The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [40]
Paleontologists and anthropologists had argued for centuries about the precise nexus of selective pressures that had created humanity. It was universally recognized that a positive feedback loop had been set up by the early use of tools: that the combination of a deft hand, a keen eye, and a clever brain had facilitated the development of axes, knives, and levers, whose rewards had then exerted even stronger pressure on the development of the hand, eye, and brain. Protohumans made tools, so the story went, and tools made true humans.
Some theorists emphasized technology as a means of making humans powerful, equipping them to hunt and fight; others emphasized its role in making them sociable, facilitating the development of language, and hence of abstract thought. Some saw the domestication of fire—the first great technological revolution—as the origin of metallurgy, others as the origin of the culinary art. None of them were wrong, but none of their accounts were complete. None of them had ever stood back far enough to see the whole picture or identified with their subjects with sufficient intimacy to grasp the aleph that bound the complex picture into a unity.
My contention was that the prehistory of humankind could best be understood with reference to the most elementary aspect of existential awareness: the consciousness of death. Protohumans began to be human not when they became aware of their own mortality but when they did not immediately retreat into denial. Protohumans began to be humans when they decided to use whatever means they had to keep that awareness and thrive in spite of it: to fight death instead of refusing to see it. Of course the domestication of fire was the beginning of cooking and of metallurgy, but its first and foremost purpose was to illuminate: to rage against the dying of the light. Even warmth was secondary to that. Fire was enlightenment, literally and symbolically, and the fundamental purpose of that light was to allow the first humans to see and face the fact of death and to take arms against it.
Humankind’s second great technological leap—the birth of agriculture—had previously been interpreted by many archaeologists as the key event in human prehistory. Human beings had lived for nearly a million years as hunter-gatherers before beginning to settle down, but once they were finally and firmly settled down, after tens of thousands of years of apparent prevarication, their condition had begun to change with remarkable rapidity. If the Crash could be regarded as its first terminus the process of civilization had been completed in a mere ten or fifteen thousand years.
Most commentators had seen agriculture as a triumphant discovery, but I took a greater interest in the minority who had seen it as a desperate move unhappily forced upon hunter-gatherers whose more subtle management of their environment had been far too successful, generating a population explosion. This minority argued that farming, and the backbreaking labor that went with it, had been a reluctant adaptation to evil circumstance, whose tragic dimension was clearly reflected in multitudinous myths of an Edenic or Arcadian Golden Age.
I had more sympathy with this minority than their traditional adversaries ever had, but I refused to take it for granted that it was solely the need to secure food supplies that had caused and controlled the development of settlements. I argued that although the sophistication of food production undoubtedly met a need, it ought not be reckoned the main motivating force for settlement.
I proposed that it was the practice of burying the dead with ceremony and the ritualization of mourning that had first given