Chapter 9.                                 (continued) 

So let us now consider the ways in which early humans probably formed and used early principles. Early hunting and gathering tribes, for example, taught their young people methods of killing elk, fish, birds, mammoths, and so on. Crush the spine, right where it enters the skull. Or pierce the heart. Or cut the throat. Study the tracks and droppings. If the tracks are in new snow, or the droppings are still steaming, the animal is close by. There were many species to hunt and many ways to stalk and kill each of them. Over time, the thoughtful, resourceful hunting tribes thrived best and multiplied.

        

                                                 Artist’s conception of Clovis mammoth hunters

A hunter needed far too many behaviours in his repertoire for those behaviours to be learned or called up one at a time, so hunting principles were invented. In nearly all cases, hunters found it useful to recall general rules about what they’d seen and been told of their target’s habits in past encounters. Using these more general principles, the hunters would try to anticipate what the animal would do in the upcoming encounter, on this particular day and in this terrain. The hunters would then prepare psychologically for violent, team-coordinated, physical action—if the hunt was to be a successful one.

The exact process by which each kill would be made could not be known in advance, but the hunters knew that they would need to act with intelligence (in the planning stage) and skill and courage (in the implementation stage). At the most general level, successful hunting tribes needed to teach the values that we today call courage and wisdom to their young in order for their young to have better chances of surviving, reproducing, and passing the same values on to their children. Again it is worth noting that the mechanism of human evolution discussed here is not a genetic one but a socio-cultural and behavioral one, and it requires conceptual thinking.

 

   

                                              Harvesting grain; ancient Egyptian hieroglyph.

Agricultural societies succeeded hunter-gatherer ones, and values such as patience, foresight, diligence, and perseverance quadrupled in importance. These values, which farming requires, would not replace the hunter-gatherers’ values totally and immediately, but the farmers’ values and their way of life grew until they, in their multiplying societies, had largely made the old values obsolete. The new agricultural way of life was just better at making more humans over the generations.

   

                                                      Ruins of Ur, ancient Mesopotamian city.

When hard grains that could be stored indefinitely were domesticated, towns were formed as an efficient way to store the community’s food wealth in a central, defensible site. Of course, the progress from stage to stage had many recursions. Nomadic tribes with little food and plenty of aggression to spare were lurking, and the most aggressive of these tribes might for a time subjugate and exploit the city dwellers. Two ways of life tested themselves against each other. But in the end, the city dwellers won.

Inside a city’s defenses, governing bodies with administrative offices became necessary to ensure fair distribution of the tribe’s food and to organize the tribe’s members in ways that brought domestic order and protection from invaders. Following them came craftsmen and merchants who found a protected, central site with a large population more conducive to the practice of their arts than a rural setting.

   

                                                                   A potter in action at a potter’s wheel