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Visiting the paleontologists can be tiring. They have looked into cranial casts and think they see the shadow of human consciousness.
But, what if they are looking at the wrong end of the organism?
Something happened less than 100K ago. It tipped us over a wall and now we are out of the garden and by ourselves, able to think but all alone.
When the evolutionary anatomist looks at our pelvis, they can see that there has been a change in the angle between it and the spine. This pelvic tilt came at the end of our standing on 2 legs. The earlier homonids had that down pat.
The tilt; "our" tilt, changed the way in which we reproduce. Reproduction; eating; breathing; are elemental . This change altered the way in which we come together to mate. And when you take a very complex vertebrate and turn it`s mating behavior inside-out, you also change the way the creature interacts with its kind.
The mother-infant period of life is a time of rapid acquisition of data. A baby scans the mother`s face before day 5, identifying all the salient features and storing those visual reference points in the "primitive" limbic brain; the same that we share with a bird. The information pours in and is processed, at first by limbic brain, which has an enormous store of hard-wired responses.
Then the mother teaches the infant to speak and to exchange information by vocalization. Again, he depends on that elemental brain to get started. The chick and the child learn to vocalize in the same way with the same model of computer.
This vocalization is what set our brains free. Vocalization out. Sound in. Sound interpreted. Communication. A software program to shape the shapeless brain.
The H.erectus and the Neanderthal had as much grey mass as us. But they left no cities or highways.We mastered technology and passed it along, accumulating.
All because of that shift that took place eons ago and takes place in every one of us, sometime after week 5 of life. Click. The pelvis shifted. Click. We looked up and saw all the Universe spread out before us.
I wonder if this was directed. And by who? |
