Make evolutionary science part of life

How and when did human beings, homo sapiens, become intelligent?

This is a question that evolutionary scientists continue to pursue through various studies and hypotheses.

Depending on who you read, the answer to the enigma of intelligence may lie in the large size of our brains, others yet place more emphasis on the development of speech and language and even the ability to control fire as the motor force behind our capacity for cultural complexity and abstract reasoning.

Undoubtedly, it was through a combination of factors, whose accumulated benefits over hundreds of thousands of years, gave humans the cognitive advantage over other species.

What many South Africans might not realise is that the scientific inquiry into human intelligence has huge potential for heritage and educational spin-offs.

This is because much of the archaeological evidence for the emergence of human intelligence has been located here in southern Africa, particularly along the western coast seaboard.

The abundance of this evidence has in large part to do with South Africa’s highly developed paleontological research capacity within our universities.

Archaeological evidence shows, for example, that human beings living in and around the area of Blombos about 100000 years ago, were culturally complex, they adorned themselves with seashell necklaces and painted themselves with red ochre, among many other activities that they did, not for mere survival, but for symbolic purposes.

The existence of this extraordinary evidence in South Africa and its centrality to the understanding of human beings has, however, not necessarily resulted in a broader understanding by everyday citizens of the story of human evolution in Africa.

In large part, this is because of our recently adopted Judeo-Christian beliefs which teach us that humans can only be understood in relation to God’s special and deliberate creation of them.

However, it also has to do with what in any case, seems like a strange linking of human beings with other apes.

Since we consider apes as inferior, and that to be likened to animals is an insult, we may naturally have a cultural aversion to the broader scientific explanation of our human origins.

When I reflect on pre-modern, indigenous cultures, however, it is clear that part of their cultural understanding was to see humans in relation to other living things.

African clan names and totems are just one example of this. The Gaba clan, for example, directly links itself to creatures that reside in water – abantu bomlambo.

Many clan names are in fact names of animals, including Ndlovu-Tlou (elephant), Nyoka (snake), and of course, Mfene (baboon).

While these are not evidence of explicit evolutionary science within indigenous cultures, they are an example of some deeper natural consciousness that accepts that humans share ancestral spirits with animals.

One cannot kill a cobra or a preying mantis in some South African cultures because these are considered ugogo, that is, an ancestral spirit.

Beyond these cultural associations, there is also a highly persuasive hypothesis put forward by Harvard scientist Louis Liebenberg that ancient African hunter-gatherers gave rise to the scientific method itself through the kind of speculative activity that is involved in tracking and hunting of animals.

In his book The Origins of Science, Liebenberg argues: “The art of tracking, as practised by contemporary trackers of the Kalahari, is a science that requires fundamentally the same intellectual abilities as modern physics and mathematics ... Natural selection for an ability to interpret tracks and signs may have played a significant role in the evolution of the scientific intellect ... the same brain that has been adapted for the needs of hunter-gatherer subsistence, today deals with the subtleties of modern mathematics and physics.”

In the practice of hunting and ochre painting then we have a scientific-cultural heritage that humans across the world inherited from African hunter-gatherers.

Bringing these archeological insights of human practices into the domain of everyday citizens is crucial to popularising evolutionary science within South Africa.