The Origins of Culture

Finding hard scientific evidence to explain why culture emerged from the course of human evolution has proved to be a monumental challenge. So, scholars have understandably resorted to speculating or reasoning inferentially about what would happen if modern human beings were somehow forced to survive without culture.
The best examples of this form of inferential thinking have, actually, come not from scientists or philosophers, but from writers of fiction—Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe (1719) and William Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954), for instance, deal with intriguing fictional "test cases" of people forced to live outside of a cultural ambiance, inferring what would happen to them because of it and how they would respond to it. Astonishingly, two real test cases turned up unexpectedly in the 1970s, stimulating great interest on the part of scientists worldwide. In 1970, a thirteen-year-old child named Genie was found in a room where she had been living alone since the age of fourteen months (Curtiss 1977). The child could not speak, and appeared to be puzzled by some cultural forms of expression, especially by artistic and narrative forms. It took a considerable amount of instruction to get her to speak and to understand such forms. Genie made considerable progress in a relatively short period of time, but she remained incapable of reaching the levels of ability achieved effortlessly by children who have enjoyed the benefits of a normal cultural upbringing. Then, in 1976 an adolescent boy was found in the forests of Burundi in central Africa. He had been living with monkeys; he walked on his hands and feet; and he climbed trees like an ape (Classen 1991, Candland 1993). The Burundi child, too, was without language, and like Genie experienced great difficulty in learning to speak at high levels of proficiency.

What can be inferred from such cases of so-called "feral" children? The inability of Genie and the Burundi boy to develop a full command of language has been viewed by many linguists as convincing evidence to support Eric Lenneberg's 1967 claim of a critical period for the acquisition of language, i.e. of a biologically-determined timetable for language acquisition that starts at birth and is completed at puberty. On the basis of a large body of clinical studies, Lenneberg had noticed that most aphasias—the partial or total loss of speech due to a disorder in any one of the brain's language centers—were permanent if they occurred after the age of puberty. This suggested to him that the brain lost its capacity to transfer the language functions from the left hemisphere—the seat of language—to the nonverbal right hemisphere after puberty, which it was able to do, to varying degrees, during childhood. Lenneberg concluded that there must be a biologically fixed period for the lateralization of the language functions to the verbal left hemisphere and, more importantly, that such a process was innate and activated by simple exposure to language during childhood. The Genie and Burundi boy cases seem to support this hypothesis, showing that without such exposure during the critical period, the language faculty does not develop as it normally does.

In our view, however, enlisting such abnormal cases of "noncul-tural development" to support one theory or the other is far too speculative. In actual fact, they have further clouded the picture. If language is indeed a special type of innate faculty that develops automatically in humans within a critical period of time by simple exposure to it during childhood, then why did Genie and the Burundi child learn to speak nonetheless after that period, albeit in a rudimentary way? Moreover, a close reading of the research findings on the two feral children indicates that their main area of difficulty was chiefly psychomotor and syntactical in nature—i.e. they had difficulty pronouncing words and putting them together into well-formed sentences. But this did not hamper their ability to understand and get across even complicated ideas through the structures and categories of language that they could use. Another polemical question these cases have raised is the following one: If culture is indeed an external (nonbiological) survival and evolutionary system that has taken over the functions of physical evolution, as sociobiologists would claim, then why did both Genie and the Burundi boy survive without a normal cultural upbringing? Any coevolution theory would have to explain such anomalies much more explicitly.

Although ascertaining why culture came about in the first place remains difficult, determining when it appeared in the human chronicle poses much less of a conundrum. Human evolution probably began with the genus Australopithecus, whose fossils have been discovered at a number of sites in eastern and southern Africa. Dating from more than 4 million years ago (with fragmentary remains tentatively identified from as far back as 5 million years ago), the genus seems to have become extinct about 1.5 million years ago. All the australopithecines were efficiently bipedal and therefore indisputable hominids. But their brain size was only a little larger than that of chimpanzees (about 400 to 500 cc).
By about 1.5 to 2 million years ago, the fossil evidence suggests an evolutionary split in the australopithecine line, with one variety evolving towards the genus Homo, and finally to modern humans, and the other developing into species that eventually became extinct. A number of skulls and jaws from this period, found in Tanzania and Kenya in eastern Africa, have been placed in the category Homo habilis, meaning "handy human." Homo habilis possessed many traits that linked it both with the earlier australopithecines and with later members of the genus Homo—it made tools and it had the ability to communicate in nonverbal ways, especially through gesture (Cartmill, Pilbeam, and Isaac 1986). It seems likely that this species represented the evolutionary transition between the australopithecines and later hominids.

Fossil evidence of a large-brained, small-toothed hominid, known earliest from north Kenya and dating from 1.5 to 1.6 million years ago, has been placed under the rubric of Homo erectus, literally, "erect human." The first part of the time span of Homo erectus, like that of earlier hominids, is limited to southern and eastern Africa. Later—between 700,000 and 1 million years ago—Homo erectus seems to have migrated into the tropical areas of the Old World, and finally, at the close of its evolution, into the temperate parts of Asia. Archeological sites dating from the time of Homo erectus reveal a greater sophistication in tool-making than was found at earlier hominid sites; they also provide suggestive evidence that this species knew how to make fire, that it had developed a sophisticated mode of gestural communication, and that it planned its social activities. The brain sizes of early Homo erectus fossils have been measured to be not much larger than those of previous hominids, ranging from 750 to 800 cc. Later Homo erectus skulls, however, possess brain sizes in the range of 1100 to 1300 cc, which fall within the size variation of Homo sapiens.
Between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago, Homo erectus evolved into Homo sapiens. Although placed in the same genus, the early Homo sapiens beings were not identical in mental abilities and physical appearance to modern humans. The latter, called Homo sapiens sapiens, first appeared around 100,000 years ago. There is some disagreement among paleontologists as to whether the hominid fossil record shows a continuous evolutionary development from Homo sapiens to Homo sapiens sapiens. Suffice it to say here that Homo sapiens groups shared many similar abilities and engaged in very similar social activities —they were highly efficient at adapting to the sometimes harsh climates of Ice Age Europe, they buried their dead deliberately, with the bodies sometimes being accompanied by stone tools, animal bones, and even flowers, and they communicated with both gesture and vocal language. By 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, Homo sapiens had evolved into Homo sapiens sapiens and had developed full language and symbolic abilities.

The most likely estimate, therefore, is that the first true cultures came into existence around 100,000 years ago—a period from which the plaster casts of skulls reveal that both Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon hominids had brains of similar size to ours (Lieberman 1972, 1991). The Cro-Magnons were representatives of the species Homo sapiens sapiens. They lived in western and southern Europe during the last glacial age. The name "Cro-Magnon" is derived from a rock shelter of that name in the Dordogne Department in southwestern France, where skeletal remains were discovered in 1868. The physical characteristics that distinguished the Cro-Magnons from the Neanderthals were a high forehead and a well-defined chin. Artifacts attributed to the earliest period of Cro-Magnon culture demonstrate clearly that they had mastered the art of fashioning many useful instruments from stone, bone, and ivory. They made fitted clothes and decorated their bodies with ornaments of shell and bone. A number of colored paintings left on the walls of caves near their habitats provide clear evidence that their form of social life was indeed based on culture. About 10,000 years ago, they started to domesticate plants and animals, initiating an agricultural revolution that set the stage for the events in human history that eventually led to the founding of the first civilizations.

As the scientific evidence suggests, the emergence of Homo cul-turalis is a consequence of four critical evolutionary events —bipedalism, a brain enlargement unparalleled among species, an extraordinary capacity for tool-making, and the advent of the tribe as the main form of human collective life. But before proceeding with this "evolutionary story," we must express a caveat about portrayals of this very kind. We have drafted our evolutionary narrative on the basis of the relevant scientific facts available. We are however aware that ours is one such story among many other possible ones. We are also aware that our account of the evolutionary antecedents to culture is by far an incomplete one because it lacks any consideration of the transition from bipedalism and brain growth to tribal culture; i.e. our story does not encompass the question of why bipedal apes with large brains felt impelled at a certain point in their evolution to fashion a social order characterized by rituals, a system of ethics, language, art, and so on. Evolutionary events in themselves tell us very little about that remarkable transition. Nevertheless, any coherent discussion of cultural origins cannot ignore the evolutionary findings, even though they must be taken with the proverbial grain of salt.

Source: Analyzing cultures: an introduction and handbook / Marcel Danesi and Paul Perron. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, c1999.