Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

There are two candidates for humankind’s first idea, one rather more hypothetical than the other. The more hypothetical relates to bipedalism. For a long time, ever since the publication of The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin in 1871, the matter of bipedalism was felt to be a non-issue. Following Darwin, everyone assumed that man’s early ancestors descended from the trees and began to walk upright because of changes in the climate, which made rainforest scarcer and open savannah more common. (Between 6.5 million and 5 million years ago, the Antarctic ice-cap sucked so much water from the oceans that the Mediterranean was drained dry.) This dating agrees well with the genetic evidence. It is now known that the basic mutation rate in DNA is 0.71 per cent per million years. Working back from the present difference between chimpanzee and human DNA, we arrive at a figure of 6.6 million years ago for the chimpanzee–human divergence.⁵

Several species of bipedal ape have now been discovered in Africa, all the way back to Sahelanthropus, who lived six to seven million years ago in the Djurab desert of Chad and was close to the common ancestor for chimpanzees and humans.⁶ But the human ancestor which illustrates bipedalism best is Australopithecus afarensis, better known as ‘Lucy’, because on the night she was discovered the Beatles’ song ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ was playing in the palaeontologists’ camp. Enough of Lucy’s skeleton survives to put beyond doubt the fact that, by 3.4 to 2.9 million years ago, early humans were bipedal.

It is now believed that the first and most important spurt in the brain size of man’s direct ancestors was associated with the evolution of bipedalism. (Most important because it was the largest; there is evidence that our brains are, relative to our bodies, slightly smaller now than in the past.)⁷ In the new, open, savannah-type environment, so it is argued, walking upright freed the arms and hands to transport food to the more widely scattered trees where other group members were living. It was bipedalism which also freed the hands to make stone tools, which helped early man change his diet to a carnivorous one which, in providing much more calorie-rich food, enabled further brain growth. But there was a second important consequence: the upright posture also made possible the descent of the larynx, which lies much lower in the throat of humans than in the apes.⁸ At its new level, the larynx was in a much better position to form vowels and consonants. In addition, bipedalism also changed the pattern of breathing, which improved the quality of sound. Finally, meat, as well as being more nutritious, was easier to chew than tough plant material, and this helped modify the structure of the jaw, encouraging fine muscles to develop which, among other things, enabled subtler movements of the tongue, necessary for the varied range of sounds used in speech. Cutting-tools also supplemented teeth which may therefore have become smaller, helpful in the development of speech. None of this was ‘intended’, of course; it was a ‘spin-off’ as a result of bipedalism and meat-eating. A final consequence of bipedalism was that females could only give birth to relatively small-brained offspring – because mothers needed relatively narrow pelvises to be able to walk efficiently. From this it followed that the infants would be dependent on their mothers for a considerable period, which in turn stimulated the division of labour between males and females, males being required to bring back food for their mates and offspring. Over time this arrangement would have facilitated the development of the nuclear family, making the social structure of the cognitive group more complex. This complex structure, in which people were required to predict the behaviour of others in social situations, is generally regarded as the mechanism by which consciousness evolved. In predicting the behaviour of others, an individual would have acquired a sense of self.