Meditations: Breakthroughs in Human Consciousness

Meditations - From MartinLeFevre in California Breakthroughs in HumanConsciousness Rosetta Stone The line betweenproto-humans, humans, and human beings is a nebulous one,but I see three stages in our random evolutionary path to amature species. Three very different orders of consciousnesscharacterize these stages. We're somewhere in the messymiddle of the last stage, though our successful transitionis by no means assured.About seven million years ago, thehominids diverged from chimpanzees, which led to a branchingbush of bipedal primates, one circuitous line of whicheventually became Homo sap. If that seems impossibly remote,consider that the chimp genome is closer to the human genomethan it is to the gorilla's. That means that we share moregenes in common with chimps than chimps share with gorillas.If God created man in his image, then God is aprimate.Even before proto-humans walked onto the stage,there was a long period of walking apes, the robust andgracile australopithecines. The 40% complete skeleton of"Lucy," which is over 3 million years old, belongs to thisperiod. So do the Laetoli footprints, the well preservedtracks of three individuals walking across a recent ashfallin Tanzania nearly 4 million years ago. With theemergence of Homo habilus, we have the first evidence ofconscious tool manufacture, about two and a half millionyears ago. The first tools were crude and opportunistic, butthey demonstrate a mental capacity that apes don't possess.Self-conscious thought was still a long way off. But thedeliberate fabrication of tools is the first sign ofhumankind's prodigious capacity for premeditated learningand manipulation of the environment, with all thedestructiveness that has attended it since the IndustrialAge.This first stage of intentional tool Rosetta Stone Hindi V3 manufacture,called Oldowan after Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, was producedby proto-humans with a brain 50% larger than that of theapes. This was the dawn of consciousness. Since "ontogenyrecapitulates phylogeny" (the development of an individualparallels the development of a species), a clue to thatconsciousness can be found by observing young children.Clearly, like language, self-awareness is a pre-programmeddevelopmental stage, whereas the inculcation of self-imageand group identification is learned. (Which is to say thatimage and identity production are deeply entrenched habitsof mind.)About a million and half years ago, more complexform of tool manufacture, Acheulean, emerged. Theall-purpose handaxe Homo erectus used for hundreds ofthousands of years required a "mental template" to fashion,thus indicating a new level of intellectualcapacity.During this enormously long time--from about twoand a half million years until about 100,000 yearsago--human consciousness did not fundamentally change. Thereis an astonishing stability and sameness to thearcheological record during this period, which includestools, dwellings, and undoubtedly culture. Therefore it'slogical to suppose that consciousness did not fundamentallychange either. Though Acheulean tools require a few monthsfor a modern person to learn how to make, proto-humanconsciousness was simple and repetitive in its scope.Thebreakthrough came just 100,000 years ago, when a small andendangered proto-human population in Africa developed thecapacity for diverse languages and cultures as we know them,as well as for art, science, and sophisticated technology.These were the first true humans, and mostpaleo-anthropologists agree that they displaced theproto-human species in Africa, Europe, and Asia overthousands of years. ("Hobbits" on a remote Indonesian islandnotwithstanding!) Every culture, race, and nation thatexists on earth today is a direct descendent of that small,pioneering population of Africans who made the transition toa new consciousness.Human consciousness appears to beguided by the principle of "punctuated equilibrium," inwhich periods of relative stability and gradual change areinterrupted by breakthroughs Rosetta Stone Portuguese that produce new adaptations inan evolving species. Taking that view, rather than humankindascending in an ever-increasing upward arc of knowledge andconsciousness, we are actually descending in an acceleratingspiral of intensifying crisis, with each turn of history'swheel producing more and more pressure for a breakthrough inconsciousness. The first human consciousness laid thefoundation in expanding brain size and generationallearning.