Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

Popular culture takes a great deal of pride in how far we've come from our roots in the primitive world. And the greater the distance from that primitive world we believe we've come, the higher we can believe we've elevated our current civilization, and the greater our pride of accomplishment.

It's become popular to attribute many of the remaining flaws in our modern world to leftovers from the primitive world. It's much more comfortable to think that our current problems are not of our own making, but rather just old problems that we haven't yet addressed. But some of our modern problems are undesirable side effects of the process of civilization itself, and were not prevalent in the primitive world. One of these is the recurrent problem of brute force gaining dominance over intellect.

Much of our recorded history appears to associate intellect with building great works and brute force with tearing them down - making intellect appear to be a force for progress, while brute force attempts to regress humanity back to its primitive roots. We like to think of civilization as the triumph of reason and order over the brutish violence of the primitive world.

In popular culture the term caveman has come to mean a hairy dull witted brute who relied mostly on his physical strength to survive. In the popular treatment of our primitive origins, we're told that in the hard cruel primitive world, those with the biggest muscles were dominant. The man who could swing the biggest club, throw his spear the farthest, or simply beat up all comers was the most valuable member of the group. Most of our competitive sports continue to celebrate this view of a primitive world dominated by simple minded physical prowess.

I submit that this cavalier dismissal of early modern man as nothing more than the wild man of the jungle is grossly insulting and chauvinistic. Insulting, that is, to my ancestors - some people seem to believe they evolved along some other path than the rest of us. Contrary to popular opinion of the value of brute force in human history, except for during our own relatively brief post-civilization period, brute force has been a negative evolutionary trend in modern man - we've been breeding brute strength out of the human gene pool for most of our time here on Earth.

Modern man, biologically indistinguishable from the millions of hairless apes who today prowl the concrete canyons of our allegedly civilized urban jungles, has existed on earth for at least several hundred thousand years. That means people every bit as intelligent as we like to think we are today have been experimenting with social structures for a long time.

The popular vision of primitive man has far more in common with the life-styles of Neanderthals than modern man - but even here the popular perception is at substantial variance with the evidence in the fossil record. The Neanderthals were evolution's experiment in human muscle power - the ascendancy of brute strength the popular view attempts to assign to modern man. The upper body strength of the average adult male Neanderthal was 2-3 times that of a modern man. But even the Neanderthals were far less dominated by pure physical strength than the popular view of primitive life.

The key to the strength and social structures of Neanderthals lies in their preferred hunting methods. While they did develop spears and other stone tools, their use of these tools was still strongly tied to the traditional killing strategies of other predators - up close and personal. The Neanderthals used their knives and spears as extensions of their own limbs - as tools for stabbing their prey. This required Neanderthals to get close to the dangerous animals they preyed upon, with the resulting increased potential for injury.

Studies of Neanderthal remains show an extremely high incidence of multiple serious injuries over a lifetime - injuries such as broken bones that would have resulted in periods of incapacity, injuries that would be fatal for predators like wolves and lions. But the Neanderthal's injuries had healed, indicating a social support structure that protected and nurtured the injured members of the group. Perhaps most telling, some individuals survived injuries that had to have crippled them for the rest of their lives - indicating far more than a "pull your own weight or you're dead" social structure.

There also seems to be a serious flaw in the popular view of primitive human societies as being dominated by the "young bucks" who pushed aside their elders as soon as they were physically able. This is of course the observed practice of many social animals, and it's not surprising that if one assumes prehistoric man also lived as a primitive animal, he would also share this basic behavior pattern.

The relative values prehistoric human societies placed on their various members can be best measured by which were considered most expendable when their society was under stress. Those promoting the youth oriented view of early man have pointed out how some cultures left their elderly to die on ice floes or otherwise exposed them to the elements to hasten the end of their lives, as proof that once individuals were past their physical prime they were of no further value to the group. Those advancing this view confuse the "death with dignity" practices of some cultures with intentional thinning of the group. Exposure to the elements was viewed as preferable to a lingering and often painful death.

In practice, the overwhelming majority of mankind's "population reduction" rituals have involved otherwise healthy and fit individuals - primarily males in their physical prime, not the older wiser men of the tribe. Young males in their physical prime have always been the most expendable members of the tribe, followed by children. There is a very real and ancient truth to the saying that "age and treachery will always triumph over youth and enthusiasm". While some cultures have practiced selective sacrifice of their less valuable members, this tends to only occur under extreme conditions, and has more commonly involved the elimination of "replaceable" children than mature adults possessing critically valuable wisdom that can only be gained through age.

Where popular distortions of human history go most wrong is in their perception of primitive modern man himself. The myth of the hairy brute caveman as the archetypical expression of might makes right directly contradicts the overwhelming fossil evidence of a persistent trend in the evolution of modern man favoring brain power over muscle power. In fact, instead of evolving bigger and stronger, the clear trend in human evolution has strongly favored substantial decreases in physical strength. Our closest primate ancestors were many times stronger than modern man. One of the reasons "domesticated" adult chimpanzees are dangerous is that even though physically smaller, they are vastly stronger than an adult modern man.

The average modern man is pretty much the wimp of the animal kingdom in terms of physical abilities. We're outclassed in nearly every category by species we still like to think of as "lower" or "inferior" to us. If brute strength were as valuable a survival tool as some claim, wimps would have been breed out of the human gene pool long ago, not become the norm. Variations like the pygmies with their obvious abandonment of brute physical strength in favor of smaller weaker bodies with big brains would simply not have happened if brute strength was of significant value in the primitive world. The reason we haven't yet followed the Neanderthals in evolving more physically powerful bodies is that brute force hasn't been a survival advantage for modern man for long enough to seriously impact the human gene pool.

While the Neanderthals were evolution's experiment in a more traditional "brute force" hunter, modern man was evolution's even more successful experiment in a "finesse" hunter. Modern man hunted with his brain, not his muscles. Where the Neanderthal had to get in close with his stabbing spear, modern man created the throwing spear that allowed him to kill his prey from a safe distance. The very essence of modern man has always been that it was better to be smarter than stronger. As such, while the young hunter who could throw his spear with the greatest force was no doubt a valued member of the hunting party, the old guy who had lived long enough to learn where the prey could be found this time of year, and how to go about killing it without getting killed yourself, was the guy with the real power.

Knowledge has always been power, and in the primitive world age was the key to acquiring knowledge. The strapping youth at the peak of his physical condition - but still grossly inferior to all of the other animals around him - was simply dead meat with little chance for survival on his own without the acquired wisdom of his elders. The guy who had lived the longest by definition had had the greatest opportunity to learn the tricks to staying alive. As such, the oldest individual in the tribe, as the repository of the knowledge on which the tribe's survival was dependent, was nearly always the most valued member of the tribe.

The ageism of early modern man continued for most of mankind's time on earth. Only within the artificial environment of civilization has it been possible to reverse the ancient appreciation of the aged and create the absurdity of today's youth oriented culture. Time will tell just how completely we've compromised our survival potentials by abandoning the wisdom of the aged for the rule of the foolish young bucks so common in the rest of the animal kingdom.

The apparent ascendancy of brute strength some claim for primitive man is instead an artifact of man's very recent transition to a civilized state. Consider that during most of man's evolution we existed as subsistence hunter/gatherers basically eating our food as we found it. As previously noted, in our dealings with nature we strongly selected against physical strength in favor of a more powerful brain. We were definitely into a method of "hunting smarter, not harder" where there was no real advantage to above average brute strength - as long as our prey was other animals.

Brute strength only became of value when it became a viable survival strategy to prey on other human beings - and this only occurred after humanity abandoned its subsistence existence. As long as humanity remained subsistence hunter gatherers consuming their assets as they acquired them, it wasn't possible to survive on what could be taken from other humans. As such, short of cannibalism or to drive others out of a desired territory, there was little advantage to attacking other groups.

All that changed when humans started accumulating physical assets like stored food and material goods. Only then did it become possible to survive by extracting sustenance by brute force from other humans. As such, only after the "smart wimps" figured out intentional agriculture and established civilization did brute strength become more than an occasionally useful asset in a world that overwhelmingly favored smaller and smarter. And even then, the temporary aberration that favored brute strength should have only existed for as long as it took the smart wimps to create technologies that once again restored the advantage of brain over brawn.

The abusive use of brute strength is an artifact of today, not of our primitive past. Brute force will only continue to be useful as long as we continue to obstruct the means smaller smarter wimps have already created to restore the traditional advantages of intelligence over physical strength.