From Femurs to Flutes: Aboriginals

Skip the B.S.

by Skip Eisiminger

“Nothing is gentler than man in his primitive state.”—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1755

“Rousseau was completely wrong.”—Jared Diamond, 2008

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—8/22/11—In The Dragons of Eden, polymath Carl Sagan collapses fifteen billion years—the Big Bang to the present—into a single year; thus, one second on his clock-calendar equals 475 years.

The advantage of this telescoping is that humans with a life span of three-score-and-ten can all appreciate a single year, whereas few economists and mathematicians fully grasp the immensity of fifteen billion.

At any rate, Earth is not formed from interstellar detritus until early September in Sagan’s scheme, and there is no oxygen until the first of December. The dinosaurs don’t even show up until Christmas Eve, and we fashionably late homos don’t arrive until December 31 at 10:39 p.m. (I used to tell students in my Humanities classes that their two-semester survey would cover the last seven ‘Sagan seconds,’ for it was then that the Trojan War was fought, and Moses sat down to write the opening chapters of the Old Testament.)

Because I had only 75 hours to cover those “seven seconds,” no time could be spared to deal with aboriginal man. What follows is a tribute to those I neglected for so long, yet who made my starting point, Homer’s and Moses’ stories, possible. Contrary to much popular opinion, humans did not emerge fully armed or writing wisdom literature from the head of Zeus or Yahweh, but nowhere in the Iliad or the Old Testament does anyone thank our ancestors for the gift of walking upright. Yet, I can think of few paradigm shifts greater.

Thanks to our aboriginal ancestors, humans had fire at their disposal as early as 400,000 years ago. What good is fire, you ask, as warm air wafts from somewhere under the house, and the pot roast in the crock pot simmers? Well, for the first time, humans could warm themselves in the winter, cook their food (thus freeing themselves from hours of chewing raw meat), secure their dwellings from most predators, sleep on the cushioned ground instead of in the trees, harden their wooden tools and weapons, and smelt copper and tin from naturally occurring ores on Cyprus and in Cornwall, respectively.

Thanks to our aboriginal ancestors, Homer and Moses grew up in a culture where people had a well-developed aesthetic sensibility. After admiring some eighteen-thousand-year-old cave art, Picasso observed, “After Altamira, all is decadence.”

Like the masterful cave paintings that in some mysterious way assisted with the hunt, Neolithic spear points were far more graceful and symmetrical than were necessary. Using antler fragments, early humans pressure-flaked obsidian edges that are sharper than a modern scalpel. And, with the atlatl, a lever-like extension of the human arm, one can hurl a flint-pointed spear 850 feet. (Incidentally, the Olympic record for the javelin is about 340 feet. With the atlatl, one could kill a mammoth and pierce most steel armor made before the 19th century.)

Thanks to our aboriginal ancestors, Homer and Moses grew up with horses to ride, cows to milk, house cats to kill the vermin feasting on their grain, and oxen to pull the plow (instead of women). In the last 4,000 years, no new animal species has been domesticated. But since an abused animal refuses to be tamed, one can make a strong case that it was the animals and females of the species that civilized their human “owners.”

Thanks to our aboriginal ancestors, Homer and Moses had any number of metal tools with which to lighten their labor, though the Mayans built their pyramids with stone chisels and wooden mallets. I’ve already mentioned the atlatl, which is essentially a lever, but wheels and axles, screws, pulleys, ramps, and wedges were also widely used by ancient peoples.

Though most European and Middle Eastern tools were made of copper, bronze, or cast iron at the time of Jesus, carbon steel was available in Africa, a continent the Roman Catholics had claimed was “invincibly ignorant.”

Europe would have to wait almost two more millennia to enjoy the advantages of steel. Thanks to the wheel, an ox pulling a cart could haul three times more than before. And thanks to metal, boats could now be fashioned from trees felled and formed by iron axes and wedges. Using natural magnets mined in places like Magnesia, Turkey, the ancients may have sailed as far as the Americas with lodestones providing direction.

Where there were few trees, the Inuit built kayaks of whalebone and sealskin. In peak condition, an Inuit hunter could maintain a ten-knot average for two hours on the open sea and still have enough energy left to harpoon a whale and tow it home.

Thanks to aboriginal people, both Homer and Moses enjoyed a rich variety of foods. One Kalahari Desert tribe dines off some 75 plants in the course of a year. Another tribe in equatorial Ghana chooses among 200 plants, while we in the First World run the risk of another potato famine because of our fondness for monocultures.

Of course, plants can also heal. An estimated 35 percent of all our drugs come from plants, yet we continue to slash and burn rain forests to plant more soybeans before we have assessed a plant’s medicinal potential. I know of at least one promising cancer drug that cannot be developed because when researchers returned to the Amazon to get more of the tree sap the drug was made from, every last tree had been felled.

In the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes famously disparaged aboriginals, describing their lives as “nasty, brutish, and short.” Little did he know that most of the fruits, grains, and vegetables available to him in England were first grown by farmers who’d begun the difficult transition from foraging to farming in about 10,000 BC.

Before we feel too sorry for aboriginal people, consider that their work-week is about 15 hours long, they live into their 70s, and they eat an average of 2,140 calories per day, including 93 grams of protein. One anthropologist called the Bushmen “the original affluent society,” though their earthly belongings weigh an average of 25 pounds. I have more than 25 pounds of softballs in the garage, and one of our grandsons has at least 25 pounds of Legos.

As Cro-Magnon peoples settled down to farm and fish, they built the first religious shrines, observatories, ports, and cities. But for the 99 percent of the four million years that humans have inhabited this planet, aboriginals did not threaten it with nuclear winter, though they did exterminate several large-animal species.

Nevertheless, it is proper that we honor our hunter-gatherer ancestors by adhering to a number of social patterns they originated: except for the blueberry, we’re skeptical of blue food; we gorge ourselves when given the opportunity; we eat one large meal a day and a larger one on holidays; if we spill some salt, we throw some over our shoulder; and we prefer to eat with our backs to the wall. Even if the wife is a cardiac surgeon, her husband, who cuts himself shaving, will carve the turkey. Moreover, like the Inuit hunter who divvies up the whale blubber for the tribe, that surgeon’s husband gets the last pick. Our sense of fairness is that old.

Make no mistake, I’m not advocating a return to the caves where aboriginals practiced infanticide, ate their slain enemies, forced captives into slavery, and died of syphilis. But these folk also taught themselves to form families and tribes, ride a surf board, and wage war by “counting coup”—tapping a sleeping enemy on the head and racing to safety. Some “primitive” tribes in New Guinea use fledged arrows when they hunt and remove the feathers in hostilities with neighboring tribes lest the killing become too efficient.

Somehow, amid my mixed feelings, I’m reminded of that small boy in the hospital crying for his mother though she’d doused him with gasoline and set him on fire. For some things as fundamental as birth, there is no sufficient gratitude.