Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [97]
This progressivist bias, in fact, is pervasive in nearly all evolutionary accounts and is directly challenged by counterfactual thinking. I once explained to my young daughter that polar bears are a good example of a transitional species between land and marine mammals, since they are well adapted for both land and marine environments. But this is not correct. Polar bears are not “becoming” marine mammals. They are not becoming anything. They are perfectly well adapted for doing just what they do. They may become marine mammals should, say, global warming melt the polar ice caps. Then again, they may just go extinct. In either case, there is no long-term drive for polar bears to progress to anything since evolution creates only immediate adaptations for local environments. The same applies to our hominid ancestors. Yet as I write this essay, The Learning Channel’s otherwise superb series Dawn of Man continues the bias with every segment throughout the four hours, recounting the steps taken by hominids “to become us,” “on the long road to us,” “on its way to becoming human,” “at the midpoint of human evolution,” and so on.
Let’s examine the evidence. Paleoanthropologist Richard Klein, in his comprehensive and authoritative work The Human Career, concludes that “the archaeological record shows that in virtually every detectable aspect—artifacts, site modification, ability to adapt to extreme environments, subsistence, and so forth—the Neanderthals were behaviorally inferior to their modern successors, and to judge from their distinctive morphology, this behavioral inferiority may have been rooted in their biological makeup.”20 Neanderthals had Europe to themselves for at least 200,000 years unrestrained by the presence of other hominids, yet their tools and culture are not only simpler than those of Homo sapiens, they show almost no sign of change at all, let alone progress toward social globalization. Paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey notes that Neanderthal tools “remained unchanged for more than 200,000 years—a technological stasis that seems to deny the workings of the fully human mind. Only when the Upper Paleolithic cultures burst onto the scene 35,000 years ago did innovation and arbitrary order become pervasive.”21
Likewise, Neanderthal art objects are comparatively crude and there is much controversy over whether many of them were not the product of natural causes instead of artificial manipulation.22 The most striking exception to this is the famous Neanderthal bone flute dated from between 40,000 to 80,000 years before present (BP), which some archaeologists speculate means that the maker was musical. Yet even Christopher Wills, who is a rare dissenting voice who rejects the inferiority of the Neanderthals, admits that it is entirely possible that the holes were naturally created by an animal gnawing on the bone, not by some Paleolithic instrument maker. And even though Wills argues that “recent important discoveries suggest that toward the end of their career, the Neanderthals might have progressed considerably in their technology,” he has to confess that “it is not yet clear whether this happened because of contact with the Cro-Magnons and other more advanced peoples or whether they accomplished these advances without outside help.”23
Probably the most dramatic claim for the Neanderthals’ “humanity” is the burial of their dead that often included flowers strewn over carefully laid-out bodies in a fetal position. I even used this example in my book How We Believe, on the origins of religion, 24 but new research is challenging this interpretation. Klein notes that graves “may have been dug simply to remove corpses from habitation areas” and that in sixteen of twenty of the best-documented burial sites “the bodies were tightly flexed (in near fetal position), which could imply