.
In fact, while man has changed faster than almost any other animal over the past two million years, the physical changes in his body were driven mainly by changes in his brain. For example, as he was able to make tools to kill and cut, his teeth got smaller.
Some milestones:
- 2,000,000 years ago: Australopithecus africanus. He could walk upright. That freed his hands to make and use tools, which in turn allowed him to eat meat. Eating meat meant less time spent eating and more time for other things. They took care of not just their own children but even those whose parents had died. He stood 1.2 metres tall (four feet) and had a brain about half the size of ours.
- 400,000 years ago: Homo erectus: discovers how to make and control fire. He probably had language too, which allowed for better hunting. Spreads as far as China, Europe and Java.
- 180,000 year ago: Homo sapiens: way better tools, like harpoons. Art for the first time.
Only man creates art. It shows that man can imagine things that he does not see before him; it means he can think about the future.
See also:
The series is on YouTube.
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Reblogged this on Life.
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“man is the only one who is not locked into his environment”
I don’t know that this is 100 percent accurate. It definitely isn’t true for many domesticated animals — and while it could be argued that their domestication means humans bred their adaptability into them, I don’t think that’s always the case. For instance, the domestic housecat (felis catus) evolved in the desert and still evidences traits from that evolution, like a low thirst drive. Yet they can survive in environments that have severe winters, even as feral cats who avoid humans and never go indoors, and even those with short hair.
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