Robin Dunbar
The Human Story
A new history of mankind's Evolution
faber and faber 2004

pg7

...the essence of what made us who we are, what finally produced humans as we know them, with all that inflorescence of culture that makes us in some intangible but very certain way utterly different from every other species alive today - and, indeed, every other species that preceded us in the long history of life on earth.

But who are we, this species of painters and poets? How did we come to be here? How was it that these nameless cave painters of southern Europe came to ply their trade there so long ago? Where did they come from? And why was it only they, of all the species that have ever been, who had the wit to leave their delicate imprint behind them? And, why - perhaps most intriguing of all - why did they do it?

This book is an odyssey, a journey up through the mists of time from the remote past. It explores what must perhaps be the most fundamental of all questions - who we are. What is it that sets us so firmly apart from all those other species with whom we share the planet? How - given that, at conception, ours is the very same beginning as that of every other life form - do the differences between us and all other species come about during the course of human life?

When in the course of our evolutionary history did those differences that separate us from our fellow creatures come to be? And, maybe the most tantalising question of all, why did these differences come to bless our lineage and no other?

This is a journey within ourselves. To understand what it is to be human, we have to understand our own minds. It is here, in our ability to reflect upon ourselves and our relationship with the world 'out there', that the real differences between us and the rest of creation seem to lie. Our physical attributes and a great deal of our behaviour are unexceptional, even by the standards of an unexceptional group like the primates. Rather, what sets us apart is, above all, a life in the mind, the ability to imagine.

As obvious as this may seem, it is only very recently that we have been able to pinpoint exactly what these features of the mind are that set us apart. So much of what we do is similar to what we see in our monkey and ape cousins, their inventiveness and intelligence, their intensely social ways of life, even their remarkable evolutionary success as a group. Yet we remain apart from them, distanced by that indefinable mental world that we claim as our own.

In exploring this world, we shall have to draw on many different sciences, each of which will give us only partial answers. The past decade or so has seen astonishing advances in many disciplines, from genetics to behavioural studies to psychology. We are still absorbing their findings and coming to terms with their implications. In their different ways, they have so revolutionised our understanding of who we are that our view of ourselves - and, in turn, how we view the other species with whom we share our past as well as our future - has been turned topsy­turvy. Only by drawing together these many disparate threads will we be able to come to some real understanding of just what it is that makes us who we are.

Our history has been a long one. In one sense, it began some sixty-five million years ago when the dinosaurs trod the steaming tropical forests of Europe and North America in undisput­ed mastery of the planet. Our earliest ancestors, as yet barely recognisable as primates, skittered through the trees and bushes much as squirrels do today. Later, in the aeons after the dinosaurs passed into that great dinosaur Valhalla, these primi­tive squirrel-like mammals diversified and evolved into a high­ly successful group of animals. They became the ancestors of the monkeys and apes with which we are now so familiar.

Much later, some six to seven million years ago, one of their many descendants began to develop some new characteristics and a slow but steady divergence developed between their lineage and that of the other African apes. At first these evolutionary innovations involves a handfull of rather uninteresting features, mostly related to bipedal walking. But eventually, genuinely novel features began to appear in this lineage - rapidly enlarging brain, tool use, language, culture. That lineage ultimately gave rise to cave artists, and, a little later still, to us, modern humans.