[The invention and subsequent development of technology was the
inflection point from which humanity was to diverge towards an
alternative pathway from all other life forms on Earth.]
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HUMAN PREHISTORY—WHY NEW DISCOVERIES ABOUT HUMAN ORIGINS OPEN UP
REVOLUTIONARY POSSIBILITIES  
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Jan Ritch-Frel
October 14, 2022
Independent Media Institute
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_ The invention and subsequent development of technology was the
inflection point from which humanity was to diverge towards an
alternative pathway from all other life forms on Earth. _

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Discoveries in the fields of human origins, paleoanthropology,
cognitive science, and behavioral biology have accelerated in the past
few decades. We occasionally bump into news reports that new findings
have revolutionary implications for how humanity lives today—but the
information for the most part is still packed obscurely in the worlds
of science and academia.

Some experts have tried to make the work more accessible, but Deborah
Barsky’s new book, _Human Prehistory: Exploring the Past to
Understand the Future_
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University Press, 2022), is one of the most authoritative yet. The
breadth and synthesis of the work are impressive, and Barsky’s
highly original analysis on the subject—from the beginnings of
culture to how humanity began to be alienated from the natural
world—keeps the reader engaged throughout.

Long before Jane Goodall began telling the world we would do well to
study our evolutionary origins and genetic cousins, it was a
well-established philosophical creed that things go better for
humanity the more we try to know ourselves.

Barsky, a researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology
and Social Evolution [[link removed]] and associate professor
at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) and Rovira i Virgili
University in Tarragona, Spain, who came to this field through her
decades of studying ancient stone tool technologies, writes early in
her book that lessons learned from the remote past could guide our
species toward a brighter future, but “that so much of the
information that is amassed by prehistoric archeologists remains
inaccessible to many people” and “appears far removed from our
daily lives.” I reached out to Barsky in the early stage of her book
launch to learn more.

JAN RITCH-FREL: WHAT WOULD YOU SUGGEST A PERSON CONSIDER AS THEY HOLD
A 450,000-YEAR-OLD HANDAXE FOR THE FIRST TIME?

DEBORAH BARSKY: I think everyone feels a deep-seated reverence when
touching or holding such an ancient tool. Handaxes in particular carry
so many powerful implications, including on the symbolic level. You
have to imagine that these tear-shaped tools—the ultimate symbol of
the Acheulian
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Africa some 1.75 million years ago and that our ancestors continued
creating and re-creating this same shape from that point onwards for
more than a million and a half years!

These tools are the first ones recognized as having been made in
accordance with a planned mental image. And they have an aesthetic
quality, in that they present both bilateral and bifacial symmetry.
Some handaxes were made in precious or even visually pleasing rock
matrices and were shaped with great care and dexterity according to
techniques developed in the longest-enduring cultural norm known to
humankind.

And yet, in spite of so many years of studying handaxes, we still
understand little about what they were used for, how they were used,
and, perhaps most importantly, whether or not they carry with them
some kind of symbolic significance that escapes us. There is no doubt
that the human capacity to communicate through symbolism has been
hugely transformative for our species.

Today we live in a world totally dependent on shared symbolic thought
processes, where such constructs as national identity, monetary value,
religion, and tradition, for example, have become essential to our
survival. Complex educational systems have been created to initiate
our children into mastering these constructed realities, integrating
them as fully as possible into this system to favor their survival
within the masses of our globalized world. In the handaxe we can see
the first manifestations of this adaptive choice: to invest in
developing symbolic thought. That choice has led us into the digital
revolution that contemporary society is now undergoing. Yet, where all
of this will lead us remains uncertain.

JRF: YOUR BOOK SHOWS THAT IT IS MORE HELPFUL TO US IF WE CONSIDER THE
HUMAN STORY AND EVOLUTION AS LESS OF A STRAIGHT LINE AND MORE SO AS
ONE THAT BRANCHES IN DIFFERENT WAYS ACROSS TIME AND GEOGRAPHY. HOW CAN
WE EXPLAIN THE PAST TO OURSELVES IN A CLEAR AND USEFUL WAY TO
UNDERSTAND THE PRESENT?

DB: One of the first things I tell my students is that in the field
of human prehistory, one must grow accustomed to information that is
in a constant state of flux, as it changes in pace with new
discoveries that are being made on nearly a daily basis.

It is also important to recognize that the pieces composing the puzzle
of the human story are fragmentary, so that information is constantly
changing as we fill in the gaps and ameliorate our capacity to
interpret it. Although we favor scientific interpretations in all
cases, we cannot escape the fact that our ideas are shaped by our own
historical context—a situation that has impeded correct explanations
of the archeological record in the past.

One example of this is our knowledge of the human family that has
grown exponentially in the last quarter of a century thanks to new
discoveries being made throughout the world. Our own genus, _Homo_,
for example, now includes
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least five new species, discovered only in this interim.

Meanwhile, genetic studies are taking major steps in advancing the
ways we study ancient humans, helping to establish reliable
reconstructions of the (now very bushy) family tree, and concretizing
the fact that over millions of years multiple hominin species shared
the same territories. This situation continued up until the later
Paleolithic, when our own species interacted and even reproduced
together with other hominins, as in the case of our encounters with
the Neandertals in Eurasia, for example.

While there is much conjecture about this situation, we actually know
little about the nature of these encounters: whether they were
peaceful or violent; whether different hominins transmitted their
technological know-how, shared territorial resources together, or
decimated one another, perhaps engendering the first warlike
behaviors.

One thing is sure: _Homo sapiens_ remains the last representative of
this long line of hominin ancestors and now demonstrates unprecedented
planetary domination. Is this a Darwinian success story? Or is it a
one-way ticket to the sixth extinction event—the first to be caused
by humans—as we move into the Anthropocene Epoch?

In my book
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I try to communicate this knowledge to readers so that they can better
understand how past events have shaped not only our physical beings
but also our inner worlds and the symbolic worlds we share with each
other. It is only if we can understand when and how these important
events took place—actually identify the tendencies and put them into
perspective for what they truly are—that we will finally be the
masters of our own destiny. Then we will be able to make choices on
the levels that really count—not only for ourselves, but also for
all life on the planet. Our technologies have undoubtedly alienated us
from these realities, and it may be our destiny to continue to pursue
life on digital and globalized levels. We can’t undo the present,
but we can most certainly use this accumulated knowledge and
technological capacity to create far more sustainable and “humane”
lifeways.

JRF: HOW DID YOU COME TO BELIEVE THAT STONE TOOLMAKING WAS THE CULPRIT
FOR HOW WE BECAME ALIENATED FROM THE WORLD WE LIVE IN?

DB: My PhD research at Perpignan University in France was on the
lithic assemblages from the Caune de l’Arago cave site in southern
France, a site with numerous Acheulian habitation floors that have
been dated to between 690,000 and 90,000 years ago. During the course
of my doctoral research, I was given the exceptional opportunity to
work on some older African and Eurasian sites. I began to actively
collaborate in international and multidisciplinary teamwork (in the
field and in the laboratory) and to study some of the oldest stone
tool kits known to humankind in different areas of the world. This
experience was an important turning point for me that subsequently
shaped my career as I oriented my research more and more towards
understanding these “first technologies.”

More recently, as a researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human
Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA) in Tarragona, Spain, I
continue to investigate the emergence of ancient human culture, in
particular through the study of a number of major archeological sites
attributed to the so-called “Oldowan” technocomplex (after the
eponymous Olduvai Gorge Bed I sites in Tanzania). My teaching
experience at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) and Rovira i
Virgili University (Tarragona) helped me to articulate my findings
through discussions and to further my research with students and
colleagues.

Such ancient tool kits, some of which date to more than 2 million
years ago, were made by the hands of hominins who were very different
from ourselves, in a world that was very distinct from our own. They
provide a window of opportunity through which to observe some of the
cognitive processes employed by the early humans who made and used
them. As I expanded my research, I discovered the surprising
complexity of ancient stone toolmaking, eventually concluding that it
was at the root of a major behavioral bifurcation that would utterly
alter the evolutionary pathways taken by humankind.

Early hominins recognizing the advantages provided by toolmaking made
the unconscious choice to invest more heavily in it, even as they
gained time for more inventiveness. Oldowan tool kits are poorly
standardized and contain large pounding implements, alongside small
sharp-edged flakes that were certainly useful, among other things, for
obtaining viscera and meat resources from animals that were scavenged
as hominins competed with other large carnivores present in the
paleolandscapes in which they lived. As hominins began to expand their
technological know-how, successful resourcing of such protein-rich
food was ideal for feeding the developing and energy-expensive brain.

Meanwhile, increased leisure time fueled human inventiveness, and
stone tool production—and its associated behaviors—grew ever more
complex, eventually requiring relatively heavy investments into
teaching these technologies to enable them to pass onwards into each
successive generation. This, in turn, established the foundations for
the highly beneficial process of cumulative learning that was later
coupled with symbolic thought processes such as language that would
ultimately favor our capacity for exponential development. This also
had huge implications, for example, in terms of the first inklings of
what we call “tradition”—ways to make and do things—that are
indeed the very building blocks of culture. In addition,
neuroscientific experiments undertaken to study the brain synapses
involved during toolmaking processes show that at least some basic
forms of language were likely needed in order to communicate the
technologies required to manufacture the more complex tools of the
Acheulian (for example, handaxes).

Moreover, researchers have demonstrated that the areas of the brain
activated during toolmaking are the same as those employed during
abstract thought processes, including language and volumetric
planning. I think that it is clear from this that the Oldowan can be
seen as the start of a process that would eventually lead to the
massive technosocial database that humanity now embraces and that
continues to expand ever further in each successive generation, in a
spiral of exponential technological and social creativity.

JRF: DID SOMETHING INDICATE TO YOU AT THE OUTSET OF YOUR CAREER THAT
ARCHEOLOGY AND THE STUDY OF HUMAN ORIGINS HAVE A VITAL MESSAGE FOR
HUMANITY NOW? YOU DESCRIBE A CONCEPTUAL PROCESS IN YOUR BOOK
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THROUGH STUDYING OUR PAST, HUMANITY CAN LEARN TO “BUILD UP MORE
VIABLE AND DURABLE STRUCTURAL ENTITIES AND BEHAVIORS IN HARMONY WITH
THE ENVIRONMENT AND INNOCUOUS TO OTHER LIFE FORMS.”

DB: I think most people who pursue a career in archeology do so
because they feel passionate about exploring the human story in a
tangible, scientific way. The first step, described in the
introductory chapters of my book
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is choosing from an ever-widening array of disciplines that contribute
to the field today. From the onset, I was fascinated by the emergence
and subsequent transformation of early technologies into culture. The
first 3 million years of the human archeological record are almost
exclusively represented by stone tools. These stone artifacts are
complemented by other kinds of tools—especially in the later periods
of the Paleolithic, when bone, antler, and ivory artifacts were
common—alongside art and relatively clear habitational structures.

It is one thing to analyze a given set of stone tools made by
long-extinct hominin cousins and quite another to ask what their
transposed significance to contemporary society might be.

As I began to explore these questions more profoundly, numerous
concrete applications did finally come to the fore, thus underpinning
how data obtained from the prehistoric register is applicable when
considering issues such as racism, climate change, and social
inequality that plague the modern globalized world.

In my opinion, the invention and subsequent development of technology
was the inflection point from which humanity was to diverge towards an
alternative pathway from all other life forms on Earth. We now hold
the responsibility to wield this power in ways that will be beneficial
and sustainable to all life.

_JAN RITCH-FREL is the executive director of the Independent Media
Institute [[link removed]]._

* Science
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* human origins
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* anthropology
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* Technology
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* Evolution
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