Humanity: how we got there by playing with things

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
—John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911, chapter 6.

When you start writing about a single thing, you find, as John Muir did, that everything else is connected, hitched together, but wonder is everywhere.

Wonder and curiosity make us human, but humans like us (Homo sapiens) evolved from the ape-like people we call hominids, whose emerging sense of curiosity and wonder must surely have slowly made them more human. The early ancestors, the ones who could ‘read’ tracks and signs were the ones that didn’t starve: the others starved and didn’t get to be ancestors. Modern fossil hunters use similar skills, reading bones to unravel the story of how we became human.

We call the hominids looking most like us Homo as well, but we call other, less-near-human pre-humans Australopithecus. Nobody knows why the changes began, but walking upright must have come first, because we have found a few fossil bones of Australopithecus specimens and the fossils tell scientists they walked on their hind legs.

Walking upright left their hands free to carry things including children, but once the hands no longer needed to be tough clumpy things that were used for knuckle-walking, slimmer hands weren’t a liability. Thin hands were better adapted for holding and working with stuff, pursuing curiosity, making things, and their owners did better. Those changes happened by chance, probably driven by variations in the African climate, but once the changes happened, the path to people like us was open.

An Oldowan chopper, an early stone tool.

Tools to fit the new slim hands came next, and around two million years ago, Homo habilis, the first of our genus, applied the curiosity we would later call science. They started breaking rocks, clearly came up with methods and rules for making good pieces, and technology emerged. Whenever tool-making first happened, that technology made our ancestors more human.

Fire came next, going on the evidence of old hearths with charcoal in them: these hearths and associated fossils of Homo erectus go back about 600,000 years. Managing fire probably involved both science and technology, but knowing how to keep a fire going was important. With fire, old people were more valuable, because while the fit adults went out for food, the old could look after the fire and the very young, training the youngsters, feeding their curiosity—the most human art of them all.

Engineering probably began when people started making shelters to keep out the weather, enemies and wild animals. There would be no civilisation without engineers making buildings and walls; bridges and roads; dams and channels for irrigation; ships and machines of many kinds.

The Arts, including music, painting, carving, dancing and storytelling, probably had to wait for language to develop, maybe 100,000 years ago. At night, communities sat around fires, telling stories in many ways and making things like clothes and tools, while the young watched and listened, taking it all in, and as language grew, asking questions.

This is how human culture was preserved and made to grow. About 30,000 years ago, Homo sapiens people in Europe were making flutes out of bone and carving figures from soft stone, or making them from clay.

The ‘Venus of Willendorf’ or ‘Willendorf Woman’ is in the Natural History Museum in Vienna. It is carved from oolitic limestone. It is typical of the other ‘Venus’ figures.

Around that time, an Australian drew in charcoal on a rock fragment found recently in the Narwala Gabarnmang rock shelter in Arnhem Land. Modern humans were on the loose, all over the world.

Mathematics became essential once there were towns, cities and rulers who needed to know the value of π, which is about 3.14159. This is the number you get when you divide the distance around a circle by the distance across it.

The Old Testament tells us King Solomon built a temple at Jerusalem, with a circular tank 10 cubits across, and 30 cubits around. To Solomon’s people, the value of π was just 3. The Hebrews were semi-nomadic herders and grain-growers, producing for local consumption, so this approximate value was good enough, although we can be quite sure the builders of Solomon’s temple knew that this “good enough” was a bit off the beam.

Just nearby, in Pharaoh’s Egypt, the correct value of π was a serious matter. Farmers paid tribute (taxes in the form of part of their crop) to Pharaoh’s officials. The grain or other produce had to be measured in containers of different shapes and sizes, so Pharaoh took mathematics seriously. Find me a reliable value for the ratio of the circumference to the diameter, he must have said, or you may end up a cubit shorter than you are now — and I’m not fussy which end it comes from!

I would like to see a public examination in mathematics based on that principle. The people required to take it first would be those who complain about falling educational standards. If they fail, we shorten them, and once the complaints stop, we can drop the test.

At Alta, in Northern Norway, 6000 years ago, people carved petroglyphs like these, but was the top picture a way of recording somebody’s count of reindeer? The lower picture seems to show that these early Norwegians had started to use fences to manage their herds, which means they probably counted them.

 Unless you are happy being an incomplete human, STEAM matters!

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