Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

["Karey L. Perkins" <karey AT charter.net>]

Another article -- this one seems to confirm Percy, that it's all about
symbol.  Though, Tattersall's description of language (2nd to last
paragraph) seems more like a traditional linguist's than Percy's or
Pierce's:


---------------------------------------------
From:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/scienceandnature/0,6121,660783,00.html

Science and nature
The skeleton key

The story of man's ascent can be traced from a single skull uncovered on
Gibraltar in 1848. Ian Tattersall tells how language triumphed in The Monkey
in the Mirror

Robin McKie
Sunday March 3, 2002
The Observer

The Monkey in the Mirror
Ian Tattersall
pp224
In a dimly lit recess of the Gibraltar Museum, a strange skull with a beetle
brow and low forehead used to glower at the occasional, perplexed tourist
who wandered in from the colony's sun and warm beer. To most, the assemblage
was just a peculiar set of bones, an intriguing oddity and little else.
But to scientists, the skull is one of our most precious prehistoric relics.
It was considered so valuable it had to be flown, in 1998, in a reinforced
box, with its own seat in BA Club Class, from its home in the vaults of
London's Natural History Museum, so it could join the 150th anniversary
celebrations of its discovery. After a short public sojourn in the colony's
tiny museum, it was returned to London where access was once again
restricted to scientists.

The skull - of a young woman - had been blasted from Gibraltar's Forbes
quarry in 1848. Many other Neanderthal skeletons have since been dug up by
scientists and most are far more complete than the bones found at Forbes.
Yet none has their symbolic significance, for no other relic so neatly
encompasses the poignant history of this lost species and the rise of our
own.

For a start, the Forbes skull was the first Neanderthal to be discovered
(although the second, dug up in Germany's Neander Valley in 1856, got all
the attention). And it was very probably the last, or at least one of the
last of the line, for it was in southern Spain that the species were
eventually cornered, like Texans at the Alamo, and wiped from the planet's
face by hordes of invading Cro-Magnons, the direct ancestors of modern men
and women. Those of us lucky enough to see the skull in 1998 got a
privileged vision of humanity's deep and disturbing past.

Today, Neanderthals are depicted as bent-kneed, brutal cavemen. But as Ian
Tattersall, curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural
History, points out, the species were for a long time 'hugely successful,
over a vast and complicated area of the Earth's surface'. They were
large-brained, made superb stone tools, cared for their old and injured and,
for a quarter of a million years, during several ice ages, ruled Europe and
Western Asia. They were simply the best in hominid evolution.

Then along came Homo sapiens and quickly put paid to the lot, although only
a sliver of biological difference separated the two species, dooming them
and propelling us to global domination. And that is why the Neanderthals are
so important. As Tattersall says: 'History has made these now-extinct
relatives unquestionably the best mirror to hold up to ourselves.'

The difference between Neanderthals and ourselves is usually depicted as the
inevitable outcome of incremental additions to our intellect, part of our
'long, singleminded trudge from primitiveness to perfection'. We simply got
smarter, little by little, until we passed a critical threshold and could
outfox the opposition.

And that, says Tattersall, is bunk. Natural selection is not a business of
fine-tuning towards a predestined goal. It simply lolls about in the
doldrums for most of the time, a story 'of monotony - non-change - that has
only rarely been punctuated by substantial innovation'. Species break up
into smaller groups and nature experiments with them, occasionally throwing
up a successful new breed among all its failures.

Take our ancestors. Five million years ago, our ape predecessors suddenly
emerged from the trees and started walking around on two legs, and, for the
next two million years, did nothing more. Then, equally abruptly, the first
toolmakers appeared and went on to chip out exactly the same kit for the
next two million years. These people made Alan Titchmarsh look interesting.

Finally, large-brained Neanderthals appeared and ruled the roost until they
were wiped out in their frozen homeland by upstart émigrés from Africa.
Another of nature's experiments had erupted on the scene. The question is:
what critical feature did these African parvenus, our own direct ancestors,
possess? Easy, says Tattersall: 'They led lives that were drenched in
symbol.' They made sculptures; adorned their bodies with drawings; created
magnificent cave paintings, like those at Chauvet and Lascaux in France;
buried their dead with flowers and beads; and communicated in highly
elaborate ways.

To all other humans that had gone before, the environment was simply a
continuum that changed as they moved about. To Homo sapiens, armed with the
power of symbolism, it had become a place that could be divided up and given
names like home, river, or cave. Thus we could recreate the world in our
heads, recombine these mental symbols and plan. The world had seen nothing
like it.
But where - and why - did this ability evolve? Somewhere in Africa is all
that scientists can say, for here we see the first evidence of our elaborate
carvings and chiselled beads, the earliest manifestations of our symbolic
prowess. Why we evolved this ability is a different matter, though it was
clearly pure chance. In fact, says Tattersall, it's like feathers which
evolved eons ago to keep creatures warm. Only millions of years later were
they conscripted to act as adjuncts to flight. So it was with our symbolic
thinking. The brain evolved the ability for some other, still unknown mental
purpose and only later was it adopted for its current use.

This symbolic prowess lay fallow in the brains of one small group of African
cavemen, until it was released by a stimulus, probably language and most
probably that spoken by children. Games, involving the stringing together of
words and sounds, quickly evolved in our symbol-receptive minds into speech
rich in ideas and images which was then adopted by adults.

'Once the notion of associating words with objects and ideas had developed,
it would have spread rapidly through society,' Tattersall states. Indeed, it
would have taken off like an intellectual virus. Complex images,
suggestions, inventions and speculations were exchanged and culture let
loose. Next thing we knew we were global overlords and Neanderthals were
museum exhibits. And all from an obscure brain mutation and some children's
games.

It is a striking vision, conveyed in an admirably graceful and convincing
style by Tattersall who has earned himself a deserved reputation for being
one of our clearest writers on the subjects of anthropology and human
evolution. The Monkey in the Mirror, conceived as a series of linked essays,
may not be easy reading. Although slim, its pages are packed with ideas and
careful argument that require close attention. For Tattersall, every word
counts. And it shows, for the end product is as neat an encapsulation of our
current understanding of our nature as you can get.