Modernity
Just before the sun crests the horizon, I reached the midpoint of the Brooklyn Bridge. The midsummer air was on the cusp of chilliness, smoldering in wait of daylight. Soon, throngs of people would jostle and the city heat would become oppressive, but for a moment, I stood alone in this liminal space. The sun rose behind me, igniting an array of icons. To my left, the Statue of Liberty beckoned as the glass buildings of Wall Street became engulfed in the burgeoning light. One World Trade loomed over even the colossi of New York. To my right, emblems of Art Deco: the Empire State and Chrysler buildings adorned the imposing skyline.
Manhattan is home to 1.6 million people and even the canyon of steel and glass splayed out before me only hints at the titanic scale of human endeavor on this small island. For all the films, novels, songs, and photographs that have sought to capture the essence of the city, even the best offer only one tiny facet of the luminous diamond of a city that defies all definition. It is a city of reinvention, destruction and creation. It humbles the greatest men, even as it elevates the meanest to its dizzying heights.
Every time I visit New York, I feel what I did on that midsummer day before I was rudely disturbed from my reverie by bustling, early-morning crowds. I am energized by the majestic and mundane alike, always inseparable in this city. I am enlivened by proximity to the cultural figures that defined the 20th century. I am privileged to participate in a project that continues to enrich so many the world over. And I am awed by the unfathomable degree of cooperation that is necessary to build and maintain the city, let alone to make it one worth living in.
The Long Road
New York wasn’t built in a day. The technology, institutions, and culture necessary to sustain a megalopolis emerged over countless millennia. The human scale is at once expansive and diminutive. Even the bounds of the earth have been breached by an intrepid few, while our capacity for imagination can conjure entire worlds long after their creator dies. Collectively, we function as rich, complicated individuals even as we participate in globe-spanning networks of collaboration. Yet, the full span of our civilization has seen only the most recent fraction of the natural processes that shape our planet and all living beings that populate it.
To clothe the earth with soil made from the disintegrated mountains – can we figure that time to ourselves? —John Burroughs
The road to modernity is long, but where does it begin? Can we credit Manhattan to the first brick laid in the New World, or in Rome? To the first brick-maker? Perhaps to the first fisherman who needed a permanent settlement, giving rise to the need for bricks?
As I wrote at the beginning of the year, the myth of Prometheus captures a truth about civilization: it was the spark of fire that is at the heart of all the arts: of men creating something larger than themselves. But if fire is the heart of civilization, did it also make us men? Who were we before? What is the story of the first man?
Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam (c. 1511), is representative of nearly all origin myths though it specifically depicts one described in Genesis. Atop the Sistine Chapel, God looks towards his creation, Adam. Adam’s body, though powerfully muscular, appears frail. He reclines limply while looking timidly, apprehensively towards his creator. Though he stretches out his arm towards God, his hand droops as if his body is not yet fully animated. Across the faint space between their fingers, God transmits the spark of life into Adam, the first man.
That a version of this story is nearly universal is understandable. Man has no peers; he stands alone amongst all other animals as intelligent, spiritual, and creative. Man creates stories and objects that persist through the generations and there is continuity between our endeavors now and those of the earliest days of civilization.
Around 300 years after Michelangelo painted The Creation of Adam, a young naturalist named Charles Darwin boarded The Beagle and began a five year circumnavigation of the globe. His meticulous record keeping and astute observations of the minute differences between similar species of animal would culminate in the publication 30 years later, in 1859, of On the Origin of Species. This treatise laid out the theory of evolution by which all animals, including humans, change from generation to generation in order to adapt to their environments. The theory of evolution, along with emerging evidence that the world was actually millions of years old, conflicted with church doctrine and the widely held, intuitive belief that man was created fully-formed. Such a heretical theory may have, in another time, lay fallow. Thankfully, Darwin published in the midst of the scientific revolution when Enlightenment values supported free inquiry, intellectual discipline, and the advancement of scientific knowledge.
Can it be possible, we ask, that this god was fathered by the low bestial orders below him, instinct giving birth to reason, animal ferocity developing into human benevolence, the slums of nature sending forth the ruler of the earth?” —John Burroughs
Within 50 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, the theory of evolution had taken root. How were faithful Judeo-Christian intellectuals able to reconcile the emerging scientific evidence with religious doctrine? John Burroughs, wrote in 1909 for The Atlantic, of “the long road of evolution” as not subverting the work of God, but of celebrating it. Already, he was responding to the criticism that science reduces the wonder of God’s creation to “remorseless logic”. His is an encomium to the evolutionary process, as Inheritance aspires to be of civilizational advancement.
“He began where and when the first cell appeared, and he has been on the road ever since.” —John Burroughs
When did this long road begin? When did man take his first breath? Burroughs compares this question to that of when the life of an individual human begins. Just as man does not come into this world fully formed but begins as a zygote that grows over time, man emerged gradually from Precambrian life-forms. Burroughs theorizes a “man-ward impulse” by which evolutionary forces conspire to “[people] the earth with myriad forms and [crown] them all with man.” While this precursor to “intelligent design” theory neatly reconciles religious doctrine with the available scientific evidence of his time, it presumes a creator and deemphasizes the power of organic systems to generate immensely complicated outcomes from few and simple principles.
Ours is indeed a long road. However, the processes by which life arose within the first billion years of our planet’s existence and evolved over the three-and-a-half billion subsequent years were not guided by a man-ward impulse. None of this was preordained.1 The world we live in is not the patient manifestation of a long-harbored design. We are the product of the same organic, competitive, adaptive forces as every other being on this planet. It is a testament to the power and relentlessness of these forces that an animal so complex as man can be the product of them. Likewise, our civilization is not the product of a grand architect, but an iteration of individuals living by simple rules.
At the Crest of Humanity
4.5 billion years along this long road, when the sun of man’s era was just below the horizon, what was it that set these “man-like apes” on the course to become “ape-like men”? Our line broke from that of chimpanzees around 7 million years ago when our last common ancestor lived. For four million years, we continued swinging from trees, foraging for food, and living much like every other creature. What was it that, 2 million years ago, led some of our ancestors to come down from the trees and distinguish themselves from every other being on the planet?
Our opposable thumbs that had heretofore been particularly useful for grasping tree branches found another purpose: creating tools. The people that created these early stone tools were not us, but they were human. They are known to us as homo Habilis, skillful man. They were around four feet tall and 70 lbs. Their legs were relatively short, though they walked upright. Their finger bones were slightly curved, revealing an adaptation for grasping branches, but also capable of a modern precision grip necessary for making tools. Though the tools they crafted were simple, they were powerful and would set the course of our history. These tools were knapped from whole stones to create a sharp edge that could be held comfortably in the palm of their hand. Wielding one, they could carve into animal flesh, break bones to expose marrow, chop roots, shape wood, and otherwise enhance their access to nutrients. This allowed their energy-intensive brains to grow larger over the coming millennia. From this point onwards, to be human was to use tools.
Man seems to be the net result of it all, of all these vast cycles of Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic life. He is the one drop finally distilled from the vast weltering sea of lower organic forms. It looks as if it all had to be before he could be. —John Burroughs
What event led to the first stone handaxe? Perhaps a particularly ambitious band of homo Habilis came across an especially large, undefended carcass and were unable to carry it away. Fearing a more ferocious predator would soon come to claim its dinner, one of these Habilis grabbed a nearby stone and knocked it against another to create a crude blade. With this in hand, the carcass was swiftly carved into more manageable pieces and hurriedly spirited away to be eaten in relative safety. With full bellies, the Habilis would remember this technique the next time they found a large meal and successive generations would gradually improve upon the initial design.
At Olduvai, in modern Tanzania, Professors Louis and Mary Leakey uncovered some of these early tools, estimated to be from two million years ago. One of these, a hand axe (pictured below) is now housed at The British Museum where Sir David Attenborough was given permission to hold it in his own hands. He describes this experience in the audio below.
Audio extracted from Episode 2 of “A History of the World in 100 Objects”.
Holding this, I can feel what it was like to be out on the African savannahs needing to cut flesh for example. Needing to cut into a carcass in order to get a meal. Picking it up is your first reaction is that it’s very heavy, and if it’s heavy of course it gives power behind your blow. The second is that it fits without any compromise into the palm of the hand, and in a position where there is a sharp edge running from my forefinger to my wrist. So I have in my hand now a sharp knife. And what is more, it’s got a bulge on it so I can get a firm grip and the edge, which has been chipped specially and is sharp … I could perfectly effectively cut meat with this. That’s the sensation I have that links me with the man who laboriously chipped it once, twice, three times, four times, five times on one side and three times on the other… so eight specific actions by him, knocking it with another stone to take off a flake, and to leave this almost straight line, which is a sharp edge.
By holding this tool in the palm of his hand, Sir Attenborough enacts a remarkable symmetry. That very tool was used two million years ago to extract the nutrients needed to fuel our brains which in turn let us develop more advanced tools in a virtuous cycle that ultimately led to a technologically advanced civilization enriched by the scientific processes, institutional frameworks, and surplus resources that enabled us to discover this tool, deduce its origin and use, and appreciate its significance. This symmetry though, would not have been appreciated by the person who crafted this stone tool all those years ago. Though homo Habilis were substantively different from every other species on the planet, they were only barely human: not capable of complex language, nor more intelligent than a modern child. Over the next two million years, we would evolve, our posture would become more upright, our brains would grow larger, and our expanse would extend out of Africa and into Eurasia.
The hungry, innovative homo Habilis we imagined earlier could not have foreseen the consequences of his craft. In due time, this tool would have been inseparable from his species. This humble hand axe would improve his diet, open up new food sources, but also present new challenges to overcome. His sort were weak and fleshy and their principle activities were foraging for food and scavenging scraps of meat left over from more capable predators. In time though, the food pyramid would invert and his descendants would become the most successful predator in the world.
The trajectory of a person’s life hinges on a few, decisive moments. So too with our species. There may have been no “first human”, no animal parent who birthed a child with the glimmer of humanity illuminating his eyes, no inflection point where the “man-like ape” gave way to the “ape-like man”. But there are some moments that inextricably alter the course of history. In this humble hand axe, we can see the eight marks that set our course from beast to man.
Next in the Prehistory series
Resources Used:
A visit to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
Multiple visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Additionally:
Burroughs, John. 1909. Review of The Long Road. The Atlantic, April 1909. https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/archives/1909/04/103-4/129556371.pdf.
Diamond, Jared M. 2005. Guns, Germs, and Steel : The Fates of Human Society. New York ; London: W.W. Norton & Company.
Harari, Yuval Noah. 2011. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York: Harper Perennial.
Macgregor, Neil. 2011. A History of the World in 100 Objects. London: Penguin.
Snow, Peter. 2018. History of the World Map by Map. London: Dorling Kindersley.
Wrangham, Richard W. 2010. Catching Fire : How Cooking Made Us Human. New York: Basic Books.
I am actually agnostic on the existence of a creator. Everything very well might be pre-ordained. However, I think it is useful to evaluate these systems on their own terms assuming there is no (literal) deus ex machina to explain away some of the biggest questions about the origin of man.
How oddly, coincidentally timely. I'm just now helping a teenager learning about the origins of humanity for the first time. I will definitely share this piece with him. It's much better written than what he's shown me of the materials he was given by his school!
Wow! There is a lot to unpack here! I am only have finished reading it and I will continue later after dinner. Thank you, I love your writing.