In recent decades we have found that man is not the only tool-using creature on this planet. By most definitions, man is not the only tool-making creature on the planet either.
There is a remaining distinction that is staring us in the face, but most of us are blind to it, because we take it so much for granted. Man still appears to be the only tool-carrying creature on the planet. I mean that in a sense much broader than carrying a just-made tool from where the materials to make it were to where there is an immediate need, I mean it in the sense of carrying useful things on one’s person.
Quick and somewhat frivolous thought-experiment just to illustrate the point: People may make claims for ape intelligence on many grounds, but others remain skeptical. However valid the claims might be, they don’t seem to be terribly obvious or convincing on an instinctive level.
However, if in our imginations we let a group of apes show up with backpacks and belt pouches, with tools and weapons in their hands and strapped to their bodies, the instinctive reaction is the exact opposite, that we are looking at intelligence (and at a fresh danger that we don’t know the limits of).
Carrying useful things on one’s person is a huge cognitive leap, and one that is pretty easy to spot in the nature of the artifacts used to carry them.
There seems to be a (perhaps vague) consensus among archeologists that there was a long period in our evolution when we made tools but did not carry them in this sense. Carrying things in our hands is at best hugely tedious. As a real experiment, pick an easy-to-handle object and try to keep it within reach for a few active hours of the day, moving it only with your hands. I once had reason to do just that, and found it almost impossible, I rarely seemed to manage fifteen minutes without walking off without the object. Having to constantly remember to pick it up is a hugely annoying distraction, and hands are far too useful to devote even one to the simple task of carrying an object for hours at a time, it just doesn’t work well.
The archeologists seem to feel that our initial way of coping with this, that lasted for quite some time, was to fabricate several tools and leave them where they were needed. If one needed a flint tool to harvest a certain food, one simply left the flint tool on the ground near where that happened.
Aside from the problems of tool loss or theft, this has an important and glaring deficiency: The tools will never be where needed if you’ve never been there before. That seems obvious, but until that problem is solved it is a huge impediment to exploration.
Speculating about the evolution of thought in early hominids is risky, we all suffer from the “explaining water to a fish” problem in that basic ideas that were once hard-to-grasp inventions to humans and proto-humans are now so inherent in just being human that we can barely perceive them at all. Still, it seems fairly certain that tool-use must have gone through some distinct phases:
1. Using objects at-hand as tools, as found (hammerstones, sticks that work as clubs).
2. Improving on objects-at hand, making tools (I can’t envision any clear demarcation between the two).
3. Carrying tools from where the materials to make them are to where they are needed.
4. Using/making tools to create other tools (seems obvious to us, but it had to be a huge cognitive leap).
5. Making general-purpose tools (requiring foresight, some form of linear reasoning).
6. Carrying general-purpose tools for unanticipated needs.
7. Making artifacts, bags, pouches, sheaths, scabbards, packs, clothing with pockets, tinderboxes, to facilitate carrying tool continuously.
I may well have the order and/or details wrong, but something like that progression has to have occurred.
We seem to have left the rest of the animal kingdom behind somewhere around the second item in this list.
This seems to hold true on an almost instinctive level. We can and do watch the videos of tool use among animals and still argue endlessly whether it, or even tool making in some animals, really indicates any higher intelligence- but if you want to see people really taken aback show them a picture of one of those animals wearing a pouch or pack of any sort. A wild ape or any animal wearing a belt pouch or fanny pack of its own volition would instantly be taken as an impossibility, or, if it were proven true, irrefutable proof of higher intelligence. We realize this on some deep level, but WHY is it true? It seems to me that the reason that it is almost instinctively true for us is because that’s about item number six in the progression above, we know that we left the apes and the rest of the animal world behind at item number two, and we’ve never seen them take any of the steps in-between on their own.
We don’t know whether the use of tools or weapons came first, as any edged rock that might have survived can be interpreted either way, and was probably used for both, and it’s probable that there were both tools and weapons made of other materials before stone. Wooden weapons can be very effective We’re not just talking about the caricature caveman’s club here- spears, atlatls and even bows and arrows can be quite effective without the use of stone or metal for points, and one can only imagine how many paleolithic Bruce Lees with implements like nunchackus may have existed over millions of years.
Working wood is easier than working stone (although it certainly became easier still after stone tools were developed, and may even have been the original incentive to develop stone tools). Since unlike almost all animals we have no natural defenses worth noting, no fangs, talons or armor, we are compelled to suppose that our current form as humans resulted from our use of tools and weapons, rather than the implausible reverse of cause-and-effect, that the use of tools and weapons resuled from mysteriously-evolved inadequacies. We are what we are, we are human, because we carry tools and weapons. That is the reason we don’t need fangs or claws, and that is the reason we don’t have fangs or claws.
This throws an entirely different light on a deeper meaning of Every Day Carry (EDC) as a subject. On a very, very deep and basic level, it is not so much the making and usage of tools (and weapons) that defines us as intelligent creatures to ourselves, as human, it is the carrying of them in anticipation of non-specific future needs that does so.
This also throws an entirely different light on our current urban environments where blockades and gauntlets of armed guards, metal detectors and x-ray machines are increasingly around every corner, enforcing to a great degree that we do NOT carry any of huge categories of generally-useful objects on our persons. Being able to do just that is actually one of our defining characteristics as human beings.
The currently-fashionable attempts to remove from us the ability to carry our tools and weapons are thus attempts to reduce us from the status of complete, functioning human beings to something less… something less capable and enabled, something less independent, and, on a very fundamental level, something less human. Basically we are being reduced to the status of domestic animals, of cattle completely dependent on the care and protection of others and unable to survive on our own for very long.
The concept of Every-Day Carry or “EDC” as a subject that has gained a great deal of interest in recent years can be seen as a reaction to this mode of thought, or even as a backlash against it. The objects that our grandfathers or great-grandfathers carried in their pockets as a matter of course were not all that different from the objects that Otzi the “iceman” carried thousands of years ago, and his ancestors carried for possibly millions of years before that: a sharp knife, the means to make fire, some cordage. There were reasons for these things for all that time, and there still are. It isn’t, I think, so much tha the need has faded as that we’re increasingly a society of men raised almost entirely by women, without much in the way of male influence or role models, that has put us in a position where we have consciously had to teach ourselves anew the value of ancient practices.
– Robert the Wombat