We are cyborgs.
More than a metaphor in this case, I think. Objectively, any species that has evolved a dependency on its own artifacts to the degree where it cannot thrive in the very environment in which it evolved without them seems like a very, very odd thing. Such a species is not entirely a product of nature, it has become partly the result of its own creations. If it weren’t us, such a species would be famous.
More than any book I’ve read in a long time, this one changed my thinking on many varied subjects.
Not that I’m a “true believer” now. IMHO, our world-views are, or at least should be, made up of all our “working hypotheses”, subject to revision as more information and further evidence come to light. Still, reading this book started a process in my mind where more and more things I’d noted in the past started to fit together to form more cohesive groups, things I had learned in isolation started to make sense in a new context.
An on-line friend says that I can find the deeper meaning in anything, whether it exists or not. That’s a pretty hearty condemnation from a scientific perspective, but then it might be at least faint praise from a writing perspective.
Not too long ago I acquired an interest in cooking, more about that elsewhere. I have an analytical turn of mind, and I like to approach things from the beginning in order to understand them completely. In most fields, the beginning is not “how”, but “why”, and there I got frustrated, there is very, very little about that fundamental question in the culinary references, but somewhat to my surprise I found that I didn’t have to dig deeply at all to find recent and intriguing research from the scientists, and some key insights I’d never heard of, the implications of which I think may be broad and profound, possibly even key to understanding our own nature.
The center of this whirlwind of ideas, at the moment, seems to be the book Catching Fire, How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham.
Up-front, I recognize that I am unusual, in the First World, in that my backgrounds with camping, backpacking, power failures, re-enacting and various flavors of survivalism have led me to value greatly the ability to start a fire. I’m one of a vanishing percentage who routinely carries that capability with me (especially as a non-smoker) even though I readily acknowledge that I ALMOST never use it. I still to this day find myself ordering old-fashioned firesteels from particular smiths in England and getting excited at finding a new type of tinderbox (the South African “Tonteldoos”.. as Dave Barry says “I am not making this up!”, stick that one in your spellchecker). Carrying the ability to create fire is different, in our world, than carrying a knife or flashlight, the things that can be of use every day. It’s obvious that in our insulated first-world environment we can go for entire lifetimes without ever really NEEDING to make fire to survive… but if you do need it, the chances are that capability will make a huge difference in your prospects.
Despite all that, apparently I have still under-appreciated the whole Prometheus thing.
<Basically, this guy’s thesis is that hominid control of fire, and cooking, date from much earlier than previously supposed, between 1.8 and 2 million years ago, likely to, and very possibly responsible for the decline of the habilines and rise of Homo Erectus, and while still much later than the earliest known use of edged tools (also, of course, a favorite subject) that is very easily early enough for it to have been a major influence in our evolution. He contends that we are, in fact, actually evolved to eat cooked foods, and unable to survive and thrive long-term on raw foods alone. He presents a lot of evidence for that.
It explains a lot. We have a much shorter digestive system than any of the great apes (generally more barrel-torsoed the larger they get, the cube-square thing again), and much, much diminished chewing capacity.
A reason that this has not been considered before is that cursory explorations of the subject have indicated that raw foods contain just about as much energy value as cooked foods. That may or may not be true in detail, but what becomes clear is that cooked foods are much higher in NET energy value- one of the things he points out is that large apes spend something like five hours a day just chewing tough, raw foods.. and of course a lot more engergy digesting it all day.
One of the things that this would explain… I’ve always been curious as to why there was apparently little physical change in the fossil record associated with the adoption of edged tools/weapons. Obviously we are poorly equipped with respect to talons and fangs, so were not primarily carnivores, and that may have changed greatly with edged tools, but we did not apparently start to lose the massive infrastructure required for the huge jaws and chewing apparatus until much later in the record- then suddenly we get the greatly diminished tooth and jaw size,the skull ridges needed to anchor massive jaw muscles disappear, almost complete lack of protruding snouts, and problems like crowding, buck teeth and impacted wisdom teeth. This accounts for that- we retained the chewing apparatus and larger digestive system through the advent of edged tools because even the meat they introduced into the diet was still being eaten raw.
That means, if Wrangham is correct, that we are already in a sense cyborgs- our actual physical structure is the result of our technology. At least as far as the control of fire and making and using edged tools we are physically poorly equipped to survive without that technology… we cannot just revert to pre-fire behaviors. The good news is that the strategy has been very successful- the bad news is that there’s no going back, we cannot give up edged tools or the control of fire even if circumstances demand it.
All this actually seems in the process of becoming accepted in the archaeological and anthropological fields.. perhaps they’re finally ready to accept change in some of their theories, so long as it doesn’t involve ancient astronauts (“Hot Rods of the Gods”).
Unfortunately, the book is somewhat marred by the inclusion of an obligatory feminist rant contending that the traditional gender-division of labor, men hunting and women gathering and cooking, reflects subsequent millions of years oppression and forced subservience of women to men because cooking made them valuable as property for survival.
Oh, please. I could just as easily contend, with just as much evidence (close to none), that there have been millions of years of female conspiracy to not teach males to cook, to convince them that it was beneath them as “women’s work” to even learn how in order to keep them dependent on women by making them literally unable to feed themselves. The fact is that no situation disadvantageous to either gender would have survived for several thousand years, much less millions. Any benefit for either gender does not mean that the other is being exploited, we seem to have forgotten how cooperation works.
There are at least a couple of copies of the author’s 1 hr 20 min presentation on Youtube, but so far I’d recommend the book anyway, it seems pretty information-dense for the genre. There are a number of Youtube vids summarizing it and discussing it and some supporting Chimpanzee research, etc.
So… a knife and the capability of making fire are still the first two things that come up in most lists of survival equipment (or just routine daily carry), from our grandparent’s time on back. Otzi illustrated that this was true 5,000 years ago, now it seems that it may have been true close to two million years ago. It’s not an arbitrary set of tools, it’s the absolute minimum equipment required to survive because we have actually evolved around the use of both.
As always, Heinlein has it covered:
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
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– Robert the Wombat