Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I studied with Errett, which is more like he tolerated us clueless
clumsy undergrads because he was finishing his MA and on the way to
his doctorate, and you know what that means if you're a grad student --
undergrad seminars!

Purely the luck of the draw, I assure you, although I have carried
that experimental bent forward into my political work.  In fact,
the political scientists finally seem to be rediscovering this weird
thing called "experimentation":

http://www.yale.edu/isps/publications/reclaim.pdf

But I digress :)

Here's a nice summary on early toolmaking with good example pics.
(Errett could make uncanny copies of these without even much
attention; me, I had trouble just making a decent core-flake.
On the other hand, we were using jasper and chert, lovely materials
but those crypto-crystalline quartzes are harder to work with than
obsidian and so on):


http://www.handprint.com/LS/ANC/stones.html

You know, these crude tools don't look like much.  Or rather, they look
crude in the way an old-fashioned wood handled hammer would look crude
today.  A properly made "crude" stone tool like this with good dimensions,
grab-ability, balance and a decent working edge can kill an animal as
large as a good-sized deer and produce messy but workable hides, meat,
etc. in the hands of even a moderately skilled person.

Plus, there is something a bit primal and familiar in picking up a
replica (or even my own crummy imitations of the most primitive axes
and scrapers).  Just like you'd expect, if you think about it for a moment.

The pictures just don't convey this at all.

The text cited above notes that these tools are only associated with
H. habilis, not the australopithecines.  In line with what wcalvin was
just talking about, I consider this a big fat clue about the whole
human lineage.  It's much more complex than the popularizers have
wanted to admit; we only see a very tiny fraction of what's happened
because of "data attrition" (there really weren't very many individuals
in the hominids during those millions of years, and they were kind of
small and peripheral to the regional scene, and many of the most
populous sites have probably long since been totally disturbed by
climate and stratigraphy change).  The fact that we know as much as
we do about our lineage amazes me as much as it did when I first picked
up a National Geographic with a Leakey story about 40 years ago.
  

    
That phrase "primal and familiar" reminds me of yet another interesting
thing that the book mentions: landscape preference studies. Apparently when
you show hundreds of people pictures of various landscapes, they tend to
prefer "garden-of-Eden" settings that include a low hill near water, wide
open spaces and perhaps a bit of forest nearby.

And this same "primal and familiar" landscape is just how the the press
described the landscape in ancient Chad where that latest proto-human fossil
skull was found.

Bill, I was grateful that you put that kind of detail into your book--it
makes for a tantalizing story--but how sound is that kind of science really?
  

    

There is so much to discuss in this book and on the topic in general!  You 
are certainly welcome to continue for as long as you like.  I just wanted 
to pop in and say thanks to our guest, Bill Calvin, and to his extremely 
able interviewer, Andrew Alden.  We enjoyed your discussion, and enjoyed 
having you.

Carry on!
  

    
Andrew asks about the "garden of eden" environmental preferences, and
how well established it is.

Behavioral ecology studies this in many kinds of animals, but only
preliminary work has been done in humans, the best of which I cite. 
These preferences (for the view of a savannah waterhole scene from a
viewpoint a story higher, framed by something) match up pretty well
with japanese tea gardens, the view from the little shelter atop a hill
from which you see scattered trees and water, with ducks and fish
visible.

This isn't to say that it cannot be culturally overridden.  Forest
peoples, taken to the edge of the forest withnsuch a view, might not
like it very much.
  

    
I found it a charming sidelight in your "Ghosts of Habitats Past" section.
Probably it will always be a soft, contentious field of inquiry involving as
it does the gut feelings of ordinary people. But as you say, "such gut
feelings tell us something about our ancestors - indeed about what they
liked to put in their guts. Such innate likings would have guided
individuals in selecting a habitat suited to the better ways of making a
living for their species, back then..."

I notice that you admit a fondness for the "water ape" hypothesis. Is there
really something to it, or is it an easy just-so story to explain how we
lost our body hair?
  

    
I first read about "landscape preference" in E. O. Wilson's "Biophilia,"
istr.  There's a ton of research in this area, for example:

http://www.unc.edu/~devries/papers/gbthesis.html
<http://evolution.anthro.univie.ac.at/institutes/urbanethology/student
/html/erich/synekpro.html>
http://www.shef.ac.uk/assem/5/chamberl.html
  

    
yes, Ed Wilson loves to use my colleague Gordon Orians' landscape
esthetics research in his biophilia lectures.

Andrew asks about the aquatic ape business, which I mention in
passing.  I've long thought that it was one of several candidates for
upright posture, back 6-7 million years ago.  Most versions of it are
salt water, but I like it for offshore islands in rift valley and Sahel
lakes as well (great refuges when trees are scarce).  But no one knows
what upright posture is all about yet, only that upright stance is
early but the prehensile big toe is lost much later with Homo erectus.
  

    
Proboscis monkeys are evolving that way on the coasts.

The problem with freshwater aquatic evolution is that we have such well
developed salt excretion glands.
  

    
Out of the blue, while I was looking for something else, I ran across a
paper by Gordon Orians, who Bill mentioned in #82. He takes an evolutionary
approach to esthetics--why we instinctively fear snakes, etc. Fascinating
reading at http://www.apa.org/divisions/div10/articles/orians.html