News & Media

by David Ragsdale, PhD

If aliens landed on earth 100,000 years ago, to inventory the life on our planet, they might have noticed, among the multitude of diverse plants and animals, an apparently unremarkable, medium-sized species of primate, wandering the savannahs of Africa. Aside from walking on two legs and making modest use of simple tools, there would have been little to distinguish these beings from other mammals. How times have changed. When we look around at the ways in which the six billion members of Homo sapiens currently dominate every corner of the world and transform the global environment, it is difficult to grasp that recorded civilization accounts for only a few percent of the 200,000 years that anatomically modern humans have roamed the earth. Our modern scientific and technological worldview has only been around for a few hundred years, something like one quarter of one percent of human existence. For most of our time on earth, the human relationship to nature was not greatly different from that of other terrestrial species.

The enormous differences between modern humans and the rest of the living world tend to distort our view of our past and of our future. We are, of course, the result of evolution by natural selection. But there is a strong inclination, even among those who feel they understand this process, to see humans and human intelligence as its inevitable end product. This is a misunderstanding of how natural selection affects life. Evolution doesn't move in a straight line from simple to complex; it's more like an ever-branching and expanding shrub. The human mind is no more an inevitable outcome of evolution than is an elephant's trunk or a bird's wings. Indeed, our planet was teaming with complex, highly evolved life for hundreds of millions of years before humans made their debut.

We may not even be the most intelligent beings in the history of our planet. That is the hypothesis of neuroscientists Gary Lynch and Richard Granger, in their book Big Brain, which describes the discovery of the "Boskops" skull in South Africa in the early 1900's. This skull and others like it suggest the existence of ancient beings, with human-like bodies, small jaws, prominent, vertical foreheads and massive brains, more than 30% larger than the typical human brain. Lynch and Granger argue that the brain size of a species (scaled to body size) is the best indicator of what we might call "brain power", and thus they suggest that Boskops was probably capable of more complex and multi-layered thinking than modern humans.

The idea that Boskops represent a separate species of hominid is doubted by many palaeontologists, but it's worth considering its implications. If Boskops were in fact a distinct species, with superhuman intelligence, and if they had survived to the present, would billions of their descendents today cover every corner of the earth, creating a vast, technological society, consuming all of the planets resources, polluting and degrading the planets environment and crowding out its other species? Would the remnants of humans be relegated to preserves or to hiding out in the most obscure and inhospitable parts of the world? Or would we be extinct, like the Neanderthals, an indisputably real species of hominid (also with bigger brains than ours), who disappeared from Eurasia at around the same time that Homo sapiens appeared there.

On the other hand, if Boskops were so smart, then why are they gone, and we're still here? To think that way is to fall into the fallacy that evolution is directed toward optimization, with the final, ultimate optimization, the inevitable "end-point" of evolution, being advanced intelligence. Evolution has been poorly described as "survival of the fittest", but it is more accurate to say it is "survival of the survivors". A trait such as intelligence may increase your odds of making through another day, but, as it says in Ecclesiastes, " ... the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise ... but time and chance happeneth to them all."

For tens of thousands of years, human beings, with minds just like ours, lived in a pre-technological world, unimaginably different from the one we inhabit today. And perhaps, for part of that time, our ancestors shared that world with beings even more intelligent than we are. Around 70,000 years ago, a huge eruption of an Indonesian volcano is thought to have altered global climate and may have reduced the world-wide population of Homo sapiens to as few as 10,000 individuals. We were lucky to have made it through that bottleneck. At some point in the prehistorical past, despite their great intelligence, perhaps Boskops ran out of luck. Intelligence doesn't guarantee the future. That's something for us to think about.