Sapiens, pages 12-13: Taco Tuesday

I'm reviewing Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari one page at a time, sometimes two.

We are still in Chapter 1, but I'm feeling a little punchy. I'm kind of dying to get to Chapter 8 (p. 133-159). And then I cannot wait for the bombshell on page 196. But those pages are so far away. And... the only way to get there is to get through the pages before. So... 

One foot in front of the other. It's taco Tuesday and we're onto cooking. There is a source! "Beliefs" are conveyed instead of 100% fact-sounding fictions! Let's get fired up.

Page 12

Okay! Cooking enables us, today, to...

1. eat more kinds of food 

2. devote less time to eating, specifically chewing

3. make do with smaller teeth

4. make do with smaller intestines

And as far as thinking about ancestral hominins goes... as in, what cooking would have enabled for them, as far back as Homo erectus times...

The first seems revolutionary. Cooking would have made more kinds of food digestible and therefore available for consumption. Do we know they were cooking hard to digest things? I don't believe that starches (from potato-like foods, which really should be cooked!) stick to teeth for very long and think it's only for like 50,000 years. And, here we really grasp Harari's perspective on hunting for so much of the last two million years: there was next to none of it. Well, that's an opinion, and it's nicely conservative given how little evidence there is, but (but!) there is still evidence that Homo erectus were hunting (and not necessarily only scavenging). 

And here's the bigger but. Were they even cooking? Here's some evidence to suggest they were cooking fish around 800,000 years ago.  The record doesn't really have much more than that, until we get closer to the present. 

The second seems revolutionary too when he says that chimps spend five hours chewing everyday and we spend up to one. I'm not going to fact check that. I'm sorry but I don't care about the details right now. I'm sure I masticate less than a chimpanzee. I bet I don't even spend an hour a day chewing and I buy it that chimps spend more time chewing than I do. Australopiths probably did too. Check out the trees in the A. sediba teeth! 

The third? Well, there is actually a way to look at the evidence for this one. Hominin molars do shrink over the last two million years. Why? We cannot know exactly. Like, someone might describe all the genes that contribute to the phenomenon and even then we wouldn't know why teeth got smaller. They did though.

The fourth? People have tried to estimate gut size from the shape and size of the pelvis, but it's not as straight forward as estimating brain size from the space inside the cranial bones. And so, it's really tough to know gut size of fossil hominins. So it's not easy to know if the hominins who were cooking were having smaller guts as well. And that's doubly hard to do because we have so little evidence for cooking until very recently. 

Of course when we see evidence of fire we'd love to imagine it was used for cooking but that's science fiction. Evidence for hominin control of fire is evidence for hominin control of fire. 

Harari doesn't even get into the question of how hominins could even think to control fire. It's fascinating to imagine. I think a lot of people fantasize about some genius who strikes two rocks together, notices the spark, and invents the greatest thing since sliced buffalo. But here's my own favorite fantasy about hominins who, at various times over the eons, definitely lived near hot lava:

A ready source of fire. Just poke it with a stick and go. https://petapixel.com/2013/07/13/photographer-gets-so-close-to-lava-that-his-shoes-and-tripod-catch-on-fire/

Page 13

Oh finally. He's prefaced some ideas with, "Some scholars believe..." This nuance is overdue by page 12, but at least it's here. Which scholars? He cites this news piece which contains them:

1. Ann Gibbons, "Food for Thought: Did the First Cooked Meals Help Fuel the Dramatic Evolutionary Expansion of the Human Brain?" Science 316: 5831(2007), 1, 558-60.

The idea is that cooking enabled the shortening of the gut, which is expensive tissue. And then, with what energy is freed up from growing and using big guts, our ancestors could evolve to embiggen the expensive tissue in our heads, whose higher costs were met by eating cooked food. (The idea being that cooking allows us to get more energy and nutrients from our food, and from food we wouldn't normally eat without cooking. I do not know the current evidence that goes into these ideas, but they are mainstream and I know this study has contributed to them.) 

The link between cooking, guts, and brains is made in the spirit of the expensive tissue hypothesis, but instead of emphasizing the digestive needs of plants over those of meats, it's emphasizing the even lower digestive needs of cooked food and the caloric rewards of cooked food. 

And, to digress, I think this line of thinking, about how shrinking one cost enables the ballooning of another, is what inspired the idea that our relatively smaller testicles, compared to chimpanzees, may be how we got larger brains. Why would evolution shrink anyone's balls, or keep them smaller than chimpanzees'? Well, what chimpanzees are working with sounds expensive, energetically. And so, people who think in terms of evolutionary tradeoffs might imagine that testes are some of the first things to downsize if the opportunity arises. That's selection-themed thinking. But subtly different, passive evolutionary thinking is just as legit. If size isn't a matter of life and death, then size can ride the waves, up and down, of genetic drift--a creative evolutionary process that's always changing everything that can change without killing off the lineage. 

But back to the point. Fire.

The regular control of fire for at least the last 400,000 years has been transformative in so many imaginable and unimaginable ways. Witnessing any of that transformation in what preserves of the past, however, is a major challenge! Still, we have fire. And while fire has a lot going for it, it's also destructive. Sounds exactly like a certain lineage, doesn't it? True to form, Harari ends this section by making fire an ominous harbinger of "things to come."

Page 14 is next. To be continued...

Sapiens, pages 11-12: Bratwurst and shillelaghs. Paging Doctor Freud!

I'm reviewing Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari one page at a time.

Harari's portrayal of human evolution as an epic psychological drama forms the basis for this book's conception of human nature, which forms the basis for this book's narrative about history, science, tech, and the future. 

It's an understatement to say that lots of readers like it.

Perhaps they like it because it's a story they've heard before (from the Bible, Rousseau, Hobbes, so many of their religious leaders, political leaders, and college professors, and so on). And perhaps it's a story that they've already accepted to be true. And, so, perhaps they are comforted or thrilled by Harari's rendition, with added fossils!

I think there's just something about being told who you are... 

So far we've had some hints, but today's pages tell us WHO YOU ARE. 

You are a bone-smashing carrion-eating underdog, and not the good kind. 

And you didn't even give him your birthday or your palm. How did he know??????

Calm down. It's probably just more metaphors...

Page 11

Coming off the last page, we've got an appreciation for the long human childhood and all the socializing that entails. All the cooperation over all that time, while a kid's big-brained body is molded by complex cumulative culture (that's entangled with the environment) that the kid was born into. By being born into that world, the kid becomes part of it and dependent on it. It's absolutely mind-blowing when you think about it. 

Harari is right to say it feels impossible not to assume that this phenomenon is responsible for what we do, what we're like, right now. Okay.

But then there's an urge to wonder when it all began. And then there's the assumption that what preserves from the ancient past tells us when that was (or ever could). He refers specifically to "a large brain, the use of tools, superior learning abilities and complex social structures." And then just assumes that "humans enjoyed all of these advantages for a full 2 million years." 

Fact check: Brains the size of ours today did not emerge until after 500,000 years ago. So, regarding brains, Harari is talking about having a larger brain than before. It's misleading. 

Then, sure, tools. But the record could be missing so much tool use across the entirety of hominin evolution because of preservation issues. Stone is hearty, but so many more materials make great tools. 

Superior learning abilities aren't preserved unless you want to talk about learning to make stone tools, so... okay. But is that superior learning or the same learning but with superior hands? How could we know? There are no Homo erectuses to cage up or to stalk with binoculars. 

And, finally, complex social structures? He must be assuming that with larger brains comes more dependent babies with longer childhoods and that whatever it is to care for them is "complex social structure." That's not only debatable but, again, it's not verifiable because it's really not preserved. 

So while it's basically habit among scientists and scholars to point to two million years ago as the beginning of a new phase in hominin evolutionary history, to assert with no nuance what he already asserted isn't great. 

But then, to assert that during this time hominins "remained weak and marginal creatures" is just going too far. 

Perhaps, he's simply recounting the backlash to Raymond Dart's "killer ape" view of human evolution. C.K. Brain and others helped to expose the problems with calling fossilized fragments of antelope bones weapons (that ol' "osteodontokeratic" culture of theirs).  Sure those bone fragments could be used as weapons but there was no way to say that they were. 

Plus, there were examples of hominins falling prey to carnivores. So, as opposed to being "killer apes", the narrative could just as easily be that australopiths were "weak and marginal creatures" and maybe that's what Harari is carrying over and up into the genus Homo, in the last 2 million years. But there is simply no evidence to support this depiction of hominins over any other. All we know is that they were as good at leaving descendents as all the other animals who did. 

He says that our ancestors over the last 2 million years "lived in constant fear of predators." It's an engaging way to remind us what life was like. I for one would not want my flux capacitor to fail me in the Pleistocene. So... okay, constant fear. 

But now I have to pick it apart, literally, even if it was meant more rhetorically. Have you seen a herd of animals, like zebras, when there is a known predator nearby? It's in all the nature documentaries. It doesn't look like fear; it looks like vigilance. And then, if chased or eaten, then there's the fear, but that's not living in constant fear, that's momentary. 

Let's ignore the confident assertions about what Homo erectus hunted and ate, and how frequently they ate what. Let's just skip to the fun he has (and we can have) drilling down on the fact that these hominins used stone tools to bash open animal bones for their marrow. Yes. And if you haven't spread roasted bone marrow on toast, then you don't know what you're missing.

But, does such a lifestyle really earn Homo erectus the description of weak, marginal, and fearful? I'm not saying they were badass but I'm saying that saying they were badass is just as easy as saying they were weak, marginal, and fearful.  So what does that mean? It means we're not talking about facts. We're talking about feelings.

What kind of animal, like ever, in the history of earth is weak, marginal, and fearful? Who exists well enough to keep existing like that? Resorting to a life of stealing from top predators--if indeed this was a big part of hominin history (and not some overhyped aspect due to its preservation over so much other behavior)--was just as good as doing what those carnivores were doing (which often includes carrion-eating, by the way). 

So, what makes bashing bone marrow lesser than clubbing bratwurst? (What a horrible attempt to make my title make sense. I'm not sorry. "Paging Doctor Freud" is running through my head as I'm writing this post.)

Why rank behavior? Oh, that's just how evolutionary storytelling has traditionally done things, I suppose The past was worse. Progress is how things work. Evolution is when advantages over the past take over and become typical. So the thinking has gone and, unfortunately, so the thinking still goes. 

Well, if the past was so bad, then how on earth is the present?

Now, here's a sentence that escaped my grumpy pen on the page. Get a load of this:

"This is a key to understanding our history and psychology."

"This" being his imagineered day in the life of a hominin with half-to-three-quarters of our current brain size imbued with how Harari might feel as a carcass-stealing bone-smasher. It's science fiction. Science fiction is great! It's fun! It offers truths that science cannot! HOWEVER, right now, on this page, science fiction is "key to understanding our history and psychology."  

Should it be? Isn't this believed to be, even purported to be, a science book?

In the last graf (which spills over onto page 12), he asserts that other lineages who evolved to be top predators, like sharks and lions, did so more gradually than we did. Even if you could carefully make this case with evidence, like, about the rate/pace bit, you'd run into a problem with the next part: 

Those animals kept their mental health, as a result. But us? We are traumatized, like, in our evolved psychology. 

Page 12

Why was our ancestors' ecological shift a problem? It happened so fast that "humans themselves failed to adjust." We suffer from underdog mentality? Those bone-bashers had underdog mentality? And, he's saying, we still carry it forward despite, now, being masters of the planet. And so, that makes us like "banana republic dictators" who are "full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous"... like... as a species... in our evolved psychology. 

And maybe readers read this as all metaphor. 

Or maybe they read it with a grain of salt. 

And so when they see him end this section by once again emphasizing how fast these changes in our ancestors ecology occurred, then maybe they think we're back to facts and that he's got a point. 

But this is the dangerous part! Because even calling it a "hasty jump" is not a fact, it's meaning made of some evidence, not all of which he has a very good command of (as we've seen on previous pages).  

What am I saying? I'm saying that he's getting away with armchair psychoanalysis of long dead people and with imputing their ghosts into our bodies, by occasionally dropping facts and ideas that sound like facts. 

There are readers who will just agree with his story about our psychology and there are readers who won't. But for the latter, how much of that rhetoric are they absorbing anyway? Are they habituating to the science fiction in a science book? How much of this engaging storytelling is wearing down their ability to identify it as something separate from the facts, as the book proceeds? 

The rest of page 12 is next. To be continued... 

Sapiens, page 10: Postscript Incumming!

I'm reviewing Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari one page at a time.

Last time, I forgot to include something fun. 

Imagine if you will, trying to orgasm in a lit-up hospital room, on an empty stomach, with strangers (or close to it) streaming in and out to check to see how you're doing. Just as you're entering your zone, escaping into the void, or wherever you go... an intern (who is also an undergrad who took a course with you last semester and who will now be seeing your naked tits and ass and all) barges through the door to ask what you will want for breakfast after all this is over. 

Imagine how, perhaps, simply being at the hospital gives you a constant undercurrent (or worse) of fear, given what hospitals are for and what awful things happen in them (despite heroic efforts). Those are just some of the conditions we're talking about when we contextualize hospital labor and birth. 

I don't know about you, but they are not the conditions I associate with getting there, getting off, busting a nut, etc., etc., etc. (drink if you can't think of another euphemism for cumming!). I'm not equating orgasm to birth. Not at all, but many of the same awesome processes involved in human orgasm are in play in human birth. 

Where would you prefer to orgasm? Could you orgasm at all in a hospital room with other people around? Maybe that's a yes for lots of people, but would they want to? Maybe it's not so hippie-dippie, ignorant, or anti-science for people to prefer home birth after all...

I could talk about birth forever, but Sapiens does not.  

Page 11 really is next. To be continued...

Sapiens, page 10: The One With the "Obstetrical Dilemma" On It

One page at a time, I'm reviewing Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. 

Already, what we've seen on the pages pairs nicely with something Rebecca Solnit wrote in her essay called Woolf's Darkness.

"Nonfiction has crept closer to fiction in our time in ways that are not flattering to fiction, in part because too many writers cannot come to terms with the ways in which the past, like the future, is dark. There is so much we don't know, and to write truthfully about a life, your own or your mother's or a celebrated figure's, [or a Plio-Pleistocene hominin's], an event, a crisis, another culture is to engage repeatedly with those patches of darkness, those nights of history, those places of unknowing. They tell us that there are limits to knowledge, that there are essential mysteries [...] Filling in the blanks replaces the truth that we don't entirely know with the false sense that we do. We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don't. Sometimes I think these pretenses are authoritative knowledge are failures of language: the language of bold assertions is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation."

Page 10

The first time I read Sapiens, back in 2015 or so, I was already 8 or 9 years into doubting and critiquing the "obstetrical dilemma". (What is it? Hang on... we're getting there! If you cannot wait, then read the picture where I scribbled "OD".) 

The first years of my antagonistic entanglement with the obstetrical dilemma were off the record. Then in 2011, I gave a conference presentation about the paper that I wrote with some colleagues that came out shortly after in 2012. Harari wrote Sapiens before 2011 and even if he had written it after our 2012 paper, there's no reason to expect him to have known about it or to have been convinced by it. The obstetrical dilemma was, and still is, as good as fact to so many people. It's a perspective on human evolution that is default or preferred by a significant number of researchers.

After that 2012 paper I kept going. Not only were there scientific issues at stake, but, over time, other issues piled on. In 2014, I gave birth and, when I did, I learned a thing or two about how childbirth works (or... does not) in hospitals. That experience did not line up with many assumptions in the "obstetrical dilemma" literature where the understanding of birth is largely based on what's reported of hospital births, and where the size of the pelvis and the baby are made out to be the basis for the difficulty and "danger" of birth. 

Then, years later, to process my traumatic hospital birth, I finally, actually learned, from the experts, about how childbirth works when it's unobserved, undisturbed, and uninhibited (which is a tad difficult to experience in a hospital). Six years overdue, I took birth classes from Flor Cruz and Lia Berquist. And I've been reading like crazy, like Ali Yarrow's excellent book Birth Control, and learning from so many other great sources like Intentional Birth, Latham Thomas, Rebecca Dekker for Evidence Based Birth, Henci Goer, Robbie Davis-Floyd, Orli Dahan, etc. I read about how people who birth outside hospitals, and people around the world, describe birth. It's not always "painful" to so many people. And I'm still learning as I watch birth in a steady stream on Instagram, thanks to @badassmotherbirther.

The learning never ends because there is a lot to learn about birth and there are lots of mysteries! But one thing we do know is that birth emergencies are rarely about the pelvis or a big baby (even if that's how someone, even a medical professional, describes the ordeal). 

And another thing we know is that, under healthy conditions which are typical conditions, being in a hospital, period, makes childbirth more challenging than not. If nothing else, it can slow down the two bodies involved.  

A slow-down wouldn't be so bad if it didn't require more endurance on the part of the birther (and maybe strain the whole two-body system)... and if the hospital staff weren't afraid of rare complications that they were (thankfully) trained to treat and if the staff weren't constrained by hospital budgets and liability. So, instead, that slow-down--caused by being observed, disturbed, and inhibited in a hospital--looks like an problem or rare complication whose fix is what staff know how to do better than they know how to assist unmedicated birth (yes, this is often true). And that slow-down looks like something that can and should be fixed with a procedure that brings in the big bucks from the insurance companies. 

So, the hospital staff perform a c-section and then let the family believe it was necessary, life-saving surgery. And so, the myth of the poorly evolved female body, a problem needing a technical-medical solution, carries right on. 

Of course, I'm not talking about every hospital birth. I'm describing a trend. An overwhelming trend.

Unfortunately those truths about childbirth and so many more are not known to, I'd guess, most people in the U.S. or to many people around the world. And so much ignorance about normal healthy unmedicated birth, I'm sorry to say, extends to many nurses and doctors. That's because normal healthy unmedicated childbirth is decreasingly the normal healthy outcome in hospitals. Where would they learn about it? So, here we are, medical interventions in childbirth (including being in a hospital under the staff's control) have not only been normalized, but naturalized. 

In our culture, the mature, correct, scientific perspective on birth is not based on people in society actually knowing much about birth with personal autonomy and informed consent. Their knowledge comes mainly from Hollywood dramatizations, highly controlled (read: inhibiting) hospital conditions, and very rare complications that benefit from medical care. None of those are normal healthy unmedicated birth. What's obviously natural to these folks, because it's so obviously necessary to their minds, is techno-medical assistance. Ironically, if you talk about "natural" birth you're seen as the ignorant one! And you're assumed to be against all medical involvement. You're a hippie or a tin-foil hattie for knowing something about actual birth. I'm not going to lie. The whole thing is enraging.

If everyone learned more about actual birth, not just people who will birth, might birth, or could ever possibly give birth, but EVERYONE who knows anyone who might, then everyone who actually does the birthing would have a much much much much much much better time of it. And wouldn't that be lovely? 

For now, we've got to read human evolution books that talk about birth with such confidence from a place of such ignorance. 

And Harari's rendition of the "obstetrical dilemma" is, as they say, *chef's kiss*:

"An upright gait required narrower hips, constricting the birth canal—and this just when babies’ heads were getting bigger and bigger. Death in childbirth became a major hazard for human females. Women who gave birth earlier, when the infant’s brain and head were still relatively small and supple, fared better and lived to have more children. Natural selection consequently favoured earlier births. And, indeed, compared to other animals, humans are born prematurely..."

But can you blame him for stating the "obstetrical dilemma" as if it's fact? I mean, I know he's been stating speculation as fact, already in the earlier pages. But about the OD, I can't blame him. It's still, more than ten years after he wrote this book, a fact to so many scientists and beyond. It's still being taught in universities and medical schools as the perspective on the evolution of birth and helpless babies.  And, before I turned against it, the OD was the fact that I taught my students back when I was a graduate student teacher and that I wrote into a 2007 reference volume. [Human Origins 101, a book on human evolution whose publisher graced the cover not only with the guy from that Metallica video (love) but also with a dinosaur skeleton (stupid)]. 

My perspective on the OD changed in 2006 when I taught my very first course as the head instructor. Because I was now a teacher of my field's understanding of human evolution that meant that I was now responsible for more than my little dissertation on fossil ape feet. So, I looked into the evidence for the OD and saw none. 

And so... let me, as pithily as I can, share a little of what I meant when I wrote that there is no obstetrical dilemma and there is no evolutionary obstetrical dilemma.

Let's breakdown the story:

1. "An upright gait required narrower hips, constricting the birth canal—and this just when babies’ heads were getting bigger and bigger."

You can have a legit scientific evolutionary perspective and not believe that what evolves was needed, as in what exists evolved because it was necessary for the lineage to keep evolving and not go extinct. And so, that's why I can say the following: we can't know if an upright gait "required" narrower hips. Or, said another way (as is often done), we don't know whether hips cannot evolve to have a more capacious birth canal. That's just not something we can know, not about the past and not about the present and, when we're in the future, we also won't know. We cannot know the limits to evolution. That's god stuff, if you're into that. So, already, our premise is fraught. 

It's true that, as adult brain sizes increased in the fossil record, we can assume that newborn brain sizes did too. That's fine. that's in line with the pattern we see across living primates. The ones with big adult brains have big neonatal brains too. Of course, fossil organisms are weird, so we can't know for sure, but our babies' brains are bigger than any other primates' and so our babies' brains had to have gotten bigger and bigger over time. Harari's good there. 

2. "Death in childbirth became a major hazard for human females."

No one knows this or could ever know this. But it's what everyone believes isn't it? And deaths in childbirth today are overwhelmingly NOT about the tight fit between pelvis and baby.  

3. "Women who gave birth earlier, when the infant’s brain and head were still relatively small and supple, fared better and lived to have more children. Natural selection consequently favoured earlier births. And, indeed, compared to other animals, humans are born prematurely..."

No. The belief that we're born early is false. I've written against it in the links above. Even the people who see the evolution of childbirth with the OD perspective agree that human babies are not born early or prematurely and so they have redefined the OD to omit that "solution." 

Our long childhood is explained by our large adult brains. It takes more time to grow a big brain than to grow a smaller one. 

Our babies are weird, too. Not under-developed though! The feet don't grasp like other baby primates'. Their whole bodies are so adorably fatty. And, their head is huge and heavy, to boot. But it holds a brilliant brain. 

Being a human baby is not easy and that's interesting and has probably had profound consequences on human development and parenting over the course of our lineage. Harari is onto that, though asserting so confidently that mothers could not forage for themselves and their babies is just foolish. That's not even true now, so why would it be true back in our ancestry? We can both be amazingly selfless, sharing and caring apes while retaining female competency. We can have it all. 

We don't need the OD story to get to to revelations about the profound consequences of our big brains. Evolution is still true without the OD. Our helpless babies and our lovely parenting of them, our long, intense period of childhood learning, and our extremely cooperative nature are all still true without the OD.

Look, I know that focusing on the dangers of childbirth is a tactic to fight for abortion rights. I think we can fight for abortion rights without telling tall tales about what an evolved "dilemma" the female pelvis and the big fat human baby face. I think we can fight for science to pay attention to female bodies without telling tale tales about how "garbage" the female body is. 

So all that (plus so much more that I left unsaid today) is why, when I read Harari's words, "women paid extra", I can't help but answer with some prickly questions...

How do you mean? 

Like, we paid extra when our ancestors evolved bipedalism + big brains by (supposedly) having fucked up, weaker, inferior bodies compared to men? 

What about all the "extra" that women have paid by living in a culture that has believed that about women? 

The last graf is also something else. Scientists are all done assuming that we are the only creatures for whom the nature-and-nurture experience applies. Other animals also have a brilliant becoming in the world. They are not meat-robots. They learn like crazy in their bodies in the world. "Instinct" is now understood to be a problematic term and concept. If you prefer to take that sentiment about instinct from a luminary in animal behavior like Frans de Waal, please do. It's in his books. 

Whew. Happy to have this page behind us. Was dreading and procrastinating about this page. Don't 100% love revisiting my trauma for science. Hope people who love people will visit the links I included in this post and learn more about childbirth. It is a wonderful thing to learn about! It saved me! It makes me love the world, too. If you don't, then maybe learning about birth will make you love the world too. 

Page 11 is next! To be continued... 

Sapiens, page 9: Hardly a Foregone Conclusion

I'm reviewing Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari one page at a time.

So far, what I've taken on may be characterized as "petty and annoying mistakes"--especially to people outside the field of paleoanthropology who have no personal or professional relationship with the details. 

I get it. Who cares about nuances of skull anatomy and beginning/end dates of the different extinct hominin species. If everyone thought that stuff actually mattered, then everyone would know paleoanthropology like a pro. 

But if I believed that all I was doing here was quibbling over details, then I wouldn't be doing it. The last thing I want to do is point out meaningless, harmless errors in someone's book. I got a tummy ache just thinking about it. 

What I hope I'm doing by pointing out these errors is revealing that, so far, the details don't really matter. And that matters!

Some, most, or maybe all of the arguments in Sapiens that are based in human evolutionary history (stay tuned... we're not through it yet...) are not based in evidence. That's why there's no need for citations and that's why hominins and their places in time can be misrepresented (as seen on pages 6,7,and 8). 

Why include those details in Sapiens if they don't matter? 

Just presenting the fact that humans evolved, period, whether the presentation is 100% accurate or not, establishes the fact that humans evolved, period. You could read these early pages of Sapiens as if they're saying: Oooh. Look at these fossils! Now hear me out...

As long as there have been fossils, the fact that we evolved over deep time has been grounds for making up stories about our ancestors and what we carry with us, today. Harari's just following tradition, and with gusto.

Page 9

I want to acknowledge the glare on the shiny paper. If anyone's been actually reading along, then I apologize for the frustration you must be feeling. But I've only been sharing the pages to show my mark-ups. I've been writing these posts as if no one is reading along. I've been trying to make my posts make sense without anyone needing to read the book, too. I hope it's been working ...

The last graf on page 8 kick-starts this section. I ran out of time last time and decided this was the better place to deal with it. 

We're in the section called "The Cost of Thinking". Harari starts (back on page 8) by claiming that mammals weighing 130 pounds have brains that are 12 cubic inches. I'm not chasing that down. I can barely muster the fucks to convert 12 cubic inches into something I understand. For brain volume, I'm used to dealing in cubic centimeters (cc) or milliliters (ml) and, for brain mass, I'm used to dealing in grams (g). They probably translated the units into cubic inches for the English speaking readership. It's easy enough to use an online converter. Twelve cubic inches is about 200 cc. That's fine.  I'm not going to spend my morning figuring out where he may have gotten this estimate, but it's not wacky so we'll just keep going. He says the earliest members of the genus Homo had brains that were roughly 600 cc. Yes, fine. That estimate comes from measuring the space within the fossil cranial bones.  And sapiens? Our brains are like 1200-1400 cc. Yes, fine. 

Now to page 9, proper.

Oh, forgive me. The first sentence showcases two of my peccadilloes. 

"That evolution should select for larger brains may seem to us like, well, a no-brainer."

Evolution cannot select anything. Neither can natural selection! Those phenomena are not agents. They are processes that are happening, always. They never don't happen. Evolution is not always and only described best by natural selection. They are not equivalent ideas. Evolution is the only way life works and anything that lives can be considered adaptive (yes, that's what I said, no not everyone would agree, no I'm not an idiot, no they are not either). But nothing and no one is doing evolution to life. Life is evolution. 

He also asks, "Why are giant brains so rare in the animal kingdom?" As if the cats and frogs of the world don't have giant brains. Relative to Earth's history they sure do. This life thing is an ongoing thing. Cats and frogs are large-brained and absolutely brilliant. I'm not so sure if from, say, an omniscient, god-like point of view over the entirety of space-time, we could even claim that our brains are so much larger than cats' and frogs'.  But he's entitled to his perspective. 

These are fine estimates of the metabolic cost of brains, I think. They've probably been refined by now but they aren't going to be far off, I don't think. Our big brain costs a lot of energy to grow and to run. Yes.

Now it gets interesting...

"Archaic humans paid for their large brains in two ways."

It's missing a "likely" or "probably" or "could have" or... any nuance. 

"Firstly, they spent more time in search of food."

There's literally, no way of knowing. It's totally make-believe stuff about hominin behavior.

"Secondly, their muscles atrophied. Like a government diverting money from defence to education, humans diverted energy from biceps to neurons."

Again, there's literally, no way of knowing. It's totally make-believe stuff about hominin physiology and soft tissue anatomy.

I'm not saying he doesn't know this. He's offering what scientists have said (but not citing them). Without any nuance, this discussion sounds a lot more fact-based than it is. 

Next, he points out the sacrifice (to survival and reproduction) that giving up physical strength for increased thinking strength would have been. He says it's, "hardly a foregone conclusion" that trading away muscle for neurons was a good thing. Weighing the costs/benefits like this is a routine aspect of human evolutionary storytelling. But if you have no way of knowing if the premise (like giving up muscles for brains) is true, then what's the use of wondering how the heck it could be? 

We're here. Big brains and all. We exist despite any real or imagined burdens our big brains bestowed up on our ancestors. 

And look at all the things we do with them: "cars and guns."

Now we're joking about shooting chimps with guns. It's sardonic and I get it. He really despises humans, at least sometimes, and it leaps off the page. I despise humans who shoot chimps too. When you're a paleoanthropologist you find yourself in the strangest situations, like, sitting in the back room of a museum, pawing through drawers of gorgeous chimpanzee, gorilla, or bonobo bones that only got there because some dead old rich guy killed them on safari, including the babies, because they'd be dead anyway, without their mothers. Ah, science...

By the end of the third graf, here's where I feel defensive on behalf our hominin ancestors. Is he ragging on them for being idiots? They had bigger and bigger brains since 2 million years ago, "but apart from some flint knives and pointed sticks, humans had previous little to show for it."  

Gasp. How dare you! It's true, culture and technology had to start somewhere.  But I think we're maybe overlooking a very important obstacle to our ancestors' ability to show us what their brains could do. It's the problem of preservation. 

(Sorry. I think I might have tripped over the same kind of metaphors he was using on earlier pages when he made history as well as a whole species into keepers of secrets. What can I say, I fell over.)

"What then drove forward the evolution of the massive human brain during those two million years? Frankly, we don't know."

TRUE. Hooray! We don't!

I wonder if this attitude will carry forward.

The last graf is about bipedalism. You can see further if you're upright. Yes. You can throw stuff. Yes. You can signal to others with your arms and hands. Yes. You can make and use sophisticated tools. Yes.  

"The more things hands could do, the more successful their owners were": NO WAY OF KNOWING IF TRUE.  

Why point this out? Doesn't it seem obvious that our bipedal bodies, including our awesome, freed hands, are designed by natural selection? It does. And they certainly work or they wouldn't exist, but imagining each and every aspect of our bodies as the driver of our ancestors' evolutionary success doesn't make any sense. At some point it just becomes creationism. We are, and our ancestors were, entire organisms. If every single thing about them was the driver of their enhanced survival and reproduction... if survival and reproduction hinged on every single way their bodies varied compared to each other and to their ancestors... then wouldn't the whole system fail? Way too house-of-cardsy. 

(And that's why when you fight creationism with hyper-adaptationism, the clever creationists are like "that's impossible!" I'm not speaking from experience. I don't fight creationists. But I've seen enough fights to know.)

Ahhhh, there's no space or time to dig into the problems with adaptationism. And now's a horrible moment to try, given how big brains and bipedalism are considered to be quintessential human adaptations. I'm not touching those. They certainly are nice!

But the point is, as usual, we're being presented with a confident and simple story that doesn't follow from either the evidence or 21st century evolutionary theory.

Page 10 is next. It's got the obstetrical dilemma on it. (Deep breaths. Send chocolate, beer, and puppies.) To be continued...

Sapiens, page 8: I'm Not So Sure I Agree 100% with Your Paleoanthropology Work, There

One page at a time, I'm reviewing Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. 

People of the Internet really love to hate this book. And, after only one reading, I couldn't have said that I did. 

I first came to Sapiens sometime in 2015, well before the hype, the blockbuster success, and the legacy. At the start, I'd have said (and did say) there were problems, but I would have said (and did say) that I could see why it's such a runaway hit. And, it's not all bad! Good and bad, it's terrific for sparking good conversations, like some of the kinds of conversations I love to have. It's why I agreed to teach with it. Because of that course I co-taught for several spring semesters, I've now read Sapiens eight times (this being my ninth and final reading). Given my over-exposure to the book (which could surely ruin many a book, even a beloved one), and given all my problems with it, I still would not, and could not, say I hate it. (Though I have muttered it many times while reading it.)

My whole experience with Sapiens has been a net gain for me. A big one. During all this time I have been learning so much about how human evolution is sensed in the world, and how far removed that is from what the science has actually shown us, and from what we can actually know. And I have been relentlessly encouraged, by reading after reading, semester after semester, to figure out why that is and whether we could do anything about that massive disconnect between make-believe and reality. 

It's been an incredibly rewarding period of my life, humming and thrumming with conversations, arguments, and the endless consumption of books and articles, from the magnificent to the magnificently awful. It's been and continues to be transcendent. 

[graf inserted April 6 for clarity:] To be clear, my experience has been transcendent. I'm not describing the book that way. While everyone knows that the book has been transcendent for many readers, that's not my experience. My experience seeing the book for what it is and how others have received it has been part of my transcendent experience over the last several years. That's what I meant up there and then why I wrote the following ...

Sapiens has been an important part of all this, so I have to hand it to Harari for really going for it. Sapiens is peak holding make-believe in one hand while raising up science in the other. With Sapiens we are given the best opportunity we've ever had to see the consequences of so much storytelling in science and beyond. 

So, I cannot and will never say I hate this book. I will also never tell anyone not to read it. Because of the critical imperative, however, if people do read it, then I encourage them to read it among others, in conversation, with a friend or classmates, or perhaps with this blog. Sapiens will suck you in and sweep you off your feet, but the moment you try to talk about it with others, you will realize something. By reframing common sense, it has the disorienting effect of pulling the rug out from under the reader. And that can make the reader vulnerable, available, and keen to find their footing in its pages. 

And, as we've seen so far and as we'll keep seeing, what is offered in Sapiens isn't necessarily what's good, or right, or true. It's just one man's perspective. But it's presented as if it's so much more than that--the word "omniscient" comes to mind, so does Donna Haraway's "god trick"--and so it sounds so good, or so right, or so true. I'm not saying he's doing anything new. Many scientists and scholars who are far more familiar with the evidence of human evolution have already done and still do what he is doing. However, I don't think anyone has done it better than Harari. 

And so, I'm reviewing Sapiens one page at at time...

Page 8

Leading up to page 8, we read about how the genus Homo evolved from australopiths (those upright apes that include Lucy) around 2.5 million years ago. That's how everyone narrates the fact that the earliest fossil that's been labeled Homo dates to about then. That's fine. Starting around 1.8 million years ago, Homo erectus begin to be found not just in Africa anymore but in Europe, Asia, and southeast Asia. So he's good there, too. (It's not easy to talk about these boring details in a breezy, pithy way that's also incredibly accurate and precise. If you want to see it done properly, go take a nap inside any Paleoanthropology textbook!)

But then it gets chronologically murky as he introduces Neanderthals, later Homo erectus, Homo floresiensis (the "hobbits" of relatively recent Flores, Indonesia), and fossils from the Denisova Cave in Siberia. If you're familiar with these things, then you know we're in the phase that spans from about 300,000 to 50,000 years ago. But then at the top of page 8, things get wrong. 

It reads, "While these humans were evolving in Europe and Asia, evolution in East Africa did not stop,": TRUE. But then...

"the cradle of humanity continued to nurture numerous new species, such as Homo rudolfensis, 'Man from Lake Rudolf', Homo ergaster, 'Working Man', and eventually our own species, which we've immodestly named Homo sapiens, 'Wise Man'.": NOT TRUE. 

Homo rudolfensis and Homo ergaster don't overlap at all with Neanderthals, Denisovans, hobbits, later Homo erectus.  So, no, those more ancient hominins from around 2 million years ago in Africa were not doing their thing while Neanderthals etc. were doing theirs elsewhere.  

"While these humans [Neanderthals, later erectus, Denisovans, and hobbits] were evolving in Europe and Asia," guess who was in the "cradle of humanity"? 

Homo sapiens and some weirdos that were discovered since Sapiens was published. These are hominins over which my students are losing their minds, and with such enthusiasm and consternation that I've basically turned my paleo course into a Homo naledi course. 

The bones of these surprisingly small-brained bipeds were found in an underground cave system in South Africa and date so recently (to around 230,000 years ago). You may already know all about them from Netflix's Cave of Bones documentary. 

But I digress! 

The problem with Harari's muffed chronology makes it seem like there is a profound gap between what's happening to hominins inside Africa versus outside Africa in the last few hundred thousand years. When I look at the fossil and archaeological record, I don't see one. I'm not saying he does either, but it's an implication of the mistake on this page. (And it's a problem that we will need to revisit in upcoming pages.)

And you might say, who cares about the mistakes, the point he was trying to make stands as correct. Yes, you're right. He's basically right to say that, "from about 2 million years ago until around 10,000 years ago,* the world was home, at one and the same time, to several human species." 

(*Although I do wonder about that 10,000 years ago date. Like, I have no idea where that's coming from. We don't actually know the point in time when sapiens were the only ones left. And suggesting that non-sapiens hominins were around 10,000 years ago is to suggest what would be blockbuster science news. Just epic. It's not impossible and may well be true, but we don't have those fossils. Maybe he was thinking about the old date for the hobbits. He may have been going off the original dates that had them lasting until around that time. That must be it! But now the date has been pushed back to 50,000. Okay, it's all good. We can let that go.) 

Right. There were many hominins in the past besides Homo sapiens, and many were alive on the Earth at the same time and some were even in the same place. Exactly how many there were can be debated into infinity because these are labels or boundaries on variation that people make up about organisms whose sex lives were not streamed or recorded. But some fossils really are too distinct to lump together, like the robust australopiths who overlapped in time and space with Homo erectus.

At the end of making this point we learn why he's making this point. He's teasing us a little. It's the inkling's of an assertion or argument to come. He says that fact that we are alone, now, may be "incriminating" and says that "as we will shortly see, we sapiens have good reasons to repress the memory of our siblings." 

It's a real page turner, isn't it? 

And look how, just after creation we're killing our siblings. From Eve to Cain and Abel. Just building the case, himself, that this book is intentionally mythologizing human evolution. 

And on that note, there's one last thing. 

He goes to all the trouble to define "human" in the prior pages, only to lob an undefined "man" on page 8. "Man" conjures the myth-ness of it all, the numinous, if you will, of the evolutionary perspective, doesn't it? Oh, c'mon. Maybe this is a translation issue. He wrote the original in Hebrew. But have you been listening to how people talk about human evolution? The moment they're referring to people or humans in an evolutionary context (instead of, say, in a dorm room or basketball or coffeehouse context) my students will often speak of "man". It's never not wild to hear it in a contemporary scholarly or scientific context, but hearing it from young people is a whole other experience. Sometimes I think they're stepping into traditional language to give the ideas gravitas, or to signal "I'm talking about evolution now." But it just sounds like they're glazing over and reciting dutifully from the evolution Bible: Origin of Species + Descent of Man.  

Oh boy, I let this one get away from me. Let's wrap up. 

You may have already shouted, "So, what if he gets the timing of the species wrong, as long as the point stands that there were lots of hominins, until recently?!?"

No, no. This is not a so what. This is a pattern now, since pages 6-7. The basics aren't solid here. Shouldn't they be?

Look. Human evolution belongs to everyone. Everyone has the right to it. So everyone has the right to write about it.  The trouble is that, as I've been saying, Sapiens is the world's favorite human evolution book. It's sold millions of copies and has been translated into 65 languages. He's a scholar. He has authority. Sapiens is shelved with the science books, as a science book. 

Page 9 is next. To be continued...