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This month I have mainly been looking into some of the things that make us who we are.
I'm not talking about each of us as individuals; more about how we developed as a species, evolving from a charming Captain Caveman chap to the nasty, rapacious little chimps we are today. The more you look into this subject, the more surprising seem the origins of some of our physical and characteristic traits of today.
Unless you're one of those demented religious types that believes the
world is only 6000 years old, was created in a six day frenzy by the
bearded sky-father, and we all descended from Adam and Eve, you'll know
that we actually descended from a branch of the primate family.
As an aside, you religious folk really need to come up with something
more plausible than the whole Adam and Eve thing, because it's just so
totally ludicrous. Seriously, I get really embarrassed about it on your
behalf, and I'm a bloody atheist.
Back in the day (and I mean really back in the day) we were just as
hairy as our monkey cousins, so what happened? To cut a long story
short: we were filthy. Much like teenagers of today, primitive man
didn't like to wash and so our fur was often teeming with lice and
parasites, which isn't conducive to a healthy, or very long, life.
Not just any lice either. They've now found that we were riddled with
pubic lice; pubic lice that we picked up from gorillas. OK, so they
think we picked that up from using their nests, or even from eating
them; only that’s got me thinking of clandestine monkey-sex and it’s a
much more fun vision to have about our past, or is that just me?
Evolution works by selecting traits or random mutations that fit/work.
That's it in a nutshell, which is why it's one of the most beautifully
simple scientific theories there is (and if anyone says: "Well, you
just said it yourself, it's just a theory!" then be quiet before you
make yourself look stupid, as you obviously have no idea what ‘theory’
means in scientific terms).
If it works, then it helps the species survive and thus propagates
itself. In this case, the trait was that babies born with less hair
had the advantage of less lice and parasites, so they were a lot
healthier than their more hirsute counterparts.
They lived longer, bred more and thus, the hairless trait gradually
became the norm. Scientists also posit that our being hairless also had
the added benefit of us needing to find other ways to keep warm, which
led to us discovering fire and eventually making clothes.
In a roundabout way, I guess it also landed us with Gok-Wan, but you can't have it both ways, can you?
So the discovery of fire, one of the most important milestones in the
evolution of our species, actually came about because we were too bone
idle to clean ourselves. If that seems hard to swallow, then how about
our large brains and intelligence coming about due to our proclivities
for stuffing our faces?
With all that free time on our hands from not having to wash, we had to
do something, and excessive gluttony was obviously the best option.
Nowadays, we know that greasy, fatty foods aren't very good for us, so
if we're so smart, and if evolution is so smart, why did we evolve to
crave all that shit?
Well, the reason we are so smart is because of stuffing fatty foods
into our cavernous maws all day long. Our large brains require a huge
amount of energy to function properly, and rich, fatty foods are the
best source of such energy (it’s true).
Take a look at all the animals that live on healthy, plant based diets
and you'll find that none of them are particularly smart. Most of the
smarter animals, like humans, are essentially scavengers, and
scavengers need a more than average intelligence to remember all the
foods that are good, and all the foods that have a tendency to make you
shit out your own intestines.
Humans turned out to be a lot better at finding the richest, fattiest
foods we could get our hands on, and we also developed tools to enable
us to get even more of that lardy goodness. I'm sure it's not hard to
guess that we'd use the intelligence all those years of eating
prehistoric junk food gave us, to essentially find even more creative
ways to create heart attack inducing fare.
So what other sterling character traits, apart from being filthy and
gluttonous, shaped our evolution? Apparently refusing to grow up is
another one that has set us apart from our animal cousins.
Most animals are born and reach an adult state in a relatively short
amount of time, particularly compared to the 20 years that most humans
spend ‘in the nest’. Human children are born with small bodies and
comparably gigantic heads, due to our unfeasibly large brains. Where as
an animal's priority is to grow a fully functioning adult body just as
soon as, well, humanly possible, which is useful to either run away
from something that's trying to eat you, or to run after something
that's trying to stop you from eating it.
Humans, on the other hand, expend the energies of their first few years
developing the neural pathways within their brain, soaking up knowledge
like a screaming, shitting sponge. These years of developing the brain,
and the way we pass down knowledge through the generations, is one of
the things that make us so unique as an animal.
It also means that when your son or daughter is still living at home
aged 25 and sponging off you, that they can use evolution as a
cast-iron excuse.
OK then, so far we've got being filthy, greedy and refusing to grow up
as defining character traits of the human species. But what other nasty
shit went into making us the way we are?
If there's one thing I can't abide, it's gossip. People that scurry
around digging into the minutiae of other people's personal lives
should be shot, and anyone that's responsible for those execrable
gossip magazines should be shot twice. In both tits.
However, it appears that the earliest forms of gossip actually helped
us to evolve our large and complex societies. If you look at other
primate groups, you'll find that most of the tribes or bands number
around 50 at the most.
Studies have also found that the number of people we can comfortably
keep track of, and form bonds with, is around 150 before our eyes start
bleeding. So how did we more than double the number of members in our
social groups compared to other primates?
We gossiped.
We have a much more complex language than any other animal species
(which probably developed to aid us in coordinating hunting parties)
and this mastery of language enabled us to talk about the other members
of our groups that weren't currently present.
Other animals just couldn't, and cannot, do this, and it is one of the
factors that will always limit their social groups. As an interesting
aside, did you ever wonder where the stereotype of gossipy women comes
from?
Some anthropologists believe it all started way back then, as while the
men were out hunting, the women sat around the campfire, talking about
them behind their backs. Which figures.
So there you have it. Some of the things that have made us the world
dominating colossi we have become today. Quite frankly, I think our
roots are positively deplorable.
And next time you don't fancy washing and instead, all you want to do
is shove a cheeseburger or a bar of chocolate down your neck, pausing
only to slag people off, don't blame yourself.
It's evolution’s fault!
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