Before dawn; after awesome

Before the Dawn:

Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors 

by Nicholas Wade
 

I wanted to start off this review with a jibe at the 'Paleo diet' fad, but I quickly realized that would be an insult to this scholarly review of human history and the study thereof. This is an awesome work! He includes the most recent findings, theories, and ongoing studies of genetics, archeology, paleoanthropology, historical linguistics, primatology, social anthropology, evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology and evolutionary anthropology; and there may be a little geography thrown in as well. The result is a fascinating summary of known--and yet to be known--human history. And he tops this off with a lovely little speculation on our possible futures. Which isn't all that scary, especially since I heard just last week that scientists have succeeded in doing a gene repair in human embryos.

If I were the sort who wrote letters to authors, I would ask about this one statement I caught early on,
" ...an organ or faculty cannot be created out of nothing; it can only be shaped, by gradual stages, out of some existing structure, and each of those intermediate stages must confer advantage in its own right.

The phrase "must confer advantage" has to be a typo, doesn't it?  Many other places he mentions genetic drift and other cases where harmless mutations are accumulated for no other reason than chance alone, so why can't an organ or faculty be created out of an accumulation of harmless mutations? Unlikely, yes, but not at all impossible.  He was speaking of language which seems to defy the stated rule, so my guess is that this was not meant to be a fact but a lead-in to the research into "the language paradox" -- why don't any animals seem capable of anything similar to human syntax?

One proposal he quotes is that,
" ...the human capacity for syntax might have evolved out of an animal brain module designed for some other purpose, such as navigation.  "   They describe ways in which syntax is similar to navigation, i.e., "the ability to embed one phrase inside another in an indefinitely long chain."

I'll describe a couple--of many--of other topics he explores--

Dogs, the first domesticated animal, were important allies to the early humans. The record shows that they were first domesticated at the same time that the first human settlements appeared, and it is very likely that people adapted to live with dogs as much as dogs adapted to live with people. And just as people learned how to watch dog behaviors as a clue to something they might need to know, dogs learned to watch humans. Experimenters using dogs, wolves and chimpanzees have demonstrated that dogs, and even puppies, picked up human hints much faster than the other species.

Ray Coppinger, a dog behavior expert at Hapshire College, believes that people can take little credit for the process; it was wolves who domesticated themselves.

It is also likely that the actual domestication event occurred only once, in a single location, from a group of related animals with special features in their behavior that made them easier to train. After "dogs were discovered," they were so darned useful they spread like wildfire.

Me, I think it likely that the Big Bang of Dog event occurred when one very clever she-wolf wanted an easier life for her precious puppies. They're smarter than us, you know.

The book includes a fascinating description of cannibalism and why it may not be so rare in history as we like to believe. When mad cow disease broke out in England, the effect wasn't nearly as bad as expected--it appears a good number of Britons had a genetic protection against it. And that same sequence of genes also protects against a particular disease spread by eating human brains, as they learned when the Fore population of Australia started a practice of having women and children eat the brains of the dead. When there were almost no women left, geneticists identified the gene the survivors had in common, and it was also found in survivors of mad cow in Britain.  Cause or effect? The jury is still out but the evidence is fascinating.

He also explores the theory that our genes predilect us toward a belief in religion. Religion makes it easier for people to live in society--it promotes cooperation and altruism, but it also feeds to our natural desire to punish freeloaders. It's scary to think there might be a genetic component to religion, but it might explain to persistence of such magical thinking against all odds. Lucklily, we're not always a prisoner of our genes. And also luckily, evolution is not done with us yet.

 Even evolutionary changes need not be permanent. The aggressiveness of the Yahomamo could have a lot to do with the marginal nature of the environment in which some of them live. Under conditions in which aggressive men have more children, genes that favor aggression would become more common. If the Yahomamo should suddenly become peaceful traders for many generations, then a new set of genes might be favored. The fierce Vikings of the tenth century became the peaceful Scandinavians of today.

All those dummies who believe human evolution got stuck in the paleolithic era and conclude we should be eating grubs and tubers, take that!  But wait--wait--I'm a Caucasian of Northern European ancestry. Maybe I'm better adapted to eating apple strudel, Brussels sprouts, and sauerkraut with Weiner Schnitzel!  I can't have my olive oil and pita bread with hummus anymore?

But seriously, it's a serious book. Funny at times and very easy to read in spite of the complexity of the subject, and worth seeking out a copy. Trust me.