There is life on Earth for 4 billion years, and humans only appeared 200,000 years ago. 200,000 years is only a short moment for 4 billion years, but in this short time, human beings have become the power that dominates the earth. What has allowed humanity to escape the fate of other species and embark on a new path? What is unique about human beings? How have these unique features changed humanity itself, and how have they changed the relationship between humans and the environment?
From Guns, Germs and Steel to A Brief History of Humanity, people are trying to figure out what exactly changed the fate of humanity, and in "History of Human Evolution," science journalist Gaya Vince argues that the four key drivers of human evolution are fire, language, beauty, and time. Gaya Vince also challenges the dominant theory that the cognitive revolution has changed humanity, creatively arguing that humans are unique products of the co-evolution of genes, environment, and culture. What sets us apart from other animals is not the ingenuity of individuals, but our collective intelligence.
"Cumulative culture" has changed the way living things on Earth live, and human evolution is no longer only due to changes in environment and genes, but culture is also an important factor influencing evolution. Wang Di, a chair professor at the University of Macau, believes that storytelling is the accumulation of culture, a cause in which the whole society participates, and the collective wisdom of mankind. How did being able to tell stories and tell good stories save humanity in the process of evolution? What is the danger of erasing the story? Why is storytelling so important in the course of human evolution? The following is authorized by the publisher and excerpted from Wang Di's preface to The History of Human Evolution.
History of Human Evolution, by Gaia Vince, translated by Qingqing Jia, Jingyi Li, Gaozhe Yuan, and Xiaoqin Yu, CITIC Publishing Group, September 2021
Seeing this title, the reader may think that this is alarmist. But if the reader patiently reads the preface and then reads Gaya Vince's book, he will understand why I say that being able to tell stories and tell good stories is about our survival, because Vince gives a convincing explanation with multidisciplinary knowledge of archaeology, anthropology, genetics, and so on.
Where do we come from?
The main theme of the book "History of Human Evolution" is how human beings came to this day. I have been concerned about this issue since I was a young man. When I read this book, I remembered a distant past: it was in 1977, I can't remember exactly which day, and after a serious conversation with my parents, I decided to give up the first college entrance examination after the resumption of the college entrance examination that I had been preparing for a long time. According to my parents, self-study is also possible. My heart was heavy at making that decision. I remember the first thing I did after making this big decision was to go to the Chengdu City Library to borrow books. A friend of my mother's worked there at that time, and it was a cheap condition to teach yourself. I still remember vividly that the books I borrowed this time were all related to the origin of mankind. Why those books were taken as the beginning of self-taught at that time is completely unmemberable, but it only shows that I was interested in the question of where human beings came from at that time. As for why my parents persuaded me to give up the gaokao and why I changed my mind and took the gaokao in 1978, I need to write another article to explain, and I will not instigate it here. Later, in the 1980s, a few friends and I translated Jacob Bronowski's The Rise of Man, which should be said to be a further exploration of this question.
The History of Human Evolution is a reflection on evolution from the origin of mankind to our present day. Humans today are the result of a cognitive revolution in which evolution has changed our brains. Through four key elements—fire, language, beauty, and time—Vince explains how humans deviated from the evolutionary paths of all other animals and eventually became the animals that dominate the planet. Fire gives humans more energy, so that our brains are adequately nourished so that they have evolved more than any other animal; language allows us to store and exchange information, which is key to spreading survival strategies; when beauty becomes a cultural feature, integrated into private and public life, it provides meaning to our identity and behavior; and over time, mutations in genes accumulate over generations in populations, ultimately leading to the evolution of species.
Stills from Mad Hominid 2
In the book, Vince asks a seemingly simple, but in fact complex question: "What exactly are humans?" She tried to answer the question of why humans are different, to explore what natural forces have transformed the earth and transformed apes into adults. Her answer is the combined effect of three processes: genetic evolution, environmental evolution, and cultural evolution, which she calls the "Trinity of human evolution." Human ancestors were intelligent and social, and they evolved to adapt to changes in the environment to ensure that they could survive, and culture was one of the ways they adapted to the environment.
The ability to tell stories is about survival
Paintings in caves and rock walls left over from hundreds of thousands of years ago show that human ancestors were very fond of telling stories. Hunting, for example, has hunting rituals around the world, including imitating animal behavior and hunting only in prescribed areas. In addition to ritual-oriented hunting, there is also a kind of rational hunting, that is, summarizing successful hunting experience, forming a fixed hunting pattern and giving priority to application in future hunting.
This gradually emerging hunting pattern is a kind of cultural accumulation. "Culture" has many meanings, and what Vince refers to in this book refers to the information that humans learn through learning. Culture relies on learning from others and expressing what you have learned. But Vince points out that humans are not the only species that have evolved cultures, but only humans will continue to accumulate their own cultures, and through generations of inheritance, make cultures "more complex and diverse" and more effective in coping with the challenges of life. This accumulation is the process of telling each other "stories" between individuals, generations and groups. Without storytelling, there is no accumulation of culture.
What I want to remind the reader here is that we must pay attention to the "complexity and diversity" of culture. The reason for this is that for many years some people have continuously advocated and promoted "identity", that is, the identity, or unity, of thought, behavior, and culture. Due to the unity of the regions, some people are superstitious about the same (unification), believing that the Chinese nation has come to this day as the result of great unification. We rarely ask why, after the Spring and Autumn Warring States (the golden age of Chinese thought), ancient China lost the driving force for the development of ideas. Therefore, whether we want to pursue unity and identity, or pursue pluralism and diversity, the answer should be very clear.
Vince's book explains to us why the human story is so important. Those oral stories are the collective memory repositories of human beings, which store the secrets of human survival, production, development, and progress in a narrative manner, as well as complex and rich cultural information. "Our brains have also evolved to spontaneously incorporate it into cognition. Stories shape our minds, societies, and even change our interactions with our environment. ”
Stories save humanity
If it is said that "the story saved mankind", we would think that this is a strange theory. But after reading Vince's argument, we may have a different view. In the book, she gives an example that happened in Australia.
About 20,000 years ago, the Ice Age destroyed Australia's natural environment, making rain scarce and droughts worse and worse. For many mammals, the environment is becoming more and more severe and less suitable for survival, many large animals have gone extinct, the population has plummeted, and Aboriginal tribes are scattered alone on the Australian continent, a situation that has continued for thousands of years. Extremely difficult environmental conditions, so that the human gene pool has not been updated in time, and even destructive genetic mutations quietly mixed in, resulting in a decline in human physical fitness, these have created sufficient conditions for the extinction of human beings on this continent. However, the Australian Aboriginal people did not become extinct, how did they survive?
The way they save themselves is by "telling stories." The book calls the way those tribes tell stories through singing "song paths", and in today's more popular parlance, I think it can also be said to be a "story line". Oral stories record cultural knowledge and connect people. Each Aboriginal tribe in Australia has its own song path, which contains a variety of stories, detailing their code of conduct, etiquette, rights and obligations, ancestral gods, mountains and rivers and scenery, etc. Through melodies, lyrics, art and dances, Aboriginal people show information about survival in Australia, where there is water, where there are many animals, where pasture is fat, what can not be eaten, which plants can cure diseases, and so on.
Stills from the documentary Homo sapiens
The trail can also cross language barriers and be sung among tribes. These oral stories are collective memory repositories of humanity, and they store cultural information in a narrative manner. Stories help cultural knowledge to be stored in the collective memory of humanity for as long as possible, so that it can be passed on from generation to generation and constantly updated. As human cultures become more complex, "storytelling has become more than just an important cultural adaptation," but has become part of the brain's evolutionary process.
Through the song path, the various tribes are connected, and these messages about stories, lands, people, animals, aquatic plants and cultures are of great significance, and they give the indigenous peoples a map of survival and thus avoid extinction. That is, as the brain continues to evolve, humans can learn about the world through stories. Stories thus become a powerful cultural tool that reinforces the co-evolution of genes and cultures. "The story of humanity comes from life. We see the world and our own lives through stories. "Therefore, it can be said that the story has shaped the human mind and society, and even changed the interaction between humans and the environment." So for Vince, "Stories save humanity," and that's what touched the book the most.
Storytelling is the accumulation of culture
Humans evolved stories as tools to perceive the world. When telling a story, people bring various emotions into the story, which is one of the reasons why the story is easy to remember. The story also provides an entire ethnic group with a way to protect and use natural resources. Only when culture is continuously passed on can "cumulative cultural evolution be possible." If stories about ancestors and rituals used in the past are included as part of the ethnic story, it will promote the continuation of ethnic culture and strengthen the connection between people.
We use stories to pass on our own interpretations of the world to others, which is actually a dialogue between people's minds. Each person's story is related to the group's story, and so is the story of different groups. Stories bring people together within a community with a common belief. Storytelling skills are a manifestation of human adaptation to evolution. It can gradually promote the cohesion and cooperation of groups, consolidate social rules, and impart cultural knowledge.
Although human beings speak different languages, when we hear stories, the brain produces similar reactions, causing people to have more self-awareness and empathy. Epic stories help people build a sense of national identity, telling people where they came from and who they really are. Each story creates a common national history and brings the whole society together.
Anthropologists have found that the better the group that tells the story, the more collaborative they are and more willing to share. If a group has fewer stories about cooperation, it will be less cooperative. Because of the story, our society is more united and the members of society are more cohesive. Using stories, we deliver messages of all kinds, including our own, others' and the world at large, and learn how to relate to people and how to behave according to codes of conduct.
Therefore, if the story of an ethnic group is full of conspiracy, mutual struggle, attrition, mutual harm, dishonesty, no love, hatred, full of internal friction, sublime, lack of understanding, mutual incompatibility, mutual intransigence... Then it is almost certain that this ethnic group will weaken.
The story itself is the accumulation and interaction of knowledge between people, even if "there are no contracts, no plans, or even common goals between the 7 billion people living on earth." Billions of people on earth are busy, seemingly independent of each other, but actually dependent on each other, and all of this happens "without any planning." And in a system of coercion and lack of freedom, will the ability to tell stories deteriorate? To think that the state must control everything, that everything must be achieved through planning, and to ignore the dynamics of nature, human development itself, and social evolution itself, is actually contrary to the law of human development.
Erase the dangers of the story
In many languages, the word "story" means the same as "history." Stories provide a collective memory of accumulated knowledge, facilitating the spread of culture while making a group or society more cohesive. The story reduces the energy consumption of cultural evolution and helps humanity survive better. Telling stories and constantly using stories became part of the evolution of human consciousness. If a high-ranking chief of a tribe, for personal purposes, were to erase memories or stories that he did not like in his community, the tribe could suffer a fatal blow or even extinction. If a nation or a nation deliberately erases its memory for some purpose, it may cause the nation's intelligence to decline. Therefore, in ancient China, there was a saying that "Confucius became a "Spring and Autumn" and the thieves were afraid", which proved the importance of preserving the complete story (history) from another angle.
It is the "cumulative culture" that has changed the way organisms on earth live, and human evolution is no longer only because of environmental and genetic changes, but culture has also become an important factor affecting evolution. For cultural evolution, Vince argues that "group choices are more important than individual choices." Storytelling is more like a whole-of-society engagement, requiring people to think together, that is, "human wisdom comes more from collective wisdom than from individual wisdom." The interaction of human culture, biology and the environment has made human beings become what Vince calls "Almighty Man", which is the story of human self-transcendence.
An important point needs to be repeated tirelessly: "Human intelligence derives more from collective wisdom than from individual intelligence." "When someone thinks his intelligence is higher than his collective intelligence, when a person thinks that his brain can make better and wiser decisions than everyone else, then there is almost no suspense that he makes the wrong decisions, nothing more than sooner or later." Because fundamentally, the possibility that a person's brain is stronger than the collective, especially the large collective, is almost non-existent.
Stills from the documentary "Our Origins"
But in the history of mankind, we have constantly seen those who are dimwitted, who think that his brain can replace the brain of all people, whose wisdom is superior to the wisdom of all others, so they use the power in his hands to prevent people from thinking independently, to force others to accept the thoughts and actions that he thinks are correct, and as a result, to bring infinite disasters to his contemporaries, to the same people, or to people of the same country, and even to the whole world.
To tell the truth, in these years of historical writing, I have constantly thought about the expression and role of stories, and tried to convey my own historical thinking through storytelling. But before reading this book, I never considered how unique and important storytelling, or "cumulative culture," could be so unique and important for us humans to evolve to this day. That is, without storytelling, humans would not have evolved to where they are today, or even degenerated. For every individual, every nation, and every country, telling their own story well is crucial to their development. Not to mention the special role of storytelling for scholars, researchers, and especially historians.
The original author | Wang Flute
Excerpts | Xu Yuedong
Editor| Zhang Ting
Introduction Proofreader | Li Shihui